“Christ, he looks like he built this boat.”
“He did.”
Hardy glanced at Frank in surprise, then was distracted as the man jumped to the gangplank with a resounding grunt. He swaggered down to the deck and flung down his duffel. Walter “Hopalong” Cassidy tucked his thumbs into his belt loops. He stamped a foot on the deck slats and was amazed at the resilience of the wood. He marched over to the conning tower and pushed and poked at the plating, then kicked it. It rang with a solid metal thud. Pleased and surprised, he strolled back and picked up his gear, glancing over his shoulder at the conning tower. He made his way aft and tumbled down the hatch.
On the dock, Frank gave Hardy a sidelong look. The oceanographer was smiling, one hand stroking his beard.
Cassidy padded forward through the engine rooms, running his hands along the diesel shells with a professional touch. He stopped in the forward engine room and stared at main engine number one. A few technicians were still working on it, fitting new bolts into place, painting the shell, rewiring the engine stand. Cassidy flung his gear into a bunk over main engine number two on the port side, then made his way forward.
The bunks in the crew’s quarters were beginning to fill up with gear. Cassidy paused at the forward bulkhead and stared at the Ann Sheridan pinup pasted at eye level. Cassidy grinned in fond memory until a torpedoman named Clampett bumped into him.
“ ‘Scuse me, Pop.”
Cassidy blinked. He was brought down to reality—hard. Cassidy arrived in the control room just as Hardy and Frank came down the ladder.
Byrnes saw him first and managed another one of his almost friendly grins. “You’ve aged a bit, Hopalong.”
Cassidy grinned and showed well-used teeth. “You ain’t getting any younger yourself, sir.”
Hardy pressed .forward, eager to be introduced. Byrnes stood aside and motioned everyone together. “Walter Cassidy, this is Ed Frank... and Jack Hardy.”
They all shook hands. Then Frank announced, “Hardy served on the Candlefish during World War Two.”
Cassidy lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. “You served on her? Son of a bitch! For how long?”
“Eleven months.”
“You lasted eleven months with Basquine? I can’t believe that.”
“It’s true.”
“You know, when he came to Mare Island to pick up the boat in ‘42, I could have sworn the guy was psychotic.”
Hardy smiled but remained silent.
“And that’s a goddamned conservative estimate. He couldn’t wait to take her out and sink Japs. It’s all he talked about.” He turned to Byrnes. “You never knew him, did you?”
Byrnes chuckled. “Afraid I was a little too young.”
“Well, he was something.” Cassidy shook his head sagely. Then he looked up sharply at Hardy. “But for all that, you guys were never any blazing success.”
“What do you mean? What about our last patrol?”
Cassidy waved it off. “Okay—for three weeks you got lucky.”
“Lucky!”
Frank watched in amazement. Something had put Hardy on the defensive. He began telling Cassidy about the log he had just completed.
“I’d like to read it.”
Frank promised to have Hardy’s log typed and circulated among this little group.
Then, unexpectedly, Cassidy shoved in the stinger. “Hey, I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out there and relive the whole thing.”
Hardy’s mouth was open and stayed open. He didn’t know what to say. Frank replied for him. “Actually, Dr. Hardy doesn’t plan to go along.”
Cassidy was stunned. “No shit?” he said, and stared at Hardy as if he’d just been introduced to a plague.
There was nothing else Hardy could do. He shook his head meekly, smiled at Cassidy, mumbled something about “Nice to meet you,” and went up the control-room ladder. Cassidy watched him go, puzzled.
Byrnes straightened in supreme satisfaction. “Mr. Frank, I have a standby navigation officer due to report in Friday. You better get with it.”
Byrnes shook hands with Cassidy again, muttered, “Great to have you aboard,” and went aft Frank and Cassidy were alone in the control room.
“Coffee?” offered Frank.
“Sure.”
They moved into the galley and took coffee from a ready percolator, then moved to the officers’ wardroom.
