Ghostboat (26 page)

“Aye, sir,” said Roybell. “Flood negative—hard dive on planes.”

“Shut off all machinery—no unnecessary movement or talking!” barked the Captain.

An auxiliaryman turned off the air conditioners, shut off the whining motor generators that ran the lighting system, and switched on the red combat lights.”

The MB registered all stop at 225 feet.

In the control room, Byrnes edged closer to Nadel and asked quietly: “Sound?”

“Still coming, Captain. Bearing zero-two-four relative. Range, thirteen hundred yards.”

“Switch off our beacons.”
 

Smart, thought Frank. Now the guy is starting to act like a fighting skipper. Sit here in silence and wait. They’ll never find us. They’ll pass right over us. Whoever they are... He wondered briefly if Byrnes shouldn’t call down to the forward torpedo room and be sure they unload... No, of course not. Don’t break silence.

The only
pings
coming over the sonar now were the beacons from the other craft. A steady rhythm, alternating loud and soft. Hardy spoke quietly. “They’re still scanning—haven’t locked on us.”

“Bearing zero-one-seven,” whispered Nadel. “Range, eleven hundred yards.”

Everyone was mouse-quiet, listening as the screws churned up the sea ahead of them and grew in volume.

“Bearing zero-zero-nine. She’s swinging dead on—”

They felt rather than heard the thumps.

The sub shook, and everyone froze until Vogel’s voice bellowed over the intercom: “Shit! We just fired two fish!”

Byrnes, the master of disbelief, shouted back, “You did
what?”

“We didn’t
do
it—it just happened!”

They could hear the twin
pfushes
over their own sonar gear and the sound of the torpedo propellers churning away toward the approaching lower-pitched screws of the unknown ship.

“It’s all right,” muttered Frank hopefully. “They’re dummies.”

But they all jumped when Cassidy came swinging through the open watertight door from aft on his way to the forward torpedo room.

Byrnes jumped to the tracking indicators.

“High-speed moving away,” reported Nadel. Evidently the target had also picked up the sound of the torpedoes firing and was backpedaling to safety. “Bearing zero-zero-four relative.”

Too late. The other ship would never get out of range. Hardy tensed and listened along with everyone else.

Suddenly the steady gassy noise of the fleeing propellers stopped. Over the sonar’s speaker they heard a twin pair of thunks. And then—explosions.

Everyone stared at the speaker as sound bellowed from it. Metallic crumpling. Rumbles. A rush of bubbles.

A direct hit.

The shock wave hit the
Candlefish,
and she took a roll to port. The collision alarm went off. Everyone hung on and, when they were leveled again, Byrnes swung up to the conning tower. “Emergency surface!” he called. “Secure from silent running. Secure from collision! Take her up!”

The
Candlefish
surfaced at a sharp angle, cutting a big hole in the dense fog bank lying on the water’s surface. As Byrnes, Hardy, and Frank broke through to the bridge, an eerie red glow spread from the east: Dawn broke through the mist. They leaned over the bridge coaming and gazed down at the sea. After a few moments the mist spread to port and starboard, and they saw the bow pierce a widening oil slick dotted with debris. Jagged pieces of wood, metal, instruments—

“What the hell did we hit?” muttered Byrnes.

Hardy stared at the debris but hardly saw it. He was seeing something else, a dim memory jogging to the surface. “It’s in the log,” he said. “On December 2nd, 1944, the
Candlefish
tracked and sank a Japanese sub.”

Byrnes turned slowly and stared so hard at him that his jaw began to quiver.

Frank was also speechless, but only for a moment. Then he gripped Hardy’s shoulder and turned him around.

“Hardy—this is
1974”

The old man reacted slowly, drawn agonizingly out of his reverie. Then the simple fact of what Frank was saying registered, as if it had eluded him until just this moment. He scowled in confusion.

Byrnes hit the bridge phone and called below. “Radar, this is the Captain. Give me a position on the escort!”

