Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  “Are you on a submarine now?” asked Sparky.

  “No. I am on merchant ship Volga.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I watch and listen.”

  Sparky looked puzzled. “What the hell,” he said. “I didn’t know they had sonar on their merchant ships.”

  “They don’t,” said Fatso. “But they have political commissars. I’ll bet that’s what he is ... You ashore all by yourself?” he asked, addressing the Russian.

  “Yass. I don’t go ashore with those peegs on the ship ... ‘ow many men you have in your crew?” he asked.

  “Three hundred,” said Fatso.

  “Iss too many,” said the Russian. “We only have one hundred on Rawshun sob-marines.”

  “But ours are very big ships.”

  “Ow big?”

  “Twelve-thousand tons,” said Fatso.

  It was now obvious that the Russian thought he could find out something of interest from Fatso and his pals. Fatso was always alert to take advantage of a situation like this. “How about having dinner with us?” he asked.

  “Hokay,” said the Russian.

  They dined at a swanky tourist night spot where everything was very informal and friendly, except the prices. When Sparky Wright picked up the menu and saw them, his eyes popped. But Scuttlebutt said, “Don’t worry, pal - it won’t cost you anything.”

  Their dinner would have satisfied Ivan the Terrible. They had canapes, soup, fish, and roast beef, washed down with red and white wine and champagne.

  Fatso and Sparky regaled their Russian friend with wondrous tales about Polaris submarines, filling him up with data that may be top secret twenty years from now, but which is strictly science fiction today.

  Scuttlebutt was ogling the cigarette gal before they even sat down. By the time soup came on, he had danced with her twice and had interesting plans laid out for the rest of the evening.

  Satchmo made friends with the orchestra leader and blasted out a few hot tunes on the trumpet between courses.

  While waiting for dessert, Fatso tipped Scuttlebutt their private signal meaning, “Stand by to execute contingency plan number one.” Scuttlebutt passed the word to Satchmo, who excused himself after dessert, went out, and got the car ready for a quick getaway.

  After they disposed of the dessert and ordered cordials, Scuttlebutt had a word with the cigarette gal and slipped her five bucks. The next time the orchestra struck up she came up to the table, smiled sweetly at the Russian, and said, “You dance with me?”

  The Russian almost choked on his cognac. No good-looking gal had smiled at him since the battle of Stalingrad. He was soon clomping around the floor right briskly, wooden leg and all.

  Fatso, Scuttlebutt, and Sparky withdrew toward the gent’s can, slipped out a side door, popped into the car, and Satchmo took off.

  “Boy oh boy,” chuckled Sparky, as they picked up speed, “I’d sure like to see that Russian’s face when he gets the bill. I’ll bet it’s over a hundred bucks. He may have to hock his wooden leg to pay it.”

  “Yeah,” said Fatso. “Well, the Roosians can count it as part payment of what they owe us on Lend Lease.”

  Driving back to the ship in the wee small hours, Fatso remarked, “Boy oh boy! This is something I’ve wanted all my life. An independent command of my own - with a Commodore’s gig and official car, yet! This is like being an Admiral. I can even write my own ticket and decide where I want to go.”

  “Yeah,” said Sparky. “And speaking of Admirals, there’s a new one taking over the Sixth Fleet tomorrow.”

  “Who?” asked Scuttlebutt

  “I dunno his name. But some of the guys on the Pillsbury who know him say he’s a tough hombre. Four-Stripe Captains jump a foot in the air every time he farts.”

  “Well - he won’t bother me none,” said Fatso. “I’ll give him a wide berth.”

  Chapter Six

  USS Turtle

  Next morning LCU 1124 got underway and stood out to sea. Fatso and Scuttlebutt were leaning on the rail of the bridge as the land dropped out of sight astern.

  “Where we bound for, Cap’n?” asked Scuttlebutt. Up to now, all hands had addressed the hero of this tale either as “Fatso” or “skipper.” Since LCU 1124 had now sort of acquired the status of a ship of the line in the U.S. Navy, a more formal mode of address seemed called for. So, by tacit agreement, they had all changed to “Captain.”

