Piranha: Firing Point

“Rendezvous with the target Korean submarine will be in twelve minutes. Each of you has been training for this moment for the past year. The practice runs are over now. This is it, our operational test.” Chu paused, narrowing his eyes to a glare. “The doubting eyes of the Admiralty are on us. They have said it can’t be done, that no one can sneak up and steal a nuclear submarine, under way and steaming deep beneath the surface. But when this mission is over, and we prove it can be done, the result will change the map of China. And every one of you knows what that will mean.” Chu paused again, scanning the faces. His own face crinkled into unlikely laugh lines around his eyes and across his nose. “Very well, men. Good luck to all of you. Mister First, are you ready?”

Lieutenant Commander Lo Sun stood up from the sonar console, stripping off the headset, and nodded.

“Ready, Commander.”

“Excellent. Platoon, mount up!”

Immediately the men stood and filed quickly aft in the gently rocking cabin to the aft bulkhead hatch. One after another the men ducked into the hatchway, until the compartment was empty except for Chu. He looked forward into the cabin, and saw the copilot in the door of the flight deck. Chu flipped him a salute, glanced around the big plane one last time, and entered the opening, shutting the cabin hatch behind him.

Inside the cramped red-lit interior of the submersible, he made his way past the men to the control console forward. The control couch was a contoured pad allowing the pilot to lie on his stomach with his head, shoulders, and arms protruding into a high-pressure plastic view port bubble. This was completely black, as if it had been painted over. Chu strapped on his earpiece and boom mike, tested the circuit, and gave a crisp order to the seaplane copilot. Immediately bright light flashed into the cockpit as the bomb-bay-style doors opened in the belly of the seaplane, admitting the October afternoon light.

Below Chu, in the view port, the sea lapped steadily against the doors of. the bay. Chu glanced up at an overhead console and pulled an orange T-handle, releasing the submersible Red Dagger from the seaplane. Chu’s stomach flipped as the vessel tumbled from the plane’s bay. The waves rose to meet the view port, then splashed over the plastic bubble. As the ten-meter-long ship sank into the water, the view showed only deep blue, becoming darker as the heads-up display indicated the depth of the submersible. Within a minute the view port was again black, the waves and the seaplane now a hundred meters overhead.

The submarine loomed ahead in the powerful spotlights, long and cylindrical and fat and black. The escape hatch was his landing target. The submersible’s computer took over on automatic control, guiding them down to the hatch, attempting to match the submarine’s speed and bring down their airlock skirt precisely over the hatch ring.

According to the intelligence brief from Mai Sheng, his PLA intelligence contact, the sub was the Korean vessel Dae Gu, a Los Angeles 6881-class submarine, formerly the USS Louisville, sold to Korea four years ago under an American program allowing U.S. allies to purchase older nuclear-powered attack submarines as long as Americans were allowed to monitor and control the nuclear material of the reactor core. The intel brief had described the escape hatch location where Chu was to make his landing. The airlock led below to the sparsely occupied engine room of the huge vessel.

With a gentle thud the submersible Red Dagger touched down on the deck of the target submarine. Chu flooded a ballast tank, making the submersible heavier by a few tons. That would keep it fast to the submarine’s deck. A quiet hiss sounded as the airlock at the underhull was pumped down, creating an air seal between the submersible and submarine hatches.

The docking was complete. Chu powered down the submersible, leaving only minimal power on for the interior lights and the computer. Chu pulled himself off the control couch, his muscles aching from the cramped position, and moved aft out of the cockpit. Lo Sun operated the hatch panel. Large steel dogs rotated, and the lower hatch slowly retracted into the submersible hull. Below, bathed in the hot spotlight circle, the black hatch of the submarine was revealed. There was not much to it, only a circular groove cut in the black non-skid paint of the hull, the metal still wet from the seawater.

Chu pulled a T-wrench from the tool bag on the bulkhead.

In the center of the hatch below was a small hole with a square metal peg recessed into it. Submarine hatches had been manufactured to ISO standards for the last few decades; that way a sunken submarine could be rescued by any foreign ship happening by. Sub escape hatches could be operated by anyone with a standard salvage tool kit. Chu bent over and spun the T-wrench clockwise until he heard and felt a metallic clunk. He looked up at Lo.

“Set time minus one. Platoon, don equipment.”