The frogmen Read online

  "Lot of radio," John said. "What for?"

  "I'll check you out on it," Tanaka told him. "When we need it, it's got to work."

  "I can't check out on it without a coding board."

  "You won't need one," Tanaka said. "We're under strict radio silence. All we do is listen."

  "How'll I know what I'm hearing?"

  "I'll give you the key code."

  John looked straight at him. "Then you've got a coding board?"

  "Of course."

  "Commander," Amos said, his voice unsteady, "if you want us to believe you, all you have to do is show us the coding board. Let John see what language it uses. It would help a lot." 1 know," Tanaka said, "but I won't." 'Why not?"

  "Because I don't trust you. Not all of you." 'Since it's somewhere in this boat, we can find it."

  "I doubt it."

  "We don't even have to see it," John pointed out. "If you'll send a message to Pearl, with me listening, and Pearl acknowledges it, then we'd believe you."

  "I won't do that," Tanaka said flatly. "There're enemy planes, submarines, ships, and shore stations taking bearings on every transmission in this area. It's vital that the enemy never suspects there's a radio in this boat."

  "Maybe it's just as important for us to know who you are," Amos said. "You ask us to trust you, but you won't even prove who you are by showing John the coding board."

  "Without the radio and the coding board, this mission would have to be scrubbed," Tanaka said. "I can't take a chance with you people in the mood you're in now."

  "Commander," Amos said, "we're either going to see that coding board or you're not going to be able to use it. We're going to stay in here, around the clock."

  "Don't bother, Amos," Tanaka said. "The message I'm waiting for will come in one word—one five-letter group, John. I've memorized the key codes I need to hear that message and the two letter groups for each day."

  Amos looked over at John. "Can he do that?"

  "He wouldn't even have to," John said. "He could have them scribbled down anywhere and we wouldn't know what we were looking at."

  John turned to Tanaka. "But we don't need to see the coding board, Commander. Because, without this radio there'll be no message. And no reason to go on. In thirty seconds I can fix this radio so you'll never talk, or listen, to anybody on it again."

  Without saying anything, Tanaka went aft into the engine room and came back with a heavy, rusty hammer. He held it out to John. "Here. Use this, John. Smash the radio."

  John took the hammer, weighing it in his hands, and turned slowly to face the radio.

  The only sound in the cabin was the steady, soft roar of the diesel and the small noises made by the sea and the boat.

  John reached out and laid the hammer on the table.

  Tanaka said quietly, "Thank you, John. I knew you wouldn't. You're not that kind of people."

  "That doesn't change anything," Amos said.

  "You're right, Amos." Tanaka picked up the hammer and took it back to the engine room. He hung it on the pegs and came slowly back into the cabin. "So if you and John elect to take over this boat, remember that none of you can navigate and we are now 750 miles from the nearest friendly shore, which is an island about a mile long. If you try to go back but are off your course by a fraction of a degree, you'll miss that island by hundreds of miles. . . ."

  "I heard that these Polynesians can navigate with nothing but stars," Amos said.

  "They can. But every navigator has to know where his destination is. My crew had never before seen that island we left and don't know where it is."

  "Maybe we could just persuade you to take us back," John said.

  "You know you couldn't, John."

  Amos couldn't help admiring this man a little.

  "So," Tanaka went on, "when your fuel runs out, the currents and winds will drive you westward again. What do you think your chances are of drifting through the entire Japanese Empire until you reach, say, India?"

  Amos swung the wall shut, blocking off the radio. He hung the clothes back on the nails and arranged the china in the fiddles. At last he turned back to Tanaka. "You've got everything under control, haven't you?"

  "Everything except you, Amos."

  "So it's a standoff."

  "It's this: you can't survive now without me, and I can't pursue this mission without you. But I can, and will, pursue it without the radio; I just don't want to have to do it that way. So will you do me a favor?"

  They didn't answer him.

