"Well, listen," said Superintendent Brown, as the boys sat wondering what was coming. "An executive officer from the Bureau of Naval Operations in Washington is here on a mission of great importance. It seems the Navy Department has been watching our salvage work, and read about what you boys were doing in the hold of the Dominion. They want us to do a piece of work for them that demands speed as well as secrecy."
And then he explained in detail. During the war, at the time when a fleet of German submarines had escaped the allied fleets in the North Sea and come to this side of the Atlantic to attack shipping, and particularly supply ships bound for Europe, one of the U-boats had been sunk off Cape May, N. J., at the mouth of the Delaware River. Submarine chasers putting out hurriedly from the inlet had dashed up in time to drop depth bombs on the submerging U-boat.
That the U-boat, badly crippled, had been sunk had been established beyond all doubt by navy divers who had located it on the bottom. The Navy Department had intended salvaging the U-boat at once but had been prevented by reason of the fact that the war kept the department busy sending troopships to Europe, guarding them en route and combating the Hun "mosquitoes" that threatened Atlantic ports and coastwise shipping.
When the Navy Department had eventually set about the salvage of the U-boat they had found it by this time so nearly imbedded in the floor of the ocean that only the conning tower remained above ground. The Navy was now ready to dig the U-boat out, but had decided to ask the Bridgeford Company to co-operate with them in the venture.
"And now we come to the meat of the whole thing," confided the superintendent. "The men who are to engage in this work must be of the most trustworthy character, for reasons I will now explain. We have selected you fellows to get in on this because you are naval veterans and we know you can be trusted to the limit."
The superintendent motioned the boys closer and resumed in an undertone,
"Deep down in that sunken U-boat are plans of United States fortifications, ship and munition designs and highly valuable scientific formulas that must be recovered at whatever cost. They were stolen from the archives of the department at Washington by adroit tools of the German espionage system. I am not at liberty to tell you how they were stolen, for it is one of the secrets of the department. But we are told that those plans are on that submerged U-boat. The Germans were smuggling them out of the country, and it was a lucky shot from the 'ash-cans' of our chasers that laid that particular U-boat low."
"Naturally, we are elated that the Department has come to us in such an important matter, and it is needless for me to say that we are more than anxious to make good, not alone for the sake of our company, but, and very much more to the point, for the sake of the dear old country that we love so much."
"And we—" began Jay.