The frogmen Read online

  The Japanese was still sitting on the table.

  "I'm a Nisei, an American," he was saying as Amos came in. "My parents were Japanese, but I'm an American."

  "Tell me a story," Reeder said angrily. "If you're a Nisei, why aren't you in a detention camp with the rest of them?"

  "Because I'm in the Navy," the man said.

  "What happened?" John asked Amos.

  "The crew jumped me. We're locked in." He turned to the Japanese. "What did you do with Lieutenant Anderson?"

  "He completed his assignment and was detached."

  "I'll bet," Amos said. "Now, listen. We're taking this boat back to the island. If those guys outside are working for you, you'd better tell them not to give

  us any trouble. Turn him loose, Max. Okay, go tell them to open that door."

  The Japanese smoothed his jacket, crossed his legs, and smiled at them. "If you gentlemen will please just take an even strain, I'll explain what's going on."

  "Move!" Amos said. "Get the door open."

  "Ensign Amos Wainwright," the Japanese said, "let's don't start out on the wrong foot."

  He spoke English with no foreign accent at all and had none of the Japanese difficulty with the letter 1.

  "My name's Ko Tanaka," the Japanese said, "and I'm a lieutenant commander. I'm a graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, class of 1931, and I am your commanding officer."

  "Our— what?" Reeder asked.

  "I'm afraid you've forgotten the peculiarities Mr. Anderson warned you about," Tanaka said. "I'm one of them. This poor little boat is another, and there'll be more. So just bear with me, gentlemen."

  Amos was at first surprised that the man knew his name but then remembered some of the spy stories he had read. This, he realized, was the sort of thorough preparation they made.

  He wondered how the man knew what Anderson had told them. Had he been hiding somewhere, listening?

  There was no place to hide.

  "I'm sorry I can't tell you anything about what we're going to do," Tanaka was saying, "but I promise you that it's important."

  "I bet," Reeder said.

  Amos' NROTC instructor had been an Academy man and Amos tried to remember some of the Academy phrases he had used.

  He had used "bilge" for flunk out, and "unsat" for failing. He put "foo foo juice" on his face for shaving lotion and referred to some girls as "yard engines." But anyone as thoroughly prepared as this man was would know, or could quickly guess, the meaning of all those.

  "It's going to be a rugged trip," Tanaka said. "With lousy chow, no gedunk stand and no movies. But put up with it the best you can."

  "Where're we going?" John asked.

  "I can't tell you that, either."

  And then Amos remembered one. "When you were at the Academy," he said casually, "did you ever frap the pap?"

  The Japanese looked at him, frowning. "Do what?"

  This man was lying. "We're going back," Amos said. "Max . . ."

  Tanaka began to laugh. "What class were you in, Wainwright?"

  "No class," Amos said, turning to John. "When the door opens, hit them. No talk, just hit them."

  "Amos," Tanaka said, "things will be better if we start trusting each other. You caught me a little out of context there. Frap the pap. Frap, from the French, frapper, to hit. The PAP is the list of demerits for your crimes and derives from Published And Posted. I really hadn't thought of it for a good many

  years. So let's cut out all this suspicion and get on with it."

  Amos studied the man for a moment. "You may be who you say you are, and this may be something the Navy planned and knows about. But we're sailing due west, all alone, with no protection from anybody. We're in enemy water right now, and as long as we sail west, we only go deeper into it. Does the Navy know that?"

  "It will be a beautiful thing," Tanaka said. "If we make it."

  "And if we don't. . ."

  Tanaka shrugged.

  "That's what I thought," Amos said. "That's why it's so hard to believe that the Navy would deliberately put some of its people into a situation like this."

  It was the first time Amos had seen any emotion in Tanaka. His voice was no longer soft and pleasant. "Did you ever hear of Guadalcanal? Or Savo Island? Or the Coral Sea? Or Tarawa? Do you remember the seventh of December, 1941? The Navy puts men where it thinks they can help defeat the enemy. That's why you're here. You were carefully chosen for a very good reason."