Cassidy was hesitant. “I’m not exactly an officer.”
“You’re not exactly in the Navy either, but you’re assigned as chief engineer. That’s an officer’s post with an officer’s privileges. So sit down.”
Cassidy shrugged and sat. “Okay... but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll bunk with the engines.”
Frank chuckled. They sipped coffee in silence. Frank pulled out his pipe kit and assembled a smoke.
“Byrnes tell you what this is all about?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think we’re nuts?”
“Hell no,” Cassidy looked at him seriously. “I’ve been around submariners forty years, Commander. They are the most rock-headed baboons in the service. They’ll tackle anything.”
“But this is a big risk. We don’t know what we’re going to find. And I don’t think anybody coming aboard has the slightest idea that this might turn out to be dangerous.”
“Look,” said Cassidy, “we both know submariners have a lousy insurance rating. Anybody who’s going to allow himself to be sealed up at sea in this tin cigar for any length of time is living with one foot in the grave. And they’re all aware of it. Risks are nothing to them. If you told them they might not be coming back, there’s no way in the world they’d believe you. They can’t. They just learn to live with that possibility—and they live with it by ignoring it.”
He got up, drained his coffee, and thought a moment, then said, “There’s only one thing. They might be just a little superstitious. But everything’s okay on that score.” He fished in his pocket and produced a long, hairy rabbit’s foot. He grinned broadly. Frank grinned back.
November 15, 1974
The long yellow and green torpedoes were guided across from the tender and slowly lowered into the forward loading hatch.
Frank descended the hatch and dropped into the forward torpedo room. Lieutenant Cook was there with a full complement of submarine officers, Byraes’s staff. He was conducting a tour of the boat Hardy hovered in the rear of the little party.
Cook waited for the noise of the torpedoes rolling into the port mid starboard bays to abate, then indicated one of them. “In order to follow the pattern that Dr. Hardy has laid out for you, you will have to fire these at designated times during the voyage. We have equipped you with Mark 14 practice torpedoes; the warheads are non-functioning dummies. Since they will not explode on contact, you don’t have to have any reservations about firing them. That’s it for the torpedo room. Shall we move aft?”
The officers turned and started shuffling out. Cook led them. Byrnes hung back with Frank, and they both watched Jack Hardy limp to the connecting hatch and step through.
“We’re all set to go,” Byrnes said. “What about your navigation officer?”
“He’ll be there. What about yours?”
“Mine has already plotted our course,” Byrnes said with silky satisfaction.
“From a log written by mine.” Frank smiled back. He was beginning to get the hang of dealing with the captain. “Incidentally, I have decided that you’ll also have two executive officers aboard.” He watched Byrnes stiffen. “One qualified and one nose-grabber. I’m the nose-grabber.”
Byrnes looked at him a long time, then smiled back. “Fine. I’m the captain.”
Byrnes raised a hand, and Frank edged back; he thought the skipper was going to tweak his nose to make his point. But Byrnes merely straightened his cap and went through the hatch.
Frank was left alone to reflect on the fact that bluff carries only so far. And he still didn’t have Jack Hardy.
> But he felt he was close.
November 19, 1974
They were two days away from sailing. Frank and Cook had finished all preparations for the voyage: All stores were aboard, the crew was complete, the boat had been pronounced fit by yard inspectors. There were only two things remaining: the trim dive—which would be conducted on their first day out, in deference to Hardy’s log—and the posting of Hardy as navigation officer.
For several days Frank had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it finally did.
Cook arrived with a memo from Smitty. The timing was perfect: It was too late to fight back. Smitty was notifying Captain Byrnes, with a copy to Ed Frank, that his escort would be the USS Frankland, a special-duty destroyer which had recently been used in a series of Glomar-type tests. The Frankland was already equipped with numerous undersea research devices which would be working ahead of the Candlefish, sensing changes in ocean currents, electromagnetic fields, and anything else that could put the submarine into jeopardy. Byrnes’s instructions were short and simple: At the first sign of unusual ocean behavior, he was to fall back on the Frankland. He was in no way to place the crew of the Candlefish in danger.
