«Any problems?»
«No, sir. Sir, may I ask where we are going?»
«We'll let you know that in the morning,» Lewis said. «I hate to be so secretive, but we've had a bad experience with an aviator who couldn't keep his mouth shut.»
«Yes, sir.»
«The distance involved will be about seventy-five nautical miles, one way. We may be there a couple of hours. Does that pose any fuel problems?»
«No, sir.»
«We will want to put out at first light,» Lewis said. «So we'll be here ten minutes before that. Will that give you enough time?»
«Yes, sir.»
«Permission to come on the bridge, Captain?» Lieutenant Lewis asked at the next morning.
«Granted,» Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider replied. «Good morning, sir.»
At least one of these people knows how to treat the master of a man-of-war,
Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider thought, pleased.
The good feeling was immediately dissipated when Major Dillon and Chief McGuire came onto the bridge right after Lewis, having apparently decided the permission obviously included them.
Lieutenant Lewis handed Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider a nautical chart, and Schneider examined it in the light of a flashlight. There was an X approximately equidistant between Oahu and Molokai in the Kaiwi Channel. «Right about there, please,» Lewis said.
«Aye, aye, sir.»
By the time they had cleared the antisubmarine net guarding Pearl Harbor, it was light. Lieutenant Schneider was thus able to see for the first time where the twenty-seven oddly shaped aluminum boxes and the fifty cans of aviation gasoline in jerry cans had been lashed to his vessel. Patrol torpedo boats are not very large vessels. The packages and jerry cans were lashed all over the deck, fore and aft.
My God, we look like a garbage scow!
The seas in the Kaiwi Channel were moderate. Under ordinary circumstances, Lieutenant Schneider would have been able to push the throttles of PT-197 full forward, and her Packard engines would have sent her sailing magnificently over the water at better than thirty knots. But Lieutenant Schneider, who was in fact very experienced in handling small vessels in the ocean, knew it would be unwise to get her speed up. Sooner or later, her bow would inevitably crash into a swell. She—and the torpedo tubes and gun mounts—had been designed with that in mind. They would take the shock. But not with the added weight of fifty jerry cans and twenty-seven odd-shaped packages weighing an average of fifty pounds strapped to them wherever a line could find a hold.
They had crossed the antisubmarine net at 0450. It was 0750 before Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider felt secure in informing Lieutenant Lewis that they were at the point he had specified on the chart.
«Captain, please, maintaining headway speed, circle this position,» Lieutenant Lewis ordered, then turned to Chief McGuire. «Go get the radio, please, Chief.»
«Right,» Chief McGuire replied.
The radio equipment came in two pieces: The radio itself sat on a tripod. McGuire handed that up to Lewis on the bridge, and Lewis and Dillon set it up. There was a telescoping antenna on top, like an automobile antenna, but longer, stronger, and colored black. There was also a telegrapher's key, and a microphone was clipped to the side of the case. The second piece looked like a stationary bicycle. McGuire set this on the deck, handed a cable to Lewis, then mounted the bicycle. Lewis connected the cable to the radio, put a headset on his ears, then made a motion to McGuire to start pumping. He did so.
There was a barely perceptible humming noise, and then the dials on the radio illuminated. When he was satisfied with the position of the dials and the switches,
Lewis began tapping the telegrapher's key. «This is supposed to have a range of twenty-five miles,» he said. «With the telescoping antenna. Let's see.» He tapped the key, threw a switch and listened, and then tapped the key again, repeating the process for several minutes.
So far as Lieutenant Schneider could make out—and he had done well in his radio telegrapher's course at the University of California before getting commissioned—Lewis was sending a gibberish of short Morse code letters: A, E, I, N, and so on.
Then, while listening, Lieutenant Lewis smiled.
«They've got us,» he said. He threw a switch and resumed tapping the telegrapher's key, tapping it for longer periods, sixty seconds or so at a time, before listening for fifteen seconds.
Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider wondered whom he had contacted, but he had been ordered not to ask questions, and did not.
Lewis finally picked up the microphone. «Seagull, Seagull,» he said into the microphone. «This is Texaco, Texaco. How do you read?»
He listened, but shook his head to Dillon to indicate that he was hearing nothing.
Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider became aware of the sound of aircraft engines in the distance. He located the source of the sound a second after Jake Dillon did. Jake pointed out the airplane to Lewis. It was several miles away, no more than a thousand feet off the surface of the Kaiwi Channel.
«Seagull, Seagull, we have you in sight. If read, say how. Also wiggle your wings,» Lieutenant Lewis ordered.
The airplane lowered first one wing and then the other. By now it was close enough for Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider to recognize as a Catalina… though something wasn't quite right about it.
«Make note, Major Dillon, sir,» Lewis said, «that voice communications from the aircraft using the telescopic antenna are somewhat below expectations. They can hear us.»
Dillon chuckled. But Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider saw that Dillon had a clipboard in his hand and was writing something on it.
«Seagull, Seagull, we can't hear you. Set it down, please,» Lieutenant Lewis said into his microphone.
The Catalina immediately wiggled its wings again, then began to drop toward the water.
«We need someone to pump the bicycle,» Chief McGuire announced. «I'm getting tired.»
«You're a chief petty officer, you're not supposed to get tired,» Dillon replied.
«Fuck you, Jake,» Chief McGuire replied, and got off the generator.
It was evident on the face of Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider's helmsman that he had never before heard a chief petty officer tell an officer to fuck himself.
«Captain, please make us dead in the water,» Lieutenant Lewis said. «We'll let him come to us. And can you get someone to pump the generator, please?»
Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider retarded PT-197's engines to idle, then took them out of gear. The boat slowed. Then he reached for the speaker switch to order someone up from below, but changed his mind.
He touched the arm of his helmsman and indicated that he should get on the generator bicycle. For one thing, if boat handling was going to be involved, he would do it himself. His helmsman was a nice kid—he was, in fact, six months younger than Lieutenant (j.g.) Schneider—but all he knew about boat handling was what he had been taught in a five-week course. For another, the decks of PT-197 were about to get crowded. The fewer people there, the better.
Chief Peter McGuire came onto the bridge. «I think the first thing to do is get the boats in the water,» he said to Lieutenant Schneider. «Your people know how to do that?» he went on without giving Schneider a chance to reply. «First you tie the rope on front to something, and then throw it into the water. Then you jerk on the rope and the boat will blow up.»