  “Haven’t decided yet,” said Fatso. “There’s lots of good liberty ports we might visit around here - Istanbul - Smyrna - Beirut - Tel Aviv - Haifa ...”

  “Sail ho!” came a hail from the pilothouse - followed by the regular ritual of queries and responses.

  Fatso and Scuttlebutt swung their glasses around to the bearing indicated and picked up the upper works of a big Russian cruiser heading so as to pass about a mile abeam. At her main truck, a two-star Admiral’s flag was flying.

  “Hah!” said Fatso. “I was hoping we would meet some big-shot Russian like this ... Hey!” he yelled at Jughaid, by the signal light, “What was the name of that Russian tin can that almost cut us in two on the way to Malta?”

  “Vosnik, Cap’n,” came back the answer.

  “Okay,” said Fatso. “Give this guy a call with your light. If he answers, I want to send him a message.”

  “Whatcha gonna do, Cap’n?” asked Scuttlebutt eagerly - knowing from the gleam in Fatso’s eye that something was cooking.

  “I’m gonna fix up our pal that almost ran us down.”

  “You gonna put him on the report to the Admiral for violating the rules of the road?” asked Scuttlebutt.

  “Hell, no. But if this works the way I think it will, he may wish he had never left the farm.”

  “They’re answering, Cap’n,” called Jughaid. “I’m ready to send.”

  “The message is,” said Fatso, “ ‘Please transmit following to Captain of Vosnik: Thank you very much for the vodka ... enjoyed your visit ... come aboard again any time.’”

  “What the hell is that all about?” demanded Scuttlebutt, a puzzled look on his face as well as everyone else’s within earshot.

  “Can’t you imagine,” said Fatso, “what will happen when the Admiral sees that? This guy will probably spend the rest of his naval career trying to explain that it’s a goddamned lie and that he hasn’t been playing footsie with the Americans when the Admiral wasn’t looking.”

  All eyes popped, and admiring grins spread over all faces. “Ya-a-a-h,” said Scuttlebutt. “Hell, they may even stand him up against a wall and shoot him.”

  “It’ll be a good lesson to him if they do,” observed Fatso. Then he called over to Jughaid, who was nearing the end of the message, “Add ‘Good Luck’ to the end of that. The poor son of a bitch may need it.”

  The cruiser receipted for the message as the ships were passing abeam. About ten minutes later she began blinking the general call A-A-A at them and then came through with the query, “What is the name of your ship?”

  “Hah!” said Fatso. “The Admiral has seen it already! Answer them, USS Turtle.”

  With those words a new ship of war was born and took its place among the battle fleets of the world. You won’t find any USS Turtle in Janes’s Fighting Ships, Brassey’s Naval Annual, or on the roster of the U.S. Navy Department. But you can find her mentioned during the next month in the log books of various Russian, French, and Arab naval vessels, as well as in an exchange of diplomatic notes between the Kremlin, Cairo, and Washington.

  All craft of the amphibious forces have their class letters and numbers painted on the bow in big white letters. That afternoon, Fatso’s lads got busy with brushes and paint pots and painted out the “LC” and “124” on their bow, leaving only the U and the 1.

  “That’s fine,” commented Fatso. “We are now the USS Turtle, U-1. U stands for unknown, unauthorized, or unassigned, and we’re the first one of that class.”

  That was the morning that war broke out. What happened i
n the next five days will be studied in the War Colleges of the civilized world for many years. It is a classic example of how to negotiate when diplomacy fails.

  The Israeli Air Force took off before reveille that morning, made a wide detour to sea, and came in from a direction in which the Arabs weren’t looking. Matter of fact, the Arabs weren’t looking anywhere at that time. They hadn’t got up yet. The Israelis caught them in their bunks with their planes gassed and armed but unmanned and undispersed. They swooped in on the Arab airfields like a tornado hitting a shingle factory. They laid their bombs with pickle-barrel accuracy, shot up everything with incendiary bullets, and left a blazing shambles behind them. In a matter of minutes, the Egyptian airfields looked like American cities during a civil-rights rally, and Nasser had no air force.

  After breakfast, the Israeli flyers were off again - to lend a hand to their army. It turned out the Arabs were running so fast and leaving such a cloud of dust behind them in the desert that even jet airplanes had trouble catching them.

