Kamongo was ranged with fourteen other submarines alongside the tender David at the little island base in the southwest Pacific. The crossing after the sinking at Wake Island had been uneventful, since they had run submerged most of the time during daylight hours. Always on the lookout for enemy ships, officers and crew alike had been disappointed to run into nothing but an American task force, consisting of a carrier, a cruiser, and three destroyers racing north at full speed.

March had tried to make out the name of the carrier, and he would have been delighted to know it was the Bunker Hill carrying Scoot and his companions from their Truk attack to a small action against another Jap-held island farther north. But even American subs submerged and ran deep and quiet when American ships were near by. The destroyers would have started to toss depth charges like snowflakes if they had sighted a periscope of any kind.

At the sub base, all pigboat Skippers and their seconds were at a meeting aboard the tender. Captain Milbank, the Intelligence Officer, was speaking to them.

“You’ve all heard about the blasting of Truk,” he said. “Now, it’s certain that the Japs will try to reinforce that important post as quickly and as fully as possible. In fact, word has reached us through the Chinese that a large convoy has already left Japan for Truk, with troops, oil and gasoline, ammunition, more antiaircraft guns, food and supplies, and with almost every deck covered with Zeros. They’ve got to replace what we knocked out there and, even further, increase their defending force. They know we’ll hit it again.”

He looked around the room at the quiet, serious faces of the men who listened intently.

“You may also know,” he went on, “that we have found Chinese Intelligence to be very reliable. It’s amazing how they get word through the Jap lines so quickly and efficiently. Well—the Chinese report that there’s something special about this convoy for Truk. They weren’t able to learn exactly what it is, but they believe it is in the route to be followed. The Nips know our submarines are roaming the seas out here and will be on the lookout especially for this convoy. Having knocked Truk half out, we want to keep it in that condition. It’s you men—with some help, I must confess, from the air service—who will do that job.”

There were smiles in the room as the Captain, joking, grudgingly recognized the usefulness of the flying sailors. Then he continued:

“Our patrol planes are ranging over the ocean on the lookout for the convoy, of course, but their distances are limited and it’s a mighty big ocean to cover. So, for a while, our submarines must also act as scouts. Later we can get together and sink the ships, but first we have to act as a team to find them.

“We’re all going to leave here at the same time, and fan out to cover the main routes from Japan to Truk. And we want to catch them as far from Truk as possible. The earlier we can find them, the more subs and planes we’ll have time to get to the attack so we can wipe the whole thing out.”

The Captain turned to a chart behind him on the wall.

“Later I shall go over with you the routes to be followed by each submarine,” he said. “If and when any one of you sights the convoy he is not to radio that information. The Japs would certainly pick up that broadcast. They’d know we had discovered them and they’d be ready for us. We want the attack to come by surprise. So we have arranged certain spots for each of you to arrive at on certain days and at specific hours. A patrol plane will visit each of those spots, clearly marked so that you will not mistake it for an enemy plane. He will land on the water and pick up any information you may have. This same procedure is to be followed twenty-four hours later at another spot further away.

“If by that time not one of you has found the convoy, you are to go your own ways, looking for whatever you can find on this patrol. And by that time, if you find anything like the big convoy, the only thing to do will be to surface and radio us so we can all close in for the kill. We’ll lose the element of surprise but we’ll get them, anyway.”

Next, the Intelligence Officer went over the details of routes and rendezvous spots for each submarine. March saw at once that Kamongo was taking a westerly course from their base, then heading northwest. It seemed to him that this should be one of the most likely routes for a convoy to take from Japan to Truk, and he was pleased.

Then Larry Gray asked a question of the Intelligence Officer.

“Those rendezvous spots,” he said. “They appear to be in open sea, but I know there are little atolls all over the place. Are they near such islands?”

“No, they are not,” the Captain said. “Purposely. The Japs have little garrisons on a great many of those tiny islands that look no more than bumps on the sea. Some of them have radios. If they saw the contact of an American sub and an American patrol plane so far from our bases, they’d report it. That wouldn’t tell the Japs much, but the less they know the better we like it, no matter how unimportant it may seem. No, the meeting places are in open water. The navigators have a little work to do on this patrol.”

Larry glanced at March and smiled. March knew it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to find one exact spot in the middle of a big ocean by dead reckoning.

After going over all details of the complicated plan thoroughly, the skipper and their execs returned to their own submarines to see that everything was ready for getting under way. Fuel and supplies and torpedoes had been loaded into all the pigboats and there remained only a final check before they could depart.

In the night they slipped away from their tender one by one and, traveling on the surface under the protection of night, they headed out to sea silently, on the alert, eagerly looking forward to the task ahead. The crew of each pigboat felt that they would be the ones to find the convoy, the first to go in for the attack.

But on the second day not a sign of the convoy had been seen by any of the submarines.

“Must be coming more slowly than we thought,” Larry suggested. “We’ll catch up with it before the next patrol stop.”

