"Hmmmm," said the skipper. "That is a problem. Those tin cans have got almost as good sonar as we have these days. If we were lucky enough to find a thermal layer around 200 feet we could hide under that and fox them... but you can't depend on that... hmmmmm. How much water does he draw, Admiral?"
"Thirty-five feet."
"Well, that's too deep for the main ship channel across the bar. That means he will leave Frisco by the Bonita Channel, doesn't it? So-o-o... Lemme see something." The skipper consulted the chart lying on his desk. "Hmmmm," he said, putting his finger on the chart a few miles off the end of the channel. "Here's the hundred-fathom curve with a sandy, level bottom. He'll go right over this spot getting his formation squared away for a great circle course to Honolulu. We could lie on the bottom here till he comes along, then lift off and stay under him. Nobody will have any idea we are there."
"Young man," said the Admiral, "I consider you to be one of the best naval tacticians since John Paul Jones."
"Thank you, sir," said Commander Hanks.
That Saturday night when the task group was in port for the weekend, Admirals Bates and Day sat at a table in the officers' club at Treasure Island, bringing each other up to date on the current scandals in Washington. All angles of the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker cases, the TFX contract, and Mr. McNamara's refusal to authorize atomic power for the new carrier were duly examined and disapproved of.
Came a lull in the conversation, and the Bugler said, "Windy old boy... I must admit you really pulled the wool over my eyes on that last exercise. If it had happened to anyone else I would have thought it was funny."
"Well, that's the way it goes," said Admiral Day philosophically. "Sometimes a shenanigan works and sometimes it blows up in your face. I thought that one was pretty good though."
"My boys feel pretty bad about it," said the Bugler, "and they want to show CINCPAC they're not as bad as they looked on that exercise."
"Well, after all," said Windy smugly, "you can't blame them for that. How are they going to do it?"
"I've told CINCPAC I'm going to track you all the way out to Honolulu next week and keep him accurately informed of everything you do."
"Well now, that's fine," said Windy. "Your boys need the practice and it will give my controller's pilots some good intercept training, too. How far out do you want to keep the exercise going?"
"All the way to Honolulu."
"Hmmmm. That's 2500 miles." Admiral Day did a little mental arithmetic on the endurance of a patrol plane and said, "That will take a lot of planes to do the job. You gonna have 'em land in Hawaii to refuel?"
"None of my planes will land in Hawaii."
"Hunh. You gonna call in SAC to help you?"
"I wouldn't think of such a thing," said Bates indignantly.
"Well," said Day, "it will be a big operation before you get through with it. But of course it isn't much of a job to track us in a peacetime exercise. In wartime, we would shoot your boys down before they ever saw our ships."
"My pilots will all be instructed to return to base if they are intercepted and I'll ground the plane for the rest of the exercise as if it had been shot down."
"Say, what kind of whiskey have you been drinking?" demanded Day. "There aren't enough planes in the whole Navy to keep that kind of a show going."
"That's what you think," said the Bugler. "Your interceptors may not be as good as you think they are. There's a lot of air space to search up there for snoopers."
"Don't be ridiculous," said Day. "With the search radars on our cans and cruisers and our AEW planes, we can spot anything that comes within a couple of hundred miles of us. My Banshees can intercept it and knock it down within ten minutes of the time wet get it on our radars, night or day. In wartime, your patrol planes would be clay pigeons."
"Wanna bet we can't do it?" asked Bates.
"I'd be ashamed to take your money."
"You wouldn't take it, so don't lose any sleep over that. But I'll bet you my Army-Navy game tickets on it."
"Let's get this straight so there won't be any argument about it afterwards. You say you're going to track me all the way from here to Hawaii, reporting my position twice a day to CINCPAC."
"That's right."
"And any time my fighters intercept one of your planes it will turn around, go home, and take no further part in the exercise?"
"Yup."
"I suppose your gunners will just claim they are shooting my boys down and will keep boring in after we intercept them?"
"Don't worry about that. Any plane you intercept will turn around immediately. There will be no funny business about it."
"And how accurate are these position reports going to be? If you're intercepted by fighters, you know there's a carrier somewhere in the same ocean but you got to pinpoint us better than that."
"I'll report your position as accurately as you'll know it yourself," said the Bugler.
"Now I know you're balmy," said Day. "Your patrol planes can't navigate that well."
"I'm offering to bet you four Army game tickets on the fifty-yard line I can do this."
"It's a bet," said Day, shoving his hand across the table.
"Bet," said the Bugler, grabbing the hand.
On the way back to the ship that night Admiral Day shook his head sadly over the way his lifelong friend and rival was beginning to lose his grip. "Of course, he never was a John Paul Jones or a Horatio Nelson," he mused to himself; "but he used to be reasonably smart on routine things... Oh, well... I guess we're all getting a little old and senile now."
At a staff conference in the Admiral's cabin next day, the chief of staff outlined the work he had planned for the task group on the way to Honolulu. "We have set up a program that will keep everybody busy," he said.
