That meant the entire marine force aboard the “Logan.” Dalzell quickly got his force together, while Darrin gave orders to pull back to where the bobbing buoy lay on the water.
“Ready, diver?” called Dave, as the launch backed water and stopped beside the buoy.
“Aye, aye, sir.” The diver’s helmet was fitted into position and the air pump started. The diver signalled that he was ready to go down.
“Men, stand by to help him over the side,” Darrin commanded. “Over he goes!”
Hugging a hammer under one arm the diver took hold of the flexible cable ladder as soon as it had been lowered. Sailors paid out the rope, life line and air pipe as the man in diver’s suit vanished under the water.
Down and down went the diver, a step at a time. The buoy had been placed with such exactness that he did not have to step from the ladder to the sandy bottom. Instead, he stepped on to the deck of a great lurking underseas craft.
He must have grinned, that diver, as he knelt on top of the gray hull and hammered briskly, in the International Code, this message to the Germans inside the submarine shell:
“Come up and surrender, or stay where you are and take a bomb! Which do you want?”
Surely he grinned hard, under his diver’s mask, as he noted the time that elapsed. He knew full well that his hammered message had been heard and understood by the trapped Huns. He could well imagine the panic that the receipt of the message had caused the enemy.
“We’ll send you a bomb, then?” the diver rapped on the hull with his hammer. “I’m going up.”