There was a pause. Too long, Frank thought. And he was right.

“I’m trying, sir...” the voice came back.

“What do you mean, trying?” barked the Captain.

“Well, sir, it looks like we’ve lost them.”

Byrnes was very still. They were all looking at the same thing, the debris in the waters around them. The
Frankland... ?

“Radar, are you certain?”

“Captain... I’m sorry, we’ve lost all contact.”

“When?”

There was another pause.

“Sir, I’m not sure. I rigged out the set as soon as we surfaced. They weren’t there. I’ve been trying... Sorry, sir.”

Scopes choked on his last words. Evidently he was convinced of what the men on the bridge only suspected. Frank voiced it: “My God, have we sunk our own escort?”

“No!” croaked Hardy. He shook his head as he looked at each of them. He seemed positive, but Frank could see how little that meant to Byrnes.

The voice echoed across the submarine from the bridge phone: “Bridge, this is Cassidy. Captain to the forward torpedo room, right away.”

Byrnes was halfway down the hatch when he paused to look up at Hardy one more time.

Hardy glanced up at the lookouts, then again out to sea, at the drifting wreckage bumping the hull and slipping past into the spreading dawn. He knew Byrnes thought he was an idiot. He wondered if the captain wasn’t right.

As Byrnes dropped into the control room, he exchanged a look with Scopes. “Keep trying” was all Byrnes could bring himself to say. Then he swung around to the radio room and told Giroux the same thing. Giroux shrugged in hopeless indifference. As far as
he
was concerned, they had lost the escort when
his
equipment had lost it.

With Frank right behind him, Byrnes swung through to the forward torpedo room and saw Cassidy hovering over one of the torpedo bays. Vogel, the torpedo officer, came forward immediately, effusive in his apologies. “Captain, I just don’t know how it happened. I swear nobody touched anything. She—she fired all by herself.”

Byrnes took a deep breath and muttered generously, “I know—I know—”
 

He and Frank moved to join Cassidy at the forward end of the skids. The old yardbird was staring at the arming mechanisms on the torpedoes.

“Hopalong?” said Byrnes.

Cassidy looked up at him, at Frank, at Hardy slipping through the connecting hatch and joining them. He tapped the huge green-and-yellow fish. “We loaded Mark 14s with dummy warheads at Pearl, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” said Byrnes.

“These aren’t dummies.”

He pointed to the exploder nipple protruding from the tip of the warhead. Byrnes leaned over to inspect it He stared hard for a moment; then his fingers moved in and touched. He straightened and walked down the skid to the ass-end of the fish, stopping to check the inspection plate.

“These are live,” he said.

“Yeah, they all are,” said Cassidy.

Hardy moved around the skid to the other bays, passed down the torpedoes, checking each of them with no more than normal curiosity. Frank watched him; his brow furrowed; why wasn’t Hardy more concerned? Harmless ballast had turned into deadly bullets, each containing 668 pounds of volatile torpex. From a scientific-research ship, they had turned into a malignant hazard on the seas. If this crazy ship could shoot off its fish whenever it wanted to—

“Who’s responsible for this?” Byrnes snapped sharply, his voice cutting across the compartment.

Frank saw what was happening; Byrnes couldn’t accept the facts as they were. How could he be expected to? But to accuse... ?

“Well, somebody did it! Somebody switched these things. Now who?”

Hardy was passing down the other side of the center skid. Frank saw something dark in his eyes... the Professor didn’t seem to be himself.

Byrnes suddenly snaked an arm across the nearest torpedo and grabbed Hardy’s shoulder. “Was it you?” he growled.

Hardy stared at him a long time before he answered, not so much choosing his words as measuring the accuser. “No, it wasn’t me. But it’s a good thing.”

“What?”

“Otherwise... that debris on the surface would be
us.”

Byrnes released him. He looked around at the frightened faces of the crewmen. He straightened and rubbed his sweating face. Then he looked from Hardy to Frank.

“I want to see you two in my quarters. Right away.”