“Clipped your wings,” said Cook.
“I smell Diminsky again.” Frank held the memo a long time, then crumpled it. “The hell with it. I can work with this. What do they think we’re gonna do—go out and sink this thing? Let them carry any gizmos they want, as long as it makes them feel better.”
Cook smiled. “Sure beats a cancelation.”
“Yeah,” said Frank, and grinned back.
After dinner Frank put on a light sweater, lit his pipe, and took a stroll over to Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. He opened the door and walked down the hall of the first floor toward Hardy’s room. Seeing the door ajar and light splashing across the floor, he slowed and approached cautiously. He peered into the little room and stood watching a long time.
Hardy was hunched over the desk by the window, his eyes buried in one of the typed copies of the log he had written for Candlefish. The framed photo of his wife and son was on the edge of the desk, right under the lamp.
Frank rapped gently on the door and waited for Hardy to look up. The bearded face turned slowly and fixed glassy eyes on him.
“Professor? Mind a visitor?”
Hardy’s lips formed a “No.” His voice was lost in a throaty mutter. Frank came in and sat on the bed, leaned back, and relit his pipe. Hardy looked at him, his finger holding the page he had been reading.
“I’ve always believed that a man recalls best those things in life that he’d rather forget. The bad times are much more vivid,” said Frank.
“You’re probably right.”
“You did a hell of a job.”
“Yes.”
“It’s going to prove very useful to us.”
“Yes.”
Hardy watched him with impassive, liquid eyes.
For once Frank was not smiling. He deliberately dropped all pretense at diplomacy. “Professor... tell me about Mud Kenyon.”
There was a long, long moment during which Hardy never changed expression. Then his eyes lowered and his shoulders sagged.
“Have you ever fired a torpedo, Commander?”
“Sure.”
“You open the outboard door, flood the tube with sea water, charge up the impulse tank, then press the firing key. Four easy steps.”
“Right.”
“Ever fired a water slug?”
Frank nodded.
“The torpedo stays in place in the tube. The outboard door is shut, the inner door opened, safety interlocks are tripped, then the tube is fired. The fish stays where it is and the tube is blasted clean. Water and air are expelled back into the compartment. Again—easy. Routine.”
Frank waved his pipe, and there was a pause.
“On August 14th, 1944, Torpedoman Second Class Mud Kenyon and I were assigned night detail in the aft torpedo room. We had fired slugs on tubes seven and eight and were preparing tube nine. Kenyon opened the inner door and charged up the impulse tank. I lifted the safety interlock, and Kenyon nodded he was ready. I pressed the firing key. Nothing would have happened if Kenyon and I had been operating the same tubes. I lifted the lock and fired number ten instead of number nine. There was a terrible blast; the boat took a whacking from one end to the other. The inner door on tube ten sprang open, and Kenyon took it full across his face. He was thrown across the deck and collided with me. We both went down, and were immediately drenched by a flood of sea water. I heard the alarm go off and men behind us hollering. They sealed up the compartment and then stumbled around us, trying to reach the tube to stop the propeller on the tail of the torpedo in tube ten. It was a surface-ready tube—its impulse tank had been charged earlier, and both doors were shut. The blast had sent the torpedo bashing into the outboard door and then blew out the inner door, making a shambles of the tube. It took them forever to stop the propeller—and if they hadn’t, the whole boat would have gone up.
“When I finally managed to get to my feet, there was Kenyon’s body sloshing around in the bilges. He was face down, his head a mass of smashed bone and bloody pulp. I watched him... a long time. Somebody dropped beside him and poked him, but it was no use... he was dead.”
Hardy looked up. “I was responsible.” The words came in a throaty quaver.
