Ghostboat (20 page)

“—on a dark night!”
Byrnes finished for him, and they hooted in laughter. Even Hardy stood by and smiled; he had loosened up over the Dankworth incident, and ever since that morning had attacked his tasks with relish rather than with his usual suspicious gloom.

Byrnes reclaimed the scope and resumed his scan of the horizon. Again he stopped. There was a smaller dot in the distance. Magnifying it, he brought up the image of a long, low piece of land. He breathed easier.

“Wake Island,” he announced, and turned the scope over to Hardy, who eagerly took the position and recorded it on his chart. Next to a little dot identified as “Wake I.” he wrote the notation: 26 NOV 1530.

Hardy stood up, tucked his pencil into a pocket, folded the chart, and went below. Frank exchanged looks with Byrnes.

“He’s shaping up,” the Captain admitted.

“He’s having fun,” said Frank.

Byrnes had decided Frank needed a refresher course in submarine operation, so Frank was stationed in. the control room, required to make hourly inspections of all forward compartments, including the forward battery and the pump room below decks.

Frank ducked below at 1700 and walked through the pump room. The engines were quiet. The sub was running submerged on battery power. But diesel oil was all over everything, and Frank was becoming as filthy as everyone else aboard; his clothes were covered with oil spots, and he smelled to high heaven. He went above and trotted into officers’ country, popped the forward battery hatch, and lowered the top half of his body through. He played a battle lantern over the tops of the enormous battery cells, looking for water leaks, rust, corrosion, bubbling acid. There was nothing. Everything was in order. He lay on the deck longer than he had to, staring at the batteries, thinking back to the time he had spent aboard these subs during the Vietnam War—of the million and one thankless little jobs that had to be done aboard a sub, of the constant surveillance on all operable equipment, the attention to detail... Now he knew why he had been grateful for the desk job with NIS. It had meant relief from
this.
Yet here he was back again—just like Jack Hardy. He clicked off the lantern.

At 2000 Byrnes brought the sub to surface, not a second off schedule, which pleased Hardy immensely. He felt a great sense of relief every time his log was followed to the letter. Frank went off duty and passed through the galley to pick up a dinner tray. He brought it back to the wardroom and settled in with his briefcase. He spread papers and notebooks out on the table as he ate. He had brought along all his research on the Devil’s Triangle: all his charts and reports and his Maritime Disasters notebook. He pulled the world globe down from its shelf over the phonograph and set it too on the table, twirling it absently, settling first on the Florida vortex, then spinning it around to the Japanese area...

Jack Hardy strolled in with a dish of ice cream and smiled at Frank. “Cookie made fresh ice cream this afternoon. That old freezer still works like a charm. You fetter hurry. It’s going fast.”

“No, thanks.”

Hardy sat down and watched Frank study the globe. Then Frank pushed his dinner aside and sipped at his coffee while he began poring through his notebook.

It was a solid five minutes before Hardy asked what he was doing.

“I’m preparing a lecture on what we’re going to be up against. Thought I’d better bone up.”

Hardy reached for one of the notebooks and asked, “May I?”

He spent the rest of the evening and all his off-duty hours the next morning studying Frank’s material, poking around the globe, and frowning to himself. He never uttered a word to Frank.

November 29, 1974

At Frank’s request, Byrnes relieved all of the officers except the juniors at 1600 the next afternoon and ordered everyone to assemble in the wardroom for coffee and a briefing.

The officers slid in around the, big table. Frank positioned himself at the head; he had already spread out his maps, charts and notes, and had planted his globe within easy reach. Hardy pulled up a chair and sat near the entrance. Cassidy ducked in at the last minute and removed his cap, taking a deferential stand against the far bulkhead. He had still not gotten used to sitting in the same room with officers.

Frank scratched his chest, then lit his pipe. He gazed around at the friendly, chatting faces: Byrnes, Dorriss, Stigwood, Roybell, Hardy, Cassidy... Only Hardy had some idea of what was going to be discussed.

