Bridger's crew had set rolled-up weighted canvas tarps on the dry dock walls at both ends of the Richland. They would serve to hide the activity taking place inside the dock from preying eyes once the sub was completely out of the water on large wooden blocks inside the dry dock.
Using a bullhorn, Bridger quickly marshaled his crew, and twenty minutes later the Halibut was floating directly over the blocks. Divers from the Richland dropped down to monitor how the sub settled onto the blocks as the dry dock was raised to its normal operation float. They communicated directly with Bridger using sound-powered phones hooked to their full facemasks.
We stayed in the water, keeping out of the way of the Richland divers. They had their job — we had ours.
The Richland rose in fits and starts as Bridger adjusted the sub's position to keep it directly above the blocks. She had only about fifteen feet of clearance, but the fit was exact, and there was no room for error. It took an hour, but suddenly the sub started rising with the dock. We were in the blocks, and rising out of the water.
As we rose out of the warm waters of Apra Harbor, the canvas tarps Bridger had installed at each end of the dry dock stretched downward, completely blocking off the view of the inside of Richland, for everyone except an airborne observer almost directly overhead. With Halibut firmly sitting on the blocks, the Richland crew slid the gangway across the gap and firmly lashed it to the deck and dry dock wall. While we waited for the dry dock to drain completely, a couple of messenger lines flew across the gap between the dry dock walls over the sub. What followed was a lightweight tarp that served two functions, to provide some necessary shade over the deck, and — more importantly — to conceal topside activities from prying eyes.
Halibut maintained her watch routine, modified since the reactor plant was cold, but my guys and I were free to roam the island.
As it turned out, Guam didn't have a Winnie and Moo, or anything like it. It seems the Navy Base commander ran a pretty tight ship. The local city council kept things under control on their end, so it was great for families, but not necessarily for a bunch of sat divers who had just returned from a two-month-plus deployment.
We decided to visit the sights, which meant a mandatory visit to Talofofo Falls, nearly due east on the other side of the island from Apra Harbor. It wasn't Niagara, but given the size of Guam, the falls were pretty spectacular.
While we were there, one of the locals initiated a conversation with Ski. Next thing we knew, over a couple of beers he was telling us about this Japanese soldier who had been hiding out in these hills for 28 years.
"No shit," Ski said. "Twenty-eight years out here?" He pointed over the falls, "Up there… and nobody ever saw him?"
"'Sa fact," our new friend told us. "Me an' other fisherman was upstream when saw dis guy gone total native, if ya ken what I mean." He grinned and took a gulp of beer. "His clothes was, ya know, made of palm fronds 'n other stuff. Look like crazy man." He took another gulp of beer.
My guys said nothing, too astonished to do anything but listen.
" Jan'ry tweny-four, seveny-two," he said. "Name a Corporal Shoichi Yokoi. We chase him down. He live in a cave he dug during the war. Been livin' out here ever since."
"No shit," Ski managed to say, and that just about said it all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Skipper had made it perfectly clear that he wasn't going out again without the ability to put Halibut firmly on the bottom. No more hanging off mushroom anchors at the mercy of the weather, he had insisted.
I couldn't have agreed more, and Ham was with me a hundred percent. We participated in several meetings that created the skids that finally got installed on our belly — all four of them, two under the bow and two by the stern. They were designed with a flat, broad bottom, a bit like skis. They extended out at a bit of an angle, and sufficiently far to hold the keel off the bottom. Initially, there was a question about the skid's effect on our speed and stealth, but the Skipper quashed that with one — the Can absolutely limited our speed, and two — Halibut wasn't know as a particularly stealthy sub anyway.
Installing them was a bit of an operation. The sub was blocked sufficiently high off the dry dock deck to install them, but they could not just be welded to the outer hull. The main problem was that the Halibut was encased in saddle ballast tanks with skin that was little more than tin-can thick. The skids had to penetrate to the pressure hull, but they couldn't just be welded to the pressure hull either. The entire weight of the bottomed submarine had to be distributed evenly along a series of distribution matrices, and then down to the skids. It seems the engineering boys had already worked it out, and the skids had arrived a couple of days before we did.
Installing them involved opening the saddle tank skin — peeling it back, so to speak — and then welding the skid matrices to the hull. Finally, the skin was put back, and the penetrations were welded shut against the skid struts connecting to the skid surfaces. The Halibut now looked like nothing so much as a big black sausage on Santa's sleigh.
While the skids were being installed, an Air Force transport arrived directly from Washington, D.C., landing on the Navy runway a half-mile to the west on the peninsula. It carried a special package — a twenty-foot-long, three-foot-wide pod recorder. At twelve thousand pounds, this was no little thing. Somehow we had to secure it to the sub, carry it back to the Okhotsk cable, and install it.
The first pod had weighed just a few pounds; this one, on the other hand, was a monster, and somehow, my guys would have to extract it from the sub, float it into position, and secure the cable to the pod. No matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't see it as a piece of cake.
The first pod was a one-lift-bag-package — this one… my God, this one would need a specially designed lift system just to move it around on the bottom.
Definitely time for another meeting.
I had Ham assemble the guys in the Wardroom, and brought the Spook team in for good measure. We needed to be sure we had a system in place before we departed Guam. There was absolutely no way we would be able to improvise something on the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk.
By the time everyone was assembled, we had a full house in the Wardroom. With the ship's officers, several of the senior chiefs, the senior members of the Spook group, and all my guys, there was barely standing room.
Once everyone had settled down, the Skipper entered with a guy in a suit carrying a paper roll. I guess no one told him that Guam was near the equator — short sleeves, and even short pants — were more in order than a shirt, tie, and jacket. We had the AC cranked up in the sub, so at least here the DC spook was comfortable.
"Gentlemen," the Skipper said without fanfare, "this is Richard Jenkins from NSA. He brought the pod with him that you all have seen being lowered to the dry dock deck." The Skipper nodded at Jenkins. "Mr. Jenkins…"
Jenkins wasted no time with preliminaries. He unrolled a large drawing and taped it to the bulkhead behind him. He retrieved an extensible pointer from his inner pocket and extended it fully, pointing to the picture of the pod. "This," he said, "is the pod."
Jenkins then explained in detail how NSA had developed the pod. The initial concept, he explained, was to make a pod that could be carried inside the sub and deployed on site. This turned out, however, not to be possible. When you took the required redundancies into account so that the pod could operate unattended for months at a time, added a power source, and made it sufficiently robust and heavy to stay in place at 600 feet, no matter the weather above, what you got was something too big to carry inside Halibut.