  "Please don't let Reeder destroy the radio. I can trust you two, and Max. But not Reeder."

  Amos said in a low voice, "Aye, aye, sir."

  It was night again and raining.

  Amos leaned back against the copra sacks. His swollen cheek seemed to be going down and the cool water felt good running in the cuts in his skin.

  The fight had started when Reeder got a claw hammer and began working on the wall concealing the radio. Amos had asked him to stop, saying that the noise gave him a headache. He realized now how lucky he'd been, for Reeder had just whirled around and thrown the hammer at him. If it had hit him he would have been in bad shape.

  And then Reeder was all over him. It was like

  fighting a hay baler. Reeder had him up against the wall before Amos even realized he had a problem.

  It was a lucky shot, his right hand straight into Reeder's face with enough force to send him stumbling backward all the way across the cabin.

  He hit the wall butt first, and that snapped his head back against it and he slid down it, winding up on the floor with a surprised expression.

  There was nowhere to go, since it was still daylight, and so the four of them had sat around in the cabin, Reeder finally stopping a nosebleed and Amos patting at his bruises with a wet cloth.

  There wasn't much to say.

  Now Reeder was over in his little fort. Probably, Amos thought, making plans to shove him overboard.

  Max was aft in the cockpit talking to the crew, a thing he had done every night.

  John was nowhere in sight, and Amos guessed he was below somewhere.

  Max climbed out of the cockpit and came forward, hunched over against the rain, stepping from sack to sack across the cargo. "Hey there, Amos. How's your face?"

  "The rain's good on it."

  "That was a solid poke you gave him."

  "Did you notice he had six arms?"

  Max laughed. "He did look like a buzz saw there for a couple of seconds. . . . It's not over, Amos."

  "I know. How you coming with those Polynesians?"

  "I got to learn that language," Max declared.

  "Every time one of them says anything it breaks up the rest of them. Tve just got to know what's so funny."

  "Say something in Polynesian."

  Max said something that sounded like only vowels strung together.

  "What's that mean?"

  "Well, I got a system," Max told him. "I learn to say the words and then I find out what I said. You think that's a good system?" It s a system.

  "No, really, I can talk with them pretty good now. It's not a hard language. You know what we were talking about a while ago?"

  "Women."

  "That was before. We were talking about how does a fly light on a ceiling."

  "A what?"

  "Okay, how does he? Does he do a loop just as he gets there? Or half a barrel roll? Or does he just come bashing in head first and get all his legs scrambling around for a hold?" Max began to laugh. "I was breaking 'em up, Amos. Going good."

  "Well, how does he?"

  Max shrugged. "That's what we were trying to figure out." He looked past Amos. "Hey, John. Come on in out of the rain."

  "It isn't raining on me," John said. "I don't allow that. Listen, Tanaka wants all hands below. The message came in."

  "What'd it say?" Max asked.

  "I don't know, but it was short. I'll tell Reeder."

  As John moved away, Max slowly stood up and
hugged himself. "Tanaka was talking to me the other night, and he said the message would be either 'Yes' or 'No.' If it was 'No,' he said we'd just turn around and go back."

  "Yeah," Amos said, getting up.

  "What are we going to do, Amos, if the word's 'Yes'?"

  "He'll have to tell us what this is all about. Then we'll decide."

  Tanaka was sitting at the head of the table, some papers spread out in front of him. Amos could tell nothing from his expression.

  "Sit down, gentlemen," he said. "I've got news. Remember one night I was talking about the importance of copra to the Japanese economy? How they need the oil and protein, need all the copra they can get?"

  Amos remembered Tanaka's lecture on the copra business; remembered, too, Tanaka's claim that he had been sailing around from island to island picking up copra left drying on beaches for the past five years.

  "I think they'll leave this boat alone," Tanaka said. "They've seen it a hundred times. They know me; they know the crew."

  "I bet," Reeder said.

