He was astonished to realize that from the time of initially sighting the convoy, only a little more than half an hour had passed.
At the ordered depth, two hundred feet, there was barely fifty to seventy-five feet of water beneath Eel. Richardson debated taking a sounding, finally decided he would risk it during a depth-charge attack, should another one eventuate. Until then the need to know whether one could go a few feet deeper was less important than the chance that taking the sounding would reveal Eel’s position to a now alert sonarman in one of the two remaining Mikuras.
But, though the screws and pinging of the two frigates could be heard for some time, Eel gradually crept away to the northwest, running as silently and as deep as she could. There was never any indication that the enemy antisubmarine vessels had ever regained contact, or even had tried very hard. Perhaps, as Al Dugan suggested during one of their postmortems later on, the fate that befell one of their number cooled off the ardor for battle of the other two.
-8-
“Here, Nelson,” said Keith, handing the tall chief radioman an encoded message. “See if you can wake up the boys at NPM with this one.”
Nelson grinned as he took the paper. “There’s about twenty boats trying to wake up Radio Pearl every night,” he said. “It’s not their sleepiness that bothers us. It’s the competition.”
Keith returned the humorous look. “You radio girls all stick together. Anyway, this one ought to give them a little fun back there in ComSubPac.” He took the spare set of ear phones which Nelson, in anticipation of a message to be sent after surfacing that evening, had already plugged in for him. Instantly his mind was catapulted out of the surfaced submarine into a suddenly expanded geography covering the entire Pacific Ocean. Somewhere — the signal was so clear it was perhaps only a few hundred miles away — another submarine was sending a long varying note as it tuned up its transmitter. The radioman made a grimace of disparagement. Swiftly, as Keith looked approvingly, Nelson completed a few last-minute adjustments to Eel’s transmitter, finally looked over to Keith for permission to make a test transmission. Keith nodded. A few swift taps on the tuning key — Nelson was well aware of the danger from Japanese direction-finding stations — he nodded readiness.
The other boat was transmitting, using a coded call sign: “NPM v W3AU K — NPM v W3AU K.” Keith had developed sufficient familiarity with Morse code to be able to understand the repeated short message. Nelson waited, his hand poised over his own transmitter key. Much farther away, another boat was calling NPM and, sounding as though it must be at least a thousand miles away, the dim crackle of a distant transmitter could barely be heard: a fourth submarine calling Radio Pearl.
Nelson was gently fingering his receiver tuning control. Faintly, Keith could hear through the welter a dim but precise note. “W3AU v NPM 3,” it said. Radio Pearl had answered the unknown submarine whose coded call sign was W3AU, telling it that it was third in line for receipt of a message.
Keith motioned to Nelson, but Nelson had already begun tapping out, in the smooth, effortless rhythm of a practiced radioman, Eel’s own call-up. “NPM V 68TC OP K,” he repeated several times.
Radio Pearl seemed suddenly to have a surge of strength. “68TC V NPM K,” said the signal. Keith and Nelson grinned at each other. The Japanese radio station would have to use far better techniques than this to masquerade as Radio Pearl. A sub not alert to the ploy might transmit its message at a time when Pearl Harbor could not receive it, get a routine-sounding receipt from the Japanese station, and secure its transmission thinking its message had been delivered when in fact it had not. This was the simplest of electronic warfare techniques. Once, hearing a boat being taken in, a smart NPM operator disrupted his own orderly procedure to copy the unwary submarine’s message and thus foiled the Japanese station’s attempt at interference. But one could not be sure of this sort of good luck. “… NPM 4,” said the distant station.
“NPM v 68TC OP K,” rapped out Nelson rapidly. The Pearl Harbor operator would very likely have heard the alien station attempting to entice Eel into transmitting its message at a time when Radio Pearl was not ready to receive it, would recognize that Eel had by consequence been unable to hear all of NPM’s transmission and was asking for its repetition. He, too, transmitted more rapidly.
“68TC v NPM 4,” he sent. Keith would have been unable to read it had he not known what to expect.
Nelson pushed a button alongside his transmitting key. With a thunk, the power hum in the transmitter standing behind them went silent. Quickly he brought his log up to date on the typewriter in the well before him. Keith noted with approval that he was preparing to copy the message from the nearby submarine.
The cryptic procedure message from the Pearl Harbor radio station had signaled the unknown nearby submarine that it was third in line to be serviced. Eel was fourth. Keith stared unseeingly at the radio equipment about him. Far away in the distance, he could hear the tiny dots and dashes from a distant submarine tremulously pounding out its message. Several times it had to stop and repeat, finally received the sought-for R from Radio Pearl. Then it was the turn of another submarine, perhaps a thousand miles in a different direction, also sending in its vital information to the central gathering point, finally the submarine identified as W3AU. It was not a lengthy message, and Nelson had far less difficulty in copying it, since it was so near, than the NPM operator. Keith judged the unknown sub was not more than two or three hundred miles away. Very possibly it was the Whitefish, an identification which would be discovered when the call was broken down and the message decoded. Nelson, no doubt, could identify not only the sub but also the operator, if it happened to be one of the many whose “hand” he knew.
The next submarine to transmit would be Eel. Nelson pressed his transmitter button, had it humming and fully warmed up when Radio Pearl receipted to the nearby boat.
“68TC v NMP K,” said NPM.
“NPM v 68TC OP — RADIO PEARL FROM EEL PRIORITY ACTION REPORT…”
As Nelson pounded out the coded message, laboriously composed and then encoded while Eel was awaiting the time to surface, Keith could reflect that across three thousand miles of water, bouncing at least once off the ionosphere now lowered over the dark Pacific, this particular stream of rapid dots and dashes carried the news of the death of four ships and most of those on board. It told of Eel’s own escape after minor depth charging, the possibility that some other submarine, possibly Whitefish, might have been in position to pick off the lone straggler which had escaped to the west. It stated that Eel was now down to seven torpedoes, two forward and five aft, and that ComSubPac was undoubtedly correct about ships moving north and south close in to land along the west coast of Korea. On the game board in ComSubPac’s office in Hawaii, the little submarine silhouette marked “Eel” in the Yellow Sea would now have seven tiny Japanese flags attached to it. If W3AU was indeed the Whitefish, it was possible that she might have earned a second little flag added to her silhouette, if she had, as instructed, been patrolling outside the island chain directly westward of Eel.
The message sent and NPM’s R having been received, Keith nodded his thanks to Nelson, hung up his earphones, picked up his papers and the intercepted message — Nelson was certain it was indeed from Whitefish—and started back to the wardroom. There, he knew, one of the interminably long conversations with the wolfpack commander was undoubtedly taking place. He had, however, hardly moved forward into the control room when it was apparent the uneventful night he had been anticipating was not to be. Dimly, through two open hatches, he heard Al Dugan’s “Clear the bridge!” Simultaneously the diving alarm rang twice. Men came jumping down from above. “Dive! Dive!” shouted Al, nearer. He must now be scrambling through the hatch, latching it behind him. “Take her down! Take her down fast!”