"There will be flight operations day and night. The squadrons will shoot at towed sleeves, work with camera guns, and drop live bombs on raft targets. We will also tow sleeves for the antiaircraft batteries and let the cruisers have a crack at the rafts after the planes get through. There will be intercept exercises for the planes at night, and we'll make believe submarines are attacking the task group to give the destroyers a chance to drill on their antisubmarine tactics. It's all set up in the op order; we should get a lot of good training out of it, and everybody will be pretty busy."
When the COS had finished, Admiral Day said, "I've got a minor addition to make to your op order. Admiral Bates wants to exercise his planes in finding and tracking us. In fact, he has laid out a rather ambitious program for them to track us and report our position all the way to Honolulu. He has instructed his planes that they must turn around and go back to base whenever they are intercepted, and I want to be sure we spot their snoopers and intercept them before they get close enough to see any of our ships. I want all ships to keep their search radars alert, I want to keep early warning planes aloft, and I want four fighters fired up and ready on deck for intercept missions at all times. It should be fairly simple to intercept his patrol planes before they can plot our position accurately, and this job shouldn't interfere with the other drills you have laid out."
While this conference was in progress on the Guadalcanal, the Lafayette got underway and stood out through the Golden Gate, Hawaii-bound, with a huge bone in her teeth. Her nose, copied from the whale's, pushed up a great bow wave on the surface, but when submerged it gave her a streamlined shape that let her slip through the water much faster than she could on the surface. As she plowed out the channel, most of her 500-foot hull was awash, except for the big black "sail" amidships. Crowded into the little area in the top of the sail were the captain, navigator, and the lookouts. The ship being designed primarily to run submerged, the "bridge" area for surface cruising was little bigger than an oversized crow's-nest.
As they passed the entrance buoy at the end of the channel abeam the Captain yelled down the voice tube, "Stand by to dive." Warning howlers throughout the boat blared, everyone on the bridge plunged down the connin
g tower hatch, and the Captain took a last quick look around the horizon. Then he too went down the ladder, pulling the hatch shut behind him.
Before he got to the control room at the bottom, all diving stations were manned and reports were coming in from all through the ship: "Forward torpedo room ready," "Midship section ready," "Reactor room ready," and so on throughout the boat. The chief of the boat scanned the control board which showed the condition of all valves, hatches, and tanks, and watched the lights on the Christmas tree change from red to green as the hatches closed. When the tree was all green he reported to the exec, "Ready for diving, sir." The exec, who had been double-checking him, relayed the report to the skipper and the skipper said, "Take her down."
Except for the dials and gauges on the control board there was no way you could tell anything unusual was happening: she sank on an even keel, and you could hardly hear the tons of water pouring into the ballast tanks outside the pressure hull.
A sailor watching the depth gauge called out every 50-foot increase in depth, the boys on the trimming planes moved their wheels back and forth to hold the trim level, and the diving officer watched his board carefully. "Close all valves and vents," he said as they passed 100 feet.
"Steady her at 200," said the skipper.
"Steady at 200," repeated the diving officer.
It was all very businesslike and matter-of-fact, with no unnecessary chatter. But it would have been apparent to even the greenest observer that it was precisely done according to an exact routine, and that if any one man had started to make a boo-boo there were at least two others watching him like hawks who would have pounced on him and stopped it.
The skipper turned to the diving officer and said, "We're going to sit on the bottom here overnight, so I want slight negative buoyancy."
"Aye aye, sir," came the reply.
"Let's slow down now and scan the bottom carefully with our sonar and fathometer. I want to set her down on a level spot in about ninety fathoms."
The speed dropped down to bare steerageway. The ship sank slowly toward the bottom past 300, 400, 500 feet until the fathometer indicated only five fathoms below the keel.
"Let's keep her about this far off the bottom now and keep on going out till we get to the ninety-fathom curve. Then stop and ease her down on the bottom."
"Aye aye, sir," said the diving officer. The helmsman held his course, the lads on the diving planes kept the boat in trim, and she crept along gradually approaching the bottom, as the diving officer fiddled with his interior ballast tank, now letting in a little water, now blowing some out to bring her down slowly. When the depth gauge read 85 and the fathometer said 5 under the keel, he ordered, "All engines stop," and in a few minutes the Lafayette settled gently on the sandy bottom off the entrance of Bonita Channel.
"Okay," said the skipper. "We will sit here until tomorrow morning when the fleet sorties for Honolulu. I want to let the destroyers go over us and then to lift off when the carrier comes along. We're going to take station directly under her at 100 fathoms and stay there all the way to Honolulu."
Next morning, bright and early, a flotilla of minesweepers gave the Bonita Channel a thorough combing over, as they would have done in wartime, before any important task group would sortie from San Francisco. Of course their interest in what was on or anchored to the bottom only extended out to about the 30-fathom curve, so they turned back before they got to the Lafayette, with pennants flying from all their yardarms indicating "Channel clear, Bon voyage."
