The Guadalcanal jogged south about a hundred miles below the great-circle course to San Francisco, where she wouldn't be likely to encounter any shipping, and by sunset the next day she had three lines of exterior lights rigged on each side of her hangar deck and two phony smokestacks painted on her own big single stack. The sailors who rigged the lights and painted these phonies figured the officers were a little bit nuts, and maybe they were right. The Captain had the chief engineer shut down the two inboard main shafts and jack up the speed on the outboard ones so that anybody listening on a hydrophone would hear only two screws. That evening, after dark, Lieutenant Commander Cue flew around the ship several times and reported that from a mile or so away she looked more like a floating amusement park than an aircraft carrier.
While this was going on at sea, preparations for the exercise were also in progress on the West Coast. This was to be a joint Navy-Air Force show with SAC and Continental Air Defense participating. The DEW line of Continental Air Defense would be alert to spot any air-attack group coming in from seaward and to intercept and knock them down with Air Force fighters. It was up to the naval forces under Admiral Bates to scout for and find the task group before they got to launching position. SAC had several wings of bombers with fighter escorts poised and ready to swoop out and clobber the ships as soon as Admiral Bates found them.
To find the ships, Admiral Bates' staff laid on a big search operation for the patrol planes covering an arc from Kodiak clear down to the Gulf of Lower California, extending out to a range of 2000 miles. It takes a lot of planes to keep a sector this big covered, so all the patrol squadrons on the West Coast got into the act. To take care of the unlikely event that the task group eluded the aerial scouts, six fleet subs, including the Lafayette, were stationed on a scouting 1200 miles out from San Francisco. The dice were heavily loaded against the incoming task group, and it seemed unlikely they could launch their planes before the defenders would find them and blow them out of the water. Admiral Bates was smugly confident there would be no snafu this time.
Two thousand miles from San Francisco the first snooper found the task group up to the northwest near Alaska. There was a lot of haze and fog up that way, so they never did get a good look at it, except on the radarscope. But that was enough. The scope showed the ships in the standard task group formation with the four big ships in the center and the bent antisub screen of destroyers ahead. Nobody bothered to count the destroyers in the screen and it probably wouldn't have made any difference if they had. The four big blips in the center accounted for the carrier and the three cruisers, and nobody would have been interested in why one destroyer was missing. The snooper stayed up at 40,000 feet and after cracking off his contact report to San Francisco began shadowing from a range of ten miles, expecting to be intercepted and "shot down" very soon.
The contact report to Admiral Bates' HQ triggered a far-reaching chain of events. Messages went out over the hot lines to Continental Air Defense HQ and SAC, and squadrons of bombers roared down the runways at Navy and SAC bases throughout the Northwest.
Fighter groups rendezvoused with the bombers at 60,000 feet and away they went out over the North Pacific toward Alaska. Following the constant stream of position reports from Admiral Bates' snoopers, they had no trouble finding the task group about 1800 miles northwest of San Francisco. Unhampered by any fighter opposition, the SAC planes swarmed over the task group making deliberate bombing runs that would certainly have put the whole group on the bottom had they been playing for keeps. The lead bombers all came back with photos taken through the bomb sight lenses to prove it. The escort fighters were a bit put out that nobody came up from the task group to dogfight with them, but far out at sea they didn't have enough fuel reserve to go down and strafe the ships trying to stir up a fight.
As the bombers and fighters headed back to base, several photo-reconnaissance planes flew over taking high-altitude pictures of the ships, which were presumably sinking by then. The leader of the bomber wing cracked off a message to SAC: "Navy task group sunk. No opposition."
While the task group up north was being clobbered, the Lafayette was patrolling across the great-circle course from Honolulu to San Francisco. She was down at 500 feet with her delicate electronic ears cocked for the unmistakable symphony of propeller beats produced by a large formation of naval ships.
On a patrol of this kind a nuclear sub settles down to a routine in which there are only three days in the week: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Since you never see the sun, you have to look at the clock to figure out what time of day it is. You stand your watch, eat your meals, read books, watch movies, play acey-deucey, hit the sack, and go on watch again. You never have to worry about what you're going to do tomorrow because it's the same as what you are doing today.
After dinner one night in the crew's lounge, the "chief of the boat" was regaling some of the younger members of the crew with what might be rather loosely described as "reminiscences." In the submarine service the chief of the boat is the senior enlisted man in the crew and is the No. 2 man on board next to the Captain despite the fact that officially the regulations say the executive officer is. On the Lafayette, the chief was a veteran of a dozen war cruises in the Pacific and, like all old-timers, he didn't let a narrow regard for the facts cramp his style when telling a tale.
"This Navy ain't what it used to be," he announced judicially to the circle of young atomic technicians gathered around him.
"No, and I'll bet it never was either," muttered one of the young lads to the guy sitting next to him.