  "To get our heads knocked off?" Reeder asked.

  "Perhaps that, too," Tanaka said. "You won't be the first, nor the last." He smiled again. "All I ask is that you sail with me for a few days in the open ocean, where this boat wouldn't be worth the ammunition to blow it up. We'll be getting a message

  soon and then I may be able to tell you why we're here and what's expected of us. Otherwise, we'll just head back."

  "What if we refuse?" Reeder asked.

  The smile disappeared. "For your information, Reeder, if this boat returns without being ordered to return by the Commander in Chief, Pacific, whoever brings it back will be court-martialed for mutiny. Whether I return with the boat or not."

  "You got that in writing?" Reeder asked.

  "There's a way to find out," Tanaka said. "I have no weapons. If you choose to turn the boat back I can only argue with you to the point of being thrown overboard."

  Tanaka turned and walked out through the engine room. At the door, he called out something in a strange language and it opened for him.

  "We'd better do it now, while we can still see that island," Reeder said.

  Amos looked at John and Max. "If you wanted to get close to the enemy, maybe scout one of his islands or something, wouldn't a little wooden bucket like this have a better chance than anything else? Even a submarine?"

  "Yeah," Reeder said, "and if I were a Japanese spy and wanted to go home, this is exactly the way I'd do it."

  "He's home now, Reeder," Amos argued. "Everything west of here is all Japanese. So what does he need with us?"

  "He couldn't have gotten this boat without us," Reeder snapped. "He couldn't have left that island without us! Get with it, Ensign. This guy's smart. He knows the Navy isn't going to let a Japanese roam around all over the place, so he's conned somebody into letting him go out on this phony secret-mission stuff. But just as soon as he's home, we're down the tube."

  Amos thought about it, looking for help from John or Max, but both of them seemed as confused as he was. "Then there're only two things we can do," he said slowly. "Believe him, at least for a few days. Or go back right now. If we decide to go back we might get court-martialed, we might not. Either way, he'll put up a fight. That means we may have to kill him. If he's really a spy, then we'll get a medal. But if he's not. . ."

  "Who'll ever know?" Reeder demanded. "All it takes is a dark night and a little push from behind."

  Amos wished that somebody, Lieutenant Anderson or somebody, would suddenly appear and say No. Just No.

  "No," Amos said.

  Reeder shrugged and turned away. "Without him, there's no place for this boat to go but back."

  Max reached up and put his hands flat on the low ceiling. "You going along with this, Amos?"

  "For a few days."

  "All right," Max said. He looked down at Reeder. "If anything happens to that guy and it turns out he's not a spy, people will ask a lot of questions. And

  when they get through asking, they'll just turn around and point. At me. Because that's the way it is. So I'm making you a promise, Reeder. If anybody goes over the side, you do too."

  BOOK TWO

  Mutiny

  The little boat rode the long, slow movements of the Pacific very well. Amos watched the bow wave rolling back and spreading, and listened to the small sounds the boat and sea created. There was the endless lap-lap of water against the moving hull, the creaking of the timbers, the stubby mast squeaking in its step, the sound of a gentle wind around the rigging, the s
low, steady, hollow panting of the diesel, and the dry splashing of water.

  Amos sat in the bow of the boat, sheltered from the spray by a little barrier of copra sacks he had piled up.

  This was the third night at sea, and it seemed to him that each day things got worse.

  As the little boat plowed steadily west into the Empire of Japan, Reeder became sullen and murderous. He would no longer speak to any of them.

  Amos had asked why, upon this enormous sea, in this isolated boat, with no means of communication with anyone, Tanaka could not give them even a hint as to the reason for their being here, but the man would not. And gave no reason for that either.

  The days were horrible. By order of Tanaka, the four of them were compelled to spend from dawn until sunset below in the small, stinking, crowded cabin, the air always full of the fumes of diesel oil, the heat from the sun and the engine making the room a Turkish bath. Tanaka produced a few paperbacks and some playing cards, but aside from these there was nothing to do.

