“Grandfather! Those planes are coming from the south!”
“From Rocky Point airfield! They should have started sooner. Something must have gone wrong. But now—”
“Now will there be a battle?” The child was trembling all over.
“I don’t know, child.”
“Shall you shoot out there?”
“We must wait and see,” was the calm reply, always in a slow whisper. “We cannot afford a horrible mistake.”
And so, with the roar beating ever louder in their ears, they lay there, not daring to move, the man and the child.
As for the shadowy figures “sitting on the water,” they too must have heard, for there came no longer the dip-dip of their paddles.
Tom and Rosa, too, were being cheered by the ever increasing roar.
“We’ll leave that sub to them,” Tom said through the speaker. “We can’t have much more than enough gas to take us in.”