Halfway back they met the ten destroyers coming out in column. The destroyers were also making believe this was a wartime sortie. At the end of the channel, they fanned out and swept through a semicircular sector of twenty-mile radius pinging away with their sonars searching for any submarines that might be lurking out there waiting to torpedo the big ships. They would have found any that had been behaving the way submarines usually do behave - but, of course, not one that was lying doggo on the bottom in ninety fathoms!
Down on the bottom the Lafayette followed all this on their hydrophones and sonar-scopes. The sweep wires towed by the minesweepers sang an unmistakable song as they cut through the water searching for mine mooring cables. The little craft were clearly visible on the Lafayette's ice-scope as they passed overhead.
When the destroyers came out, the thrashing of their four-bladed screws was audible on the hydrophones as soon as they cleared the Golden Gate, and the "ping-ping-ping" of their sonars filled the ocean with noise. They too passed in review overhead on the ice-scope. Next came the unmistakable screw noises of the heavy ships, and Lafayette lifted gradually off the bottom and began creeping ahead. The three cruisers appeared first in the scope and then came the big blip from the carrier. Watching the scope carefully, the skipper jockeyed his engine to keep the blip directly overhead and soon he was making fifteen knots on course west, 500 feet under Guadalcanal's keel. The ice-scope showed a neat geometric pattern with the carrier in the center, the three cruisers in a V around her, and the destroyers in a bent semicircular screen ahead.
"Looks mighty pretty, doesn't it, Cap'n?" observed the exec.
"Yep," said the skipper; "I'll bet the Admiral gave 'em a 'Well done' signal on that sortie."
That evening the Lafayette's navigator consulted the dials on his computer and read the Latitude and Longitude as the ship's clock tolled eight bells. Then he wrote out a dispatch for the Captain to release: "From Lafayette to Com West Sea Frontier... 2000 position... Lat 39° 0.0, Long 123° 10' course 275, speed 17." The Captain scribbled his initials it, gave it to the communications officer and said, "Squirt it out."
Ordinarily, to send a radio message of this kind would require transmitting for at least a few minutes. There are six bits of information in it, seventeen words, and to put it in Morse code takes about 500 dots and dashes. But on a squirt transmission, you tape those dots and dashes and run the tape through a high-speed transmitter that spits the whole thing out in less than a second. To any snoopers listening in with a direction finder, the transmission is nothing but a chirp that sounds more like static than a formal message, and is over too quickly to get a bearing even if you recognized it. The chirp goes on a high-speed tape at the receiving end, then the tape is slowed down and out comes the message in ordinary Morse code.
An hour later on the Guadalcanal the chief of staff handed Admiral Day Bugler Bates' dispatch to CINCPAC reporting the task group's position at 8 p.m. The dispatch had been sent in plain English on a circuit which the task group guarded and was addressed to them for "information." "They have our position pretty close, sir," said the COS, "and our course and speed, too."
"Humph," observed Admiral Day. "Knowing our time of departure and our destination, anybody could make an educated guess as to where we would be twelve hours later. Has he got any snoopers over us now?"
"Nossir," said the COS, "I just came from CIC. All the search radars in the task group have got clear scopes."
"Just to throw his estimates off a little," said the Admiral, "let's change course to the north by ninety degrees and hold it that way until sunrise."
"Aye aye, sir," said the COS. Soon a blinker signal went out from the flagship, lights winked all around the horizon as the task group acknowledged they understood, and then, on the execute signal, they all swung around to course north and readjusted the screen. The Lafayette didn't get the blinker signal, of course, but the change of course showed up right away on the ice-scope and she had no trouble keeping her "station."
Just before sunrise the next day, Lafayette squirted her position report to Admiral Bates, he relayed to CINCPAC, and at six that morning the COS handed it to Admiral Day. "They've still got us pegged," he said. "Position is accurate, and so are the course and speed. I've checked carefully with all our people and they say we've had clear radar screens all night. There have been no snoopers at any time."
"What the hell?" said Admiral Day. "There's obviously a snooper up there somewhere. Build a fire under th
e task group skippers. Make 'em get out of their bunks and wake up their radar people. Send up some early warning planes and search around the task group to a range of 300 miles."
"Aye aye, sir," said the COS.
A sharp message went out to all captains telling them, in effect, to sound reveille in their Combat Information Centers and get the dopey radar operators on the job. Four early warning planes with huge radar dishes roared off from the Guadalcanal and climbed to 20,000 feet.
Half an hour later the squawk box in flag plot where Admiral Day was studying the chart announced, "AEW plane has bogey bearing east, 200 miles from task group, headed this way."
"Just like I thought," observed the Admiral; "there were snoopers up there all the time."
A moment later a great "WHOOM" on the flight deck indicated jet engines being lighted off, and the squawk box said, "Destroyers now have bogey on radar - altitude 30,000, coming this way."
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