The island of Hainan had, for centuries, been a remote and forgotten corner of the Chinese Empire, a place of exile for disgraced officials, its shores fringed with mangrove swamps and its interior steaming with a relentless, tropical heat. But now, hidden deep within a secluded, mist-shrouded inlet on its southern coast, a place unmarked on any naval chart, a new and secret heart of the Empire was beginning to beat.
This was Dragon's Tooth Cove, the secret base of the Qing Empire's nascent submarine fleet. It was a place of frantic, feverish activity. Under the watchful, expert eyes of the German U-boat specialists who had arrived on the U-9, a team of the best Qing engineers and shipwrights were working day and night. The Kaiser's blank cheque was being cashed.
They had not yet attempted to build a new submarine from scratch; the industrial requirements were too great, the time too short. Instead, they had taken a small, obsolete coastal torpedo boat, a vessel that had been left to rust in a backwater harbor, and had performed a miracle of brutal, pragmatic engineering. They had stripped its superstructure, built a crude, rounded, watertight casing over its hull, and fitted it with German-made diesel-electric engines and primitive diving planes. It was not an elegant vessel. It was a clumsy, temperamental, and incredibly dangerous hybrid, a steel coffin that leaked, smelled of diesel fumes and unwashed bodies, and groaned like a dying beast under the pressure of the depths. But it could submerge, it could move, and it could fire two German-made torpedoes. It was a "Dragonfish," the first of its kind.
The first of these strange, new vessels, designated Long Jiao 01—Dragon Shark 01—was finally ready for its first hunt. Its crew was as much of a hybrid as the boat itself. The key technical positions—the chief engineer, the diving officer, the torpedo master—were held by veteran petty officers from the Kaiserliche Marine, grim-faced, silent men who communicated in clipped German. The rest of the crew were Qing sailors, hand-picked for their courage, their loyalty, and their ability to withstand crushing claustrophobia.
Her commander was a young, daring Qing naval officer named Li Jie. He was a graduate of the new Imperial Naval Academy, a man who burned with a fierce, modern patriotism and a deep, abiding hatred for the foreign powers who had humiliated his country for a century. For the past month, he had been the personal student of Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen, the veteran commander of the U-9, absorbing every scrap of knowledge about the dark, silent, three-dimensional art of submarine warfare.
Their first mission was a test, a proof-of-concept, but it was a test with live ammunition and a deadly purpose. Their orders, delivered by a special courier directly from the Forbidden City, were simple and absolute: proceed to the main shipping lanes of the South China Sea, the great artery that connected Hong Kong to the British fortress of Singapore. There, they were to find and sink a British warship. They were to prove to the world that the Dragon could now strike, unseen, from beneath the waves.
The Long Jiao 01 slipped out of Dragon's Tooth Cove in the dead of night, a black, low-slung shadow moving through the dark water. The first few days at sea were a tense, nerve-wracking shakedown. The claustrophobic reality of early submarine warfare was a constant, oppressive presence. The air inside the steel hull quickly grew foul, a thick cocktail of diesel fumes, battery acid, and the sweat of twenty men. A constant, cold drip of condensation from the hull plating made everything feel damp and clammy. The groan and creak of the hull as it responded to the pressure of the sea was a constant, terrifying reminder of the crushing weight of the water just inches away. To be a submariner was to live with the constant, intimate knowledge that your tomb was all around you.
Commander Li Jie drove his crew relentlessly, drilling them in the complex, delicate dance of diving, trimming, and surfacing. He stood for hours at the periscope, his eyes burning from the strain, learning to read the subtle signs of the surface world from his dark, silent realm below. He was a natural, a born hunter.
On the fifth day of their patrol, they found their prey.
"Smoke on the horizon!" the lookout called from the small conning tower.
Li Jie quickly ordered the boat to dive to periscope depth. The klaxon blared, and the crew scrambled to their stations, the familiar, controlled chaos of the dive procedure taking over. With a great hiss of venting air, the Long Jiao 01 slipped beneath the waves.
