“Open the hatch,” Chu said.
As Lo undogged the hatch, a hiss of compressed air leaked in from the docking skirt. He unlatched the heavy hatch, and the spring force pushed it slowly upward to the open latch. Down below a half meter, inside the wide docking skirt, the rubbery gray skin of the submarine glistened with droplets, a neat circle carved in the hull outlining the hatch. In the center of the circle was the expected hole for insertion of the ISO key. Lo handed the key to Chu like a nurse passing a scalpel.
Chu inserted it and began to spin it clockwise — the opposite direction to a normal valve — and had a bad moment when nothing happened. Could the Japanese have chained and locked the hatch? It would seem to make sense, since this was an entry into a radioactive space with the reactor operating. But if it was locked, the only way in would be with an acetylene torch, which Chu did not have.
Then the hatch budged, just a hair. He looked up at Lo, keeping his expression one of calm and authority.
“Ready, First?”
Lo Sun took a deep breath, put on his mask, and looked over at the other men. “Ready, Admiral. Let’s steal a submarine.”
“Set event time zero. Insert on my mark,” Chu commanded.
He donned his own air mask, the men gathering close to the hatch. “Three, two, one, go!”
Chu pulled the hatch fully open, his eyes wide in expectation.
The hatch clicked into the open latch. The hot, stuffy air from down below rose into the clammy cold of the submersible’s atmosphere. There was no light coming from the opening, just a dark, gaping maw.
Chu snapped on his vest flashlight button, the beam shining out from his chest. He strapped on a headband light and adjusted it downward. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest and in his ears, his breathing loud in the air mask. He would enter the hatchway first, then Lo Sun, then the other six men. The crew was smaller than on the Korean attack mission. The highly automated Rising Sun submarine required only a few men to operate her, using only one small habitable space.
Chu’s former crew members were now lending their experience to the other five submersible teams.
The hatch led to the diesel-battery compartment, aft of the reactor compartment, and there was no shielding from the operating reactor here. Unfortunately, they could not make an entry into the forward escape hatch, because the distance between the hatch and the forward edge of the fin was too short — the submersible would not fit without colliding with the fin. They’d have to shut down the reactor since they could not survive the radiation, thereby alerting the Japanese crew. But there was nothing he could do about it. They’d have to run the risk.
An image loomed in his mind of an experiment commissioned by the PLA Navy Medical Command to see what would happen to a man entering an operating reactor space. A video had shown a prisoner from the civil war left at the Wuhan Electrical Generating Station’s reactor-compartment door. Motivated by some hidden leverage — family members in prison, promised humane treatment perhaps — the prisoner opened the hatch and entered the containment, where the reactor churned out hot, pressurized water for the power plant as well as a tremendous flux of gamma rays and neutrons and alpha particles. As the prisoner descended the ladder, the hair on top of his head immediately stood on end. At the bottom of the ladder the man’s scrawny frame had become chunky, his bony face filling out until his cheeks bulged, the prisoner swelling quickly, liquid rushing to his radiation-damaged tissue while gas pockets grew inside him.
The enlarged prisoner limped as he dismounted the ladder, suddenly stumbling and blind, feeling his way with one grotesquely swollen hand, his other on his eyes.
The prisoner’s skin steadily changed from a pale to a deep purple shade. The man, becoming nearly spherical from the swelling, sank to his knees, his skin black, his eyes swollen shut, his face toward the lower-level camera.
In the next moment he literally exploded, the gases inside him blowing his body apart, blood and organs flying from his abdominal cavity.
Chu lowered himself into the hatch, his boot finding a ladder rung. He descended into the darkness, his headband light showing a narrow vertical tunnel with only a ladder, some cables and pipes. The tunnel was faired in with sheet metal, polished aluminum from the look of it The tunnel was still too dark to tell how far down it went.
Chu stopped just below the hatchway, looking for the emergency cutoff switch for the reactor. Intelligence data had indicated that the trip switch would be a large T-handle, although the manual was vague about its exact location. There was also an automatic reactor-kill circuit wired to the hatch itself so that anyone opening it while the reactor was running would trip the reactor. This was only for someone standing on the deck while the ship was at the pier, though. The circuit would typically be disabled at sea — after all, who would expect an outer hatch to be opened when the ship was submerged? And so, for all Chu knew, the reactor had continued to operate as he came in. It would irradiate him with a lethal dose of gamma and neutron radiation until he found the cursed kill switch.
He spun around, one hand on the ladder, the other feeling for a switch. Near the hatch hinge he thought he felt something, and found a rotary switch. Yet in the flashlight beam it looked nothing like the intelligence manual’s sketch of the reactor-kill switch. It was most likely the tunnel light switch, and it might set off some kind of alarm or intercom circuit, blowing their surprise.
To his right, Chu’s light beam illuminated a computer display panel. There was an electronic eye, several small display screens, a keypad, and a row of variable-function keys. Chu turned away from it. The emergency switch should be located somewhere at the hatch opening. It would be large, with red coloring or yellow and black stripes, not just a computer panel. Unless this hull was different from the intelligence manual, he thought with a surge of dread, with no emergency cutoff lever.
He tilted his head up, the circle of light from above showing Lo’s torso leaning down. Chu’s eye followed the outside periphery of the hatchway. Finally he found a protruding panel opposite the hinge spring, a T-handle painted bright red with Japanese symbols next to it.
Chu reached for the cutoff lever and tried to turn it.
Nothing happened. The switch wouldn’t move. He looked at the writing by the switch, forced himself to concentrate, and realized his mistake. The switch had to be pulled far out before being rotated. He pulled and turned it, listening hard for changes to see if he had tripped out the reactor, but nothing seemed different.
Maybe the plant had tripped itself off when he first opened the hatch.
But even if it had, he remained in danger. The unshielded reactor would drop only to six percent power even after being tripped. The radiation coming from it would be less intense, but still lethal, as the reactions calmed down in the core. It would take years for a reactor’s radiation to reach “safe” levels and in the hours after tripping it, a lethal dose of radiation would be absorbed in just a fraction of an hour. Chu and his team had mere minutes to make it to the forward compartment, on the other side of the radiation shielding.
“Insert! Let’s go,” Chu yelled into his mask microphone.
He put his boots outside the rungs of the ladder and slid down quickly, gripping only the vertical bars of the ladder. The tunnel continued downward two levels, until the lower hatch became visible in a wider spot in the tunnel. He leaned down and spun the chrome wheel in the circular hatch. By the time he opened it, the remainder of his platoon had joined him. When he pulled the hatch up, bright light blasted into the tunnel from the lower level of the diesel-battery compartment, the space painted a stark hospital white. A ladder could be seen leading from the lower tunnel hatch to a catwalk-style deck grating.