The story of the submarine USS Billfish begins quietly enough, like so many others of her time. She was a Balao-class boat, built at Portsmouth Navy Yard and commissioned in April of 1943, one of the many sleek steel predators that would come to define the silent war beneath the Pacific. Her skipper was Commander Frederick Colby Lucas Jr., a 1930 graduate of the Naval Academy, seasoned by years in the service but untested in the chaos of combat. On paper, Lucas was the model officer of his generation, steady, methodical, and dutiful. In reality, he was about to face the one test that reveals more about a man than any résumé ever could.