"Take it easy, nothing!" Freddy replied hotly. "I could, Dave. And if you'd used your eyes, you'd have learned what I did!"
"The—the location of Suicide's force?" Dawson asked incredulously.
"Exactly!" Freddy told him firmly. "At least what it was at ten o'clock this morning. It was One Hundred and Forty degrees West, and Five degrees North. I saw the position marked on the desk chart in that Nazi's cabin. And do you know what that means, Dave?"
"Well, I'll be a bowlegged son of a gun!" Dawson gulped out in awed admiration. "Kid Bright Eyes to the rescue again. Boy! I sure hand it to you when it comes to coming through in the clinches! Just like that he learns what Admiral Jackson's whole force wants to know. Holy smokes!"
"And a fine lot of good it does me to know, locked up in this blasted steel closet!" Freddy Farmer groaned. "But I asked you, do you know what that means? Do you happen to know where One Forty West and Five North happens to be?"
"Huh?" Dawson echoed. "Where?"
"I noticed it on the chart, of course," Freddy replied. "It happens to be a good hundred miles west of the area our planes have been searching. In other words, Colonel Welsh and Admiral Jackson are not going to find the Japs in the area they're searching. Sasebo is well west of them. So he didn't go south, as was reported. He moved west from Truk for almost five hundred miles and then turned south. And as of ten o'clock this morning he was heading for Jap-held New Guinea. And—"
"Jumping jeepers!" Dawson broke in with a gasp. "So that's it? He's going to slip through between New Guinea and New Britain and catch our attacking force on Guadalcanal from the south? Cut our supply lines to shreds, and then follow through with a main attack on whatever our boys have gained. Good night! That'll be a heck of a note, Freddy!"
"Quite, and definitely!" the English youth replied with a faint tremor in his voice. "Either that, or he'll go all the way around the western end of New Guinea, and split his forces. Half to cut off our forces on Guadalcanal, and half to make a sea and air attack against perhaps Darwin on the northern side of Australia. Who knows what that cunning devil has up his sleeve? And to think we know where his confounded force is! Man! I could shoot myself in despair!"
"Here, cut that out, pal!" Dave snapped. "Get that old chin up. We're still alive, and that's something."