"I made three cruises in the Squark during the war," continued the chief. "You could pretty near hoist her aboard this craft, but we really gave the Japs hell with mustard and horseradish on it. Sank 150,000 tons of ships, including a brand-new aircraft carrier. Red Ramage was our skipper. He's a vice admiral now. Got the Congressional Medal of Honor. There was never a dull moment when you went to war with Red. He wasn't scared of nothin'. He took us right Tokyo Harbor once and we sat on the bottom, stuck up the periscope, and watched the horse races going on ashore."
"Gee, said a couple of his listeners.
"And on the other side of Tokyo Bay from the race track there was a big navy yard where they had just finished building a new aircraft carrier, a big son of a bitch of about 50,000 tons. There was a whole crowd of Japs in silk hats and dress uniforms around the building ways, they had the guard and band lined up, flags were flying all over the place, and tugboats were standing by at the end of the building ways. Then while we were sitting there on the bottom watching them they fired a 21-gun salute, the whistles started blowing and the band playing and I'll be damned if the carrier didn't come sliding down the ways right out into the bay."
"Could you hear the band playing through the periscope?" asked one of his skeptical listeners.
"Naw," said the chief, "but you could see the steam coming out of the whistles, so we knew the band musta been playing, too. Anyway, just as the Japs' brand-new carrier coasted out into the middle of Tokyo Bay, Red Ramage put four torpedoes into her and blew her up.
"I wish you could of seen all them Jap naval officers, jumping up and down waving their arms and screaming when she capsized and sank... made 'em madder than hell, and they heaved depth charges and bombs around all over Tokyo Harbor. I didn't think we'd ever get out of there alive. But Red pulled us out. He always did."
"Even if that was so I wouldn't believe it," announced a doubting Thomas among the listeners.
"Why not?" demanded the chief.
"We got a book in the ship's library about the Congressional Medal winners and I was reading Admiral Ramage's citation in it the other night. He got it for barging into a convoy on the surface at night and shooting it up with his deck gun. There's nothing in the book about blowing up a carrier coming off the building ways."
"Yeah. That night battle on the surface was later on," said the Chief. "We didn't even report that business in Tokyo Bay because we figured nobody w
ould believe it anyway."
One of the other listeners poked the skeptic in the ribs and said, "Listen, kid, don't you know that after a story like that has been told often enough it becomes naval history, and it's unpatriotic to argue about it?"
On that philosophical note the bull session adjourned.
Around midnight the hydrophone operator picked up screw noises approaching from the west. After listening a few minutes he reported to Captain Hanks, "She's a twin-screw ship with three-bladed propellers making 150 rpm. They sound like fairly big wheels."
"Okay," said the skipper. "See what she looks like on sonar."
The sonarman beamed his set in the direction of the incoming propeller beats, sent out a few pings, and reported: "Bearing 275°, range 4 miles, speed 18, course 080. I get a big blip and a good solid echo - she's a pretty good-sized ship."
The navigator laid this dope down on the chart and the Captain said, "Right on the great-circle course from Honolulu. Probably some passenger liner. Can you estimate her size yet?" he asked of sonar.
Pretty soon the sonarman said, "She's a big one, sir. I estimate five or six hundred feet long."
"Let's go up to periscope depth and take a peek at her," said the skipper.
"Aye aye, sir. Take her up to forty feet," said the exec to the helmsman.
As the depth gauge slowly eased up to forty, the quartermaster swung the scope around to the bearing indicated by the hydrophones and the skipper took his station at the eyepiece. At forty feet he gave the order "up scope," electric motors shoved the slender tube up ten feet above the surface, and the skipper took a quick swing around the horizon, as all prudent submarine skippers do when coming up, before settling down on his target. It was a clear, dark night, but a black one. The horizon was empty except for a brilliant array of lights four miles to the west.
The skipper studied the two illuminated funnels with red and white bands around the top, the three long rows of lighted "portholes," and the bright green starboard light, and then announced, "Yep. She's a tourist ship, all right. Let's surface and surprise her by saying hello."
"Stand by to surface," sang out the exec, and warning howlers sounded throughout the boat. A few minutes later the Lafayette broke surface, the conning tower hatch popped open, and the skipper climbed out into the top of the sail, followed by a signalman with a blinker light.
"She looks like a waterfront saloon on a Saturday night," observed the skipper. "Give her a call with your light."
The signalman began blinking his searchlight with the "AA" Morse code call for an unknown ship.
On the signal bridge of the Guadalcanal the chief quartermaster yelled down at the signal men, "Hop to it, you dopes. Answer that guy calling us out there."
From the flag bridge below, Admiral Day, who was on hand to watch the forthcoming launch of the air group, yelled, "Take it easy up there. Let 'em call a couple of times more before you answer 'em. We're supposed to be a cruise ship with a'bunch of dopy signal floozies, not a man-o'-war."
"Aye aye, sir," said the chief.
