“Can you talk about it?” Harmon asked.
“I’m being relieved,” Lake said.
“Relieved?”
“I’m not supposed to do any more work on this case until my superior gets here and I can brief him.”
“Too late,” Harmon said. “We’re already here. You’ll have to be relieved after we leave because I’m not making this drive again and I’m not going to be involved in this any more than I am already.”
They were in front of a pre-World War II-era building with a red tile roof. Harmon led the way inside. After talking to her friend, she led Lake to a small unoccupied office. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Lake didn’t have much time to reflect on his suddenly terminated career, because she was back in less than two minutes with several large canvas-covered books. She thumped them down on the desk. “HDSF logs for August and September 1945. Shall we?”
“You look, I need to think for a minute,” Lake said. As Harmon flipped through pages, he unfocused his eyes and slowed his breathing. He felt like he was sitting on a dock jutting out into a large lake. He could see the surface, but what was underneath was hidden from his view. Lake knew that bodies of water held all sorts of hidden threats and treasures. There were forces at work here that he couldn’t even begin to understand. Fifty-two years was a long time for things to simmer under the surface.
Harmon’s voice intruded on his dark thoughts. “September the second, 1945, 2027 hours in the evening, hydro acoustics picked up an initial possible submarine contact nine miles out from the Golden Gate, just south of the main channel.”
Lake leaned forward in his chair as she pointed at a small map of the harbor.
“The station that first picked it up was here, on the south peninsula at Hydrangea. Since the war was over, there was no special concern about it being an enemy contact,” Harmon said. “The minefield had already been deactivated and the sub net was no longer in service.”
“So the harbor was wide open,” Lake noted.
“Yes.”
“Is that our boy?” Lake asked. “Did the 1-24 make it here?”
“I think that may be it,” she said. “There’s no record in here of any American submarine that was supposed to be in the area. The duty officer specifically notes that. But since the war was over, no alert was issued and no further action was taken.”
Harmon tapped the old duty log. “The station tracked the contact in to three miles off the Golden Gate where there’s a semicircular shoal called the Potato Patch. Then something strange happened. They heard nothing for a half hour, then the submarine apparently went back out to sea, but the log says there was an echo going in toward the harbor.”
Lake frowned. “An echo? What do they mean by that?”
“I think that the initial contact was the 1-24,” Harmon said. “Remember I told you that they would most likely have a smaller submarine on the deck of the 1-24, a midget sub? I think the echo is that midget sub which would have carried the Genzai Bakudan or at least towed it to the target.”
Lake looked down at the map. He remembered the current he had faced several miles out to sea from the Golden Gate. From his SEAL training he knew quite a bit about hydrography and he also knew something about seagoing craft. He’d seen pictures of Japanese midget subs, such as the one that was beached on Oahu shortly after the attack at Pearl Harbor. “I think a midget sub would have a hell of a hard time trying to make it in the Golden Gate, even from only three miles out,” Lake said. “The current there is very powerful and a midget sub doesn’t have the greatest engine or an unlimited supply of power. Also, one of those old-style nuclear bombs must have weighed a hell of a lot.”
“Maybe that’s where it all fell apart,” Harmon theorized. “They sent out the midget sub and it got caught in the current and pushed back out to sea, lost forever.”
“They wouldn’t be that stupid, would they?” Lake murmured. Why couldn’t the damn sub have just disappeared in the mid-Pacific, he thought to himself.
“Excuse me?”
He was still looking at the map. “I mean they would have known about the current and all that. They were sailors, for Chrissakes.” Lake’s frustration and anger at the recent phone call and events was seeping out of him, water flowing over a high dike of discipline and self-control. “Something’s not right about this.” He slapped the table top. “Shit, nothing’s right about anything.”
He drew his finger across the map to the narrow gap between the peninsula of San Francisco and Marin County to the north. “You said the harbor was basically undefended after the war. The mines were deactivated and the sub gate was open all the time. They would have expected that. So what happened to the mini-sub? Where is it resting?”
Harmon was turning pages in the log, looking for any more information. “Here’s something,” she said.
“What?”
“The U.S.S. Honolulu, a cruiser that was departing the harbor after overhaul, picked up a small sonar contact that coincides with this echo. They tracked it until they lost it at—” There was a sudden intake of breath that caused Lake to look up from the map in concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“They tracked it until they lost it against the southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.” She looked up from the log. “The midget submarine with the second bomb is at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
CHAPTER 12
“So why didn’t they explode it?” Lake asked.
Harmon was seated now, staring at the logs in front of her as if they might suddenly jump up and bite her.
“Maybe it didn’t work,” she said.
“The one in Korea worked,” Lake said, remembering they’d already had this conversation. “There’s no point dwelling on that right now. The key issue is, was this contact really a midget sub and, if it was, is it still down there?” The answer came to him even as he asked the question. “Yeah, I think that contact was it and I think it’s still down there.”
“Why?” Harmon was rousing out of her shock and closing up the logs.
“It makes sense to me now. They knew the midget sub could only stay down so long and make it so far against the current with its batteries. If they could just make it to the mouth of the harbor, they could anchor it against the base of the southern tower. The northern one is connected to land, but the southern one stands alone in deep water. Then with the bomb tied off there, they could blow it at any time. Imagine taking out the Golden Gate? Not only that, but the blast would have hit the headquarters for the HDSF right here at Fort Point and the adjacent areas in the Presidio.” Lake remembered the other night and the paint sprayer on top of the bridge. “And the prevailing winds would have carried the fallout right over San Francisco.”
“You really think it’s still down there?” Harmon asked.
“Yes. I think that’s what the North Koreans are hot after and has the Japanese scared shitless.” Lake had a feeling that Araki might even know this and had withheld this little piece of news. Or perhaps Araki had been using Lake as bait on the hook he was using to fish for the bomb’s location.
“What are you going to do about it?” Harmon asked.
“I don’t know at the moment,” Lake said. “I have to think about it.”
“Well, while you ponder that,” Harmon said, “I do have to get back to the campus.”
Lake checked his watch and nodded. “I have someone I’m meeting there at three.”