  Of course, all this was not known until days later. The Armed Forces Radio simply announced that war had broken out, there was heavy fighting everywhere, and both sides were claiming smashing victories.

  “Well,” said Fatso, when the broadcast was over, “There goes our plans for visiting any good liberty ports.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” said Scuttlebutt. “This thing won’t last more than a week. Maybe we can visit them after the Arabs take over.”

  “Maybe,” said Fatso. “Meantime, we gotta figure out something else to do ... I think we can have some fun getting in the Russians’ hair. So let’s take a run down to their base at the Gulf of Laconia.”

  “If we ever run across the Vosnik again, after what you done to them this morning, I think we better give her a wide berth,” chuckled the Judge.

  ‘‘Hell, if we ever run across that bucket again she’ll have a new skipper,” said another.

  “How do you figure we can get in the Russians’ hair, Cap’n?” asked Scuttlebutt.

  “Suppose we go down to the Gulf of Laconia and just hang around, watching what goes on at their base,” said Fatso.

  “I don’t see why that should bother them much,” said Scuttlebutt. “They’re watching our ships all the time.”

  “Yeah. But they’ve never had anybody watching them. With all the talent we got on board here, maybe we can make them think we’re doing a lot more than we really are. It might make them nervous.”

  “We’re all listening, Cap’n,” said Scuttlebutt, respectfully - knowing from long experience that when Fatso got a glint in his eye and started talking this way, strange things usually happened.

  “I think we can convince them we’re some kind of an electronic spy ship and maybe worry the hell out of them.”

  “It’s kind of hard to make this bucket look like anything except just what she is,” objected Scuttlebutt.

  “Depends on how much imagination those Russians have got and how much we help it. Suppose we put something up forward that looked like a big radar dish and kept it pointed at them while we cruised back and forth. They might begin to wonder what the hell was coming off.”

  “Sure. But where we gonna get the big radar dish?”

  “We already got it,” declared Fatso. “That geodetic frame of the Marines. When you get that thing put together, there’s only two things in this world it looks like. One is a geodetic frame for a Marine General’s HQ - and hardly anybody but a Marine knows what that looks like. The other is a hell of a big radar dish. We can stand it up on its edge, and mount it on one of our fork-lift trucks so we can swing it around and point it anywheres we want to. Our high sides will hide the truck, and anyone who sees it, except a goddamned leatherneck, will swear it’s the granddaddy of all radar dishes.”

  All eyes around the table were lighting up and heads nodding enthusiastically. The Professor, their radar technician, said, “By gawd, Cap’n, I think you’re right. That’s exactly what I’d think if I seen something like that mounted on a ship.”

  “Okay,” said Fatso. “If they fall for this, we may get them to do some foolish things ... I want to put that frame together this afternoon and mount it up near the bow. Then you guys get busy and dream up some ways of booby-trapping those Russian bastards into doing things that won’t do them any good.”

  When you issue a directive like that to a group like Fatso’s improbable things will probably happen. Soon the boys had assembled the geodetic frame, stood it on edge, and mounted it on a fork-lift truck. The truck could, of course, be easily swung around in any direction, and Scuttlebutt devised a way of tilting the dish so it could “look” nearly straight up as well as horizontally. The twenty-five foot frame towered over the boat, of course, but the high sides of the well deck concealed its mounting. By proper handling of the truck, it could put on a very convincing act of a big search radar scanning the surrounding sea and air.

  Meantime, other projects were hatching. The stuff taken aboard in Malta proved to be a basket of golden eggs for the Turtle’s “dirty trick” department - aerology balloons, sonobuoys, walkie-talkies, Q-band radars, and many other pieces of scientific equipment designed to assist the U.S. Navy in maintaining control of the seas. With minor modifications by Fatso’s ingenious boys they could also be fixed to do other things that might make the Russians rather curious to see what was inside them.

  While the rest of the boys were assembling the “radar dish,” the Professor and the Judge got a sonobuoy out of the Malta freight and a box of assorted spare parts for electronic sets. They lugged these up to the messroom and went to work.