A minute later, the Guadalcanal answered, using merchant ship procedure, and the Lafayette asked, "What ship?"
"Grace Liner Oahu. Who you?" came back the reply.
"Tell her USS Lafayette. I'm submerging. Good-bye and good luck," said the skipper.
As the signalman finished blinking, Captain Hanks yelled down the voice tube, "Stand by to submerge," and followed the signalman down the hatch. At the bottom of the ladder in the control room, the exec handed him a priority dispatch from Western Sea Frontier: "Enemy Task Group located 1800 miles NW of San Francisco. Patrol planes tracking continuously. Attack groups are en route to target."
"Well, that's the end of that tea party," observed the skipper. "Take her down."
On the flag bridge of the Guadalcanal, the Admiral, observed, "Just like I said. No matter how much fancy electronic gear they put on those buckets, the skippers will always want to come up and have a look now and then.
"I want a copy of that exchange of signals," he added to his chief of staff. "You can launch our attack group now whenever you're ready."
Just before sunrise the Guadalcanal swung into the wind and launched her whole air group to attack San Francisco. Continental Air Defense had already written off the task force as sunk by SAC and were not looking very hard for any attack coming in from seaward. Besides, the air group came in at wave-top level until it sighted land and so was too low for the search radars to see in time to do anything about it. The planes were on their way back to the carrier, and San Francisco was theoretically as flat as the day they had that "big fire" back in 1906, by the time the interceptors got to them.
Bugler Bates was about to crack off a hot dispatch to Day protesting this attack after he had "sunk" the whole task group when his COS laid the just-developed films of the photo reconnaissance planes in front of him and the skunk was out of the refrigerator. There was the task group, in pretty parade formation - but with a destroyer occupying the Guadalcanal's spot.
Admiral Bates' comments at this point shocked and embarrassed even his Marine orderly, who was a veteran of twenty-four years' service with four rows of campaign ribbons.
By the time the Guadalcanal arrived in San Francisco the lights had been unrigged and the phony smokestacks painted out. However, Admiral Day had colored photographs taken before the stacks were painted out, and the first boat ashore took a set of them to Commander Western Sea Frontier.
When the Lafayette anchored next day the Admiral's flag lieutenant took an envelope over to her with another set of pictures, copies of the exchange of blinker signals on the night of the attack, and the following note from Admiral Day:
Dear Hanks -
Suggest you back up your computers, accelerometers, and atom smashers with a fail safe attachment on the periscope.
Day
Chapter Nine
WILLY WIGGLESWORTH AND THE PRESS
In San Francisco, Commander Cue sent for Ensign Wigglesworth and said, "Willy, we're going to have a reporter from TIME magazine aboard next time we go out."
"That's too bad," said Willy. "I don't like TIME."
"Neither do I," said Curly, "but it's just one of those evils we have to learn to live with until enough people get mad enough about it."
"You mean like they did in Boston that time they threw the tea overboard?" asked Willy.
"Yeah," said Curly. "Anyway, I'm appointing you public relations officer and I want you to take this guy in tow when he gets aboard."
"Cap'n, this might turn out to be a disastrophy," said Willy. "I don't like any newspapermen, let alone a TIME reporter."
"Why not?" asked Curly.
"I don't know. Some people don't like strawberries. I think maybe my mother was frightened by one just before I was born. Anyway, I'm allergic to politicians, Hollywood press agents, TV commercials, snakes, and newspaper reporters."
"Well, you've got the job now," said Curly. "Do the best you can with it."
"Aye aye, sir," said Willy.
Just before the Guadalcanal sailed next day an alert character bustled up the gangway, shot a few piercing glances around the quarterdeck, and announced, "Parker, TIME magazine."
Parker, known to his associates as Ace, was a brash young news-hawk on the make. He had made a couple of minor scoops in his budding career and came aboard the Guadalcanal determined that if the Navy was trying to cover up anything on this ship, he was going to unearth and expose it.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Parker," said the officer of the deck, "we've been expecting you. Ensign Wigglesworth has been detailed to show you around. He'll be up in a minute."
A few minutes later, as Willy was showing Parker to his stateroom, he asked, "Ever been aboard an aircraft carrier before, Mr. Parker?"
"Yes, indeed," said Parker, who had covered the commissioning ceremony of the Coral Sea when the ship was alongside a dock.
"Anything in particular you are interested in?" asked Willy.
"I've got quite a program laid out for you," said Willy. "By the time we get to San Diego you ought to have enough for several good stories."
"Uh-huh," said Parker. "How do I get my stuff ashore while it's still news?"
"By radio," said Willy. "Just give it to me and I'll see that it's properly cleared and filed with the outgoing traffic."
"Whadaya mean, cleared? - censored?" demanded the scribe.
"Call it that if you want to," said Willy. "I call it 'checked for security.' But that won't be any problem because I won't show you anything you can't write about - like the atom bomb magazine."
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