Piranha: Firing Point

Surface ships hunting them unsuccessfully would soon yield to submarines. The first might be more 6881’s, the antiques. But in time others would come, more capable units. They would begin to hunt down his force, and his ships had only so many weapons. The key had to be a rapid demoralizing strike, something so devastating that they wouldn’t come back for more. Whether he could achieve that, no one knew.

With that thought Chu decided to turn to the task at hand and stop thinking about eventualities. He was a dark soul, as he’d known for years, and men like him did not drink in the champagne of victory, they waited for the pain of failure. And so, in Chu’s mind, the time for debate had ended. He resumed the mantle of the commander and made the orders that had brought them here, where his force was set up to kill the invading surface fleet Chu reclined in his control couch’ at the intricate command console, looking over its marvels. The displays could be configured in any of a thousand modes. The screens could read out computer machine language, sonar curves, sonar raw data, weapons presets, camera video displays, virtually anything. He’d read through some of the manuals, even had some of the Japanese captain’s notes translated to English, and by now he was becoming confident. The ship would function, and he would lead it and the men to victory.

He looked at the center screen, the god’s-eye view of the sea, showing his Arctic Storm in the center. There were no sonar contacts, but he had instructed the Second Captain to show for him the approximate position of the other Rising Sun submarines. Twenty kilometers to the northeast was the Lightning Bolt, twenty kilometers to the southeast the Thundercloud, the three subs forming a triangle, but which was actually a bottle, with Chu’s ship the bottom of the bottle, the other two the sides.

Much farther to the east, in the Pacific Ocean, were the subs that would act as the bottle cork. The Earthquake, Volcano, and Tsunami. Chu’s Arctic Storm was positioned directly in the path of the approaching American Rapid Deployment Force convoy. If the landing was to be Shanghai, as he was hoping, the convoy would drive right toward him. However, if Tsingtao was their course, it would bring them within two kilometers of the Lightning Bolt, and his Arctic Storm would be south of their track by about twelve kilometers. Similarly, if Hong Kong was their destination, the Thundercloud would be close and he would be off track by twelve kilometers.

Either way, his three subs would still manage to bottle up the incoming fleet. He hoped central White China was the target, so he could shoot down their throats.

Sinking three aircraft carriers of the massive Webb class would be glorious.

With his computer link to the radio gear, Chu had ordered the other subs to their coordinates using an ingenious encryption system — music. He had broadcast old, scratchy American and English rock’n’ roll songs, each one referred to in a code book. The Rolling Stones was the address for the Thundercloud, the Beatles selected for the Volcano, and so on, with individual songs keyed to different preplanned codebook positions. All the while he’d brought no suspicion upon himself from the listening American fleet. And that was for his initial positions.

If he needed to maneuver the fleet as the Americans approached, he would use VHF bridge-to-bridge radios, having his Korean-speaking first officer come up on the radio as if he were a fishing boat captain speaking to other fishermen, telling them to get out of the way of the convoy, which would risk collision, scare the fish, and possibly dump them in their huge wake waves.

Chu’s trawlers currently filled the East China Sea.

“Admiral,” Chen Zhu, the operations officer at the weapons console said, “is it time?” “Yes,” Chu said, his eye on the chart, then on his watch. If he acted too soon, he’d have to turn off the torpedo gyros to keep them from overheating, but if he warmed up the weapons too late, he’d lose vital seconds in the attack sequence. He decided to take the risk.

“Open all twenty-four outer doors. Apply power to all torpedoes.”

Chen spoke into his boom mike to the Second Captain, which then reported back to Chu: “All doors coming open, sir, all torpedoes indicate power applied. All gyros are coming up to full revolutions now.”

“Very good.”

A tense moment of silence filled the room, only the electronic hum of the consoles and the deep bass roar of the air handlers audible. Then Lieutenant Commander Xhiu Liu, the navigator who stood watch as the sensor-console operator, reported: “Admiral, I have a strong detect on a muffled seven-bladed screw showing up on low-frequency analysis, with high broadband noise from multiple pumps, with high flow noise and several flow-induced resonances. Sir, it’s a 6881-class submerged warship, making way at high speed, headed directly toward us!”

USS ANNAPOLIS, SSN-760