  "That's why I think we've got a chance. Because the message is 'Yes.' We go. There won't be so

  many secrets now, and when I finish I think you'U understand why it's been such a bad trip so far."

  Tanaka picked up one of the papers on the table, unfolded it, and taped it to the wall. "This is where we're going."

  The map was so pretty, Amos thought, with the sea painted a light blue, the land colored in greens and browns, the shallow water over reefs white and gray.

  It was the map of an atoll, the islands linked together like a circular chain of beads by coral reefs lying just below the water.

  Printed below the islands were the words:

  SUNDANCE ATOLL

  "That's the code name for it," Tanaka said. "You don't need to know the real name."

  "Where is it?" Reeder asked.

  "You don't need to know that either. All you need to know is that this atoll is important to the enemy. More important than Guadalcanal or Tarawa or Midway were. It's a much more vital part of the chain he's making on his way south to attack Australia."

  Tanaka got a pencil and pointed at the atoll. "This is one of the most protected lagoons in the Pacific. I've been there; it's a beauty. There's room enough in there for the entire enemy fleet, and on the main island, here, there are warehouses and shops he can use to supply his ships and repair them. There's an airfield, here, with hangars and hardstands big

  enough to handle hundreds of aircraft. There's a dry dock over on this island that can haul a cruiser. It's quite a place."

  He sat down, holding his pencil by both ends. "We're going to take it away from him/'

  "The five of us?" Reeder said.

  No one even smiled.

  "At Tarawa," Tanaka said, "the Navy made a lot of mistakes and paid for them with a lot of lives. The biggest mistake was in attacking the island head on, straight in from the sea. The Navy tried to land the Marines on the seaward beaches, but the reefs stopped them and left the Marines with three hundred yards of water to wade through. That's where they got cut to pieces by shore batteries. A man can't shoot well when he's neck deep in water, but he can easily be shot. We don't want to make that mistake again."

  Tanaka went back to the map. "There are three good beaches on the seaward side—here, here, and here—where an attack could be mounted. The enemy knows that better than we do, and he expects us to attack him there. So he's ready for us. All along this area, here, he's got his guns well concealed and well protected and aimed."

  Tanaka looked over at them. "That's why we're not going to hit him there. We're going to hit him here." He tapped the map with the pencil. "Inside the lagoon, at this long beach. We're going to do it that way because the enemy is sure that we cannot do it that way. He is so sure that he hasn't even

  bothered to set up guns around the beach to protect it."

  "I've been wondering," Reeder said.

  Tanaka ignored him. "You see . . ." he said, circling the atoll with the pencil, "there's only one deepwater entrance into that lagoon. This channel here. . . ."

  Amos watched the point of the pencil slowly tapping a narrow strip of blue water between the two green islands.

  "I've been through that channel many times," Tanaka said. "It's very good. Deep, but narrow. Only a mile wide. Guns placed here and here, on these two islands, can cover it completely. And guns are set there—big guns, and so well protected that it will take an enormous bombardment to knock them out. But they can be knocked out."

  Tanaka unfolded another map, this one an enlargement of the channel into the lagoon. "We're not going to make the mistake we did at Tarawa and just give them a light going over with main batteries and aircraft; we're going to hit those guns with everything we've got."

  Amos hardly heard him. He sat staring at the pretty blue strip of water between the green islands, knowing that what Tanaka was saying had nothing to do with him. He did not have to concern himself with guns and aircraft and bombardments. Somehow he knew that only the channel concerned him.

  "We can knock out his guns," Tanaka went on,

  "but that won't do any good if we can't get through this channel."

  Amos watched the pencil point tapping on the blue channel. That's where he was going. He could almost feel the blue water closing around him.

  "Because it's mined?" John asked.

  "That's right."

  It was just talk, Amos thought. Unimportant talk.

  "What's the problem?" John said. "After we knock out the guns, why can't we just go in there with mine sweepers and clean it out?"

