Ghostboat Read online

  “Every U.S. ship within two hundred miles.” Cook sipped his coffee and made a face.

  Frank frowned and glanced over at the framed picture of Joanne. She smiled back at him. “What about the Japanese freighter—the Shimui Maru? Is she still in the area?”

  “They wanted to get the hell out real fast, but their own people told them to hang around. If the sub isn’t doing anything—if she’s just noodling—they figure it’s better not to get a rise out of her. You know, sort of like standing real still on top of a coiled snake. No fast moves.”

  “Very sharp, the Japanese.”

  “Yes, sir. And mad. Jesus, they must have hauled half the State Department out of bed at two a.m. Thought we were getting even for Pearl Harbor all over again.”

  Frank smiled and drew a mental picture of a shipload of astonished Japanese officers and crewmen, gaping as a submarine swept up out of the water off their bow and settled down in their path... Whoever was skipper of that sub had better get his affairs in order. There was bound to be a Naval Court of Inquiry in his near future.

  “Where’s Diminsky?” asked Frank.

  “Golf. The whole weekend.”

  Frank nodded absently. What did he expect? The exalted presence? Assistant Chief of the NIS striding purposefully through the door at three in the morning, setting his jaw, and barking, “What the fuck is going on?” Nope. Not Diminsky. Off to the links, old boy. Round of golf, eh what?

  That left Ed Frank, the highest-ranking available Submarine Force Officer attached to the NIS at administrative level.

  “Well, Lieutenant, seeing that I’m in charge of this mess, I guess I should delegate a little work, right?”

  Cook’s smile faded.

  “Get hold of ComSubPac and have them run a complete check on all fleet boats in that area. I don’t care if they can guarantee that sub isn’t theirs. Have them check it through again. Then get back to Defense Intelligence Command. We want priority clearances and access to current fleet disposition—I want to know where every goddamned submarine in the entire fleet was sitting at exactly 0134 hours this morning. If this is somebody’s idea of a joke...”

  Cook nodded and got up quickly. He went into the next office, and Frank could hear his muffled voice on the phone. Frank sat back, sipped at the terrible coffee, and rolled the telex information over in his mind. An American submarine defies all general orders for patrol operation and surfaces directly in the path of foreign shipping in international waters. Not necessarily a threat—it could be only a joke. Poor timing, at the very least. But why? And what about the markings?

  Thirty minutes later, an ensign walked in and stopped to announce that wirephotos had just arrived and were being processed, and would everybody please meet in the enlarging room on the second floor in fifteen minutes?

  Frank was poised over a chart of the Pacific Ocean. He was studying in particular the area six hundred miles northwest of Pearl.

  He went down to the second floor with Cook, who had managed to reach everybody by phone.

  “ComSubPac will clear the information with DOD, and we can get it within two hours. But they’ve already double-checked. There are no fleet boats of any sort, not even nukes, in that general area. They are now contacting all boats on patrol, and they’ll let us know if anybody’s fibbing.”

  “What about sending out a boarding party?”

  “Defense Command wants to deploy a few oceangoing tugs, ATFs, and they’re coordinating with SubPac.”

  “Let’s insist”

  “I did. And I used your name.”

  “You get smarter every minute, Cook.”

  “Yessir.”

  “But if I get transferred to the Sahara, you’re going as my Exec.”

  “Be happy to, sir. I’m a big desert freak.”

  Frank enjoyed the banter. It always took him a while to warm up in the morning, but once he got going he and Cook could toss barbs like footballs all day long.

  Cook turned on his way out. “By the way, old Walters wants a look at those photos. I told him to meet us there.”

  “Walters? The guy from the sub force records division? Who called him?”

  “I did. Who knows? He might recognize the bloody thing.”

  Frank and Cook entered a paneled projection room. Another ensign was setting up the enlarging projector. A sixty-year-old Submarine Force officer sat in the front row, smoking a pipe. The old man turned around, waved, and smiled. Captain Walters was an anomaly in the NIS—just about the only officer happy about sailing a desk. He was a year away from retirement and couldn’t stand the idea. He intended to die on the job.

  Frank smiled back and sat down next to him. Walters gripped Frank’s forearm and patted it affectionately.

  “How are you, son?”

  That always did it. Frank liked Walters, but when would he learn that a thirty-six-year-old Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy was nobody’s “son”?

  “Fine, Pops.”

  Walters grinned. “What have you got to show me?”

  “Just some snapshots. How Cook and I spent our summer vacation.”

  The lights went down and the ensign set up the first photo on the big screen. It was an aerial shot over a portion of the sea, and they could make out two fuzzy black spots in the distance. The second picture was closer, and now they could distinguish the shape of the submarine from that of the freighter. The next one was directly over the freighter, and they could make out a load of automobiles gleaming in the open cargo hold.

