“Compelling and visionary. DiMercurio’s characters run as deep as his submarines themselves!” --Joe Buff, author of Crush Depth and Thunder in the Deep "DiMercurio really knows his subs...his characters step right off the sub deck and onto his pages." --Larry Bond "A Master Rivaling Tom Clancy." --Publishers Weekly "Terrific." --San Francisco Examiner "Thrilling." --Associated Press "Superb storytelling." --Virginia-Pilot/Ledger Star

Excerpts of Piranha Firing Point,
a novel by Michael DiMercurio, 1999

PROLOGUE

THE LAST ENGINE DIED as the plunging aircraft tilted into a steep deadstick turn, the crosswind shaking the wings, the view ahead filled only with deep blue ocean. The waves grew alarmingly close, flying impossibly fast toward the windshield. A moment later the plane smashed violently into the water.

The pilot was hurled into his seat's five-point harness, fighting the wheel and the rudder pedals, until the massive four-engine seaplane glided to a halt and began rolling in the gentle swells of the East China Sea. The pilot glanced one last time at the panel and nodded at the copilot, then shrugged off the harness and moved aft through the flight deck door and into the large aft cabin. Looking up at him were two dozen pairs of eyes, some steely and cold, some excited, a few bored, but none anxious.

The pilot turned to the starboard side of the cabin, where a crowded deck-to-overhead console was set against the bulkhead to the cockpit. A small intense man sat lost in the console, the panels and keypads and trackballs encircling him. One of the flat panels graphically depicted the aircraft on the surface, a door opening in the underhull, a ball on a cable lowering into the sea, a set of numbers rolling up as the ball sank into the depths of the ocean. A panel next to the graphic display filled with dots swimming in a darker field, until the dots coalesced into a bright spot moving slowly across the screen.

"She'll pass close in ten minutes, Commander Chu, five hundred meters east. She's slow at fifteen clicks. That puts mount-up time now, deploy time in two minutes, with three minutes of contingency time. It's tight, but we can do it."

Commander Chu Hua-Feng stepped to the center of the cabin and looked at the men, each of them clad in unmarked black coveralls, their belts holding machine pistols, grenades, and daggers.

"Attention, fighters," he said, his voice deep, projecting without effort. Chu stood 180 centimeters, taller in his rubber-soled boots, towering over the crew, his frame thin but muscled. He was in his mid-thirties, which was odd in the Red Chinese PLA Navy, where senior officers were inevitably gray-haired. He carried himself with the air of unquestioned authority, as if he had been the oldest brother, used to command since infancy. The unblinking eyes of the twenty-four men stared at him.

"We mount-up in thirty seconds," Chu continued. "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 into 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, underway 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 crinkling 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. 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.

He stood in the cramped red-lit interior of the submersible, making 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 the high pressure plastic viewport bubble, which was completely black, as if it had been painted over. Chu strapped on his earpiece and boom mike, tested the circuit, and spoke to the seaplane copilot. After his clipped words, the view out the port immediately flashed bright light 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 colored T-handle, releasing the submersible Red Dagger from the seaplane. Immediately Chu's stomach flipped as the vessel tumbled from the plane's bay. The waves rose to meet the viewport, splashing over the plastic bubble in an instant as the ten meter long ship sank into the water. The view then 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 sea dark.

THE SUBMARINE LOOMED AHEAD in the powerful spotlights, long and cylindrical and fat and black, there beneath him, the hatch just ahead, his landing target. The submersible's computer took over on automatic control, guiding them down to the circle of the hatch, attempting to match their 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 ahead was the Korean vessel Dae Gu, a Los Angeles 688I-class submarine, formerly known as the USS Louisville, sold to Korea four years ago under an American program alowing U.S. allies to purchase older nuclear powered attack submarines as long as the 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 leading below to the sparsely occupied engineroom 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, to 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 bottom hatch of the submersible and the escape hatch of the submarine below.

The docking was complete. Chu powered down the submersible, leaving only minimal power on to the interior lights, keeping the computer power up. Chu pulled himself off the control couch, his muscles aching, and moved aft out of the cockpit. Lo Sun operated the hatch panel, and 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 below was revealed. There was not much to it, only a circular groove cut in the black nonskid paint of the hull, the metal still wet from the seawater.

Chu pulled a T-wrench from the tool bag on the bulkhead. The hatch below had a small hole set into the center of it, with a square metal peg recessed into the hole. Submarine hatches had been manufactured to "ISO" standards for the last few decades, in the hopes that a sunken submarine could be rescued by a foreign nation. The International Standards Organization had published engineering guidelines for sub escape hatches with salvage connections that could be operated by anyone with a standard salvage toolkit. Chu bent over and spun the T-wrench clockwise until he heard and felt a metallic clunking noise. He looked up at Lo.

"Set time minus one. Platoon, don equipment."

Chu shrugged into a harness with a dual scuba-type air bottle, then grabbed the gas mask hanging from the hose to the bottles' regulator and hung it around his neck, then belted on two automatic pistols and a bandoleer of grenades. He put on his earpiece and boom microphone, looked up at his men, and saw that they were fully ready.

"Mr. Lo, set time zero when I pull up the hatch. There'll be an indication in their control room as soon as we open it. I want the ship taken within two minutes. Insert on my mark. Five, four, three, two, one, now!"

Chu plunged his fingers into a recessed groove and pulled up the hatch. Despite its mass, it was mounted on a counterbalanced spring, and came easily up into the space of the airlock. Chu latched the hatch in the open position, found the ladder down into the escape trunk, and slid down the rails into the dark chamber, switched on a battle lantern, then bent low to spin the central chrome wheel of the lower hatch, and pulled it up and latched it. The hatch was open to the bright whiteness of the engineroom below. The sound of the whining turbines came up from the hatch, and a cloud of heavy, steaming humidity.