  Now, Amos knew, it was time to listen, and the voices came close and loud again.

  Tanaka unfolded a big aerial photograph and held it up. It was a black-and-white picture showing the channel even more clearly than the map did. There were about a dozen ships underway in the channel, some going in, some going out.

  "Notice that the wakes of the ships moving in the channel are all perfectly straight," Tanaka said. "No ship has maneuvered as it would have to do if it were traveling on a charted, zigzag course through a mine field. Also notice that the ships are not in file, but are sailing anywhere they choose in the channel. This is only one of many photographs our recon planes have taken of that channel, but in none of them are any ships taking precautions against mines."

  Amos didn't want to go there, didn't want to feel that water around him, and he began to seek excuses for keeping him away. "The mines could be

  shore-controlled," he said. "They'd be harmless unless somebody on shore pushed the button."

  "Could be, Amos," Tanaka agreed.

  "Or they could be magnetics," Amos argued. "They wouldn't want to arm the magnetics unless they saw us coming."

  "That could be, too," Tanaka said.

  Amos felt himself escaping from that channel. "Then all we have to do is knock out the shore-control stations, if there are any, and then, to be sure, go in with degaussed sweepers towing magnetic exploders and we've got it made."

  "Let me give you this problem, Amos," Tanaka said. "We sent two submarines out there to investigate that channel. The night they were there was like this one, very dark, raining most of the time, but no h'ghtning. One of the subs stayed outside, at periscope depth, and the other went in through the channel. She got into the lagoon without making contact with any sort of mine; she touched no mine cables and her sonar picked up nothing. Once inside the lagoon she came up to periscope depth and reported to the sub outside what had happened. She then said that she was coming out through the channel again. . . ." Tanaka paused. "She didn't make it."

  "They saw her periscope and hit her," Amos said.

  "No. She had been submerged for a long time before she got it. In other words, they did not spot her from the land, Amos."

  "Then it was a ship. Maybe another submarine."

  "No. The submarine outside the lagoon picked up no sound of screws other than those of her sister ship."

 
; There had to be an answer to this, Amos thought, something that could be handled by someone else.

  Tanaka said, "The submarine outside heard the underwater explosion and could fix it fairly accurately. Her sister was hit in mid-channel and totally destroyed, with all hands."

  "They have to be shore-controlled," Amos said.

  "How could they have known that a submerged submarine was going through the channel, Amos?"

  Amos grinned at him. "Sonar! They've got sonar set up on both sides of the channel and probably another one out in it somewhere so they can triangulate anything in the channel and get an accurate fix on it. That way, they tracked our sub until she was over a mine and then blew her up."

  "One, or both, of our submarines would have heard the pings, Amos. Neither heard any sonar, much less three of them."

  And then John solved everything, saying, in his slow way, "Then it's a timed field. They let their own ships in and out whenever they want to, but only during certain hours. At all other times, the mines are turned on."

  "Could be," Tanaka said, "but don't you think that the probability of our submarine going through that channel while the mines were turned off and coming back out just at the instant they were turned on, is pretty slim?"

  Amos slumped down on the bench as Reeder said, "Okay, so how did they do it?"

  "Now you know."

  "Know what?" Reeder demanded.

  "Why we're going," Tanaka said.

  "Maybe you know, but / don't," Reeder said.

  "If one of our attack transports gets into that channel and hits a mine," Tanaka said, "thousands of men will die, and the wreck of the transport will block the channel so that we won't even be able to get in there to save any men who survive the explosion. That's why, Reeder."

  "That's all high-brass stuff," Reeder said. "I'm talking about me, Carl Reeder. What have I got to do with all this big-war operations?"

  "At this moment," Tanaka said, "hundreds of ships and thousands of men, tons of ammunition, planes, guns, food, supplies, are moving toward Sundance. It is a huge and complex operation, but in the final analysis the five of us here are the key to it all. It's up to us to get into that channel and find out what's in it and what to do about it."