There was no movie show, but as he stared at the unmoving wheel, he did feel one regret, that he had failed to connect with Mai Sheng. He abruptly pushed the thought from his mind and continued straining. Finally he quit, dropping to the deck.
“It’s no good. Admiral. We’re trapped,” Lo said.
Chu looked at him, too winded to reply.
“Get on the wheel, each man to a spoke, and heave together when I say,” Chu growled into his mask microphone.
He could feel his breathing becoming labored, his tank almost out of air. He had pulled himself up from the deck, glaring at Lo Sun for his expression of hopelessness.
He had put six men on the wheel, stepping on each other, six shoulders crowding together. They were probably more interfering with each other then helping, but what else could Chu do?
“Now! Pull together!” he shouted. The men strained, their breathing loud through their air packs. As Chu watched, disappointment and fear and frustration mingled into a feeling of pent-up rage. Just as he was ready to scream, two things happened — the men stopped, two of them falling to the catwalk deck, the effort a failure, and Chu’s air ran out, the regulator wheezing to a halt, Chu sucking in his face mask.
In anger he pulled off his mask and threw it toward the deck, sweat and spittle flying from it. The mask swung on its air hose, wrapping around his neck and continuing around his head, striking him in the face from the other side. All of a sudden the answer dawned on him, and the answer and the comedy of his mask hitting him in the head combined to make him start to laugh, three quick, choked rasps escaping his throat before he clamped down, his men staring at him.
The answer was simple. Just as he had thrown the mask but couldn’t throw it away, the dogging wheel was just as constrained. He’d seen the mechanism up close, and in the panic of the moment he had not registered what he was looking at. But now it was clear. So clear he felt like a fool.
A loud but indistinct voice sounded from the forward bulkhead as Chu made his way to the hatch.
“Was that the ship announcing system?” he asked Lo.
“What did it say?”
“Sir,” Lo Sun huffed, his own air low, “it said, ‘The reactor is in the power range.’ We’re being fried right now—”
“Get a hold of yourself. First,” Chu spat.
At the hatch-dogging mechanism, he leaned far over the chrome wheel, putting his face down to the hub.
There a circular chrome ring surrounded the wheel shaft where it entered the hatch bearing — but only from the top did it look like a ring. On the right side a small protrusion extended from it, a small nipple. Chu felt the nipple, moving his fingers slowly around the outside of it. On the other side of the nipple was a set of gear teeth ground into the shaft of the dogging wheel, and pushed into the gear teeth was a single protrusion of metal from the ring. It was a simple mechanical interlock. The hatch wasn’t chained and padlocked; it was just interlocked to avoid inadvertent opening from vibrations of the ship.
All he had to do was pull up on the nipple and disconnect the key of the ring from the gear teeth of the shaft, and the wheel would be free to rotate. He turned the wheel clockwise, as if to shut the hatch, freed the ring key from the teeth, pulled up the locking-ring nipple, then turned the wheel counterclockwise. The wheel spun rapidly as if oiled that very morning.
The hatch dogs unlatched, the wheel spinning quickly, until the hatch was ready to be opened, outward toward the forward compartment. Suddenly their situation had changed. No longer were they fighting for their survival, running from a nuclear reactor about to cook them like mice in a microwave oven, but were now about to assault and capture a foreign warship. The difference was startling. They were about to change from prey to hunters in an instant.
Chu had to restrain himself from pushing the hatch open and bolting for the safety of the shielded compartment.
He had to prepare the men, ready their weapons, and ready himself to attack. It would take only a second, but it was a second he couldn’t afford to let slip by. He turned his back to the hatch, and eyed the men steadily while he grabbed his AK-80 and dropped his air bottles.
The men, just as panicked as he had been, immediately realized what he was doing. Discarding their air bottles, they put in their earphones to their VHF radios, strapped on their boom microphones. Without saying a word, he looked quickly at each of his men, then turned back around.
He put his hand on the hatch, ready to charge into the middle level. On the other side a half dozen armed officers of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force could be waiting for him. His heart rate climbed, his breathing coming rapidly. There was no turning back now.
Commander Suruki Gama felt a sickness settle in his stomach like a cold rock. What he’d expected to be the most eventful day in his life — the maiden voyage of the Rising Sun-class submarine fleet — was in fact eventful, but in a hideously twisted way.
Perhaps it was the way the day had begun. The phone call that had awakened him at one o’clock in the morning started the day. The Second Captain computer system with its female human voice interface called him to tell him the status of the submarine. “Automatic sequence notification for Captain Gama. Please authenticate.”
The voice would repeat those words over and over until Gama spoke his rank and name. The call reported that the reactor was critical. It took Gama twenty minutes to fall back asleep. The two o’clock call reported that the reactor was at operating temperature. At three a.m. the steam plant was up and functional. At four the ship was on internal power, being divorced from shore power. At five a.m., with dawn’s light seeping into the bedroom from a part in the curtains, the alarm clock buzzed insistently, and Gama, enraged and sick from the sleepless night, picked up the clock and hurled it across the room.
He had arrived at the pier and gone to the plateglass windows of the concourse pier building overlooking the submarine tied up at the berth below. SS-403 was the hull number of his Rising Sun-class attack submarine.
Gama had been given the opportunity to name the ship himself, and in line with the orders of fleet headquarters that the Rising Sun class be named after natural phenomena, Gama had given SS-403 the name Arctic Storm.
There was something deeply important in christening an oceangoing ship, and this name resonated with Gama, for reasons beyond the grasp of his conscious mind.
The ship was a stubby-cylinder, the hull extremely wide compared to conventional nuclear-submarine designs, and relatively short in length. The fin protruded starkly from the hull, its shape rounded and tapered aft, and it jutted impossibly high above the vessel, the fin height roughly equal to the diameter of the hull itself.
Aft, the rudder was an X-shape, the surfaces of the X at once rudder and elevator plane. Other than the forward hatch opening and the windows set into the forward edge of the fin, the hull was smooth and unmarked, its skin slick like that of a shark, the material a sonar-evading foam coating over high-tensile steel.
After he had met with his first officer and spoken to the Second Captain computer system. Admiral Tanaka, the fleet commander, had come aboard, greeting Gama warmly, then leaving without saying much. Gama looked after him, knowing that the old man had lost his only son in the American blockade battle. At that point Gama went to the surface control space on top of the fin, and he and his first officer had taken Arctic Storm to sea.
A hundred kilometers south, Gama submerged the Arctic Storm to a depth of a hundred meters. Five hours later, the ship was taken through her paces, a highspeed, maximum-depth run, including a torpedo-evasion maneuver when the ship was under the control of the Second Captain system. The hull groaned from the pressure of the depth, the deck rolling deeply through the turns. A single tenth of a degree of control surface-angle error potentially could put the ship below crush depth, where the weight of the water above would rupture the hull like a steamroller crushing an egg.