close together, bridge rounded in front with portholes in it.'
'Not Momo class?'
'All three had a section cut out of the forecastle to form a well-deck, I was pretty sure the first two were of the small Momo class, though we never were very close to either of them. This one was probably the stern-most escort, and he was somewhat different, bigger, I thought.'
Captain Blunt made notes with a pencil as I spoke. 'What about his tactics? Anything odd or strange about them?'
'Only that he was waiting for us when we came up. He must have silenced his machinery, because we couldn't hear anything until after he saw us.'
Blunt looked grave. 'This is important, Rich. Are you sure he was not running machinery until after he sighted you?
Could you have been below a temperature layer or some other unusual water stratum which could have prevented you. from hearing him?'
'Nothing that we had any evidence of, Captain. Besides, we didn't hear him after we had practically reached periscope depth, either. And our sonarman swears he heard him start his engines.'
Blunt made more notes. 'This is extremely significant. You should have mentioned this in your report. What else?'
Slightly on the defensive because of the vague accusation of his last comment, I wracked my brains to find further details.
'Well,' I finally said, 'there were at least fifty men on lookout watch with binoculars.'
'Wait a minute!' Old Blunt was writing rapidly. 'Fifty men, all with binoculars? You did say something about there being an unusually large number of lookouts.'
'They were all over his decks. A dozen on the wings of the bridge, a large group on the forecastle, more clustered around his stacks on a sort of deckhouse amidships, and still more around a searchlight platform, or whatever it was, back aft.'
'All with glasses, you say?' still writing on the scratch pad.
'It's most unusual for a ship that size to carry that many binoculars.'
'Yes, so far as I could see.' I was still wondering what the cause was for the particular interest in our first depth-charging, although, granted, it had been a terrifying experience.
'Anything else? You said you were close enough to see clearly on to the bridge. Did you get a look at anyone special on the bridge? Were there any white men there? Or any- where?'
I stared at him. 'No, sir. I got a quick-look at a lot of people, but they were all Japanese.'
'Rich, needless to say, you'll keep all this to yourself. It's probably no surprise to you that we and the British are carefully monitoring German broadcasts. Day before yesterday the British picked up one in which the German people were told that their great allies, in the Far East had just sunk the second American submarine in two weeks, south of the Bungo Suido and that this should be taken as evidence of the effectiveness of the cooperation already existing between the two countries.
We were wondering whether you might have seen any Ger- man officers on Pete's bridge.'
'Pete's bridge?'
'Bungo Pete's. That's who you ran into for your first brush with the enemy, Rich. You're luckier than you have any idea of. Exactly a week before you entered AREA SEVEN, the Needle- fish was due out of there. We never heard from her.'
The Needlefish! Roy Savage's boat, the one to which he had received orders immediately after Jim's qualification fiasco!
'It's a tough war, Rich, Savage was a fine skipper, and the Needlefish was a fine submarine. She was, one of the new Mare Island boats, and her first two patrols were outstanding.
'You don't know what happened to Roy?'
'Not a thing, until this dispatch from Washington relaying the dope from the German broadcast monitors. Bits of wood and other debris came to the surface in both cases, and in the second case the submarine attempted to surface and surrender. but couldn't make it.' Blunt looked quizzically at me, and suddenly I realized what I had been slow to catch on about.
'You mean, we're the other boat!'
'Right, Rich. Not only that, they know it was the Walrus.
Bungo always seems to know the name of his victims. He knew he had sunk the Needlefish, too.' He chewed reflectively on his pipe. 'It's of course vital to us to find out whether or not the Germans are actively helping the Japs with their anti- submarine campaign. God knows they've had their chance to learn which techniques of ours are the most damaging.'
I nodded with dawning comprehension. 'Who's in AREA SEVEN right now?'
'Your old side-kick, Stocker Kane!'
'Is he all right?' I couldn't help the question; it slipped out without conscious volition.
'So far as we know he is. He got a ship the first week he was in there, and one other since, I think. We're going to pull him out in a couple of days and shift him to Australia.''
Mentally I crossed my fingers. 'Will we be going back to AREA SEVEN again after he leaves?'
'Nope. If Bungo Pete is that good, it's time we let him waste some energy just looking for a while. We haven't enough submarines to cover all the areas yet anyhow.'
Some time later a jeep swung me into the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. It was some little distance, around an arm of the bay, and on down to the far end of the yard to where Walrus presumably was already settled down on the dry-dock keel blocks. We could see the Enterprise, also in dry dock, in the one next to ours. I looked her over with interest as we ap- proached. This was the only carrier left in commission in the U. S. Navy, not counting Saratoga, laid up in the Bremerton Navy Yard with a hole in her side, and Ranger, still, for some reason, held back from the fighting zone. New carriers were coming, true, but none of them had yet hit the Pacific.
Enterprise, Yorktown, and the new Hornet had won the Battle of Midway against startling odds, and Enterprise was now the only one left.
'The Japs would give a lot to know your whereabouts, old girl,' I thought as I looked her over. 'You're supposed to be in the South Pacific.' The situation down there, according to the newspapers and radio broadcasts, was just about a stand- off, with two big Jap carriers to our one, neither side anxious to risk an all-out fight. Little did they know the true facts! We dared not risk a fight, for we certainly could not afford to lose the Big E, as she was affectionately known. The enemy, on the other hand, had already felt her sting, and knew that she could easily take care of both of theirs if they took their fingers off them.
But Enterprise needed replenishment and repairs, just like any other ship. Hence, no doubt, her presence here in Pearl.
Equally certain, she would depart unannounced, at full speed, probably in the dead of night so that concealed watchers from the hills of Hawaii or skulking Japanese submarines would not see her.
My mind drifted thus, watching her bulk grow as the jeep approached. There must have been a thousand men crowded all over her topsides, probably an equal number below decks, all engaged in different tasks, all working like men possessed.
Every man of her crew and every man in the Navy Yard must realize what this ship meant to the, United States at this particular instant of time. I was daydreaming, looking at her long gray side, when I saw a large puff of smoke spew up from the dry dock amidships.
Everything stood still for a second. I failed to comprehend the significance of it until another puff of smoke joined the first, and then a black cloud commenced to boil out of the dock around the carrier's underbody, racing up, partly obscuring her side and reaching high, in a few seconds, into the heavens.
'Driver! She's on fire!' I was sitting in the front seat, along- side the sailor-driver loaned to me by the ComSubPac motor pool, but I shouted nevertheless. He didn't answer, merely pressed the accelerator to the floor.
'Forget the Walrus! Take me over there!' I yelled.
This time he answered. 'Aye aye, sir.' We stared, with horror in our faces, at the impending catastrophe.
The road along which we were gunning the jeep did not permit us to approach the dry dock directly. We had