Li Jie raised the periscope, the brass handles cool and solid in his grasp. He swept the horizon. There it was. A single vessel, moving at a steady, confident pace. He twisted the magnification dial. It was a British light cruiser of the Pelorus-class. Sleek, fast, and modern, but unarmored. She was steaming alone, on a routine patrol out of Singapore, a solitary sheep wandering through a pasture where it believed no wolves existed.
"Target identified," Li Jie said, his voice calm, but his heart hammering against his ribs. "British light cruiser. Course one-niner-zero. Speed, fifteen knots."
The German torpedo master, a grizzled veteran named Klaus, grunted his approval. "A perfect target. Arrogant. Not zigzagging. He does not know we are here. He does not know we exist."
For the next hour, Li Jie engaged in the deadly, intricate ballet of the attack. He was a shark stalking a seal. He had to maneuver his clumsy, slow-moving submarine into a perfect firing position, a point off the cruiser's bow, without being detected. It was a nerve-wracking process of calculations, of brief, furtive periscope observations, of whispered commands in a mixture of Mandarin and German.
"Bearing… mark! Range… two thousand yards! Angle on the bow… ninety degrees starboard!" Li Jie called out the final calculations. They were in the perfect position. The British cruiser was steaming directly into their sights, a beautiful, grey profile against the blue sky, completely oblivious to the doom that was lurking just beneath the surface.
"Both torpedo tubes… stand by!" Li Jie commanded. "Rohr eins… Feuer! Rohr zwei… Feuer!"
With a jolt and a great whoosh of compressed air, the two German-made torpedoes were launched. The submarine shuddered as they left the tubes. Inside the steel hull, the crew could hear the faint, high-pitched whine of the torpedoes' propellers as they sped away on their deadly errand.
On the bridge of the HMS Psyche, it was a day like any other. Captain Weatherby was enjoying a cup of tea, gazing out at the calm, empty sea. The South China Sea was a British lake. The only conceivable threat was from a typhoon, and the weather was perfect.
"Wakes! Wakes to starboard!" a lookout suddenly screamed, his voice cracking with a terror and confusion that no one on a British warship had ever felt before. He was pointing frantically at two parallel white streaks, churning through the blue water, moving at an impossible speed, directly towards the ship.
Captain Weatherby and his officers rushed to the railing. They stared, uncomprehending, for a fatal second. What in God's name were they? Some strange kind of dolphin? A freak wave?
Then the terrible, impossible realization dawned. Torpedoes.
It was too late. There was no time to turn, no time to accelerate.
The first torpedo slammed into the hull of the HMS Psyche just below the bridge, in the unarmored section that housed the forward boiler rooms. The explosion was catastrophic. A brilliant, terrifying flash of orange and black, followed by a deafening roar that ripped the sky apart. A column of water, smoke, and twisted steel erupted a hundred feet into the air.
The second torpedo hit moments later, farther aft, near the engine rooms. This explosion was even more devastating, igniting the ship's main fuel bunkers. A secondary, massive blast tore the light cruiser nearly in two, its steel spine broken.
Aboard the Long Jiao 01, the crew was thrown against the bulkheads by the concussion of the explosions. Then a great, triumphant roar went up, a wild, exultant cheer in two languages, the voices of Chinese sailors and German specialists rising as one.
Li Jie was already back at the periscope, his face grim, his knuckles white. He watched the final, horrifying moments of his victim. The HMS Psyche was a dying wreck. She was listing heavily to starboard, wreathed in fire and smoke, her bow already slipping beneath the waves. He could see tiny figures of men leaping from her burning decks into the sea. Her death was swift and brutal. Within three minutes of the first impact, she was gone, her stern rising high into the air before sliding beneath the waves, leaving behind only a great, black stain of oil and a scattering of desperate survivors.
He slowly lowered the periscope, the sounds of his cheering crew a distant buzz in his ears. He had done it. He had drawn first blood.
He gave the order to dive deep and clear the area. The first naval battle of the Southern War had been fought and won. It had been won by a weapon the British did not even know existed, commanded by a man from a navy they had dismissed as a joke.
The Royal Navy's absolute, century-old mastery of the seas was no longer guaranteed. A new and terrible predator was now hunting in their waters.