CHAPTER 14

December 2, 1974

Hopalong Cassidy questioned every torpedoman forward and aft and was convinced that no man aboard had deliberately or otherwise tampered with the big fish. The only explanation seemed to be that someone in the Pearl Harbor armament detail had loaded the wrong torpedoes. Vogel protested vigorously. He was positive they had left Pearl with regulation practice torpedoes. Cassidy nodded and accepted the answer, but knew from forty years’ experience that far stranger mistakes had been made. As for Hardy, how could Byrnes point the finger at him? To accuse the Professor didn’t make any sense at ally.

No matter how, they were now carrying a full load of lethal weapons. And for the time being it wouldn’t be wise to attempt to deactivate them. No one on board was qualified as a demolitions expert; they had left those fellows ashore. But then, hundreds, of crews had sailed aboard fleet boats with armed fish—that was part of the nature of submarine duty. After all, the
Candlefish
was no fishing trawler, was she? Then what bothered him? Why did he keep asking himself these stupid, nagging questions as he made his way back to his station in the forward engine room? If submariners were accustomed to eating, sleeping, and sailing in the company of high explosives, what made
him
so bloody nervous? The fact that he was a yardbird and in reality not a submariner at all? No, for he saw the same nervous, worried expression on other faces. He wasn’t alone in his fear. Was it really fear? He stopped in the aft engine room and leaned against the bulkhead, listening to the murmuring whine coming from his own diesels just through the next hatch.

The
Candlefish
wasn’t supposed to be armed. And yet somehow the temptation had been placed in their hands. Temptation? He wondered about that. Cassidy did not believe in fate or the occult or the extraordinary—or anything except cold steel and greasy engines. Yet he couldn’t deny the rush of excitement he had felt when those two fish had blown clear of tubes one and two. And then the strikes! The explosion! The sudden flurry of submarine war action. He had been a yardbird all his life; he had taken boats out only on their initial trial runs; he had never seen action before. Now he had gotten his first taste of excitement, and was strangely anxious for more.

Grabbing the hatch lip with both hands, he propelled his body through, landing on both feet and immediately padding over to his engine stand. He checked the gauges and whistled at Googles and Brownhaver. Both of them threw him the thumbs-up gesture, and he leaned back, satisfied that at least his little corner of the world was in fine shape. He eyed the carved mahogany pipe cabinet secured to the bulkhead over main engine number two, the cabinet with the name etched into the wood beneath the little hinged doors: WALINSKY—HIS PIPES. Cassidy smiled. Every engineer he had ever known was the same. Incurable grease monkeys, yet they all had to have their little bit of class. Pipe cabinet—that had been Walinsky’s grasp on dignity. Cassidy opened the cabinet doors and admired the clean felt lining, the carved Larsens, Charatans, Dunhills, a Barling, and a pair that must have been handmade by a loving amateur—probably Walinsky himself. Lovely things. Cassidy inspected the bowls, looking for carbon deposits. The lack of ash buildup surprised him. What the hell had Walinsky done with these pipes? Just shined them?

They looked a little dusty. He rubbed one. It needed wax. There were pipe tools, rags, wax, cleaners, and nails in a small rack to one side. He pulled down one pipe after another and polished them to a high gloss, working as if they had always belonged to him, as if he knew all there was to know about pipe care.

And while he worked, he thought about Jack Hardy. The problem.

Hardy and Frank spent a most unpleasant forty-five minutes in the Captain’s cabin.

Byrnes sat in his desk chair, straddling it backward, and kept leafing through Hardy’s log, at Hardy’s prodding.

“Detail for detail,” the Professor insisted, “we’re duplicating the 1944 patrol, Captain. It’s more than what’s covered in that log. There are things happening that I couldn’t possibly be expected to remember, yet when they happen, I do remember them! Clearly!”

“Déjà vu,”
muttered Byrnes.

“No! I’m not imagining these things. I
have
been there before. They’re happening again. That submarine we sank—”