Run Silent, Run Deep - Страница 61

Bungo would be puzzled at the apparent reappearance of Walrus, would remember that twice before he had thought he had sunk her, and twice before been fooled. Once he had even swallowed evidence of the existence of an entirely fictitious submarine. Furthermore, Jim's reputation had been made as a night fighter, on the surface, while every ship the pseudo- Walrus-ourselves-had sunk, with the exception of the first one, had been as a result of a submerged day attack. It was logical that Bungo would want to wait and evaluate for a while.

But how would he be getting information? We had seen no one enter or leave the Bungo, except the two freighters. It was possible, though hardly likely, that he had slipped by us to search for evidence…

"Of course!" I said aloud. "We missed one of the most obvious things!"

"What do you mean, Captain?" Keith looked puzzled.

"The fishing boats! Of course the fishing boats! They are his lookouts. Those are the people who find the sacks of garbage for him! No wonder we've not seen anything. They're probably just plain, simple, old Japanese fishermen, but he tells them where and when to look, and he sits back and analyzes the results!"

"Then you think he may be waiting for more garbage?"

"Nope! He's got that by now. But right now he doesn't know where we are. No point in just rushing out to where a ship was sunk-we'd be gone. He wants a contact of some other kind, one where there might be a chance of our sticking around for a while to give him time to come after us." An idea was growing.

The fishing boats-there were quite a few around, and more up and down the coast, in both directions from the Bungo Suido.

"Keith," I said, "let's go find us a fisherman, hey?"

"Going to put a bomb in the garbage sacks and teach him a lesson?" Jim might have gone for that idea, but Keith, I could see, was a little dubious.

"Not quite. We're just going to let him find us!"

Keith relaxed in a wide grin as he got the point.

It was the next day, a bright mid-morning, before we found one. We had purposely moved a goodly distance away from the Bungo Suido. It was a regular wooden boat with a sort of plat- form on which a half-dozen straw-hatted figures sat cross-legged, tending fish lines and poles. The day was balmy, bright, and sunny, though in the eastern sky storm clouds were gathering.

"These fellows will want to be back home by nightfall, be- fore the wind blows the sea up," I told Keith.

The Eel swam sibilantly toward the fishing boat, passed close alongside. Nothing disturbed the monumental calm of the wizened graybeards under the straw hats. I was looking right at them with the periscope, only a hundred yards away as we went by. We turned around, came back. Closer this time, about fifty yards abeam. Still no sign of having seen us.

"Keith," I muttered, as he took a look at them, "if this is the best kind of help Bungo has got, the old rascal is slipping badly."

Keith chuckled as he put the scope down. "Don't waste too much pity on him, skipper. Nobody ever tried to get discovered before. These guys have probably never seen a submarine in their lives, and never expect to."

"We'll fix that!" I crossed to the hatch, looked down to the top of Al Dugan's head. "Control, watch your depth. We're going to go right underneath this little guy!"

"Watch the depth, aye, aye!" Al leaned his head back, acknowledged the caution.

Eel turned around again. Instead of going right under, Keith suggested we pass within a very few yards. This would permit continual observation of the fishing boat, whereas passing right under would require dunking the 'scope. We must have been less than five yards away from the boat as we passed this time, and I was looking through the periscope in low power practically under one of the straw hats. Keith had the other scope up, was doing likewise.

He was an old Jap in the classical mold. A long gray beard, about twelve inches long, wispy, and doubtless silky to the touch, ended in a point on his chest. His face was leathery, seamed from years under the sun's unshaded rays. No telling his age. It could have been anywhere from fifty to eighty. His eyes were closed, or half-closed, and he was the picture of peace and contentment as he sat there, balanced bolt upright with his bare toes sticking up from behind bony knees.

The picture changed radically and suddenly when the old man opened his eyes. It must have been the noise of the water rippling past our extended periscopes, or perhaps the shadow of the most tremendous fish he had ever seen passing beneath him. Whatever the immediate cause, his peaceful contemplation was shattered beyond reclaim. His eyes grew as large as two butter plates, and his mouth, startlingly red, popped wide open. I could have sworn I heard him scream with terror, he jumped to his feet, forgetting the fishing pole he had been so blissfully tending, pointed frantically right at me.

