Ghostboat (5 page)

CHAPTER 3

October 6, 1974

They flew cross-country in a Navy jet transport.

While they were crossing the Rockies, Cook accepted a call from ComSubPac and listened intently. “Could you hold a second, sir?” Cook covered the mouthpiece and leaned over to Frank. “ComSubPac. The ATFs report their people are unable to gain entrance to the submarine.”

“What does that mean?”

“They sent over a boarding party—couldn’t crack tile hatches.”

“Probably rusted shut.” Frank thought a moment, then took the phone. “This is Commander Frank. Tell your people not to try any more. Just have them tow the damned thing into Pearl. Okay?”

The voice on the other end of the line murmured acknowledgment. Frank thanked him and hung up. “Ray... get hold of DIC. Tell them we’d like to have a conference with that boarding party when we get into Pearl. And tell SubPac that when the
Candlefish
gets in they should have Graves Registration standing by.”

“Yessir.” Cook got back on the phone and relayed the requests to Defense Intelligence Command.

Frank returned to his notebooks and spread out his chart, a standard Navy cartographic relief of the Pacific from the west coast of the U.S. to the east-coast of China. He had hand-painted nearly a hundred red dots on it, and over a few of them had added tiny black submarine caricatures. There were three American submarines, six Japanese, and one Brazilian. Frank had tagged each with a date copied from a separate list. All of them were centered around a single large area of sea off the coast of Japan. He lowered his pencil to the one U.S. sub tagged with the date 11 DEC 1944. He circled it.

He looked up to see Diminsky standing over his shoulder, watching him and sipping a Coke. “What the hell have you got there, Ed?”

“A little private research, Admiral.”

“Yeah?” He sat down next to Frank and ogled the chart. “What exactly is it?”

“Maritime disasters. Unexplained disappearances. A little hobby of mine. There is one area in this part of the Pacific where more disappearances have occurred than anywhere else.”

Frank swept a finger around an area roughly due east of Japan. “Right here—Latitude Thirty.” The way he traced his circle, it formed an oblong blob exactly parallel to the tiny nation.

“The eastern edge of the Northwest Pacific Basin, right over the Japan Trench, stretching from Iwo Jima up east off Morioka by some four hundred miles. Roughly fifty percent of all the unexplained disasters in the North Pacific have occurred right in this circle.”

“What’s with all the little red dots... ?”

“Ships, planes, anything that disappeared or was found deserted over the last hundred fifty years.”

“The last hundred fifty?”

Cook came over to have a look, and Frank turned the chart around so they could see better. He pointed out the red dots. “Each dot indicates the last recorded position of a specific ship or plane. In all cases they’ve simply vanished without any trace and to this day haven’t been found. Crews and all—just phfft.”

“And the little subs?” asked Cook.

“The three American subs, the
Candlefish
among them, disappeared during World War Two.”

“Sunk by the Japs,” barked Diminsky.

“No—these are the ones that
weren’t
sunk by anyone. Granted, there are official explanations for each one—still, none are confirmed. It’s just that the Navy—the Office of Naval Investigation in those days—said this is what happened and that’s how it’s going down in the record books. A bit arbitrary.”

“Well, we don’t operate that way today,” Diminsky offered gruffly.

Both Cook and Frank became suddenly silent, but it failed to register on Diminsky. Finally Frank was prompted to make a comment. “Admiral, I hope you’re right. Because I have a feeling there isn’t going to be any
simple
explanation for the reappearance of the
Candlefish.
And I hope we’re not going to assign one arbitrarily just because it
seems
to fit.”

Diminsky displayed a look of pronounced displeasure. “This is no time to be advancing theories, Commander. First examine the sub—
then
figure out what you’ve got.”

Diminsky rose. Frank looked up at him tightly. “What we’ve got is a submarine that has no business being where it is.”

