Operation Mickey was the name given to the USS Enterprise crew's mission to locate and destroy Mickey, a rat brought on board by Hikaru Sulu which had escaped and was suspected of carrying bubonic plague. There were bets on when Mickey would be found, and Lieutenant Uhura composed a song commemorating the event, "The Saga of Mickey the Space Rat." When a shipwide search failed to discover him, Captain James T. Kirk authorized Sulu's plan to flood the ship with chlorine gas. This was believed to have succeeded in killing Mickey, but he turned up alive a week later, and the hunt resumed again. However, Kirk later figured out that Mickey never had the plague, and that it was all a ploy by Spock and Leonard McCoy to keep the crews' minds off of their space cafard. (TOS novel: Mission to Horati