Ghostboat
Page 33
A chilly dawn broke and edged out the darkness. The fog had been too eerie for sleep, and the cold too bone-numbing. Cassidy and Frank stared out to sea and counted the life rafts adrift in the bedraggled group. They spent a full half-hour making silent head counts.
“I think we’re all here,” said Frank.
“Except Hardy,” Cassidy mumbled.
An hour later Dorriss broke out the canned rations. Most of the men were awake but slugged with exhaustion. They fell to the food and ate voraciously. For dessert they stared out to sea.
“If we get picked up...” Frank began, then stopped, his short frame crouching into a corner, his eyes under a furrowed brow. He started over. “If we get picked up by the Japanese... we’ll simply explain that we’re Americans... the crew of the Candlefish... she sank last night in heavy seas... The worst that can happen is they chuck us into a prisoner-of-war camp...”
“That’s the worst?” snorted Cassidy.
“Assuming...” Again Frank hesitated, for once in his life reluctant to assume anything. “Assuming that this is still... 1944.”
Cassidy slowly looked up at him, grimly assessing the possibility.
Even if they, were all stuck here in 1944 for the rest of their lives, unable to explain why to themselves or to anyone else—Hell, it wasn’t a bad life, 1944. Not for a machinist. He bit his lip. Then the problems presented by the warp of time came showering down on his head.
“What happens when the war is over?” he asked. “And we go home?”
Frank’s brow darkened in silent reproof. The other men shifted uncomfortably.
“Smoke on the horizon!”
The voice hailed them from another raft. One of the men stood up and pointed into the dawn.
They watched the sun spread across the sea, and the black dot sailing out of it.
They shielded their eyes and squinted. Silhouetted directly east of them, her black hull creeping closer, enlarging, the markings distressingly invisible. A single freighter...
She was huge, imposing, dwarfing them.
Cassidy felt a jiggle in his raft, glanced around to see Frank unsteadily getting to his feet, tears streaming down his cheeks. His hands dropped to his sides, and he confronted the ship, clenching his fists and growling under his breath, “Sitting duck.”
The markings on her bow were Japanese. It wasn’t until she loomed up in front of them and her officers came to the bow and she shifted broadside to take them aboard that the black silhouette disappeared and they saw her hull colors for the first time. Baby blue and cream, bright and sparkling, and there painted in giant block letters the entire length of the hull, the word that announced better than any other their fate, their ultimate destiny.
DATSUN.
Within seconds the Americans were aware of it. They gaped at the letters and spelled them out, read them to each other, breaking out in smiles, crying. Some threw up their hands and clasped them into fists, shaking them over their heads, cheering joyously.
Only a few stood up in the rafts and stared, comprehending the irony and sobered into frozen silence.
Cassidy and Frank in particular. Cassidy sneaked a look at the Captain and saw him suddenly small, insignificant, no longer the giant rock of authority—a walking aftermath.
It was 1974 again—and Ed Frank stood quietly considering his own diminished impact.
PART VI
CHAPTER 26
December 12, 1974
They were removed from the freighter by relays of Japanese helicopters and transferred to the aircraft carrier USS Encounter. All eighty-three men were taken to sick bay and examined head to toe. They were ordered not to talk of their ordeal among themselves. Admiral Begelman himself was flown out and made a special plea to “save it for the Board of Inquiry.”
December 15, 1974
The crew was removed from the Encounter by two shifts of transport planes, then flown back to the Ford Island Naval Air Station at Pearl Harbor. Fit and rested and sobered, they were transferred to quarters at the Submarine Base. Ed Frank was put up at the BOQ in a small room much like the one Hardy had occupied. He got a telegram from Lieutenant Cook and realized that they hadn’t sunk the Frankland on December 2nd after all. Hardy had been right: They must have dropped into 1944 early on the morning of December 2nd, dropped completely out of contact with the escort, then torpedoed the same Japanese submarine the Candlefish had sunk in World War Two. The Frankland had searched frantically for them until ordered to abandon the effort and return to Pearl.
He felt a twinge of guilt because the fate of the Frankland hadn’t crossed his mind once in the four days since his rescue.
Lieutenant Cook had been transferred. The cable was couched in guarded language, advising Frank of the new assignment and thanking him for their past association, congratulations on a safe return. There was nothing even remotely resembling a “looking forward to a reunion and an update...”
Cook either was no longer interested or was not permitted to be.
December 18, 1974
The Board of Inquiry went into session and took depositions for four days, questioning each crew member about what he had seen and done. Most had only vague memories of their feelings, and all had shaky stories about their actions. To each man the entire patrol had proved a nightmare, and one they were not anxious to discuss.