Diminsky shook his head. “This is going to be a very brief preliminary investigation, Ed. I have no intention of letting it get blown up out of proportion. Well get in—we’ll take a look—we’ll make a determination. That’s it.”

They landed at the Ford Island Naval Air Station shortly after 1300 Pacific time, and all three of them were whisked across the Southeast Loch by launch to the submarine base and then driven right down to the pier.

A huge old gray submarine tender, the USS
Imperator,
was moored by itself, and a portion of the dock was being cleared for the arrival of the
Candlefish.
They checked aboard the tender and were escorted to their quarters above the main decks. Diminsky was given the Flag Quarters. Cook and Frank shared connecting offices. Cook checked with SubPac and learned it would be another three days before
the Candlefish
could be expected to arrive. Frank gave Cook an armful of orders covering the inspection of the submarine. He wanted a platoon of technicians present He wanted explosives in case they had to blow the hatches. He wanted radio equipment, protective suits, gas masks, and complete authority to run the operation. Cook promised all but the latter. “That you’ll have to arrange yourself.” He smiled.

Frank took a car over to the base offices of Defense Intelligence Command. He was greeted by a tall, wild-looking man with a great shock of red hair, who introduced himself as Captain Melanoff, and then apologized for not having his boarding party back quickly enough.
 

“A chopper from that carrier is picking up one of my boys, and they’ll wing him right back to you. Should be in tonight. Can I show you around, Commander?”

Frank demurred, but asked to be called the moment the DIC officer got in. He drove back to the pier and went up to his quarters aboard the
Imperator.

He was lying on a hard vinyl sofa under an open porthole, studying a cutaway of the fleet submarine, when his eyelids fluttered and he collapsed into slumber. Four hours later, Lieutenant Cook banged into the office and woke him up. “I did my bit,” he announced. While Frank blinked himself awake, Cook plopped into the chair behind the single desk and rattled on about the arrangements he had made, until he too drifted off to sleep. Frank got up, went to the port, and looked out, sniffing the fresh sea air.

Across the water he could see the smooth black conning tower of the USS
George Washington,
one of the newer “nukes,” or nuclear-drive submarines. Most of her was underwater, but what showed above was enormous, dwarfing the few converted fleet types nearby. Frank had never had the pleasure of serving aboard one of those floating hotels. He had spent his time tied to a desk or skulking the Tonkin Gulf in a cramped fleet boat. At least aboard the
Candlefish
he would be on home ground.

As he stared at the
Washington,
he thought of the USS
Scorpion—
a $40-million nuclear submarine that disappeared with a crew of 99 in May of 1968. Her wreckage was found strewn all over the Atlantic floor at a depth of 10,000 feet some 460 miles southwest of the Azores—directly over the mid-Atlantic ridge. And the Naval Court of Inquiry had concluded: “The certain cause of the loss of the
Scorpion
cannot be ascertained from any evidence now available.”

Nothing but superstition? Frank smiled. Although there was a load of hogwash surrounding the Devil’s Triangle, the facts couldn’t be dismissed. Ships, planes, and subs—all sorts of craft—had disappeared with alarming frequency in the waters off the coast of Florida, in an area forming a rough triangle between Miami and points north of Bermuda and south of Barbados. And now, according to Frank’s own research and the independent studies of others, the area off the coast of Japan, known as Latitude 30°, was emerging as a similar center of oceanographic terror.

He swung around and looked at Cook, asleep behind tile desk. It was Diminsky he had to contend with—and all the little Diminskys—and the NIS, the Joint Chiefs. How in the world was he going to wake them all up? And why in the world did they always sleep through things like this? Pretend they don’t exist and the problems will go away! What an attitude! What a goddamned maddening attitude—this rampant official
blindness!
Places like Bermuda and Latitude 30° would go on claiming their victims ad infinitum, and no one would ever make a move to prevent it. After all, how can you take action against something that “doesn’t exist”?

