The bang of the pistol was loud, despite the silencer.
The youth’s head exploded, leaving brains against the bulkhead behind him and blood on the carpeting, a raw, meaty, liquid mess where an innocent face had been.
“Lieutenant Wong, clean this up.” Chu holstered the pistol and walked to the door of his stateroom.
There, in privacy. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng, current commanding officer of the MSDF submarine Artic Storm and admiral-in-command of a fleet of the most advanced submarines in history, bent over and vomited.
Five minutes later he sank to the deck, his eyes shut, his fingers pressed to his eye sockets, muttering two words to himself, repeating them over and over — “Good God… good God…”
Chu went to the control console. He had to loosen the five-point harness for his larger frame. The leather of the seat was comfortable, the arrangement of the consoles well designed. He spent a few moments scanning the panels. All of them displayed Japanese script, even the camera view out the top of the fin, showing the silvery undersides of the waves approaching the ship.
The periscope was down, the instrument’s mast lowered sometime during their invasion of the ship. Chu had not yet grasped how to raise the device, nor did he intend to.
But that was the essence of the problem of the moment — and the problems seemed endless — getting the ship to do what Chu wanted it to do. This vessel had very few knobs, control yokes, function keys, or dedicated instrument dials, just a cluster of computer workstations.
All were characterized by an arrangement of high-definition flat-panel and holographic displays. This was not a ship that he could treat like the Korean vessel, finding a tersely written procedure in a dogeared manual, then push some buttons, open an automatic-valve joystick, dial in a depth rate, push a control yoke to change control-surface positions.
No, this ship was completely commanded by the computer system. On the plus side, Chu had managed to raid the ship and take it over without a single bullet entering a computer cabinet. And without the slightest scratch to his crew. On the negative side, the ship continued steaming under the control of the advanced computer system, and the intelligence briefing manuals’ details were sketchy about the system. It was either very simple to operate or hopelessly difficult. Continuing adding up the negatives, the ship was at mast-broach depth, shallow enough that a ten-meter-long pole — be it periscope or radio antenna or electronic emission-detection antenna — would poke out of the sea five meters. Which meant the top of the sail was only five or ten meters beneath the surface. Which meant an approaching ship could smash into them and cripple them, maybe even sink them.
So far this ship was blind and deaf. It was an unfamiliar dog without a leash.
Chu knew he had to get the ship deep and steam west, away from the Japanese fleet, now possibly alerted to the fact that their submarines were in the hands of rogue forces. He had to hurry.
Forward, in the computer room, Chu had stationed his computer expert. Lieutenant Zhang Peng. Right now Zhang would be speed-reading the manuals embedded in the computer software, paging through displays, researching the control system. It might take him weeks to understand how to give the simplest order to the computer, or even to become acquainted with how to take manual control of the ship with the computer out of the loop.
Chu ran his hands through his close-cropped hair, staring helplessly at the computer display of the fin camera.
He opened his mouth to call out to Zhang, but instead checked his watch. It had been only three minutes since the last time he had demanded an update, and Zhang’s reply had been the same one he’d given before that— status unchanged.
“Right one effective degree rudder, change course to one eight five, aye, sir,” the Second Captain’s odd-sounding female voice responded in Chu’s headset. Chu had ordered Zhang to shift the system to English, the language all crew members understood.
Chu had retrieved the cordless headset off the deck near the console. It was a strange mechanism, with one earphone, a boom microphone, and a device that pointed at his right eye as if trying to read where he was looking.
A display in the lower center of Chu’s console changed from a readout of tank levels to show computer animation of the submarine ahead. The depiction was strangely real, with waves that caused shimmering patterns on the sub’s upper deck. The aft X-tail of the animation blinked, flashing red appearing on the control surfaces. The view suddenly rotated so that the observer looked down on the ship as it began to turn right slowly, from a superimposed line labeled 180, another line five degrees clockwise labeled 185. The numerals 185 blinked for a second as the Second Captain’s voice again spoke in his earphone: “The ship is steady on course one eight five, sir. All control surfaces now at zero effective rudder.”
Chu wondered what his script read at this point.
Shrugging, he said, “Very good.”
“Seems to work. Admiral,” from Zhang.
Inside, Chu smiled. The plan was working. It was time to drive the ship deep, then steer westward to the East China Sea and get out of the sea-trials area. The Japanese surface fleet would be coming soon, looking for their missing submarines. Once he’d made some miles east, he would need to communicate with his satellite— to tell the PLA Admiralty the good news — and with the other unit commanders. Then he’d instruct the seaplanes to drop their explosives and cargo of wreckage into the sea. They were loaded with oil tanks, pieces of fabric, scraps of plastic piping, some electrical cables, about a ton of floating detritus each, all designed to buy time, to create the impression to the Japanese navy hierarchy that their subs had all sunk.
More important than that was to learn the ship, how to drive it, how to fight it, and how to make the Second Captain completely functional.
He was bone tired, and there were hours and hours of work to do. But then, so much had gone right They had done it, they had actually done it.
Chu felt like a proud father watching a son walk his first steps. His plan, his brainchild, was working.
STORM WARNING
Chapter 3
Wednesday October 27
Vice Admiral Michael Pacino lifted his eyes upward, past the flank of the submarine to the structure of the ship’s tail towering over his head. The top of the rudder rose over seven stories high relative to the floating drydock’s deck. The ship was huge and graceful from this angle, the clean lines of her hull and the sharp edges of her tail section making her seem to lunge forward to the sea, even suspended motionlessly on the dock’s blocks.
The new ship was beautiful, much of her Pacino’s own design. Yet somehow today that thought held no magic for the admiral.
Pacino stood over six feet tall, thin and gaunt in his lightweight khakis and black shipyard boots. His white hardhat was painted with the crossed anchors and eagle of a Navy officer, three stars of his rank posted above, the legend below reading commander unified submarine command. He wore the three silver stars of flag rank on his collars, with a gold dolphin submariner’s pin above his left pocket. He wore a white gold Annapolis ring on his left ring finger, a scratched and worn Rolex diving watch on his wrist. The skin of his arms and face looked tanned, but actually had been damaged from a frostbite injury during an Arctic mission that had gone wrong.
His face would have been handsome had he weighed ten or twenty more pounds. As it was, his cheekbones seemed overly pronounced, making his large green eyes seem startling, his lips too full, his nose too straight. His hair was white, contrasting with his black eyebrows and dark skin, and his otherwise young appearance. Adding to the effect were the deep lines around Pacino’s eyes, as if he had spent decades at sea — perhaps on the windblown deck of a square-rigged sailing vessel. When people met him for the first time, they invariably stared at him, trying to read the conflicting signals of his age. His tall, wiry frame, the shape of his face, and the tone of his voice were those of a vigorous man in his late thirties, while his hair and skin brought to mind a fisherman in his sixties.