Frank testified for a full day. He made his statements calmly and thoroughly and answered questions as best he could.
An admiral made the only comment: “You know, Commander, your story is corroborated in every respect save one. You were the only man on the bridge at the time Captain Byrnes was hit. Everyone else had gone below. Isn’t it possible you only thought you saw him hit?”
“But the planes? The holes in the conning tower— the blood... ?”
The admiral was nudged by another admiral, and lapsed into silence.
Frank lapsed into indifference.
December 21, 1974
The Japanese Government quietly protested the maneuvers of an American submarine in their waters. Until the crew was picked up, the Candlefish had never been detected, by either radar or sonar. Somehow a submarine had penetrated their defenses, and the Japanese were rightfully upset about it.
By the time the official panic reached Smitty at NIS headquarters in Washington, he had already responded to the unofficial rumors. He prepared a statement for release to authorized agencies only:
The refit of number 284 had been improperly handled; she was a thirty-year-old boat that died suddenly of old age. As for the so-called maneuvers, the Candlefish was on an oceanographic research project led by Dr. Jack Hardy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who was unfortunately lost with the boat.
Eventually this version found its way into newspapers and became the accepted public explanation. But to the eighty-three survivors no explanation was acceptable. Twenty-one died within six months of the incident; thirteen immediately underwent extended psychiatric care. The remainder did their best to consign the voyage to the furthest recesses of their minds. Some suffered nightmares the rest of their lives. Some forgot, some coped—nine of them committed suicide.
Those who did manage to deal with it incorporated bits of unfamiliar personalities into their own lives. They became nostalgic for ‘40s music, fond of old war movies, prone to certain out-of-date epithets, and spiteful of all things Japanese...
Walter “Hopalong” Cassidy returned to Mare Island in his capacity as a civil-service mechanic and disappeared one month later. His body was found curled up in the crawl space beneath the maneuvering room of the USS Pompanito, the last surviving World War II submarine in the yard.
December 24, 1974
The day before Christmas, Ed Frank was flown back to Washington and driven to the Pentagon. He walked the halls to his office. Everything was just as he had left it—the photograph of Joanne in its sparkling silver frame still centered on his blotter. Cook’s name was already gone from the other door; his cubicle was
vacant.
Frank made several attempts to get through to Smitty. He was told that the Director of the NIS was away for the holidays.
Admiral Diminsky was in a doorway, chatting with an Air Force general.
Frank didn’t stop to say hello; he went straight home.
He unlocked the door to his apartment, hoping to find a Christmas tree and other evidence of Joanne’s holiday spirit.
He found only a note. Dated November 15th.
He spent Christmas Eve alone, nursing a bottle of Scotch, recalling that he hadn’t written since he left for Pearl.
Maybe this was the way he had always wanted it.
January 15, 1975
Frank was advised in a curt note from Diminsky that the findings of the Board of Inquiry were not in his favor, that the NIS in particular was reprimanded for allowing a desk man to assume command of a Navy vessel, that in the future such matters would not come under the jurisdiction of that office.
The results of the Board of Inquiry were not surprising. But he finally understood why they had so easily accepted the stories: The case was too complex for them. They intended to hush it up and file it away. He knew it for sure when he was visited by the CIA and told point-blank that to speak of the Candlefish in public would be regarded as a treasonous act.
He received a letter from Jack Hardy’s son in Seattle. It was a severe accusation, but he managed to deal with it.
February 20, 1975
But within two months he was having regular nightmares about the Candlefish and her crew, about what he had done, the parts he had played... and Jack Hardy.
For reasons he was never able to explain, he lost his ability to make firm, snap decisions. He became hesitant, cautious, worrisome.
He had inherited Jack Hardy’s albatross.
On February 20th Diminsky sent him on an extended vacation.
On March 14th Ed Frank resigned from the Navy.
July 4, 1975
On Independence Day, one year before the two hundredth birthday of the United States, Scripps Director Dr. Edward Felanco set out from SUBDEVGRU ONE at San Diego in the AGSS-555 Dolphin with a team of oceanographic researchers. They were bound for the area off the south coast of Japan known as the Ramapo Depth on a classified project.
In thirty-one days of deep-sea exploration, they found not a single trace of the phenomenon known as Devil’s Triangle. Nor did they find any trace of the USS Candlefish.
But if they had been able to reach the sea bottom at Latitude 30, their cameras and lights might have picked out a shape mired in the deep silt of the Pacific floor. An old, rotting, coral-encrusted hulk, the raised bolts on her conning tower outlining a vaguely discernible group of digits:
284.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PART I
Chapter 1
PART II
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART III
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART IV
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
PART V
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
PART VI
Chapter 26