The return of the USS
Candlefish,
after thirty years of dark, lurking oblivion, presented a matchless opportunity. Somewhere, on board or below her decks or in the path she had patrolled, there were answers. And Ed Frank was positive he was the only one willing to ask the right questions.

At 1730 hours Captain Melanoff called to say that his officer, a Lieutenant Harry Nails, had just arrived by helicopter with a full report on the attempted boarding and preliminary recon of the
Candlefish.
Frank arranged to meet him at the Officers’ Club for dinner, then woke up Cook. They changed shirts and hurried across the sub base under a threatening afternoon sky.

The Officers’ Club was crowded.

Lieutenant Nails had a Navy raincoat slung over his chair. He greeted them with a brisk handshake and invited them to join him.

“I’ve ordered steaks, Commander,” he said to Frank. “Melanoff wants everything on his bill.”

“Happy to oblige, Lieutenant.” Frank sat down next to Nails and motioned Cook into the other chair. “Let’s hear something about the
Candlefish.”

“Mint condition, sir. Not a spot of rust or a sign of rot. She’s almost like new.”

“Did you go aboard?”

“Yes, sir. I took a boarding party of four men, all technical ratings—they know their stuff.”

“Okay,” said Frank, “now backtrack and tell us exactly what happened,”

“I got my first look at her from the Japanese freighter that reported the surfacing. The captain himself pointed her out to me. She was lying dead in the water about a half mile away, with no number visible on her con. I checked her over through the captain’s binoculars, until he tugged at my sleeve and started talking. He was so frightened over the whole incident that he couldn’t even tell me how she had surfaced— straight up, bow first, stern first All he said was ‘Submarine come up! Up!’“

Cook couldn’t restrain a smile.

“Apparently he tried everything. Hailing, radio, Morse code, white flag... got some idea into his head that he had provoked an attack. His interpreter was very busy quoting me the unwritten law: Never surface in the path of friendly shipping, not even as a joke. In the radio message the captain sent out to his people...” Nails paused and dug in his briefcase for a notebook and opened it. “Here we are... he says, ‘The submarine surfaced in an unfriendly manner.’“

Cook snorted. “That’s why the State Department was in such an uproar yesterday.”

Frank smiled. “That’s okay. We thrive on panic.”

“It turns out,” said Nails, “this fellow has been in the Japanese Navy some forty years. He’s been a skipper on
Maru
-class freighters since before the Korean War. As a seaman during World War Two, he had his share of submarine encounters. On one convoy every ship but his was sunk. So you can imagine how much love he has for our boats. He got to smiling and joking about it by the time I left, but I could tell he was still upset.”

Nails paused to devour part of his drink, wiped his mouth, and then added: “And if you need it, I’ve got the whole interview on tape.”

The steaks had arrived, and they ate while Nails told them about boarding the sub. “We approached from three separate quarters and kept the radios going all the time. I guess we were being, understandably cautious. But she didn’t do anything at all, just sort of sat there, never responded to our signals. We even hailed her with bullhorns. Nothing. So I ordered boarding parties from two of the tugs, and I went with one of them. There were five of us. We fanned out over the boat and checked her out I swear, Commander, she looked like she hadn’t been out to sea more than two days from her last refit.”

“Was there seaweed or silt or anything like that?”

“Sir, she was bone clean.” Nails buttered a roll and glanced at his report. “When we checked for ID, we found the raised bolts on the side of the con and could verify the number—Two eighty-four. But none of us knew at the time what that meant. Then one of the techs found the name lettered on the rescue buoy at the top of the periscope shears.
Candlefish.”
He paused and chewed on a piece of steak. “That didn’t ring a bell either. Then we tried rapping on the sides of the con. No response. So I ordered them to crack the hatches. Well, sir, those guys were down on their knees, puffing and straining—just couldn’t get them open. Wouldn’t budge. So we abandoned that and just made a tour of the deck to collect evidence,”