Ghostboat (27 page)

Byrnes interrupted, “That unknown vessel!”

“Whatever it was—the same thing happened thirty years ago to the day, to the hour! I remember it. And there it is in the log!”

Byrnes slapped the log shut “I don’t give a damn what you wrote. That was
then
—this is
now.”

“Right! And what’s happening
now
is what happened
then!”

The muscles tensed in the Captain’s neck. “What in hell do you want me to do, Professor?”

“We have to react the way our crew would have reacted thirty years ago. If a target appears—if it fulfills the log—then we have to act as the log tells us to act. That’s why we’re here! Ask Frank! Whatever is going on is giving us the perfect opportunity to recreate the 1944 patrol!”

Byrnes snapped back, “You’re so busy recreating things—you’re imagining planes in the middle of the Pacific.”

“Nobody imagined that oil slick.”

Frank smiled. Hardy had a point. They had sunk
something.
The fact that no one knew precisely what it was did not diminish the coincidence—they had fulfilled that moment in the log.

“Look, I’ve heard enough nonsense about Devil’s Triangles and geomagnetic anomalies and disappearing ships and recreating bullshit!”

Frank held up a hand, appointing himself instant referee. “Let’s think this out logically for a moment.”

Byrnes jumped up and shouted, “No more logic! Just orders. You forget, both of you, that we have lost contact with our escort and all that special equipment! That is a large enough catastrophe to put an end to this mission, as far as I’m concerned. The experiment is over! I’m keeping this tub on the surface. We’re going to sit right where we are until that escort shows up. I’m going to radio Pearl light now and inform them that we will return to base as soon as possible!”

Frank’s jaw slackened. Hardy opened his mouth to protest.

Byrnes pointed a shaking finger at the Professor. “As for you, don’t give me a hard time. I’m responsible for eighty-four other lives! I won’t have one
nut
putting the rest of them in jeopardy!”

Frank spoke in as controlled a voice as he could muster. “That’s a bit rough, Captain. I don’t see any reason-for pinning anything on Hardy. He’s certainly not responsible for—”

“He confuses the issue! And so do you—and I don’t want another word out of you.”

Frank stood up, and the two men faced each other across the tiny cabin, as if for a fist fight. But then Jack Hardy made it clear the battle hadn’t even begun yet.

“About the radio,” said Hardy. “I wouldn’t advertise our position if I were you.”

Byrnes was caught by surprise. “To who?”

“The enemy.”

Byrnes couldn’t believe it, and neither could Frank. Byrnes once again pointed at Hardy, but this time to say, “You’re relieved as navigation officer.”

Hardy sat still a moment, staring at Byrnes, not understanding what he had done wrong. Then he rose and silently left the cabin.

Frank was stunned and speechless as Byrnes turned to him. “From now on, you will act as full-time Exec. I’ll need Dorriss at navigation. That should keep you out of trouble. And I’m holding you responsible for what Hardy does and says. I don’t want him alarming the crew.”

Frank couldn’t hold back the contempt in his voice. “Well, if they’re like me, they’re already sufficiently alarmed. And as for returning to Pearl—I’ve got a hunch it isn’t going to be that easy.”

Frank stepped out quickly, before Byrnes could muster a comeback. But the thud and slam were unmistakable as the Captain kicked his door shut. Frank hurried aft to the galley to pick up a cup of coffee. His nerves needed calming.

Cookie was a small, heavily bearded pug from Brooklyn with all the mouth of a Manhattan cabbie. He tolerated no criticism. Frank found him carrying on a one-sided argument with an electrician who had found a matchbook in his stew.

“You’re lucky it wasn’t my toenail clippings!” Cookie raged.

“I already ate those! They were in yesterday’s pudding.”

Cookie waved a greasy ladle at him. “Then you’re gonna
love
today’s ice cream!”

The two continued shouting while Frank poured himself coffee, snatched a fresh doughnut, and shoved past them. He slipped into the crew’s mess and spotted Cassidy with his two cronies, Brownhaver and Googles, at a corner table. Cassidy was sporting a queer-looking pipe clamped tightly between his teeth. Frank couldn’t remember having seen him smoke before.

