While all hands in the task group watched prayerfully from below, Joe reached forward with his magic gum-tipped whip, gave the bank-control knob a flip into the straight-flight position and brought the plane into a normal glide headed smack into the wind.
Heading into a 30-knot wind, the bump when the plane hit the water was no worse than a hard landing on the Guadalcanal. Before the splash had subsided, Joe tore the door off his cubbyhole, scrambled up on the wing and pried the cockpit hood loose. He had the unconscious Lieutenant out of there half a minute before the plane sank, and in another minute a helicopter snatched them both out of the water and headed for the Guadalcanal.
As soon as they touched down on deck, Lieutenant Potter was hustled down to sick bay, where he came to before long. "Creeping concussive cranial thrombosis" was the doctor's diagnosis of what had happened, meaning delayed reaction from that bump on the head. He would be okay again in a couple of days.
Meanwhile, Joe was escorted up to the bridge, where a large delegation of officers, including the Admiral, was waiting for him. As he came on the bridge the Captain stuck out his hand to him and said, "Congratulations, my lad. That was a very brave thing you did this morning. I'm promoting you to radarman second class right here and now." So saying, he handed Joe a second-class rating badge and pumped his hand up and down while everyone on the bridge beamed approval. "I consider," continued the Captain, "that your conduct was in accordance with the best traditions of the U.S. Navy."
"Aye aye, sir," said Joe, "that is... I mean... aw, heck, sir. It wasn't nothing much."
"The hell it wasn't," said the Captain. "How in the world did you do it, anyway?"
"Well, sir, you see, sir, I done it the same way I fouled up the volume at the movies the other night, sir."
"Wh-wh-what did you say?" gasped the Captain as the jaws of all the spectators popped open.
So then the whole story came bubbling out; that is, all of it except Ensign Wigglesworth's part in it. Joe explained how he had leveled out that plane using the whip antenna with a piece of gum on the end of it the same as he had fiddled with the volume control at the movies. He made a clean breast of the whole awful business including the cigarette under the thermostat. He stated that, although he still thought he had a right to get even with the movie operator for taking his place in the chow line, he couldn't just keep quiet and let him go to jail for it.
By the time he had finished, faces which had assumed a grim set when the Deluge was first mentioned had softened tolerantly. It was obviously unthinkable to just sweep that flood under the rug and forget it. But the expression on all faces, even of those who were suffering from cracked ribs, indicated that in this case justice could be tempered with mercy. All eyes now turned to the Captain, curious as to how the Old Man would handle this unheard-of curve ball.
The Captain deliberated for a decent interval, doing his best to screw his face up into a stern expression, then cleared his throat, and said, "Bluberry, for what you did the other night you ought to be flogged, keelhauled, and hung at the yardarm."
"Yes sir," said Joe.
"But I'm going to let you off with a warning," said the Captain. "You might call it a 'suspended' sentence. If you ever monkey with a thermostat again on this ship, you will be suspended, by the neck, from the yardarm."
"Aye aye, sir," said Joe.
"And now getting back to that business this morning. The promotion to second class still stands; and I'm recommending you for an Air Medal."
Later that morning Ensign Wigglesworth met the squadron executive officer on deck. "Mr. Wigglesworth," said the exec, "what did you do about that Bluberry case that I mentioned to you yesterday?"
"It's all taken care of, sir," said Willy, "and the charges against him have been dropped."
"Good work, Wigglesworth," said the exec; "I'm glad to see a young officer take hold the way you have."
Chapter Seven
VERY DEEP STUFF
When the Guadalcanal sailed out the Golden Gate, it left Admiral Bates muttering in his beer about the way he had been sucked in on the intercept exercise. The Admiral naturally had to devote some of his attention to plans for defending the United States against foreign aggression and stuff like that there, but his main interest in life at this time was squaring accounts with Admiral Day.
While Bates was still sizzling, the new Polaris submarine USS Lafayette came into San Francisco on her shakedown cruise. When her skipper, Commander Hanks, called to pay his respects on Admiral Bates, he invited the Admiral to take a short cruise at sea in the Lafayette. Bates gladly accepted this chance to make a trip at sea, get a little salt air in his lungs, and have a look at this latest addition to the modern Navy. Next day the Lafayette put to sea with the Admiral to show him what she could do.
As the skipper showed the Admiral around, the old sea dog was completely flabbergasted. A new Navy had been born since he had last set foot on a sub twenty years before. The old-time pig boats were small craft of about 1500 tons, jammed with machinery so that there was barely room enough left for the crew. They were run by diesel engines, but had electric motors driven from a huge storage battery to enable them to run submerged. They were really surface vessels that had the ability to submerge to a depth of a few hundred feet and operate there at slow speed as long as the charge in the battery lasted. They could make twenty knots on the surface, but only five or six submerged, and they couldn't stay submerged more than about twenty-four hours.