  Finally, a clear view of the submarine. Definitely a fleet-type boat: conning tower, double periscopes, huge deck gun...

  “One of ours,” said Frank. “No mistake there.”

  Cook spoke quietly. “How many have we still got with the damned deck guns aboard?”

  “I don’t know.” Frank glanced at Walters, whose warm smile was gone. He was frowning, a bit perplexed.

  The next image was even closer, still high aerial but abeam of the sub. The boat was black, and the telex was apparently correct: no markings.

  Walters rose, put on a pair of glasses, and went right up to the screen to inspect the image at close range.

  “Fleet boat... early type. I’d say vintage World War Two.”

  “Vintage?” questioned Frank.

  “Well, she’s definitely not one of the updated models. Most of those still in operation have been converted. You know that—you’ve served on them.”

  “Sure, but there must be a few around unchanged.”

  “Of course.” Walters rubbed his chin. “They’ve been sold to every foreign country on the planet or turned into floating museums. Besides, this boat looks in pretty good shape.”

  Frank turned to the ensign. “You got anything closer? Anything on the conning tower?”

  The ensign fumbled through a short stack of photos, found one, and placed it in the enlarger.

  Walters was still pacing around in front of-the screen when the new image came on. It was a very close shot with the conning tower off to one side.

  “Center it,” said Frank, “and bring it up closer.”

  The ensign pulled the tower in to the center of the screen and then blew it up slowly.

  “A little higher,” said Walters, stepping up close. “Hold it”

  The image froze. Frank could barely make out markings on the side of the conning tower.

  “See those buttons? Those raised buttons, like rivets?” said Walters, getting excited. “They outlined the number in the old days. That’s the way they used to do it. Just paint in the number when you want to be identified—right between the buttons. Paint it out when you want to be incognito.”

  Frank tapped the enlarger. “Make it bigger.”

  The ensign resumed enlarging the shot, and they all studied the buttons, barely visible on the fuzzy blowup.

  Finally Walters turned and announced in triumph, “Two eighty-four!” Walters tapped the screen happily. “Have to check it out. But I think it’s about a 1942
commission.”

  Cook nodded, but Frank slowly turned to granite. “Wait a minute,” he said quietly. “Are you telling me this really is one of our World War Two subs?”

  Walters’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes. Sure. Positively.”

  Now even Cook froze. Frank got up and stared at the fuzzy blowup and the raised buttons on the tower. No wonder ComSubPac had no information on this one.

  Walters led the way back to his office in the records division, his face alight with excitement.

  Cook and Frank walked behind him, Frank carrying copies of the photographs. Cook wanted to know if they should tell SubPac to call off the dogs.

  “No,” said Frank, “let them stew. Maybe they’ll come up with the same information, and maybe they can tell us why. Has to be an explanation for it. They’ve probably got a few of the unconverted old types left and they just don’t want anybody to know.”

  Cook grinned. “Or maybe we sold this one to the Brazilian Navy.”

  Walters barked back over his shoulder, “I think I know that sub.” He said no more, just picked up his pace. Frank hurried to keep up.

  “You know, you qualify as a spry old man.”

  Walters grinned back over his shoulder and did a Cagney two-step.

  His office was larger than Frank’s, larger and far more cluttered. The shelves were lined with dusty old naval volumes. Walters rummaged through them and invited Cook and Frank to sit down. He pulled out a thick book and thumbed through it on the desk. He flipped pages quickly, muttering to himself until his searching finger slammed down on something.

  “Here, look at this,” he croaked.

  Frank got up and came around the desk.

  “Number Two eighty-four. The USS Candlefish, reported sunk around latitude thirty off the coast of Japan—11 December 1944.”

  “Sunk?”

  “Yes. And with no explanation. Nothing that would jell. I remember that damned thing. There were a couple like that on the Pacific patrols. December of ‘44, yessir.”

  “Thirty years ago?” said Cook in disbelief.

  Frank stared at the photographs in his hand. “Hell. She looks like new.”

  Walters chuckled. “This is gonna cost you boys some time,” he said. “Can’t just file a report and forget it Gonna have to account for it. Ha!”

  Cook made a face. Frank was lost in thought. Something else had occurred to him. Latitude 30. That rang a bell.

  At nine o’clock that morning, Cook and Frank were in the main coffee lounge, bent over trays of ham and eggs, coffee and toast, when Cook spotted a figure ambling past the other minor Pentagon officers stuck for Saturday duty.

