The ship intercom phone buzzed on the bulkhead above Richardson’s steel bed. He reached for it swiftly, alertness awakening throughout his body.
“Commodore, this is Radio. We’re intercepting a message from the Cushing to NSS Annapolis. He’s coming in loud and clear.”
“Call Commander Williams in ComSubDiv One-oh-One’s room. I’ll be right up!” He slammed the telephone into its cradle, jammed his feet into slippers, ran out the door in his pajamas.
Buck, barefooted, carrying his shoes, arrived in the radio room only seconds after he did. Evidently he had been sleeping in his underwear, had delayed only to pull on his trousers.
There were three crewmen there, one a supervisor. “I called you as soon as the message started coming in, Commodore,” the senior said with a hint of pride in his accomplishment. “We’re copying it at two stations.” He indicated the two radiomen seated at their typewriters, earphones on their heads, clacking the keys with measured simultaneous cadence as their eyes stared miles beyond the radio receivers banked directly in front of them.
“Have you another set of earphones?” Richardson knew there must be, automatically reached out his hand. Buck Williams, he saw, likewise could hardly contain his eagerness.
“Yessir. But we can only plug you in at one station.” The supervisor handed Richardson a single set of earphones, swiftly plugged in the other end of the six-foot cord. Rich fumbled with the headpiece, detached one of the earphones from its clip, handed it to Buck, put the headpiece with now a single earphone to his head. Buck, crowding close to be within range of the wire attached to his earpiece, held it to his near ear. The earpieces were fitted with earmuff-type coverings to cut out extraneous sound. Both men cupped their hands over their unused ears, strained to blot out all other sensation.
XVTMW, said the radio waves. PLTMV ZAWLN MMPTL XZBKG — the rhythm was steady, hypnotic. Glancing over the shoulder of one of the radiomen, Williams could see the encrypted message forming before his eyes. There were already three lines of type, ten five-letter groups per line, all neatly columnar, the letters coming one by one as the distant operator hammered them out with his radio key. Like many officers, Williams had learned Morse code early in his career. He had never become as good at it as the radiomen who dealt with it every day, but he could recognize the letters, although not fast enough to receive a message at normal transmittal speed.
“Dash-dot-dash-dot,” went the faint signal. The letter C. C appeared on the paper as the radioman hit the typewriter key. Then a single dash, the letter T. Then three more: o. Holding both hands, one with an earphone, to his head, Buck could visualize the distant operator, far to the north, beating out the dots and dashes as rapidly as he could, yet well aware that a rhythmic swing, and steady, precise formulation of the letters was vital to accurate receipt. He was obviously a professional. Buck would have described him as having a “copperplate hand,” meaning that the dots and dashes were crisply distinguishable, the spaces between them always the same, the spaces between letters slightly longer but also exactly the same, the spaces between groups longer yet but still unvarying. Keith must also, at that very moment, be hunched in a chair alongside his radio operator, a spare set of earphones on his head, following his radio transmission with his ears and with his mind. He would hear the signals streaming out from his ship, imagine them crossing the frozen ocean, bouncing at least once off the ionosphere and finally coming within range of the tall, huge antennas across the Severn River from the Naval Academy. There, the so-carefully-tuned receivers would amplify them back into the audible range to be copied. In his own receivers he would hear also the much fainter notes of the distant station as Annapolis responded to his call and indicated readiness to receive the message. He would listen as his radiomen confided his enciphered letters to the aether, hear the procedure signals calling for repeats of doubtful passages if any, finally hear the R for receipt that indicated the shore station now assumed responsibility for the message and its delivery to the addressees. Not until a message of this importance had cleared completely would Keith himself — short of urgent matters elsewhere — leave his radio room.
But would Keith know that his two closest friends were similarly occupied, that they had lain in wait to intercept his expected second message, had carefully planned to be in the Proteus’ radio room to hear it directly, from his own transmitters? It was what Keith himself would do were the situation reversed, and if he was anywhere within reach of the proper receivers. But there was no way Keith could be sure that Rich and Buck, his most immediate associates, had monitored the ship-to-shore frequency and were taking his message directly, that they were at that moment directly connected to him by the tenuous, invisible, fragile radio waves emanating from his own radio room. For that matter, he expected Buck to be at sea in the already-begun barrier exercise.
But, beyond doubting, the hope would have been in his mind. Positive confirmation would be a tremendous booster to morale. If possible it should be done. How to alert him?
“Chief,” Buck said to the radio supervisor, speaking in a low voice so as not to interrupt the concentration of the men receiving the message, uncovering his left ear as he did so, “Chief, is your transmitter on this frequency?”
“Yessir. The Commodore had us do that this afternoon — I mean yesterday. But we don’t have the power to reach the Cushing where she’s at.”
“You mean we don’t have the power of a big shore station. We can hear Cushing okay, and we have bigger transmitters than she has. So she ought to be able to hear us.”
“Sometimes it works,” said the supervisor doubtfully, “but the Cushing didn’t know which shore station in the whole world would be the one that could hear her message. You never know that.”
“Sure, but maybe she aimed it at us, Chief. She picked a time when we’d be in darkness. Maybe she’s hoping we would think of putting this watch on her frequency.”
“Annapolis answered her call-up, sir,” the chief radioman said earnestly. “All we’re doing is copying her message. There’s no way she could know we’re on the circuit. Since we’re in port, we’re not allowed to use the ship-to-shore frequency. Even if we did open up as soon as she’s finished with NSS, we might be just enough off-frequency from her that she won’t hear our weak signal.”
“I know,” Buck said, containing his impatience. “But if we can hear him, isn’t right now the best chance we’ll ever get for him to hear us?”
“Where is he at, sir?”
“Oh. Sorry, Chief.” Buck quickly covered his near breach of security. “Anyway, he’s in about the same longitude as we are, and so is Radio Annapolis. So that means the radio conditions in this north-south line right now are at their best, and we ought to be able to work him direct ourselves.” Richardson had become an interested and approving onlooker, Buck noticed.
It would be necessary to disregard the rule against transmitting while in port. Proteus’ transmitter, already on the frequency, would be fine-tuned to Annapolis’ transmissions. Then, as soon as Annapolis receipted to the Cushing, Proteus, acting as though she were another ship at sea waiting for the circuit to clear, would open up with the cryptic call signs of the old wolfpack code. These would mean nothing to anyone, not even Cushing’s radio operator (unless Keith had prepared him for this eventuality) but they would to Keith, if he were there and heard them, or even if he only saw them appear on his radioman’s typewriter log sheet. Keith would be there. He might even be hoping for something like this to happen.