  A sonobuoy is a cylinder about the size of a golf bag that is full of electronic gear. It is used by airplanes hunting submarines. When a flyer suspects there is a submerged submarine nearby, he tosses it in the water. The buoy floats with just a few inches of one end sticking out of the water. When it hits the water, it lowers a microphone on a cable out of its bottom and shoves a whip antenna up out of the top. The mike picks up whatever noises there are in the water and feeds them into a radio transmitter that sends them up to the airplane. The flyer is thus able to eavesdrop on the surrounding ocean and to hear propeller noises if there is a submarine down there.

  The Professor and Judge had the sonobuoy disassembled with its guts all over the table when Fatso came in. Fatso watched with interest for a few moments and then said, “Whatcha doin’?”

  “We’re making some changes in the circuits of this sonobuoy.”

  “What’s it gonna do when you get through with it?” asked Fatso.

  “Apt-so-lutely nothing,” declared the Professor.

  “Nothing?” said Fatso.

  “Nossir. Not a gahdam thing. But it’s going to look like it might do plenty.”

  “Yeah?” said Fatso, with interest.

  “When we get this put back together, it’s going to look like a perfectly good piece of equipment with a lot of extra circuits in it that ain’t in our other sonobuoys they’ve picked up. Anybody who knows a little bit about electronics will take one squint at it and say, ‘hey, we got something new here. This is worth looking into.’ It’s gonna take a half a dozen real experts to find out that it’s as phony as a rubber swab handle. They’ll probably have to send it back to Russia before they find out.”

  Fatso grinned appreciatively. This was the sort of strategic thinking he liked to see among young sailors. “That’s good,” he said. “How ya gonna get the Russians interested in it?”

  “We’re gonna put it in the water where they can see it, and we’re gonna put on an act with a walkie-talkie and an underwater phone that will make them think it’s doing lots of things it ain’t. They pick up pretty near anything we put in the water anyway - you remember that guy who was snooping on the landing drill even picked up a burned-out smoke float.”

  “Yup,” said Fatso. “What kind of pitch you gonna give them?”

  “We’ll use our walkie-talkie to make out that we’re talking to a
submerged submarine. Their radio intercept guys will get their receivers on that pretty quick. We’ll stick an underwater phone in the water and use that as if the submarine is answering. As soon as they think we got a sub down there, they’ll man their sonars, and they’ll be able to hear the sub talking underwater and being broadcast by the sonobuoy. We can make them think we got one of our Polaris subs hanging around poking up a periscope and peeking at them.”

  “That’s damn good,” said Fatso. “If it works, I’m gonna put both you guys up for second class ... We’ll have a confab right after chow tonight and go over everything we’re gonna do tomorrow.”

  That evening after chow all hands were listening to the radio news.

  “Jerusalem: The Israeli high command has just announced that all the Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground this morning. The Arab armies are in disorderly flight on all fronts. They are abandoning tanks, weapons, and even their shoes as they flee through the desert toward Suez.”

  “Holy Cow!” said Webfoot in an awed voice. “It’s hard to believe.”

  “What the hell is hard to believe about it?” demanded Ginsberg. “I told you guys right from the start that’s how it was going to be.”

  The radio continued:

  “Cairo: Nasser announced that a treacherous sneak attack by the Israeli air force had been smashed, all the Israeli planes shot down, and many pilots captured. The Jewish armies had been routed on all fronts, and the victorious Arabs were racing on to Jerusalem, sweeping all before them.”

  “Ya see?” said Webfoot. “I knew that broadcast from Jerusalem was a phony.”

  Next morning at two bells of the forenoon watch (9 AM to landlubbers), the Turtle steamed into the Gulf of Laconia and began cruising back and forth a mile south of the group of Russians anchored there.

  The big “radar dish” swung slowly so as to stay pointed at the Russians. When the Turtle reversed course, the dish slewed around to the other side.

  Meantime, Satchmo and the Professor were inflating an aerology balloon. When they got it blown up to its full five-foot diameter, they attached a small beeper radio and a smoke candle to it and turned it loose. Away it went, going beep-beep-beep and leaving a trail of brilliant yellow smoke behind it. The big dish immediately swung around and “locked” on the balloon.