was no doubt in my mind that this was the case.
He had to come out with us for a day's operations to see for himself, of course, and his comment before the day was half over was proof of his satisfaction. 'You've got a beautiful ship here, Rich,' he told me. And he told me where he planned to send us for our first patrol: AREA — TWELVE, the Yellow Sea, between Kyushu and the mainland of China, all the way up to the Gulf of Pohai on the north.
It took quite a while to put Eel through all her paces, and it was long after dark before we finally put her back alongside the dock in the submarine base. As we came in, the ComSub- Pac Duty Officer and a car were waiting for Captain Blunt.
There was a whispered consultation. He turned back to me before stepping in: 'Rich,' he said, 'after you get finished with the ship, come on up to my office, will you?' His face was grave. Something was wrong.
I turned a few details over to Keith, followed Blunt in a few minutes, a cold foreboding clutching at my heart. I knew what it was the moment I opened the door to his office. He was standing alone, looking out the window at the black waters of Pearl Harbor, the pipe in his mouth, hands clenched behind his back.
He didn't turn when he heard the door open. 'That you, Rich?'
Upon my affirmative, he told me to sit down. Still he didn't turn. just stood there. I stood also, waiting.
For about a minute he stood there, motionless. I could hear him breathing. His hands were working gently behind his back, massaging his fingers.
Then, without turning, he commenced to speak softly, almost tenderly. 'There are some parts of that ocean out near Japan which are worth more than any material value can ever express.
They are parts which are consecrated, for they are hallowed by our heroic dead. One day God, in His infinite wisdom, may let us see the reason why some men must die young that others may live to a useless old age-why men like me, who have never heard a shot or seen a torpedo fired in anger, must be the arbiter of life and death for younger and better men.'
He paused, turned to face me. 'Every grave on land and in that ocean is a tomb to an ideal. Some of the ideals are wrong, some right. But the graves are never wrong, they are monuments to the heroic men of either side who sleep there. For who has the right to say to the men who bear the brunt of the battle, 'This was wrong, this was worthless to die for?' Is not the warrior the purest and most heroic of all, because he dies for his beliefs? It is the men who send the warriors on their quests who must answer to that question.'
He stopped.
'When did it happen?' I asked quietly.
'Maybe it hasn't happened!' he turned away again, almost fiercely. 'This might just be their propaganda claim!'
'Jim was not due out till tomorrow, was he? Should we have heard from him?'
'Rich, we had him reporting weather every three days from his area. Our task forces need to know that weather data. It moves from west to east, you know. Three days ago he sent a message, giving the weather and telling us that his total bag for the patrol so far was then six ships. He had only four torpedoes left, all aft. Ordinarily we would have had him come back, but we have to keep a watch on the Bungo, and we have to have those weather reports. So we told him to stay till tomorrow, which is the day the Tuna is scheduled to move in there to relieve him. Bun, — o Pete claims to have sunk him the same night he sent his message. Another one was due this morning, but he made no transmission.'
'Maybe he's only been damaged and his antenna or his radio are out of commission.'
'Maybe so. Anyway, we can't send any more boats into SEVEN. You were right, it is suicide. I've already sent a message to the Tuna to stay clear, and the Admiral has an appointment with CinCPac in the morning to tell him the same. If only there were a way of eliminating that bastard Nakame! Until we do, I'm afraid we'll have to give up on this much of our assigned mission. The trouble is, of course, that once he realizes we're not going into the area around Bungo any more, he'll simply shift his own operating ground.'
'Let me go into SEVEN! I can get him!' I spoke with a surge of confidence and rage. 'I've been practicing for just this type of thing all during the past months at the Attack Trainer. Give us just a couple of days to get ready.' I argued a long time, finally got down to pleading with the old man.
At first he wouldn't hear of it, but the thought of the Explanations, the Admiral would have to make finally swung the tide in my favor. I was determined, reckless, in a mad fury. Bungo Pete had to got Walrus had outwitted him twice before, with a little luck. Now Eel would not only outwit him, but sink him, and we'd not need luck!
We got the base ordnance shop to give us a little high-priority emergency assistance: we designed some waterproof demolition charges which we could put into the garbage which would go off when the package was opened. We carried along a lot of old Walrus stationery and got some papers made up with rubber stamps and other markings, just as we had improvised for the Octopus, only using the name Walrus.
And we put aboard a full load of brand-new electric torpedoes, the wakeless kind.
When we finally shoved off, somehow it looked as though word of our mission might have leaked out. A great crowd of submariners gathered silently on the dock to see us off, and I could feel the cumulative force of their unspoken thought.
The Admiral was there, of course, and so was Captain Blunt, and as we backed clear the band struck up 'Sink Em All' which, by this time, had become a sort of submarine hymn.
Under the circumstances, it had a special meaning for us.
They kept playing the same tune over and over until we had headed up beyond ten-ten dock, and the submarine piers had drifted beyond our sight.
13
The trip west made no conscious impression on my mind.
We topped off fuel at Midway, got on our way again the same day, kept on going. The only thing I could think of was Bungo Pete, or to use his proper name, Captain Tateo Nakame, Imperial Japanese Navy. He was no doubt a Jap hero because of the number of U. S. subs he claimed to have destroyed. To Keith and me he was a devil, and needed to be destroyed in his turn.
War rarely generates personal animosities between members of the opposing forces, for it is too big for that. The hate is there, but it is a larger hatred, a hatred for everything the enemy stands for, for all of his professed ideals, for his very way of life. Individuals stand for nothing in this mammoth hate, and that is why friends, even members of the same family, can at times be on opposite sides, and why, after the fighting is over, it is possible to respect and even like the man who lately wished to kill you. Bungo, however, had done us personal in- jury, really many-fold times personal injury, and had thereby lost his anonymity. We had learned to know him by his works and by his name; it didn't seem in the least strange to Keith and me that this time, this once, we should be consumed with bitter personal enmity toward a certain personality among the enemy. That this individual was only doing his duty as he saw it, as he had a right to see it, made not the slightest difference.
And it was not entirely one-sided. For Nakame knew the Walrus by name too, and was doubtless gloating in his own turn over the fact that he had at last squared accounts with the submarine which had dared to outwit him twice, even though accidentally, and had sunk one of the destroyers working under him, even if that also had been a fluke. He might know my own name, just as I knew his, it could not have been too hard to discover.
It was with this thought in mind that Keith, Quin, and I worked out one of our ideas for the campaign against Bungo.
We had previously prepared for it by bringing along stationery and other material originally belonging to the Walrus. All the way out to Kyushu, Quin worked an hour or two a day on the papers. We made certain that the name Eel would nowhere appear in our garbage sacks, but that the name Walrus would with normal frequency. And I wrote my own name in several normal places, as though on papers which had been spoiled or discarded for one reason or another and thrown away. In this way the Walrus would once again have escaped him. Keith and I were agreed that our personal revenge would take the form of robbing Bungo Pete of that satisfaction before destroying him.
And after his curiosity had been aroused by discovery that the Walrus had returned to make depredations in the home waters of Japan, after he had had plenty of evidence and would be searching for the answer to the riddle,
