Piranha: Firing Point

Chu ducked back down, shutting the hatch. He leaned against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. Once the Admiralty was briefed on the mission, it would set into motion a chain of events that eventually would restore mainland China to its rightful status. No longer would the rest of the world call it “Red China”—the country’s unofficial name, intended to prevent confusion with the eastern rebel nation, which had intentionally named itself “White China.” The nation, once reunited, would once again be known by its true name — the People’s Republic of China.

Within twenty minutes, the submersible was docked in the belly of the enormous seaplane, and Chu was sitting in the pilot-in-command seat, throttling up the powerful turboprops to take off, on the way to Beijing.

Chapter 1 Sunday October 13

GREAT HALL OF THE PEOPLE

BEJING

RED CHINA

The men’s room sparkled. Italian marble stall walls gleamed in the warm light of an ornate crystal chandelier.

A babbling fountain was set into the polished tile of the floor, and the jets of clear water were reflected in a rainbow shining high overhead on the ornate Indonesian tigerwood carvings in the ceiling. Deeply polished pine planks lined the walls. The sinks were streaked marble, the faucets solid gold. An armed Red Guard stood stiffly at the door.

Commander Chu Hua-Feng saw none of it. He stood before the gold framed mirror and stared at his reflection.

The black coveralls of the Red Dagger mission had been left behind. He was wearing a black tunic with the gold stripes of his rank of full commander, his four combat medals gleaming. Despite a knock at the door, Chu continued to gaze at his face in the mirror. There was no narcissism in his look, only disbelief. The face staring back at him could have been his father’s: the same high, severe cheekbones, broad nose, dark stern eyes, and severe square chin below full lips. His height was within a hairsbreadth of his father’s. And though he had worshipped his father, the mirror’s image brought not pride but deep regret and sadness.

His father, Chu Hsueh-Fan, had been the admiral in command of the Lushun Northern Fleet. He’d been aboard his flagship, the aircraft carrier Shaoguan, when his fleet and his ship were sunk by a group of rogue American submarines trying to break out of the Go Hai Bay outside of Beijing after one of them had been captured spying and the others came to the rescue. The catastrophic sinking of the Shaoguan had happened ten years before, when young Chu had been a mere junior lieutenant aviation officer flying an antisubmarine Yak-36A vertical-takeoff jet. He had had a front seat for the sinking of the flagship. He’d seen one of the submarines fire a supersonic ship-killing missile. The missile had flown out of the sea, the arc of the rocket’s flame trail a perfect parabola, leading directly to Chu’s father’s ship.

Shaoguan had taken the hit amidships, exploded into flames, rolled over, and vanished into the gray sea.

Young Chu could only watch helplessly, his only depth charge already expended against the evasive criminal submarines. Though his plane was running on fumes, he was determined to remain hovering over the bay to watch the sinking of the American murderers, until the U.S. fleet’s supersonic fighter jets had come screaming in, missiles flying. His Yak had lost a wing. Chu had ejected, but his twenty-two-year old weapons officer and friend Lo Yun had not. The one-winged Yak had plummeted to the sea, exploding into a blinding fireball just before hitting the water. Chu had floated in the deep water of the bay for almost forty hours. The waves washing over his face mixed with angry tears of frustration, while somehow he knew that despite the evidence before him, he would not die. It was the middle of a rainy night when rescue finally arrived, in the form of a Udaloy destroyer. There were no helicopters — they had all been downed by the American fighter jet’s missiles.

Chu had been lucky, or at least so he was told. He had escaped without a scratch. The remainder of the fleet’s sailors and officers had not fared as well. Of the nearly seventy ships of the task force, half had gone down with all hands. Over three thousand men had died that day. All because a wolfpack of murderous submarines had torpedoed their way out of the bay that they had been in spying.

The horror of that day was a line of demarcation across Chu’s life, and after watching his father’s ship explode and capsize, he would forever be haunted.

When the pain had eased, after over four years, and he felt he could begin to move on with his life, he realized that he had been overtaken by an obsession, a specter that filled his nights with vivid dreams, that made him toss and turn until he was tangled in sweaty sheets.

The obsession was with the power of a stealthy nuclear submarine.