“Not a sign of life there,” Larry said as he looked through the periscope. “Beach fires all out. Down ’scope. Take her up.”

They moved toward the ladder leading up to the conning tower, Larry first, Scoot immediately behind him, in trunks. He held a bundle in one hand.

“Hope I can keep these clothes a little dry,” Scoot said. “I’d like to be dressed when I do this if I can.”

Larry unfastened the hatch cover and hurried up on to the bridge. Scoot was behind him in a second, followed by March and two enlisted men who manned the machine guns at once. Everyone moved swiftly and noiselessly.

Scoot was already sliding down the ladder to the deck, with March right behind him. Larry stayed on the bridge, looking sharply toward shore at every minute.

“So long March,” Scoot whispered as he slid into the water. “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Good luck, Scoot,” March whispered back. And that was all. For just a second he watched Scoot strike out toward the plane, holding aloft his bundle of clothes and making no splashing sound. Then March turned and went back up the ladder to the bridge.

There he stood quietly beside Larry, who said nothing. March picked up Scoot’s dim figure in the water, listening at the same time for the sound of an alarm on the beach in case a sentry saw the black hull of the submarine offshore.

“He’s reached it,” March whispered to Larry.

“Good.”

“Must be unfastening the buoy now,” March said. Again they waited in silence.

“Can’t be sure, but I think he’s climbing up on the pontoon,” March said. “Yes—I can just barely make him out. Can’t be seen from shore.”

Then there was a long silence, tense, expectant. March tried to picture Scoot slipping into trousers and shirt, climbing into the plane’s cockpit, feeling for the switches and controls in the dark. He’d probably have to wind up the starter. And suddenly at this moment, March wondered how much gas the Jap plane had in it.

“Must be enough for it to get back to its battleship,” he told himself.

March jumped. A coughing roar split the silence and the darkness. Flashes of flame came from the exhaust pipes of the plane as the engine roared, subsided, roared again. Scoot had taken just half a minute to warm it up. Then he gave it the gun and March saw the plane begin to move.

“Down, men!” Larry shouted, and the two men left their guns and slid down the hatch. “Get on down, March,” Larry said, “and take her down. I’m right behind you.”

But at that moment shots rang out from the shore. Figures were running along the beach, shouting and gesticulating wildly. The seaplane was roaring away over the water and some men were firing at it.

March, his feet on the rungs of the ladder, looked up, startled. And then Larry fell at his feet.

“I’m hit, March,” Larry said. “Don’t waste a minute. I can get down. Hurry.”

Grabbing his Skipper, March hauled him to the companionway. He heard the spatter of bullets against the sides of the submarine. He lowered Larry quickly down the hatch and men below grabbed him and helped him from the ladder. March slid down after him, shouting commands to take her down while he was still closing the hatch.

“Call Sallini,” he said to one of the men. “Take the Skipper to his quarters. Mac, go in with him.”

The roar of water into the ballast tanks flowed over them, and the whine of the electric motors told them the ship was under way.

“Steady at fifty,” he said. “Hold course. We’ll surface in a little while. Stan, will you take over here? I want to see how the Skipper is.”

“Sure, March,” Stan said. “Pat him on the back for me. Hope it’s not bad.”

March stood at the door of Gray’s quarters. There was not room inside. Larry was on his bunk, looking up to smile with an effort, but with pain marking his face.

“This was one if we didn’t think of, wasn’t it, March?” he asked.

“How are you, Larry?” March asked.

“It hurts like the devil,” the Skipper replied. “I think there’s two or three slugs in my chest somewhere. Sallini will be able to tell in a minute.”

The pharmacist was ripping off Gray’s shirt and undershirt, which showed spreading stains of blood. McFee helped him, trying to move Gray as little as possible. Then Sallini examined the wounds carefully for a few moments.

“Three’s right, Skipper,” he said. “And they’re still in you. I don’t see how this one missed the heart but it must have or you wouldn’t be talking now. This one up here busted your collar-bone. That’s what hurts so much right now. And the other, on the right side must’ve gone right through the lung. I can’t tell if any might be lodged in the spine or not. Doubt it or you’d have passed out—couldn’t move much.”

“Can’t move much anyway,” the Skipper replied weakly.

March saw that his face was draining white, and his eyes began to cloud over.

“Sulfa tablets, anyway,” Sallini said. “And bandages to stop the bleeding here, though there’s not much likely to come out while he’s lying down. May be some internal bleeding but I couldn’t do anything about that. Don’t know what else I could do right now.”

“Okay, Sallini,” March said. “Go get what you need and do it as fast as you can.”

The pharmacist left and March stepped close to the Skipper, leaning down close to him as Mac was.

“March,” Gray said. “I don’t know what the devil this is, but I feel like passing out. Anyway—and this is an order from your Captain—carry out plans exactly as we have laid them out. You’re in command of this submarine when I’m—er, incapacitated. McFee will help you carry on. Go get that convoy!”

“We’ll get it, Larry,” March said. “But you’ll do the job, because you’ll be up and around by the time we get there. Or at least you can direct the battle from your bunk.”

Gray smiled and let his head fall back. He seemed to be sleeping. Then Sallini reappeared and Mac and March stepped to the companionway and watched through the door while the pharmacist did what he could for Gray.

The Skipper was unconscious and they had done all they could. March, with a heavy heart, stepped back into the control room and took the interphone from the orderly.

“The Skipper’s been wounded,” he said to the entire ship. “I know that makes you all feel just as badly as I feel right now. Sallini’s done all he can for him and he’s resting. Can’t tell much about his condition, but I’ll let you know regularly how he is.”