The Lafayette was as different from the old pig boats as the Missouri was from John Paul Jones' Bonhomme Richard. She displaced 8000 tons, more than the light cruisers of the Admiral's younger days. The inside was like that of the Super Chief, with air conditioning throughout, indirect lighting, pastel-colored bulkheads, and overstuffed furniture. She had all the comforts of home except wall-to-wall carpeting and female companionship. The old-time submariners never had it so good.
Her atomic power plant used no oil or air, so she could stay submerged for months, and was designed to operate that way rather than on the surface. She was perfectly comfortable at 1000 feet depth, and could go faster down there than she could on the surface. Her endurance was limited only by her food supply, and even with the crew eating high on the hog it was good for ninety days.
Her armament was sixteen huge Polaris rockets with a range of around 2000 miles, which could be fired while she was still submerged and wreak greater havoc than all the bombs dropped by both sides in World War II.
As Commander Hanks showed the Admiral around explaining all this, the Admiral's most frequent comment was "Well, I'll be damned."
The control room, corresponding to the bridge of a surface ship, was of particular interest to the Admiral. This is more like the switchboard of a big powerhouse than of the bridge of a ship. The compartment is packed with an array of gauges, dials, instruments, warning lights, switches, valves, interlocks, and circuit breakers. Armored cables and insulated pipes run everywhere. About the only instrument the Admiral could recognize was the clock.
The Captain put his hand on the shoulder of a young sailor in a bucket seat with his feet on a pair of rudder pedals, holding a control stick between his knees. "This is the helmsman, Admiral," he said "Actually, he flies this ship through the water with that stick the same way a pilot flies an airplane. He steers with the rudder pedals. Although you can't see it when we are submerged, he banks when he makes a turn, the same way an airplane does. That instrument right in front of him is an airplane's turn and bank indicator. He can make small corrections in depth with his control stick, and this other lad on the hand wheels over here moves the big diving planes, which correspond roughly to the horizontal stabilizer on an airplane. The chief over there watches the trim and balance of the boat and shifts ballast if necessary to keep her in trim if a large number of men move forward or aft - and also when we fire rockets. That control board of his shows him just how much water he has in all tanks and whether the boat is in positive or negative buoya
ncy."
"Uh huh," observed the Admiral.
"The officer of the deck stands his watch here and everything going on inside the boat is right at his fingertips on this panel. There's the gyrocompass - the speed indicator - depth gauge - condition of ballast tanks - the Christmas tree... Now over on the other side we have the display of what is going on around us on the outside."
Taking the Admiral by the arm, he led him over to an array of electronic tubes. "This one is the fathometer that tells us how far we are from the bottom. This one is the search sonar that shows us what's on the surface all around us. And over here is a special ahead-looking sonar that shows us what's ahead of us on our same level. This is very important, because of lot of mountain peaks on the sea bottom don't show on the present-day charts that were made for surface vessels. Every now and then when we're running deep we find one of these peaks with that sonar set... which is a much better way of finding it than running into it!"
"Um," agreed the Admiral.
Indicating another scope, the Captain continued: "This is a special set we use for navigating under the ice. This is what the Nautilus used when she went to the North Pole. It bounces echoes off the bottom of the ice sheet and tells us how far below it the top of our scope is. When you're running deep and there's no ice around, this one gives you a clear picture of any ships directly above you for about a mile around... And over here we have our passive listening arrays. We run very quietly ourselves and our underwater microphones can often pick up the noises from ships' propellers long before our sonar can get an echo from the ship itself. We pick up lots of other noises, too: the ocean is full of strange sounds from fish, waves, and other sources we don't understand yet." Tapping the operator on the shoulder, he said, "Ya hearing anything now, son?"
"Yessir," said the lad, "a school of porpoises just discovered us."
"Put it on the loudspeaker," said the Captain.
The lad threw a switch, and the control room immediately sounded like feeding time in the bird house at the zoo. Porpoises are very curious and gabby animals. They were whistling and yelling at each other in great excitement. You could easily translate some squeals as "Hey, come over here and look what I found" and others as saying, "Holy cow, what a big son of a bitch" and others as "Hey, ma, what's that?"
The Admiral's eyes and mouth popped open in pleased amazement. "Can we see anything through the periscope now?" he asked.
The Captain glanced at the depth gauge and said, "Nossir. Too deep now. Almost 700 feet. We hardly ever use the periscope on these kinds of boats anyway, because we usually run deep... and with all this sonar and listening gear we get just as good a picture of what's going on on the surface as we would through the scope... We can even come pretty close to telling, after a little practice, whether a blip on the scope is a tanker, a tramp, a liner, or a warship, just from the size of the blip and the sound of her screws."
"Don't you have to come up every now and then and surface, or at least stick your scope up to have a look at the stars and check your position?" asked the Admiral.
"No, sir," said the skipper. "Our inertial navigation system over here takes care of that for us. It has inputs from the gyrocompass and propeller shafts, and it has delicate accelerometers which measure the accelerations on three sets of axes which are gyro-stabilized with respect to astral space and aren't even affected by the revolution of the earth. It integrates these accelerations twice, feeds the result into a computer. The computer gives you your latitude and longitude corrected for all such things as unknown currents, erratic steering, variable engine speed, and so forth. It's accurate to within a few hundred yards... has to be so we can shoot our missiles accurately."