At the time Larry spoke they were on the surface in the late afternoon, watching the big American flying boat slide down out of the clouds and circle above them. March had felt a thrill of satisfaction when he saw it, knowing that it meant he had found his particular spot in the wide Pacific, but Larry just seemed to take it for granted that his navigator would have brought them where they were supposed to be, no matter how difficult the job.

They gave their negative report to the patrol, learned that no other pigboat contacted had had better luck, then submerged as the flying boat took off from the choppy waters.

They ran submerged at periscope depth for two hours until darkness began to fall, with one of the officers having his eye glued to the little rubber piece on the ’scope every minute. Then they surfaced and went steadily forward on their prescribed course. Two officers and three lookouts stayed constantly on the bridge, and the sound detector man below concentrated on his listening as never before. It might well be that he could pick up the sound of a convoy’s propellers long before the lookouts would sight anything, especially on a moonless night.

But dawn came and found them with nothing to report.

“You’d think there wasn’t even a war going on out here!” McFee complained. “Don’t the Nips have any ships in these waters?”

“Not in the waters we’ve been sailing on, anyway,” Stan Bigelow replied. “I feel cross-eyed from looking so hard for the last four hours.”

The bright sun sent them under the water again, but only to periscope depth so that a constant lookout could be maintained. Still—late afternoon found them filled with discouragement, waiting for the patrol plane. The patrol had found nothing.

“Maybe one of the others—” March suggested, but Larry shook his head.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I think we’re in the best spot. We’re furthest west of the whole bunch. That’s certainly the most likely route for the convoy, keeping as close to the Philippines, to land protection, as possible. If they were attacked they’d have support from land-based planes there for quite a while. If anything, I think they may even be further west than our route.”

March and Larry talked as they stood on the bridge waiting for their patrol plane to come out of the west. Suddenly the lookout shouted, “Plane coming out of the sun!”

“Can’t be ours!” Larry shouted. “Rig for dive, March.”

As March barked out the orders to take the ship down, the lookout reported that the plane was a two-motored flying boat.

“Must be a Jap all right,” Larry said. They all knew that their own plane was four-motored, one of the longest-ranged flying boats in the world.

In two minutes March had slid down the hatch, to be followed by Larry, who dogged the hatch cover tight.

“Take her down to a hundred and fifty,” he said.

Kamongo turned her nose down and slid forward. As they leveled off at a hundred and fifty they heard the roar and felt the jar of a depth charge explosion. But it was not close and it went off far above them. Then came another, a little closer but still threatening no danger to the sub.

“Not full-size charges,” Larry said. “We’re all right at a hundred and fifty. We’ll just wait him out. He can’t be carrying very many depth charges in that job of his. But hold on—he’ll probably get a little closer.”

They all held on, but nothing happened. Not another charge went off. March looked questioningly at Larry.

“Don’t know,” Larry said. “Maybe he’s gone on. More likely he’s playing possum, hoping we’ll think he’s gone and will come up for a look. That’s when he’d get us.”

“Better stay down for a while,” March said.

“Yes, he can’t fly around up there in a circle forever,” Larry said. “We’ll go up in an hour.”

“What about meeting our patrol plane?” March asked.

“I’m afraid we’ll miss him,” Larry said. “Can’t take a chance on going up now. He might hang around for a while, of course, if the Jap has gone.”

“He could take care of that Jap in a minute,” McFee said.

“Say, maybe that’s what happened,” March suggested.

“Perhaps,” said Larry. “Maybe our plane came and drove off the Jap. But we can’t be sure. I’m not going to risk a sub and sixty men just to find out.”

Then the sound man turned excitedly.

“I hear something, sir,” he said. “Something in Morse—sounds like a hammer tapping against metal. I’ll have it in a minute.”

They waited impatiently as the sound man took down the message. Then he handed it to Larry.

“Kamongo,” it said. “Jap went home. Come on up.”

Larry grinned. “It’s okay,” he said. “The Jap wouldn’t have known we were Kamongo. It’s our plane. Take her up.”

When the ship surfaced and Larry scrambled through the hatch on to the bridge he saw the big American flying boat resting on the water not a quarter of a mile away. It taxied over beside the submarine as March and Mac joined Larry on the bridge.

“I thought you’d get that hammer-on-the-hull message,” the plane’s pilot called with a smile. “Nippo just took one look at me coming and decided he had a date west of here in a big hurry.”

Larry passed on his report of not having sighted the big Jap convoy and learned that no other submarine had found it either.

“Well, you’re on your own now,” the pilot said. “Go get ’em and good luck.”

They waved as the plane turned and roared over the water, lifted in the air and circled to the east with a last dip of its wings.

“Now where do we go from here?” March asked.

“We’ll head west,” Larry said. “After that Jap plane. Let’s get going. I’m going to find that convoy!”

