In the rush of taking the room Pig had heard a torpedo tube door slam shut. No doubt one of the guards had dived into an empty tube, hoping to pop back out unexpectedly and shoot the SEALs from behind.
But Pig knew how to lock a tube from the central console in the room. He peeked up at the torpedo room central console. The top of the console was burned out and full of holes, but the controller section for the port tube bank looked as if it had been hastily repaired and rewired, the plastic function keys ripped out with crude toggle switches installed in their place.
Hoping the repaired switches worked, he had thrown a switch and watched as the thick steel ring rotated over the dogs of the inner tube door. He could hear the faint sound of a man shouting, the sound muffled and resonant, as if the noise came from inside a metal can, which in a way it did. Pig threw a second switch to vent the tube to the torpedo room, opening a valve in a pipe on top of the tube, the pipe intended to make sure no trapped air remained in the tube when it was filled with water. The third switch was the best; the marking above it said FLOOD. Pig hit the switch, opening up the tube to the water in the tube tanks, filling the tube with seawater all the way to the vent valve, which automatically shut when the tube was full of water. There followed a rushing noise, louder shouts from the tube. By the time the vent valve shut, the tube was full of water, and all human sound was extinguished.
But they couldn’t all be that easy, Wilson knew.
The room was the most vulnerable of all the spaces they would be raiding, full of weapons and their high explosive warheads as well as the volatile fuel. A single bullet would be enough to cause a fire that could kill the whole ship … the self-oxidizing torpedo fuel, once lit, could not be extinguished by anything — it burned under water, it burned when blasted by a CO^ or PKP or foam-extinguisher, it just burned until the fuel was gone. That kind of violent fire would blow every warhead in the room, creating a chain reaction that would breach the hull, perhaps even cutting the ship to pieces. One goddamned bullet.
When the stun grenade exploded in the space, Pig held his breath, but heard only the clatter of guns dropping to the deck and the screams of the guards as the stun juice hit them. After a moment of quiet, Pig and Python began to search the space.
Fighter Sai, the last Chinese P.L.A guard remaining alive aboard the Tampa, managed to escape Pig and Python and bolted for the stairs leading from the torpedo room to the middle level, his AK-47 clattering against the rails of the stairs as he ran. He ran aft along the passageway between the crew quarters and officers’ country, heading toward the crew’s mess to the tunnel and the aft compartment. He knew a hiding place where he hoped they wouldn’t look for him.
When the Americans thought they were safe in their recaptured boat, he would emerge and take over the ship, killing the complacent, overconfident Americans with some of their own weapons. Or at least he could sabotage the vessel, sufficient to sink the ship somewhere in the bay.
Sai reached the corner of the galley and turned into a short passageway leading starboard. He thought he heard an American shouting something and worried he’d been seen. At the end of the passageway was the massive hatch to the aft compartment that lay open on its latch. Without stopping to shut the hatch Sai climbed through and ran along the tight tunnel leading to the aft compartment, and felt the deck tilt as the ship turned at high speed.
Midway along the tunnel Sai stopped at the door to the room he privately called the forgotten compartment.
Forgotten because it seemed to be between the forward and aft compartments, but other than the one tunnel going through it there was no access to the space. The one door to the space was set into the wall of the tunnel and it had a window with a mirror that rotated with a hand wheel providing a view into each corner of the room. Inside the space there were large pieces of equipment, mostly tanks or storage containers.
Sai knew that no one ever ventured into the room because the oval door to the space was locked with a thick chain and padlock. No one went in, no one ever came out. There were a hundred places where no one would see him from the tunnel. He was feeling better.
As Sai shot the chain of the lock and turned the wheel of the door’s latch, he ignored the yellow-and magenta-colored sign set above the door as well as the panel next to it flashing red letters. He pulled the thick door open, marveling at its thickness and heaviness. Once inside the room, on a grating platform on the other side of the door, a suffocating steamy heat assaulted him. What was the compartment’s original purpose? Part of the engine room But if so why would it be locked? Why was it so hot? Sai pushed the thoughts from his mind and shut the door, then climbed down the two ladders to the grating at the lower level and found a place to sit next to a large steel tank, keeping the tank between himself and the window of the door high above.
The sign Sai had been unable to read was printed in block letters in English: CONTROLLED ACCESS — NO ADMITTANCE — HIGH RADIATION AREA. The panel flashing the red letters read: WARNING — REACTOR CRITICAL. The tank that Sai sat next to, his hiding place, was the pressure vessel of the Tampa’s nuclear reactor, which was then at fifty percent power.
Sai could not feel the radiation as it went through his body. The gamma radiation ionized the molecules of his cells as the waves penetrated, the radiation some ten million times the strength of an X-ray, the equivalent of standing next to a nuclear explosion. The neutrons from the uranium atoms’ fissioning slammed into his tissues, the flux of the radiation vaporizing the structure of his cells.
The first indication Sai had that something was wrong was his hair standing on end as if he had grabbed a hot wire. The second sign came within ten seconds, when Sai’s eye lenses changed from being clear to being black and opaque, leaving him blind.
His abdomen began to swell with fluid buildup as his tissues tried to compensate for the massive damage.
When his stomach ballooned he could no longer see it from the blindness.
Unfortunately, in a sense, for Fighter Sai, his brain was the last organ to be affected by the radiation, protected as it was by the bones of his skull, which acted as a partial shield, leaving a capacity to feel the effects of the radiation inflating his body to several times its normal size. He was still alive when his abdomen exploded. An observer standing at the window of the door to the compartment would have seen only a dark stain in the bilges.
Fighter Sai’s death marked the end of the occupation of the submarine Tampa by the Chinese P.L.A. Inside, the ship again belonged to the U.S. Navy. The same could not be said for the outside.
Aircraft Commander Yen Chitzu jogged out of the ready-building off the taxiway at Hangu, pulling on his flight helmet and blinking the sleep out of his eyes.
He only half-cursed the late hour. A year before he would have been mumbling obscenities about the senior officers and whether they had any idea what time it was. Now, with the White Army closing on Beijing, the landscape of reality had changed. Now when the alarm to scramble to an aircraft blared in the ready building Yen rushed to his aircraft without a complaint.
He climbed up the step over the 23-mm forward gun into the upper cockpit of the Mil Hind-G helicopter, pulled his feet up and over the sill of the door and landed in the thinly padded seat, then shut the cockpit door after him, already starting in on his preflight checklist while his weapons systems officer, Leader Ni Chihfu, checked the weapons pods and, apparently satisfied, climbed into the lower forward cockpit. The Hind was the largest assault-helicopter gunship in the Chinese P.L.A Navy, the ship licensed for construction from the Russians, the new variant named the G, although it was essentially identical to the F variant of the old Red Army. This particular helicopter was fairly new, its interior still smelling of the vinyl and plastic and paint.