"Well, I'll be gahdamn," observed the Admiral. "But you have to come up every now and then to use your radio, don't you?"
"Nossir. We send and receive completely submerged. We couldn't keep our subs on station in the Arctic off Murmansk if they had to surface. They stay down all the time."
"We have a ship ten miles ahead on opposite course, sir," reported the OOD. "Think she's a single-screw merchant vessel."
"Very well," said the skipper. "Lemme show you what you can do with this submarine, Admiral. I'm going to take station on that ship and stay right under her for a while." Turning to the OOD, he said, "I've got her, son; give me a running plot of that ship so I can slide in under her."
"Aye aye, sir," said the Lieutenant, seating himself at one of the sonar-scopes and picking up a grease pencil. "Bearing 015, distance five miles... I'll give you her course and speed in a minute."
A sailor took the seat next to him at the ice sonar, adjusted the headphones, and flipped the switches to warm up the set that would give them the overhead picture.
Watching the scope over the OOD's shoulder while the Lieutenant plotted the track of the approaching ship on the scope with his grease pencil, the skipper swerved out a little to give himself room for a 180° turn. He let the range close until the target was about two miles away and broad off his bow. Then, "Right full rudder," he said, and the helmsman shoved his rudder pedal and banked with his control stick into a tight turn. The only way you could tell that everybody was now standing at a 30° angle to the vertical instead of straight up was by looking at the turn and bank indicator.
Soon the lad on the ice-scope sang out, "Target on scope, sir," and the skipper shifted his attention to the overhead scope.
"Rudder amidships," said the skipper, "steady on course 270."
"Rudder amidships. Steady on course 270," repeated the helmsman.
A few more orders to the helm and a couple to the engines brought the blip in the ice-scope to the center and held it there. "There she is, Admiral," said the skipper; "directly above us and on same course... Cut the hydrophones in on the loudspeaker," he added.
The man on the hydrophones flipped a switch and the loudspeakers picked up the "thrum thum thum" of a three-bladed propeller directly overhead.
"She's making 120 rpm, Admiral," said the Captain, glancing at his wristwatch. "Probably a 5000-ton tramp coming in from Honolulu. Wouldn't he be surprised if he knew what was sitting right under him now?"
"Could you do this to one of our big carriers?" asked the Admiral, beginning to get a strange gleam in his eye.
"Sure," said the skipper. "No trouble at all."
"A carrier can make a lot more speed than that tramp steamer," observed the Admiral.
"So can we, sir," said the skipper. "We can keep up with any carrier. And if she runs at high speed, she'll soon have to refuel. We don't."
"Could you stay under her if she was squirming around trying to shake you off?"
"No strain," said the skipper. "We can turn much sharper than she can. You saw how easy it was to slip in under that tramp when she was on opposite course."
By this time the gleam in the Admiral's eye was getting incandescent. "Let's go up to your cabin, son; I want to discuss something with you."
"Aye, aye, sir!" said the skipper. "Mr. Bailey," he said to the OOD. "She's all yours. Head south and hold this course and speed till further orders."
Up in the cabin the Admiral said, "Captain, I believe you are scheduled to go to Honolulu next week."
"Yessir. We sail next Monday."
"Hmmmm..." said the Admiral. "Admiral Day is at sea now but he's coming back in for the weekend and he is sailing Tuesday for Honolulu in the Guadalcanal with a task group of four cruisers and ten destroyers."
"Yessir."
"What are you supposed to do on the way to Honolulu?"
"Nothing has been prescribed for us, sir. This is our shakedown cruise and I can more or less write my own ticket."
"Will you be running surfaced or submerged?"
"Submerged. These boats normally run that way. We're more at home below than on the surface."
"Hah! That's fine," said the Admiral. "How would you like to join Admiral Day's task group unbeknownst to anybody in it, escort them all the way to Honolulu, keeping me informed
as to what they are doing?"
Now it was the Captain's turn to get a gleam in his eyes. "You mean sneak in under them like we just did with that tramp and stay there?" he asked.
"That's exactly what I mean," said Admiral Bates.
"Sure. We can do that. No strain at all," said the skipper.
"They will be conducting flight operations, turning into the wind every now and then to launch and land, and changing speed. You sure you will be able to stay with them?"
"We'll stay with him like a barnacle," said Commander Hanks confidently. "It's no more difficult than it will be for his destroyers to keep station on him up on the surface."
"And I'd want you to send me a position report on him twice a day and report whenever he changed course or speed."
"No problem," said the skipper.
"There's just one trouble about this thing," said the Admiral. "I don't want him to know you are down there. How are you going to sneak under him without one of those destroyers in his screen spotting you?"
Stand BY-Y-Y to Start Engines Page 11