Piranha: Firing Point

Time to kill him. Now. One bullet and the mission continues. It would be quick. Painless. Over in a second.

Just one more mess to clean up and the ship was his.

“Oh, fuck,” Chu said, hating himself for what he was about to do. He put the silenced pistol barrel in the boy’s right eye. He squeezed the trigger slowly.

The bang of the pistol was loud, despite the silencer.

The youth’s head exploded, leaving brains against the bulkhead behind him and blood on the carpeting, a raw, meaty, liquid mess where an innocent face had been.

“Lieutenant Wong, clean this up.” Chu holstered the pistol and walked to the door of his stateroom.

There, in privacy. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng, current commanding officer of the MSDF submarine Artic Storm and admiral-in-command of a fleet of the most advanced submarines in history, bent over and vomited.

Five minutes later he sank to the deck, his eyes shut, his fingers pressed to his eye sockets, muttering two words to himself, repeating them over and over—“Good God… good God…”

Chu went to the control console. He had to loosen the five-point harness for his larger frame. The leather of the seat was comfortable, the arrangement of the consoles well designed. He spent a few moments scanning the panels. All of them displayed Japanese script, even the camera view out the top of the fin, showing the silvery undersides of the waves approaching the ship.

The periscope was down, the instrument’s mast lowered sometime during their invasion of the ship. Chu had not yet grasped how to raise the device, nor did he intend to.

But that was the essence of the problem of the moment — and the problems seemed endless — getting the ship to do what Chu wanted it to do. This vessel had very few knobs, control yokes, function keys, or dedicated instrument dials, just a cluster of computer workstations.

All were characterized by an arrangement of high-definition flat-panel and holographic displays. This was not a ship that he could treat like the Korean vessel, finding a tersely written procedure in a dogeared manual, then push some buttons, open an automatic-valve joystick, dial in a depth rate, push a control yoke to change control-surface positions.

No, this ship was completely commanded by the computer system. On the plus side, Chu had managed to raid the ship and take it over without a single bullet entering a computer cabinet. And without the slightest scratch to his crew. On the negative side, the ship continued steaming under the control of the advanced computer system, and the intelligence briefing manuals’ details were sketchy about the system. It was either very simple to operate or hopelessly difficult. Continuing adding up the negatives, the ship was at mast-broach depth, shallow enough that a ten-meter-long pole — be it periscope or radio antenna or electronic emission-detection antenna — would poke out of the sea five meters. Which meant the top of the sail was only five or ten meters beneath the surface. Which meant an approaching ship could smash into them and cripple them, maybe even sink them.

So far this ship was blind and deaf. It was an unfamiliar dog without a leash.

Chu knew he had to get the ship deep and steam west, away from the Japanese fleet, now possibly alerted to the fact that their submarines were in the hands of rogue forces. He had to hurry.

Forward, in the computer room, Chu had stationed his computer expert. Lieutenant Zhang Peng. Right now Zhang would be speed-reading the manuals embedded in the computer software, paging through displays, researching the control system. It might take him weeks to understand how to give the simplest order to the computer, or even to become acquainted with how to take manual control of the ship with the computer out of the loop.

Chu ran his hands through his close-cropped hair, staring helplessly at the computer display of the fin camera.

He opened his mouth to call out to Zhang, but instead checked his watch. It had been only three minutes since the last time he had demanded an update, and Zhang’s reply had been the same one he’d given before that— status unchanged.

“Right one effective degree rudder, change course to one eight five, aye, sir,” the Second Captain’s odd-sounding female voice responded in Chu’s headset. Chu had ordered Zhang to shift the system to English, the language all crew members understood.

Chu had retrieved the cordless headset off the deck near the console. It was a strange mechanism, with one earphone, a boom microphone, and a device that pointed at his right eye as if trying to read where he was looking.