CHAPTER XVIII—“GHOST TALK” AGAIN
The Colodia was put about, and at reduced speed approached the spot where the submarine had gone down. There was very little wreckage on the surface of the ocean; but several black spots seen through the officers’ glasses caused two boats to be hastily launched and both were driven swiftly to the rescue of the survivors of the German craft.
Morgan was in one of these boats. All through the fight he had thought of the Argentine skipper, Captain di Cos of the Que Vida. The possibility of his still being aboard the submarine worried the American lad. If there were prisoners, they had gone down with the enemy craft.
These were the fortunes of war; nevertheless, that the unfortunates should be lost with the members of the German crew, was a hard matter. Only three survivors were picked up, and one of them, with his arm torn off at the socket, died before the boats could get back to the destroyer.
The two were Germans. Questioned about possible prisoners aboard the submarine, they denied knowledge of them. Yet it was positive that Captain di Cos, at least, had been carried away by the German craft when the Que Vida was sunk.
Later some information was gleaned from the two prisoners brought back to the Colodia. The super-submarine had been known as the One Thousand and One. She was the first of a new type of subsea craft that the Germans hoped to use as common carriers if they won the war.
According to the story told by the prisoners—especially by one who was more talkative than his fellow—the huge submarine had a crew of sixty men, with a captain for commander, a full lieutenant and a sub-lieutenant. She was fully provisioned and carried plenty of shells. Her commander’s desire to save torpedoes, their supply of which could not be renewed nearer than Zeebrugge or Kiel, was the cause of the submarine being caught unaware by the destroyer.
Had the Western Star been sunk at once by the use of a torpedo, the underseas boat would have been far away from the scene when the American ship arrived. It was an oversight!
“And it is an oversight her commander can worry about all through eternity,” Mr. MacMasters growled, in talking about it with the boys he took into his confidence now and then. “It is my idea that that big sub could get stores and oil without running home to her base; but she could not get torpedoes.”
He did not explain further what Commander Lang and his officers suspected. But the German prisoners had been interrogated very carefully along certain lines, especially regarding that German raider called the Sea Pigeon for which the Colodia had really been sent in search.
The big submarine had taken considerable treasure and valuable goods from the vessels she had sunk. Then, for a time, she had disappeared from the steamship lanes. Where had she gone with the stolen goods?
The prisoners hesitated to explain this. Indeed, one of them became immediately dumb when he saw what the questioning was leading to. From his companion, however, was obtained some further information.
It was a fact that the submarine had left her base with the raider known as the Sea Pigeon. The underseas boat convoyed the bigger craft through the danger zone. It was not a difficult guess that when the two German boats had separated arrangements had been made for certain rendezvous at future dates—when and where? Besides, both boats were furnished with wireless.
“I would make that Heinie tell the whole story,” Ensign MacMasters said.
“He might not tell the truth, sir,” suggested Whistler Morgan.
“Then I’d hang him,” declared the officer. “A threat of that kind will make these brave Heinies come to time. I know ’em!”
Commander Lang had his own way of going about this matter. He used his own good judgment. Whether he believed he had obtained the full truth from the prisoners or not about the Sea Pigeon, he turned the destroyer’s prow toward the reaches of the western Atlantic, leaving the eastern steamship lanes behind.
The crew only knew that the Colodia must be following at least some faint trail of the raider. For the destroyer had been sent to get the German ship, and Commander Lang was not the man to neglect his work.
The radio men picked plenty of chatter out of the air; but, as far as the Navy Boys knew, though they tried to find out, little of it referred to the German raider.
One thing George Belding did learn from his friend, Sparks: The “ghost talk” was rife in the static once more. This wireless spectre had all the operators in a disturbed state of mind, to say the least.
“Sparks seems to have lost his common sense for fair, over it,” Al Torrance observed. “You know more about this aero stuff than any of us, George. What do you really think it is? Somebody trying to call the Colodia?”