Brownhaver appeared to be dominating the conversation.

“I’m tellin’ ya, the Japanese don’t have no long-range submarines today. Haven’t had ‘em since the end of the war. That was part of the settlement. They couldn’t maintain a navy. If we sank a submarine, it sure wasn’t Japanese!”

Googles shook his head, confused, and turned to Cassidy. “What do you think?”

Cassidy rolled the pipe across his mouth, then pulled it out and spoke sagely. “We sank
something.
And somebody’s bound to complain.”

Frank sipped his coffee and thought about it. Of course, if they sank a domestic ship there was bound to be something about it broadcast on the radio. He must remember to tell Giroux to monitor the civilian bands. Of course, if it really was their own escort... One thing seemed ruled out. If Brownhaver was right, and Frank was certain he was, it could not have been a Japanese submarine. If there
weren’t
any... well, one wouldn’t just
appear
to fulfill their purpose, would it? He wondered If Byrnes wasn’t right: Maybe Jack Hardy was deranged But Byrnes’s panic, his inability to keep cool under pressure, was just as dangerous. Byrnes seemed to be slipping his anchor. In fact, maybe he posed more of a threat than the Professor. Hardy had no desire to be responsible for anyone else’s life. Byrnes was responsible for eighty-five of them, including his own.

Frank’s concern was the expedition. The experiment Proving himself right.

Cookie and the electrician were still at it when Frank strolled past the galley and flung the empty cup at them. Cookie fumbled to catch it and stared after him.

Frank found Hardy sitting alone in the wardroom, working on a cup of tea. His arms were flat on the table, and he was staring at the globe he had ripped apart only a few days earlier.

Frank sat down a few feet from the Professor and pulled out his pipe kit. He loaded, tamped down, and lit, then puffed in silence for a few moments.

“Byrnes has a very short fuse,” Frank offered. Hardy looked up slowly, as if coming out of an absorbing personal reverie. “He jumps off the handle—and always a little early.”

“Mr. Frank... I hope
you
realize... we sank a
real
submarine.”

Frank lowered his eyes and tamped down the pipe. “Apart from that—”

“Nothing
is apart from that!”

Frank saw that Hardy was going to maintain his position to the last. That wasn’t going to help matters at all. He relit the pipe, then looked Hardy in the eye.

“Isn’t it possible that you are recreating for yourself what you wrote in that log?”

The Professor’s eyes bored angrily into him, and Frank felt the trust slipping away. “I didn’t create that oil slick” was all he said. He got up, left his teacup, and went to the door. He turned at the last moment and half smiled. “Tell you one thing, Commander. You wanted to find out what happened in 1944—I think you’re going to find out firsthand.”

“Not if Byrnes turns us around.”

“Don’t think he’ll find
that
too easy.”

Hardy departed, his limp echoing down the deck. Frank was conscious that the older man had echoed his own words to Byrnes. Perhaps they both suspected the same thing: The
Candlefish
was in the grip of some force bent on fulfilling their project. Or... or could they themselves be in the grip of the submarine... ?

Frank didn’t want to believe that the submarine was acting independently, but if he accepted Hardy’s explanations and theories, it all fell into place.

But that was impossible.

The project was directed at finding out
how
the submarine had come back. Hardy insisted on knowing
why
—not how. Byrnes wanted to fall back on the tactics of Basquine and Bates: find a scapegoat; blame everything on him. That was the ignorant approach.

Yet there was the reality of it—these things
were
happening! Nobody was imagining them.

As Cassidy had said: “We sank
something.
”

Well, what?

Frank rose and headed toward his quarters, intending to reread Jack Hardy’s log. Carefully.