The mess steward circulated cups. As soon as the men were quiet, Frank began.

He pulled the globe closer and picked up a red felt marker. He drew a neat red oblong around the area off the coast of Florida, then turned it around for all to see.

“Gentlemen, the Devil’s Triangle.”

Everyone fell silent. No sailor in any modern navy is unaware of that infamous vortex. Though many do not believe in it, most have at least a genuine respect for the stories.

“I have to warn you before we begin, gentlemen,” said Frank, “that we are going to be dealing with an area of discussion that some authorities consider myth, superstition, or just plain folly. But whether you believe in these mysteries makes no difference to us today. At this very moment, we are standing aboard such a mystery. This submarine is our central focus on the inexplicable. And it is my feeling—my personal feeling—that her story is directly related to
this.”
Again he pointed out the circled blob, the Devil’s Triangle.

“Ships and planes and submarines have been known to enter this area and vanish. Not all ships and planes, mind you, but enough to rate the descriptive term: an alarming number. I’m alarmed. The Navy is alarmed, but only, it seems, when a fresh ship or plane or sub disappears. Then, for a short time, all hell breaks loose. There are searches and theories, some recriminations, and finally: obscurity. No one in the Navy wants to believe that unnatural acts are possible in our precious oceans. They are not only possible, they are a
fait accompli.”

Some of the faces shifted. Eyes looked away.

“There are many theories about what happens in the so-called Devil’s Triangle. I’m sure Professor Hardy is well aware of most of them. But what isn’t so well known is that there appears to be more than one Devil’s Triangle.”

He spun the globe around and drew another red oblong: “Here—off the coast of Japan. Two hundred fifty miles south of Honshu, between latitude thirty to forty degrees north, and centered around one hundred forty to one hundred fifty degrees east longitude.” He paused to let this little bombshell have its effect. Roy- bell and Stigwood were staring at the red circle, agog. Frank added quietly, “Gentlemen, the
Candlefish
went down in this very area in 1944.”

There was some mumbling. Byrnes looked at Frank, his eyes reflecting displeasure. He was not the sort of man who appreciated this brand of science fiction.

Neither did Hardy. He sat with arms folded across his chest under his beard, impassively eyeing the charts spread on the table.

Cassidy fidgeted with his machinist’s bandanna.

“According to the original reports, she sank in the Ramapo Depth at about latitude thirty degrees north and longitude one hundred forty-six degrees east. That’s smack in the middle of this particular... shall we say, anomaly?” He moved the globe aside and eyed his captive audience. He picked up his coffee and sipped it.

“Let’s go back to the original Devil’s Triangle, the one off the coast of Florida, the most popular one. To be a bit more exact, it isn’t a triangle at all—it’s more in the shape of an oblong sphere, a football with rounded ends—and it’s doubtful that the Devil is much involved. Roughly, it is bordered at three points: Bermuda, central Florida, Puerto Rico. It extends from thirty to forty degrees north latitude, and fifty-five to eighty-five degrees west longitude. It sits right over the Sargasso Sea, another of history’s more unpleasant mythical centers. The Sargasso Sea is a surface of ocean literally matted with seaweed. For a few centuries during the early explorations to the Americas, the Sargasso was rumored to have caught and tangled dozens of ships, ensnaring them until the crews would desert or die or the boats would rot and sink. And considering that most of the monster legends grew out of this strange section of sea, it’s very possible that what sailors took to be sea serpents were no more than long strands of seaweed pushed up and curling in the moonlight—or perhaps they were fish, eels, or squid, caught in a surface patch while trying to feed. There certainly are some reasonable explanations for such bizarre events. But legends have a way of perpetuating themselves, and the superstitions of early sailors have undoubtedly contributed to the aura of myth surrounding this... triangle today.”

From the faces around him, Frank knew he had found the right approach: Temper the bizarre with the real, feed the fantasies with documented evidence.