“That is exactly what Sparks doesn’t know. He admitted to me that he caught the destroyer’s name, but not her number. It’s got so now this ‘ghost’ breaks in at a certain time in the afternoon watch—just about the same time each day. One of his assistants says he has spelled out ‘Colodia,’ too. But it may be nothing but a game.”
“How ‘game’?” asked Ikey eagerly.
“Somebody fooling with a machine. Sparks says the sounds grate just like ‘static!’”
“And that is as clear as mud,” complained Frenchy Donahue.
“Could this unexplained talk be some new German code?” Whistler Morgan asked.
“All Sparks got is in English; but it doesn’t amount to any sense, he says. If it is a code, he never heard the like before.”
“It might be a German code with English words,” put in Al. “One word in code means a whole sentence.”
“I believe you! Wish Sparks would let me put on the harness and listen in on it,” grumbled Belding. “I haven’t forgotten the wireless Morse I learned back there before the war.”
“Go to it, George,” urged Al.
“I wish I knew Morse,” added Whistler. “Get into it, George. Get Sparks to let you try a round with the ‘ghost talk.’ He is friendly to you.”
Thus encouraged, Belding took a chance with the chief of the radio during that very afternoon watch. It was during these hours, it was reported, that the strange and mysterious sounds broke in upon the receiving and sending of the operators aboard the Colodia.
“It is against the rules to let you into this room, boy,” Sparks told him, smiling. “I can’t give up my bench to a ham.”
“I’m no ham, Mr. Sparks,” declared Belding. “I’ve shown you already that I can read and send Morse.”
“I don’t know,” the radio man murmured, shaking his head.
But he was really fond of George Belding, and the latter had to coax only a little more. This, as a rule, was not a busy hour.
He allowed the youth to slide in on the bench and handed him the head harness. George slipped the hard rubber discs over his ears and tapped the slide of the tuner with a professional finger.
“Plenty of static,” he observed, for it was trickling, exploding, and hissing in the receivers.
“No induction,” Sparks suggested.
Belding slid up the starting handle. The white-hot spark exploded in a train of brisk dots and dashes. Belding snapped up the aerial switch and listened. The message he was catching from the air was nothing to interest him or the Colodia.
He was sensitizing the detector and soon adjusted the tuning handle for high waves. The chief watched him with a growing appreciation of the boy’s knowledge of the instrument and its government.
On these high planes the ether was almost soundless. Only a little static, far-removed, trickled in. It was in the high waves that most of the naval work is done and the sending of orders to distant ships is keyed as fine as a violin string—and sounds as musical.
Sliding the tuning handle downward, Belding listened for commercial wave-lengths. Something—something new and unutterably harsh—stuttered in his ear.
He jerked back from the instrument and glanced suspiciously at Sparks.
“Do you hear it?” the latter demanded.
“I hear something,” said the young fellow grimly. “It—beats—me——”
Were these the sounds that had been disturbing the radio men, off and on, for a week or more? Laboriously, falteringly, the rasping sounds grated against Belding’s eardrums. It was actually torturing!
The atrocious sending began, in Belding’s ear, to be broken into clumsy dots and dashes. The wave-lengths were not exactly commercial; nor did the sending seem to be in the Continental code.
He listened and listened; he turned the tuner handle up and down. He got the soundwaves short and got them long; high and low as well. But one fact he was sure of: they were the same sounds—the same series of clumsy dots and dashes—repeated over and over again!
George Belding swung at last from the instrument and tore off the receiving harness. Sparks was grinning broadly upon him.
“Ugh!” ejaculated the youth. “Is it a joke? I am almost deafened by the old thing.”
“What do you make out the ghost talk to be, George?”
“Are you sure it isn’t a joke?”
“Not on my part, I do assure you,” declared the radio man.
“Then,” said Belding slowly, “I believe somebody is trying to communicate a message and for some reason can’t quite put it through.”
“Did you get the word ‘Colodia’?” Sparks asked quickly.
“No, sir. But one word I believe I did get,” said the young fellow gravely.
“What’s that?”
“‘Help,’” Belding repeated. “‘H-e-l-p, Help.’ That’s what I got and all I got. I do not think I am mistaken in that!”