Piranha: Firing Point

One man went into the sonar display room, piling up books. Chu found a book cabinet at the chart table, and withdrew a manual marked Submarine Standard Operating Procedures. Chu began scanning it — stopping only when he heard a loud explosion behind the periscope stand. One of the men had blown apart the tumbler of a safe. Once the smoke cleared, the contents of the safe were withdrawn and added to a pile on the deck. Other safes throughout the ship would likewise be yielding up their contents.

Time was short, Chu thought, anxiously adjusting his gas mask. Their air supplies would run out in mere minutes.

At last he found the procedure he was looking for.

“Turn the engine knob to stop,” he called out, his voice distorted through the mask.

The man at the ship-control console rotated a dial with a needle set in the face from the area marked standard to stop. A second needle set into the face clicked to the stop square, ringing a small bell, the answer from the nuclear control room aft. In the engine room Chu’s men would be shutting the throttle valves to the steam turbines.

Chu watched the speed indicator as it dropped from 15 to 12, then to 10. He hurried to the wraparound port panel. He scanned through the procedure manual, searching for the hovering system chapter. If he could stop the ship, they could depart without fighting the forward velocity of the vessel. He paged through several computer displays on the main flat panel, finally finding the display for the hovering system, and selected the presets the procedure called for on the checklist.

He looked over the speed panel. The ship’s speed was now nearing zero. It would be like stopping the engines on a blimp, he thought. Now they would either sink, pop up to the surface, or tilt forward or aft. It depended on how the ship had been before they slowed. He waited as the ship glided to a halt. He selected the ship’s desired depth using a computer control on the display, then squinted at the display to see the ship’s actual depth.

The two matched. The ship was hovering.

With one rapid twist of the depth-rate dial, Chu commanded the computer to send the ship plunging vertically downward, to sink to her crush depth.

“Extract!” he commanded.

“Go!” Chu hissed. There was no time for him to climb into the control seat. One of the platoon pilots had already climbed onto the view port couch and flooded the hatch skirt, breaking the connection between the two ships. The depth of the two vessels would be at least four hundred meters, not far from the crush depth of the submarine. The Red Dagger could descend to almost seven hundred meters before its titanium hull began to fail, but it would do no good for the submarine’s hull failure to take the submersible down with it.

The water jets spun up, and the Red Dagger accelerated away from the still descending abandoned submarine.

The deck of the submersible angled sharply upward as it made its emergency ascent. Emergency, because its atmosphere remained poisoned with the deadly hydrogen cyanide gas from the grenade detonated on the submarine below, and each man’s air was running out. Chu could feel his own air supply dwindling. It was getting much harder to pull each breath from the mask. Finally the submersible reached the surface, and the pilot began to ventilate the interior. A blast of fresh air blew over Chu’s sweaty coveralls, chilling him. He waited as long as he could, until the bottle gave up, its air completely exhausted. Hoping the submersible was now safe, he pulled off the sweaty mask and pulled in a breath of salty sea air. The other members of the platoon were watching him, waiting to see if he would collapse to the deck. He took a second pull and nodded solemnly at the men. They all pulled off their masks, relief breaking out on their faces.

A violent shriek sounded through the sea around them, then a roaring screech of ripping metal. Quickly it died to a barely discernible groan.

“Sub’s hull is imploding,” Lo Sun said. “It must have hit crush depth.”

Without answering, Chu climbed to the upper compartment hatch, where he looked out a view port revealing the cloudy sky above. He engaged a control, and the hatch came open. Chu put his head out above the hatch ring and looked out over the calm sea. The mostly submerged submersible hull was barely visible beneath him.

The small vessel rolled in the swells, a rocking motion that seemed deeply relaxing. Perhaps that feeling was due more to the success of the mission than the beauty of the sea, Chu thought. Off in the distance the sound of aircraft engines could be heard. Their seaplane was coming to pick them up.