Chu slid down the second ladder, his boots hitting the deck of the engineroom, his AK-80 automatic pistol in his right hand, the long silencer screwed in. He stepped away from the ladderway as his men came down behind him, their boots quiet on the rungs. Chu walked silently aft past the motor control center to the nuclear control space. The side door was narrow, and the men inside were deeply involved in a conversation, the Korean syllables melodic in the space. Chu snapped off three rounds per man, efficiently dropping the nearest at the throttle, the next two at a long console. The officer standing behind the three men looked over in confusion, the expression becoming a death mask as two bullets silently ripped into his chest. He sank to the floor slowly, his eyes shutting as his face clunked onto the deck.

Chu waved one of his men into the room and continued aft, dropping his spent clip and reloading without looking down. He saw a figure between the two large turbines, the noise in the space now a shrieking roar of steam. Chu fired and hit the man in the bicep. The man, a large senior enlisted man or an older officer, lunged to hide, but Chu found him and squeezed off another four rounds into the man's chest. Blood began to run on the deckplates of the catwalk between the turbines as Chu continued aft. He found another watchstander aft of the reduction gear and killed him, then ducked down a ladder to the middle level. It took less than sixty seconds to find the amazed watchstander, standing between the turbines with a clipboard, his attention suddenly turned from the gauge he was reading to clutch his chest, blood spurting over his palm. Too late he looked up to see Chu, then sank to the deck.

By the time Chu returned from the lower level, its watchstander neutralized, he found his platoon gathered at the opening to a ladder to the upper level, not far from the escape trunk from which they had entered the ship. When Chu joined them, Lo Sun mortioned them to the port side, where he'd located the duct leading fowarward to the fan room forward of the reactor compartment, where the air was redistributed throughout the ship. Chu made the signal, and the men strapped on their gas masks, checking the seals and valving in their regulators. Chu put his face into his mask and tasted the coppery dry air. Chu fired four shots into the end of the mesh-covered duct, the metal of it shattering, the mesh destroyed. He took a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin and hurled it into the duct, waiting to hear it explode. There was no loud report, only a dull thudding sound as the hydrogen cyanide canister burst apart, the deadly gas now being sucked to the fan room.

THE DOOR TO THE CONTROL ROOM was open, and Chu could see how choked it was with equipment. He hurried in and looked around.

The dead men registered first. They seemed to be everywhere. He was surprised that the American technology required so many individuals to run the ship. There on his right was a ship control station, where two men slumped over airplane style control yokes. One of his men was pulling the Korean helmsman up from his seat, tossing him into the forward passageway, then taking the control yoke himself. Others did likewise, until the passageway was piled with bodies and the men of the Red Dagger Platoon occupied every control station. Chu stepped up to the periscope stand, and checked the men. The two at the ship control consoles were maintaining depth at what the numerals said 550 -- it must be feet rather than meters, he thought, recalling the depth of the submersible and the fact that the deck never took a down angle during their assault. The speed indicator read 15, which would mean knots instead of meters per second.

Chu craned his neck around a periscope pole to look at the wraparound panel on the port side, where the red circles stood out, indicating the open hatch aft. The rest of the control room was much less important. With a nod at one of his men, Chu gave the next order -- to harvest every technical manual they could find, given four minutes. 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 immersed himself in reading, stopping only when he heard a loud explosion coming from behind the periscope stand as one of the men blew apart the tumbler of a safe, the smoke clearing, the contents of the safe 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, anxious to get out of the gas mask, knowing that their air supplies would be timed to run out in mere minutes. 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 in English "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 engineroom, Chu's men would be shutting the throttle valves to the steam turbines.

Chu watched the speed indicator as it came down from 15 to 12, then to 10. He hurried into the seat of the wraparound port panel next to the ship control seats. He scanned through the procedure manual, searching for the hovering system chapter. If he could grasp the system, and assuming it worked, he could stop the ship and freeze it in a spot in the ocean, allowing them to depart without fighting the 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 at the speed panel and saw that 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 balanced the ship was 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!" Chu commanded.

"GO!" CHU HISSED. There was no time for him to climb into the control seat. One of the platoon pilots had already climbed into the view port couch and flooded the hatch skirt, breaking the connection between the two ships. The depth of the two vessels would now be at least 400 meters, not far from the crush depth of the submarine. The Red Dagger could descend to almost 700 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 angling 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 dwindle. 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. The fresh sea air blew over Chu's sweaty coveralls, chilling him. He shivered in the blast of air, waiting as long as he could until the bottle gave up, its air completely exhausted. Hoping the ventilated submersible atmosphere was now safe, he pulled off the sweaty mask and pulled in a salty sea air breath. The other members of the platoon were looking at 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. The expressions of relief on the men's faces faded as a violent shriek sounded through the sea around them, then a roaring screech of ripping metal, dying down to a barely discernible groan.

"Sub's hull is imploding," Lo Sun said. "It must have hit crush depth."

Chu stood without answering, climbing to the upper compartment hatch, where he looked out a viewport revealing the cloudy sky above. He engaged the hatch opening motor, 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 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 coming to pick them up.

Chu ducked back down, shut the hatch, leaned against the bulkhead and shut his eyes, the words of his briefing already coming effortlessly into his mind. 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 now 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.

USSDEVILFISH.COM Michael DiMercurio Princeton, New Jersey E-mail: readermail@USSDEVILFISH.COM