“I couldn’t sleep now. It’s all too strange,” Nancy murmured, her eyes on the sea.
And indeed for this American girl it was strange. All her life she had been looked after, cared for. The things she wanted she got. She had joined the WAVES to do her bit but with the thought that she would remain in America. Now, caught up and carried on by Sally’s enthusiasm, she had gone to sea. She had been told that theirs was to be a slow convoy, that they would be twelve days at sea.
“Twelve days,” she whispered, looking away at the dark waters of night. “Twelve nights.” Losses from sinking were greater in these days than ever before. She could swim, but shuddered at the thought of being thrown into those cold, black, miserable waters. How was it all to end?
“Whatever happens, I’m in it to the end,” she had written her mother just before she sailed.
“And that’s that,” she told herself stoutly as she turned to make her way down the ladder to the forward cabins on the deck below where the nurses and the WAVES had their quarters.
Four hours later Sally found herself standing on the ship’s tower. Beside her stood Lieutenant Riggs. Riggs was a veteran ship’s radio engineer. No one seemed to know how old he was. He was tall, erect, every inch a sailor. His steel gray hair told that he was not young. His sharp, darting eyes had told Sally that here was a man who would demand exactness of service and never-failing loyalty. And she loved him for that.
She was feeling a bit nervous, for this was to be her first testing at sea. They had arrived at the place of meeting, an unmarked spot in an endless sea, ahead of the other members of the convoy.
Just a moment, before, she had caught a winking blink on the horizon.
“There’s one, south southwest,” she had said to Riggs.
“You have good eyes,” he commended. “Give them this message. See if they get it.”