“Vincent Gaddis coined the phrase ‘Bermuda Triangle’ in a magazine article he wrote in 1964, documenting the more infamous incidents that have occurred over the last hundred years in this area. John Wallace Spencer has written a book titled
Limbo of the Lost
, a list and description of all the major known vanishings that have occurred in the triangle.

“Of course, we have to realize that some of the things that have happened here can occur over land as well. Planes have disappeared over our own United States, over dry land, without a trace. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be a pattern for those incidents. They never seem to occur twice in the same place.

“The triangle is different. Every strange thing that could happen to a ship or a plane has happened here. The most famous single incident took place on December 5, 1945, when five U.S. Navy Avengers, IBM torpedo bombers, took off from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida. They were on patrol, each with three-man crews. The day was perfect: sunny with no clouds. They were on a two-hour flight out over the Atlantic, and they had been airborne only an hour and a half when they radioed back—” Frank picked up a folder and read from a report: “ ‘We seem to be off course... we cannot see land... Can’t be sure just where we are... We seem to be lost... Even the ocean doesn’t look right...’”

He put down the folder and carried on without it. “Air-to-ground chatter continued for another hour, and all of it amounted to the same thing. The pilots were confused and panicky. The air, the ocean—nothing was familiar. And then they simply disappeared. A rescue plane was scrambled, a Martin Mariner Flying Boat, and it took off toward the last known position of the TBMs. Within fifteen minutes the Martin Mariner and its crew of thirteen had also disappeared. Nothing was ever found of any of the planes, despite an immediate massive sea and air search, in which, thankfully, no more planes were lost. But this is not the first nor the last mysterious occurrence. I have here a list of ships and planes that have disappeared over the last hundred years.”

Frank pulled copies from his folder and passed them around. It was a detailed list, compiled from many different sources, and accounting for a vast number of missing planes and ships that had purportedly sunk, disappeared, or turned up adrift without crews.

Frank watched Hardy glance at it quickly, then turn it over in front of him. Cassidy stood staring at it, a tight frown stretching his features. Byrnes had a hand to his mouth, covering it so that no one could see his skeptical expression.

Frank resumed. “As you see, there have been many different types of incidents, and that emphasizes the strangest fact of all concerning the triangle: It would seem to be responsible for a lot of apparently unrelated phenomena. What ties all of them together is the fact that so
many
unusual disasters have occurred in the
same
area.”

He then produced another list and passed it around. It wasn’t quite so well-detailed as the first one, and he explained that was due to lack of proper investigation on the part of authorities. But it was still a substantial collection of dates and facts about a great number of similar disasters that had occurred off the coast of Japan.

And opposite the date December 11, 1944, was the notation: “USS
Candlefish,
American submarine lost on wartime patrol. No satisfactory explanation. One survivor.”

“We are headed for this area because we want to see what physical and natural phenomena are indigenous to it, and what interaction this submarine might have with them. We don’t know how the
Candlefish
got back after thirty years; we want to” find out It would seem that she hit some sort of physical hole in space—disappeared just like the five TBMs. Maybe it’s some sort of time warp: She got caught in it and reappeared in 1974.”

Byrnes groaned aloud

“All right,” said Frank, “I’m sure no one wants to believe anything like that. I’m not asking you to. We are sailing to Latitude Thirty to find some evidence of what really did happen to the
Candlefish. At
the moment, our theories don’t matter. Maybe these areas act like air pockets in which hot and cold currents collide and interact, creating violent electrical disturbances. Maybe there are similar forces clashing beneath the sea, creating underwater storms, whirlpools, whatever it takes to suck a plane out of the sky or pluck a ship off the ocean surface. Who knows what could happen under such circumstances?

“We don’t know how this relates to the
Candlefish,
but it’s part of our job to find out. And if the physical characteristics of latitude thirty degrees off the coast of Japan are the same as those of latitude thirty degrees south of Bermuda, then we can report back to the Navy for a
fact
that there are
two
Devil’s Triangles!”