Frank felt a chill. For a moment he was not certain whether it was produced by the words or the breeze from the window, but he knew one thing for certain: He now had the key to the man.
“The burial at sea—the four days that followed—I endured all of it First the sympathy, then the open hatred from Kenyon’s crewmates. The story got around. On a little three-hundred-foot steel island, everything gets around. But it wasn’t until Bates and Basquine offered their feelings that the crew began to take sides on the issue. Bates demanded a Board of Inquiry, a court-martial, or, at the very least, my transfer from the boat the moment we returned to Pearl for repairs. We were in the Skipper’s cabin. I think Basquine left the door open deliberately, so Bates’s voice would carry through half the boat—what didn’t carry would be picked up and passed on by the men. Bates finally ended his harangue and sat down. Then Basquine took over. He spoke quietly at first, and I remember his eyes—cold with contempt, He told me that my dog days aboard the Candlefish were all over. And he refused to transfer me off the boat. He said, ‘Because that’s just too goddamned easy. I want you here, where I can see you, where every day you spend in my sight will remind you of what you’ve done. I’m going to make you remember this the rest of your career, Lieutenant. I’m going to teach you what it means to be responsible for another man’s life!’
“And I became the scapegoat—the one they could blame for all our troubles aboard the Candlefish—all our months of failure.”
If Lieutenant Commander Billy G. Basquine had been a witch, he could not have handed down a more effective curse.
Frank watched Hardy fall silent, sag a bit in his chair, and at last lose his place in the log as his hand dropped away from it. His eyes came up slowly and met Frank’s.
“I know why you’re here,” he said, and Frank stiffened. “You’ve been trying for days. You think you’ve just got to have me along.”
Frank tapped out his pipe on the windowsill. “I suppose I’m a little obvious.”
Hardy’s voice rose, “Don’t you understand? I was responsible! A man died on that boat because of me!”
“According to that log, you and the rest of that crew were responsible for a lot of lives on that last patrol. Enemy lives.”
“Not the same.”
“Yes it is. There are casualties on both sides in any war. Individuals aren’t responsible. The war is.”
“This was different. They made me responsible.”
“They couldn’t make you anything. You made yourself!”
“Mr. Frank, that boat went down and I’m the only one left!”
Frank stood up and
pointed the pipe at him. “Don’t try to tell me you’re responsible for that!”
Hardy’s gaze dropped.
“Look, Professor, I’ve met a lot of submarine officers in my life, but I’ve never even heard of a skipper as tough as Basquine. If you’re telling the truth—and I’m sure you are—if he gave you a thirty-year guilt complex—then Basquine was the last man in the Navy qualified to be the captain of a submarine. Either he became that way without drawing the attention of the review boards, or—”
“Or what?”
“Or you have one hell of a subjective imagination.”
Hardy stood up, and Frank had the sinking feeling that once again his mouth had done him in.
“As it turns out, Professor, I believe you. It would seem you’ve had more than your share of anguish over the whole thing. I can’t force you to come along. And I won’t have you if you don’t want to be there.”
He turned and went to the door, then looked back at the old man silhouetted in the window. “Only one point bothers me now: If you were responsible then—for that crew—you’re even more responsible now, for this one.”
“Why?”
Frank pointed at the log on the desk. “Those are your words, Hardy. We need you to back them up. If something goes wrong—if you forgot to put something down on paper—how are we going to know? If something happens to this crew because of that”—his finger stabbed at the log—”then what are you going to feel?”
Hardy never moved.
Finally Frank turned and walked out He strode quickly down the hall, clutching the pipe, disgusted with himself. But he had done what had to be done.
November 20, 1974
At 0800 the morning before they were to set sail, Byrnes and Frank held a final briefing for the entire crew, in which they spelled out the history of the Candlefish, the purpose of the voyage, and the dangers they might encounter. They were immediately met with a barrage of questions about what they hoped to accomplish.
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