The other five old men hopped up as if stung, crowded to his side, all six mouths wide open, an even dozen eyes staring with stupefied terror. They looked over into the water on both sides of their boat-no doubt our gray hull and black topsides could plainly be seen down beneath them-gesticulated violently, pointing down, raised their hands to their heads, waved them around helplessly.

"No more fishing for those fellows for a while," Keith commented grimly. "Guess we taught them a lesson at that!"

"I hope they have a guilty conscience for helping old Bungo,"

I laughed. "Serves them right!"

Through our sonar equipment we could hear the high- pitched putter of a light gasoline engine. Our fishermen friends had started for home, as fast as their little craft could carry them. We watched them fading out of sight toward the shore, in the meantime set our own course at best-sustained speed back toward the Bungo Suido.

"Let's see," mused Keith over the charts a few hours later.

"Let's see. Give the six old men three hours to get home and another hour to get the news through-they'll have a phone somewhere in their village, don't you think? Old Bungo ought to be stirring his stumps some time this afternoon. Maybe he'll come on out tonight."

"That's the way I've got it figured, too, Keith," I answered.

"He'll have us pegged for a day-submerged operator, so he'll plan on flushing us at night."

Buck Williams had been an interested listener. "Do you think maybe we might have overdone it?" he asked. Buck's apparent nervousness was just a mannerism, I had already decided. His brain was clicking all the time.

"Could be," I answered him. "But we've already used up fourteen torpedoes leaving our calling cards on Bungo Pete's doorstep, and we have only one full load left for our torpedo tubes. The best way would be to try to sink another ship, but then we'd have some dry tubes when we finally did meet up with the old rascal!"

Buck nodded, convinced. "I guess he'll be sufficiently sure of himself to come after us anyhow," he said.

"Well," responded Keith as he folded up the charts and handed them to Oregon, "he surely knows we're around any- way, and has enough reason to wonder what is happening out here in his back yard. If he can, he'll be out tonight. Otherwise, tomorrow for sure. That's my guess!"

"Mine tool Bungo will have a pretty good idea of where to look for us tonight-at least he will think he has. And that's why we should get back as near to the Suido as we can tonight.

Maybe we'll be on him before he suspects we're laying for him!"

All the rest of the day Eel raced for the entrance of the Bungo Suido, where we had been only the day before. It wasn't much of a race, as races go, for we had to balance our consumption of battery power against our speed and calculate carefully the degree to which it would be wise to allow it to be run down in prospect of the battle with Bungo Pete. We got in as close as we dared, right into the shallow water where the channel leading out of the Bungo Suido joined the open sea. It was dangerous because there was not enough water to go really deep-we'd hit bottom first-but it was the place to be if we hoped to nail Nakame before he realized what was going on.

It presented our best chance.

As the last rays of the setting sun were cut off behind the hills of Kyushu, the clouds to the east had grown until they covered nearly the entire sky. Through the periscope we could see that a freshening wind had already built up. Choppy waves four to five feet in height were running in from the east, and it was apparent that the wind also was coming from that direction.

Shortly before it was dark enough to surface, Keith sought me out in the conning tower where I had gone to get ready.

"It looks like a storm to me," he said. "We've had no radio warning of it, but all the signs are exactly like the description in Knight's Seamanship." He handed me the ship's copy of the classic, open to the on hurricanes. The page showed diagrams depicting the behavior of storms in northern and southern latitudes.

I already had my red goggles on; so I didn't try to read the text. I had studied it all at the Naval Academy anyway. "I've been thinking the same," I told him. "With the weather coming in from the east, it looks as though the storm is to the south, and if it behaves the way storms are supposed to it will curve to- ward the east as it moves north. The storm center will pass just to the east of us, and this area will get a good lashing."

"When will it hit us?"

"Tonight, before morning, unless it goes erratic on us."