Meanwhile, the Jap plane heading west had sighted something else. Its pilot was angry at having been driven away from an American submarine just when it was about to blow the hated pigboat to its ancestors. And there ahead of him—to make up for that loss—was a lone American fighter plane. He grinned happily.

“American plane,” he said to his co-pilot. “We get him.”

The co-pilot looked worried. “American fighter too fast for slow flying boat. Maybe he get us!”

But the pilot was angry and not to be argued with. “No, we get American fighter!”

It was obvious that the American had seen them, but the plane did not put on a sudden burst of speed, did not maneuver quickly to get into position for the attack.

The co-pilot grinned. “American plane damaged,” he said. “American plane cannot fly fast!”

“Now will you question what I say?” demanded the pilot. “I said we get American plane. Our gods damage plane so we can get it.”

Scoot Bailey looked at the approaching Jap bomber and frowned. Here was a quick decision to be made. He had been out with the other fighters and bombers from Bunker Hill attacking the Jap garrison on a small island to the north. A lucky shot from one of the few defending Jap Zeros—before it went down—clipped Scoot’s oil line. There was a leak, though not a big one, and the engine was heating up badly. So Scoot had been separated from the others and now was limping home to his carrier, trying to get the best speed he could without overheating the engine too much. It had not been an easy job to nurse it along that way, for the oil was dripping away drop by drop. Still, he thought he might make it, for he had only about forty more miles to go.

“And now this clumsy boat of the Japs has to show up!” he shouted to himself angrily. “I could take him in a minute if I was okay, but with this leaky oil line—what’ll I do? If I give her the gun and really swoop down on this bird, I’ll force out most of the oil that I’ve got left, heat up the engine so much it’ll burn out. But if I don’t, then I’m just like a clay pigeon, sitting here waiting to be taken.”

Scoot smiled. “Doesn’t take long to make up your mind in a case like that. I’ll get that baby who thinks I’m crippled and can’t fight back. And then I’ll just be setting myself down on the sea somewhere and hoping to be picked up, though there’s not much hope for that here.”

He let the Jap patrol plane come on, continued to act as if he couldn’t maneuver the plane. He wiggled the wings as if he were trying to make his craft do something it wouldn’t do. He succeeded in filling the Jap pilot with such confidence that the man was happily off guard.

Then, at the last minute, he gave his Hellcat the gun and she almost jumped out from under him. Up he rose, then did a wing-over and swooped down on the Jap plane from above and behind. Big splashes of oil were covering his windshield, forced from the leaky line by the sudden rush of power in the engine. The Jap plane was just a blur when Scoot pressed the gun button and heard the pounding of bullets from his machine guns.

Then he pulled up and to the right, looking out the side. Yes, he had done it. The Jap bomber was afire, but trying to turn to the left. Then Scoot saw what he was aiming for—a tiny reef with a few palm trees a few miles to the south. Suddenly the Jap plane blew up in the air with a roar. Scoot felt the shock of the blast and watched the pieces of flaming plane plummet to the sea below, where a steaming smoke arose from the water.

Scoot’s smile was frozen by a hard hammering knock from his engine.

“That did it!” he exclaimed. “She’s conking out, and right about now. Maybe I can make that little island even if the Jap couldn’t.”

He edged the plane around with the last gasps from the engine and put her into a glide toward the little spot of land. Then it occurred to him that there might be Japs on the island, tiny as it was, and with one hand he checked his service revolver to be sure that he might take a few with him before he went himself, if the worst should happen.

“And all that depends on whether I make it in this glide or not,” Scoot said. “But it looks okay.”

The plane was slipping down the sky fast, approaching the island. About ten feet above the water, Scoot leveled her off and pancaked into the water, trying to get his tail to act as a brake. The controls flew from his hands and his head hit the top of his cockpit. But he didn’t lose consciousness from the blow, even though he was badly stunned.

He saw the rocky shore of the island rushing toward him as the plane seemed to skim over the water. Then he struck the rocks, was thrown forward, and heard a ripping, tearing sound as the bottom of his fuselage was crushed and mangled on the rocks.

He felt a throb in his forehead and realized that he was looking at the slightly twisted floor of his cockpit.

“Must have been knocked out for a minute,” Scoot told himself.

He lifted his head and looked around. His plane was entirely on dry land. It had skidded over the rocks, leaving the water. Right in front of him was the smooth slanting trunk of a palm tree. He saw no movement anywhere.

“Well, if there were Japs here they’d have been on top of me long before this.”

Scoot unfastened his safety belt and crawled from his seat, feeling his bruised arms and legs to make sure they were whole. In another moment he stood on the rocky shore surveying sadly his crumpled and twisted ship.

“My beautiful Hellcat!” he said, patting her side. “Look what I’ve done to you!”

Then he turned and looked the island over. It was, he could easily see, not more than two hundred yards long and fifty feet wide, and it curved in a gentle arc. There were rocks, a few palm trees, some low bushes and nothing else.

“Well, I might as well like it,” Scoot said. “It may be my home for the duration!”