“That’s something like it!” Scoot exclaimed to himself. “I’ll bet poor old March isn’t having any fun like this, cooped up in that stuffy submarine.”
It was at that moment that March was listening with pleasure to the explosion of the Kamongo’s torpedoes against the sides of a Jap tanker at Wake Island.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CRASH LANDING
Kamongo was ranged with fourteen other submarines alongside the tender David at the little island base in the southwest Pacific. The crossing after the sinking at Wake Island had been uneventful, since they had run submerged most of the time during daylight hours. Always on the lookout for enemy ships, officers and crew alike had been disappointed to run into nothing but an American task force, consisting of a carrier, a cruiser, and three destroyers racing north at full speed.
March had tried to make out the name of the carrier, and he would have been delighted to know it was the Bunker Hill carrying Scoot and his companions from their Truk attack to a small action against another Jap-held island farther north. But even American subs submerged and ran deep and quiet when American ships were near by. The destroyers would have started to toss depth charges like snowflakes if they had sighted a periscope of any kind.
At the sub base, all pigboat Skippers and their seconds were at a meeting aboard the tender. Captain Milbank, the Intelligence Officer, was speaking to them.
“You’ve all heard about the blasting of Truk,” he said. “Now, it’s certain that the Japs will try to reinforce that important post as quickly and as fully as possible. In fact, word has reached us through the Chinese that a large convoy has already left Japan for Truk, with troops, oil and gasoline, ammunition, more antiaircraft guns, food and supplies, and with almost every deck covered with Zeros. They’ve got to replace what we knocked out there and, even further, increase their defending force. They know we’ll hit it again.”
He looked around the room at the quiet, serious faces of the men who listened intently.