  “Diminsky,” announced Cook, and Frank turned to see a short, graying admiral. He too was in uniform, and he didn’t look very happy about it. Rear Admiral Lobell Diminsky was the Assistant Chief of the NIS, and wasn’t even happy about that. He would rather be Chief Chief, and one day probably would make it—as soon as the civilians could be shoved aside.

  “Boys.” He smiled briefly.

  They acknowledged the greeting, and Frank asked him how the golf was going. Diminsky gave him a hard look. “I got pulled off the second tee by the Secretary of State. I had to bloody fly back here, yet.”

  “No sense of priorities,” clucked Frank.

  “No sense of timing!” barked Diminsky. He hailed a passing busboy and ordered coffee. Then he eyed Cook’s half-finished eggs and toast. Cook caught him looking and very generously pushed the tray toward the admiral. Diminsky grinned at him and nibbled at the toast.

  “Next time order rye,” he offered.

  “He didn’t know you were coming,” said Frank.

  “I gather we’ve got ourselves a submarine that nobody’s seen for thirty years. Right?”

  “Yessir,” said Frank.

  “Bring me up to date.”

  “ComSubPac firmly denies that it’s one of the current fleet boats. It appears to be the USS Cartdlefish, sunk in the Rampo Depth, around latitude thirty in December of 1944. How she got where she is, nobody is even venturing a guess. We ordered DIC to scramble three tugs and some of their people to go, out for a look. They may even attempt to board her.”

  “What about the Jap freighter? The Secretary was very concerned about their position.”

  “We’ve ordered DIC to send out a crew to calm them down and take their report. We’re assuring them the sub meant no harm.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Admiral”—Frank smiled—”a sub thirty years old?”

  “Exactly! You don’t know why it surfaced.”

  Frank sat back. “I think it’s more a matter of how. I mean... there can’t possibly be any crew left alive on her, unless she really wasn’t sunk in ‘44 and somebody’s been running around the ocean in a stolen submarine for thirty years.”

  Diminsky waved his coffee cup.

  “What about those Japanese soldiers in the Philippines? Every year they turn up some joker who’s still fighting for the Emperor. What if our side has a bunch of trigger-happy submariners whose radio got knocked out in ‘44 and who’ve been running around the Pacific for thirty years growing beards and afraid to show their faces?”

  The look on Cook’s face was enough to slow Admiral Diminsky to a crawl. He snatched up the rest of Cook’s toast and ate it. “Okay,” he growled, “just wanted you to see that any guesses on our part at this point are ridiculous. We cannot assume that boat is just a harmless old hulk until we prove it’s a harmless old hulk!”

  Frank sighed and finally nodded agreement “I think we should be glad to have it back.”

  “Glad!” bellowed Diminsky. “I’m glad you’re glad. And you’ll be really tickled to know we’ve been ordered to remove that damned boat from the shipping lanes in one fat hurry.”

  “And then?”

  “And then figure out how it got there.”

  Frank relaxed. Good. He was relieved. Sometimes the Navy had a tendency to ignore things that posed too many problems. Shove them into a hole they can’t stick out of—that was the attitude. In the Navy—in all the services—the Inexplicable was equated with the disagreeable. But to Ed Frank the inexplicable was of paramount interest. He loved intrigue and danger and the unknown—seized on it doggedly whenever he encountered it.

  Diminsky rattled off orders about procedure. The next step would be to line up transportation to Hawaii and quarters at Pearl Harbor. Diminsky wanted to leave at 0800 the next morning.

  Frank couldn’t resist: “What time do you want to tee off, Admiral?”

  Diminsky eyed him squarely. “I’ll leave my clubs home if you’ll leave your girl friend.”

  Frank spent the rest of the morning in his office, pulling out the charts and notebooks of independent research he had been skulling out during the last few years. He got on the phone with Joanne at 1100 and apologized for leaving in the middle of the night. Then he had to apologize for waking her up at 11 in the morning. She complained about her sunburn, and he listened patiently and wondered if he could somehow sneak her over to Pearl Harbor. On second thought—she would only get sunburned again. The hell with that.

  He hung up and leaned back in his chair. He studied her photograph: the frozen smile, the hair swept back, the delicate skin. Around him, the other cubicles were empty. Somewhere, from far across the room, came the sound of a typewriter. Another Saturday soldier. Frank sat up straight and looked over his notes again.

  This whole project of his—the notes and charts he had put together for himself, the research he had done, the interviews—all looked now as if it might take on fresh purpose. The Candlefish. could be the key. At last those little red dots he had spot-marked on the Pacific chart—the ones clustered around latitude 30°—might really provide the first concrete evidence that the Devil’s Triangle off the southeastern coast of the United States was no myth; that, in fact, she had a sister.

  CHAPTER 3

  October 6, 1974

  They flew cross-coun
try 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.