Frank spent most of his eight off-duty hours stretched out on his bunk with the curtain pulled closed, reading and rereading Hardy’s log by flashlight. On every page he found something to disturb him anew. For there was no way around it: Down to incredibly tiny details, they were duplicating the patrol of 1944. He recalled vividly Hardy’s actions on those last days in November, when he had been carefully checking the quartermaster’s log against his own, remarking on the similarities: leaking valves, busted gaskets, the battery connector cables... Things that he had shrugged off when Hardy had first brought them to his attention now seemed to take on more meaning. Then there was the airplane sighting—or “hearing”— last night. That certainly jibed with the log. It had happened exactly the same way thirty years ago, and it was Hardy who heard it then, too. Of course, that could be explained: Both times he was hearing things. The lookouts didn’t support him, did they?

“... Sorry, I don’t know
what
I heard...”
 

But then there was December 2nd, 1944 and 1974. The sinking of a suspected Japanese submarine. They had been able to verify the kill thirty years ago, but they never knew exactly what they had killed. And the same thing had happened this morning. Too close. Too much of a coincidence.

It couldn’t be explained away. They were caught in something, and they were going to have to find a way of dealing with it. Frank put the log down and lay still.

He raised his arms over his head and stretched, becoming conscious of the sweat soaking his blouse. He felt sticky and uncomfortable. Funny—he had always felt that way reading Hardy’s log. There was something inherently creepy about it. Now, he could understand why—they were living it.

He swung his legs off the bunk and listened to the sounds from the sub’s interior. The motors ran silent; they were still cruising at periscope depth. He could hear the
ping
of the sonar: Byrnes must be keeping Nadel glued to that headset. Then there was Byrnes’s voice, coming from his cabin a few feet up the corridor, growling at the mess steward bringing him his supper. Frank checked his watch: It was 1730.

He got up and went to his locker, pulling off his shirt and rolling it into a ball. He swung the locker open and threw the shirt in, reaching for his only fresh one. He smoothed out the starch and struggled into the sleeves, gazing at the worn Xerox copy of Hardy’s original log, the handwritten copy the Professor had first turned over to him. He pulled it out and thumbed through it, checking December 2nd to be sure that the information was the same. It was; no one had made a typo. He couldn’t attribute these hair-raising similarities to the overworked imagination of some irresponsible Navy secretary. It was all there in Hardy’s precise handwriting. He tossed the log back into the locker and buttoned the shirt as he gazed at Captain Basquine’s original day-to-day log, which he had brought along for... for what? Comfort? What good was it? Bloody thing was as blank as a dead man’s face. He pulled it out and thumbed through it in disgust—and he was immediately sorry that he had. The two pages he was looking at were full of Basquine’s hasty scrawl. And the date? His eyes went to the top of the page.

November 29th, 1944.

That wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. He remembered clearly the first time he had opened .the log, the morning he had found it stashed away in the Captain’s desk. And how he had shown it to Hardy the night they had drinks in the Clean Sweep. The blank pages had run from the opening notation on November 21st to the date of the submarine’s loss, December 11th. Blank—all blank.

And now? He turned the pages, one after another. They were all filled solid. Scratchy blue ink—Captain Basquine’s uncooperative old fountain pen, his familiar chicken-track scrawl, from November 21st on...

Even the date of sailing itself. The first date, November 21st, had carried only the notation
“0800. Underway from Pearl, proceeding under orders to general area Kuriles, Pacific.”
Now the entire page was filled in with details that matched every move Frank remembered from that first day when the sub had left Pearl under, Byrnes’s command. There wasn’t a single point missing! Only those little things that a captain wouldn’t bother to record. But Basquine was meticulous—hadn’t Hardy said so?

Basquine? What was he thinking? How could Basquine have filled in this log?

He went further, page after page, standing in front of the open locker, more sweat pouring from his armpits, soiling his only other fresh shirt. He stared at the details as they cropped up: December 1st—yesterday—the sub had refused to surface until exactly twenty hundred hours—that was Hardy’s view. And here in the Captain’s log? No mention of any problem at all. Just the notation:
“Surfaced 2000. Heavy fog. Proceeding on course 272 at one-third speed.”
That seemed to match last night as Frank remembered it. But wasn’t something missing?