  "It's essential," Tanaka had told them, "that no U. S. Navy is ever seen aboard this boat. The deeper we go into enemy water the more the enemy will be looking at us. From patrol planes, submarines, even surface ships. You stay below."

  The nights were only a little better. Out on the copra sacks, each of them had built a makeshift home for himself. Amos had his barrier against the spray. John had moved two sacks out of the pile and made an open coffin for himself. Max had kneaded and worked several sacks into one large, fairly smooth mattress. Reeder had built himself a little fort, piling the sacks on top of each other.

  Tanaka just slept wherever he stopped, his straw hat over his face.

  The crew slept on the hard boards of the fantail deck or in the sunken cockpit, using thin grass pallets they kept rolled up in the daytime.

  The food was pure monotony—fish and rice. The Polynesians fished from the stern all day long and always had troll lines out. Occasionally they would catch something and would immediately clean it and throw it into the five-gallon tin can which had once contained gasoline, but was now the cooking pot.

  There was fresh water for drinking only, but it rained often enough so that washing was no problem. Shaving with salt water was a painful process, and Reeder refused to do it after his first try.

  The bathroom was a foot-wide plank extending out about six feet beyond the sternpost. There was a rope to hold, one end of it secured to the wheel mount, the other to the end of the plank, but even with the rope it was an adventure.

  At eight o'clock every night Tanaka went into the cabin and locked the door. As soon as he did, the three Polynesians who were off the wheel watch sat down with their backs against the door and wouldn't let anyone come near it.

  Tanaka usually stayed in the cabin for an hour or so and then would come out, eat something, and go to sleep.

  This infuriated Reeder, who spent a good deal of his time below searching the cabin, trying to find out what Tanaka did in there. Reeder pried loose half

  the ceiling planks, took up all the deck planking, and would have pulled the walls down if Max had let him, but he found nothing. Then Reeder concentrated on the engine room, searching every inch of it, even scooping out the filthy bilge water with his hands.

  Amos and John and Max also wondered what Tanaka did in the cabin. His navigation, Amos guessed, because he always shut himself in right after taking his evening star sights.

  "He just doesn't want us to know where we're going," John said. "I'd say he was talking to Tokyo every night, only there's no radio."

  "I bet he hides the stuff, papers and things, in the copra somewhere," Max said. "Reeder'll never find it-It was wearing them out. The days in the cabin, the heat, the lousy food, the rain on them sleeping at night. But, most of all, the suspicion and fear and doubt.

  Amos was just settling down to sleep when he saw John come up out of the cockpit and stand on the sacks, looking around. In a moment he waved, beckoning Amos to come aft.

  Amos glanced at his watch. It was two in the morning.

  Stepping carefully over the men asleep on the deck, they went to the cabin. John closed the door and turned up one of the kerosene lamps.

  "I think I've got some answers," he said in a low voice, "only I don't know the questions."

  He went over to the forward wall, which, like the entire cabin structure, was of unpainted wood, the planks stained with diesel oil and sweat and salt. Some dungarees and Tanaka's blue jacket were hanging from rusty nails driven into the wood beside the racks holding the plates.

  John took the clothes down and did something to one of the planks. A whole section of the wall swung open.

  Amos didn't know much about radios, but the one built in behind that wall looked elaborate and expensive, the front of it covered with dials and switches and knobs.

  John said, "Funny Tanaka hasn't mentioned this. That thing's got enough power to shoot a message around the world and pick it up coming back."

  "How'd you find it?"

  "I'm dumb," John said. "It took me two nights to begin wondering about Tanaka saying that we were going to get a message. And then it hit me. How? A sea gull going to drop something on us? A submarine going to come up alongside? So then I figured it's got to be a radio, and if it's a radio it's got to have an antenna and the antenna's got to stick up and the only thing on this tub that sticks up is that little mast up forward. So, tonight, when he went down and locked the door, I put my ear against the mast."

