“Let’s pull into the lee of it and surface,” Larry said. “There won’t be any Japs on something that small. We can charge the batteries up full, get plenty of fresh air, and plan our campaign from here on in.”
“Right,” March agreed. “We’ll reach it in about an hour. We’ve gone about two hours since the patrol plane left us.”
So it was that Scoot Bailey, lying at the edge of the beach not far from his wrecked plane, which he had covered with boughs so it would not be seen by Jap patrols, heard a rushing of water a little way from shore and saw a huge black hull appear from the deep, not a hundred feet out!
He scrambled behind a bush quickly and peered out cautiously, though it was so dark that no one on the sub could possibly have seen him.
“A sub!” he exclaimed. “But the question is—Jap or American?”
He tried to find a marking that would tell him the answer to his question, but it was too dark to see anything. Then he made out figures of men on the bridge, two men looking around. One said something to the other, but so low that he could not make out the language. One of the men took up a lookout position.
“If it’s a Jap,” Scoot muttered to himself, “I’d hate to let it get away from me. I’m probably not in any danger. It must just be up to charge batteries. They wouldn’t come ashore here for anything—nothing to come for, unless some of the men just want to plant their feet on solid ground for a change. Even then I can hide.”
He thought hard. “Seems as if there ought to be something I could do, though one grounded flier against a sub is kind of tough odds.”
He was so busy trying to think what he could do to sink a Jap submarine single-handed that he convinced himself that it was Japanese.
“The machine guns in my plane!” he exclaimed suddenly. “They probably still work if I can get at them. The plane’s heading the wrong way or I could just shoot them as is. But maybe I can get one or two out.”