After getting a room at the hotel, I made contact according to instructions, never mind with whom. I wouldn't know him if I saw him on the street, myself. He was just a voice on the phone. He told me-it was morning by this time-to spend the day sightseeing, which is a technical term for making damn sure you're not being watched.
Reporting back in the evening with the all-clear signal, I was told to leave the hotel casually, on foot, a certain exact number of minutes before midnight. I was to walk in a certain direction at a certain pace. If a red Austin-Healey sports job pulled up beside me, and the driver wore a Navy uniform and uttered a certain phrase, I was to answer him with another phrase and get into the car.
The upshot of these Hollywood maneuvers was that just before dawn I found myself on a motor launch crossing Pensacola Bay, which put me back in Florida again after a wild night drive, but near the top of the state instead of the bottom. There was an aircraft carrier anchored out in the bay. It loomed over the still water massive and motionless, as if set on permanent concrete foundations. It was as easy to imagine the Pentagon putting out to sea.
I glanced at the lights of the Naval Air Station from which we'd come, bid terra firma a silent farewell, and scrambled onto the platform at the foot of the long, flimsy stairway suspended from ropes-a ladder, in Navy terminology-that ran slantingly up the ship's side to a lighted opening far above. My escort was beside me, ready to keep me from falling in the drink.
He was a trim young fellow with a shiny gold stripe-and-a-half on each shoulder of his immaculate khaki gabardine uniform, and a shiny Naval Academy ring on his left hand. There were shiny gold wings on his chest, and a neat little plastic name plate, white on black, reading J. S. BRAITHWAITE. He waved the launch away. This left us stranded on the rickety platform just a few feet above the water, with no place to go but up.
"After you, sir," he said. "Remember, you salute the quarterdeck first, then the O.O.D."
"Quarterdeck," I said. "I thought quarterdecks went out with sail." I glanced at the two-and-a-half stripes on the shoulder of the uniform I had been supplied for the occasion. The change of costume had been made in an empty apartment in town.
"You're a lieutenant commander, sir," he said. "The quarterdeck is aft, that way." He pointed.
I started climbing, trying to fight off the sense of unreality that came of switching location and identity too fast. I saluted the quarterdeck and the O.O.D., as Braithwaite had called him-the Officer of the Deck-who wore a pair of binoculars hung around his neck and looked sleepy and bored. I guess the early-morning watch is a bitch in any service, uniformed or otherwise. I followed my guide along a vast empty hangar space to a stairway- excuse me, ladder-leading down. Presently, after negotiating a maze of narrow passages below, I found myself in a white-painted cabin with a single bunk.
"You can flake out there if you like, sir," Braithwaite said. "They're still in conference. They won't be needing you for a while. Would you like some coffee?"
In the business, we go on the assumption that, among friends at least, we'll be told what we need to know when the time comes for us to know it. I didn't ask who was in conference, therefore, but I did drink the coffee. Then, left alone, I shed my uniform blouse, stretched out on the bunk, closed my eyes, and tried not to think of a shape under a blanket and a single silver slipper. After a while I went to sleep.
When I awoke, my watch read well past eight, but the cabin had no direct connection with the outside world, so I had to take daylight on faith. I noticed a certain vibration and deduced that we were under way. Presently Braithwaite appeared and guided me down the passage to the plumbing, after which he took me to the wardroom for breakfast.
I knew it was the wardroom because it said so on the door. We had a table to ourselves, but there were other officers present who looked me over casually as I sat down. I hoped I didn't look as phony as I felt in my borrowed uniform.
"We don't want to make a mystery of you, sir," Braithwaite said. "As far as the ship's company is concerned, you're just a reserve officer on temporary active duty observing carrier training operations for the day. There'll be less talk that way than if we tried to hide you from sight." He glanced at his watch. "We should have some advanced jet trainers coming in shortly. As soon as we've finished chow, we'll go topside and watch them practice landings to make it look good. I hope you don't mind a little noise."
He grinned. I didn't get the significance of the grin just then, but it became clear to me a little later, as I stood on a narrow observation walk on the carrier's superstructure, or island, looking down at the flight deck, which was the length of three football fields, with catapults forward and arresting gear aft, all explained to me in detail by my conscientious young escort. We were well out in the Gulf of Mexico by this time, out of sight of land on a clear, bright, cool fall day, and the ship was steaming into the wind fast enough that I had to pull my uniform cap down hard to keep it from being blown away. Braithwaite laughed.
"We've got to have thirty-two knots of wind along the flight deck to take the jets aboard," he said. "This time of year there's usually a breeze to help out, but in summer, in a flat calm, the engineering officer has to sweat blood to make it. Here they come now, sir."
They were already circling the ship like a swarm of hornets; now the first one came in fast, snagged an arresting wire with its tailhook, and slammed to a stop. It was hardly clear and taxiing forward, past the island where we stood, when the second one hit the wires-and I began to understand Braithwaite's remark about noise. The damn planes roared, shrieked, sobbed, and whistled. The port catapult would fling one thundering jet off the bow to go around again, while another blasted away on the starboard catapult, awaiting its turn. Meanwhile number three was taxiing up amidships, howling up a storm, and number four was coming in over the stern, screaming like a banshee…
There was something hypnotic about the tremendous din. It brought back memories of other places I'd stood some years ago watching other planes take off, planes that upon occasion I'd helped prepare the way for in secret and unpleasant ways. I don't suppose the kids in those planes ever knew that anybody had been before them, any more than these earnest kids with their faces half hidden by their helmets and mikes realized that if the time ever came for them to take their deadly machines up armed, they would be contributing only a little official noise and glamor to the silent, unofficial war that's always being fought by quiet people without flashy helmets and often without microphones, too, or any other means of communicating with home base. What we undercover services needed, I thought wryly, was a public relations department. People just didn't appreciate us.
Suddenly the planes were gone, and it was quiet again except for the wind and the muted rumbling of the ship's machinery. Braithwaite glanced at his watch.
"Just about time for the HUP to pick up the brass from Washington," he said. "There she is, right off the quarter."
A clattering sound broke the relative peace, and a banana-shaped helicopter with two rotors settled to the deck right below us. Three men-two dignified civilians and an Army officer with a lot of fancy stuff on his cap-made their way out to the chopper, climbed aboard, and were borne away to the north. I glanced at Braithwaite. He showed me a smooth young poker face, so I didn't deem it advisable to start a discussion of the fact that we'd just seen three fairly important people whose faces would be recognized by almost every alert newspaper reader or TV viewer. On the other hand, it didn't seem likely I'd been shown them by accident. Somebody was trying to impress me with the importance of the forthcoming job, whatever it might be. Braithwaite made reference to his watch again; the boy was a real chronometer fiend.