Then he gave the order to surface the boat and they went ahead on course in the darkness. March stood his watch on the bridge, looking ahead in the blackness, wondering how Scoot was making out up there, and how the Skipper was making out in his own blackness down below. Sallini had given Larry some blood plasma to overcome some of the loss of blood that the Skipper had suffered, but Gray was still unconscious. When March went below as Stan came to relieve him, he found Sallini worried.

“His fever’s going up,” he said. “I’ve just given him more sulfa. Don’t know what it can be but there’s infection somewhere. Wish I could get those slugs out of him, but that’s a ticklish business.”

“We’ll wait and see,” March said. “Maybe the sulfa will lick the infection and the fever will come down. If not—well, we’ll decide then what to do. Meanwhile, get some sleep. You’ve been up all night.”

March lay down on his bunk for a while and managed to drift off to sleep for three hours. Just as dawn was breaking he got up and had a cup of coffee, had the boat submerged to periscope depth, and traveled ahead more slowly, checking regularly to make sure he was exactly on the course he had agreed on with Scoot.

“I wonder how Scoot’s making out,” he said. “He might be pretty near that convoy now—if there’s a convoy there.”

Scoot was at that moment disgusted. He had been able to do nothing with the Jap plane’s radio during all these hours, and now, even with more light to see by, he could not get it working.

“Maybe when the Japs order radio silence,” he told himself, “they enforce it by gumming up the radio some way so it can’t be used. Anyway, I can’t do anything with this baby. I’m going to be keeping radio silence whether I want to or not.”

So he turned his attention to the sea ahead of him, where he hoped to sight the convoy. Looking at the chart occasionally and checking his speed, he calculated where he must be.

Then he saw it! First a few clouds of smoke far ahead on the horizon. Then little dots below the smoke—dots that were Jap ships. More and more and more of them he saw, line after line in orderly procession. Up ahead and at the sides were destroyers and near the front a battleship—no, two battleships. As he flew on further he made out a carrier in the center and at the end three cruisers and more destroyers kept a rear guard.

“Don’t want to get any closer than I have to,” Scoot spoke aloud to himself. “But I want to get all the dope I can and as accurately as possible. Got to stick around long enough to check their speed and course.”

He flew on, counting, checking, making another estimate to compare with his first.

“About fifty-five ships,” he said to himself. “Eight miles long, three miles wide. Pretty slow—there must be some old freighters in there. About ten knots.”

He grabbed a chart and quickly plotted the convoy’s course, wrote brief notations of his conclusions, tucked the paper into a waterproof pouch and stuck it in his pocket.

“Won’t trust to memory, anyway,” he said.

Then, feeling that he had learned all he could, he banked the plane and turned away, still about two miles ahead of the leading ships. He looked back down at them as he headed eastward once more.

“Right now they’re wondering what’s going on,” he said to himself. “Up to now they haven’t thought a thing. They saw the plane coming in and just thought it was a little earlier than they had expected. That maybe made them wonder if I had some special report. But now they really are in a dither! They just can’t figure out why I should come so close and then turn back.”

He laughed. “Well, that’s their problem, not mine.”

He gave the little plane all the speed he could. If they were going to send up a plane to have a look at him, he wanted to get as far away as possible. They might send up several planes.

“If they’re fast, then I’m sunk,” Scoot said. “But why should they send up a flock of planes to look at one Jap seaplane that acts a little funny?”

He checked his course often, so that he could land where the submarine could pick him up. And he kept looking behind for the Jap plane that might be coming after him.

He did not have to wait long for that. Half an hour away from the convoy he saw the fast little pursuit ship behind him, coming like the wind. He wished his own plane could travel twice as fast, but he could not urge another mile per hour from it. Gradually the gap closed between the two planes.

“Now what?” Scoot asked himself. “What should I do? I’ll keep right on this course, first of all. And I’ll just keep flying straight ahead as if I were minding my own business. Nothing much else I can do. That plane’s got three times the speed and ten times the fire power of this one!”

The pursuit was only a few hundred yards behind. It stayed there for a while, apparently awaiting some kind of signal from the seaplane. Then it came around to one side, and Scoot tried to hide his face.

“First and only time I ever wished I looked like a Jap,” Scoot said.

The fast plane flew alongside the other for a time, slowing down to keep pace with it, but still some distance to one side.

“What is this?” Scoot asked. “Are we just going out for a spin together? I wish he’d do something.”

The Jap flier obliged by cutting back and coming up on the other side, then speeding up and circling around in front. It was at this moment that he looked full into Scoot’s face. Scoot could even see the alarm that filled him, the wide eyes, the gasp of amazement, as he realized that an American was flying the Jap seaplane.

At that moment, Scoot pressed the trigger on his own machine gun, but it was too late. The Jap had darted out of range just in time. He was so fast that Scoot could not possibly maneuver his slow ship to battle him.

“There’s only one chance,” Scoot said to himself, “and I’m going to try it. If this monkey is the bad shot most of them are, he may miss on his first try, even with a set-up like me. If he does, that’s my chance.”

The fast pursuit was diving on the seaplane’s tail. Scoot heard the staccato rattling of the ship’s machine guns.

“Good!” he cried. “Firing while he’s still too far away, like all of them! Too anxious!”

But then Scoot’s plane wobbled, tipped over, and went spiraling down to the sea in a slow spin. The pursuit plane circled above and watched. About fifty feet above the water, the seaplane lurched a little, seemed to come out of its spin. The pursuit plane pilot looked puzzled, but he smiled again as he saw the plane stall, slip back and hit the sea, tail first.