  John smiled. "When I heard that teeny-weeny whine start up inside the mast, I knew there was a big ma-moo in this boat somewhere. Nothing else makes a whine like that."

  "So he's been talking to somebody every night."

  "I don't think so. I'd have heard a key or a bug; you can't kill that racket."

  "Not code. Just talking, whispering."

  "People don't talk any more, Amos. Not since the war started. It's all in code. Anyway, with that stubby antenna, voice wouldn't carry fifty miles. I think all he does every night is listen. For that message."

  Amos stared at the elaborate radio. "Can you run it?"

  "Sure I can run it." John reached out and touched the smooth black cup of the key. "I'm the fastest dit-dah gun in the Navy."

  "Then dit-dah something to Pearl and ask them what's all this with this little boat and the Japanese skipper."

  "What'd they teach you in ensign school?" John asked. "Now in radiomen's school we learned not to listen to anything that didn't come in in the right code on the right day at the right time. Without that, it's just noise."

  "You mean you can't even talk to anybody on that thing?"

  "You can talk, but who's listening? Look, anybody can say anything they want to on the air. How you going to know who they really are if they don't use your code?"

  Amos felt a little foolish.

  "That works both ways," John said. "The enemy doesn't listen, either, unless you're talking in his

  code. Among other things that bother me is why a little boat like this needs a big ma-moo like that? Who are we talking to, and what code are we using?" He looked at Amos. "We ought to find out."

  "How?"

  "He's got a board somewhere in this boat," John said. "It's not in his suitcase; I looked. But it's got to be here somewhere."

  "A board? The whole boat's a board."

  "Amos, not a plank. A coding board. Without one of those, that radio's just a piece of handsome junk."

  "What does it look like?"

  "About the size of a book. It has little windows in rows with the code cylinders behind them. You turn them with knobs. But before you can do ant/thing you have to have the right key code for that day and that time. When you have the key code and do it right, people can take what you send and put it through their coding board and it comes out in plain English. Or plain Japanese."

  John looked under the table and then under both the benches. "They always keep it in a case with lead weights built into it so it'll sink if you
throw it overboard or your ship goes down."

  "If you found it, would you know which language it was made to use?"

  "I couldn't prove it was Japanese," John said. "They don't use the Morse code, so I wouldn't know. But if we used it to send a message to Pearl and Pearl didn't acknowledge receiving it we'd know we were in deep trouble."

  "We're in trouble period," Amos said.

  John walked over to the radio. "I can fix this thing so it can't talk to Pearl Harbor or Tokyo or anyplace else."

  "Yeah," Amos said vaguely, thinking.

  "Only, if he's who he says he is, that would just buy us a lot more trouble. We ought to find the coding board first, Amos. Then at least we'd know who he's listening to."

  "It could be anywhere. In any one of those sacks. Under a plank. In the walls."

  John slumped down on one of the benches. "What if it turns out that Reeder's been right all the time?"

  Amos looked at the radio, then swung the wall shut so that it disappeared. "Very clever," he said, opening the wall again. "John, I think Tanaka's got to explain this to us. Right now. I'm going topside and tell Max and Reeder to stand by until I get him down here. You wait over on the starboard side of the engine, where he can't see you."

  "What if he jumps you?" John asked.

  "Then we'll know," Amos said.

  The voice from the doorway startled them. "What would you like to know?" Tanaka asked. He came on into the room, stopping at the end of the table. He had nothing in his hands.

  "You went to a lot of trouble to hide this thing from us," Amos said, motioning at the radio.

  "Not from you. This has got to be nothing but a little boat going around picking up copra from the beaches. It doesn't need a radio like that."

  "Then why's it got one?"

  "Sit down. Both of you," Tanaka said.

  "I'm all right," Amos said, standing where he was.

  "Suit yourself, Amos."

  John didn't sit down either, but Tanaka sat on the edge of the table and pushed his straw hat back. "Now John, I'm no expert on these things. That's why I need you. Isn't it a beauty?"