The frogmen (10 page)

Amos had once been in a head-on collision. He

had been driving at speed but in his lane and correctly and had just topped a hill when the other car was suddenly there, in front of him, passing on the hill.

There was nowhere to go, and Amos remembered in the split second before the impact an odd, detached little voice asking, "Why me?"

"There's all the equipment you'll need," Tanaka was saying, "and I don't foresee any difficulty either in getting you into the water or out of it. They let these copra boats move around without too much harassment."

Amos said, "Why us?"

Tanaka swung the wall closed again. "Because you're the best."

"The best—what?"

Tanaka seemed a little puzzled. "The best underwater demolition team. What else?"

Reeder sat down on one of the benches and began to laugh. "Okay, let's turn around and go home."

Amos wondered why he suddenly felt so sad. "There's been a real mistake, Commander. We don't fit your picture at all."

Tanaka's black eyes looked like wet stones. "You're divers, aren't you?"

"Max wasn't even in the school," Amos told him. "And the rest of us were only students. None of us had graduated."

"Have you had any experience with mines?"

"Only in school."

Reeder laughed. "Slow down at the next corner; I want to get off. I'm allergic to being a hero."

Tanaka seemed to be talking to himself. "How could it happen? I asked for the best. . . ."

Amos remembered the last night in BOQ, and it made him mad. "It happened because the Personnel Officer is a stupid jerk. Your request came in as an order to the commanding officer to select four men for this duty, but the skipper was away so this jaygee in Personnel just phoned a chief petty officer in charge of us and probably said send me four bodies, if they're breathing/'

It was the first time Amos had ever seen Tanaka really angry. "That order went straight from the Commander in Chief, Pacific . . ."

"And it ended up with a jaygee named Beach."

John said, "We could radio Pearl right now and get a real team sent out."

Tanaka was figuring something with the pencil. "Twenty-fourth," he said.

"It wouldn't take a week to get a real team out here." John glanced over at Amos. "We could name them for you. Chief Hingman, for one. Those two Master Divers, Amos?"

"That's three," Amos said. "How about that lieutenant in the scuba school?"

"Didn't Beach tell you they wanted a radioman, first?" John said. "That's the only one he got right."

Tanaka got up and took the map down off the wall. He sounded as though he were talking to himself again. "The attack on Sundance is controlled by the

tides, and the tide will be exactly right for the invasion on the twenty-fourth. A week later the spring tides will have that beach so far underwater the Marines will have to land with gun muzzles in their faces. And if we wait a month for the tide to be right, again, the westerlies will have started and there'll be such a chop in that lagoon that a landing will be impossible. No, there's no time left; it has to be the twenty-fourth. The Task Force is already moving."

"If they flew them out. . ." Amos said.

"We've been under enemy surveillance for the last thirty hours," Tanaka told him.

"Commander," Max said, "I don't want to do this thing, but if I've got to, I like knowing that John and Amos know as much about mines as anybody. They know more than the teacher did. They zapped him."

John said, "Thanks just a whole lot, Max."

Max looked hurt. "Well, John, you did."

"That doesn't make us mine experts."

Amos said vaguely, "It depends on what kind of mines there are in that channel. If they're like anything we've seen before . . ."

Reeder stamped his feet on the floor, and his voice was like an angry child's. "Wainwright, you're crazy! He can't make us do that! It isn't fair! It isn't like asking somebody to do something he knows how to do. He's going to get us killed, that's all. For noth-ing!"

Tanaka picked up his papers. "Talk it over, gentlemen."

"I'm not going!" Reeder yelled. "I don't have to talk it over. I'm not going down in that water."

Tanaka didn't even look at him. "Let me know what you decide."

Amos asked quietly, "What are our alternatives, Commander?"

"Amos, if you can get the dope on those mines so that our attack transports can get in there and put Marines on the beach, we can hit them where it really hurts. If we take Sundance, it will break the chain, slow them down, make this war a little shorter. If you won't even try, then there's nothing to do but turn around and go back."

The rain had stopped. The sky was clear again, the ocean black. The little boat seemed to have grown smaller, a tiny thing in the vastness of black water.

Reeder was the only one who talked about the problem itself. Somehow John and Amos and Max could not get beyond small details.

"I didn't count the tanks," Amos said, "but it didn't look to me like there was more than fifteen, maybe twenty hours of air/'

"How deep is that channel?" John asked.

"You guys better listen to me!" Reeder said.

"The chart showed sixty feet."

"They can't do anything to us if we don't go,"

Reeder said. "It's like telling somebody to get in a fighter plane and take off and he's not even a pilot."

"He said the water was very clear," Amos said.

"What's this about a radio?" Reeder demanded. "You said he could radio Pearl. What with?"

"I didn't say anything about a radio," John said, but it sounded lame.

"Never mind, stupid! He's got to have a radio. How else can he get a message back? It's down here somewhere. All we've got to do is get on that radio and tell Pearl everything's fouled up."

"Those wet suits are gray, though," Max said. "They won't show up like the black ones we had at school."

"Get on the horn, John!" Reeder demanded. "Tell Pearl what's going on out here."

"Oh, shut up," John said. "We can't talk to Pearl without the coding board, and he's got that."

"We'll take it away from him."

"We never worked on a mine under the water," John said. "That could be hairy."

"It's all hairy," Amos said.

"Listen to me!" Reeder screamed at them. He was shaking with anger.

"You've made up your mind," Amos said. "We haven't."

"You'd better!" Reeder yelled. "You're going to get killed . . ." Suddenly he stopped, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. "That's it! That's what he wants. Listen, you guys . . ."

"John, remember the Nazi mine Hingman gave us

that took two days to figure out?" Amos asked. "We haven't got air enough for one like that."

"I see the whole thing now. . " Reeder said.

"Reeder, if you want out, you're out. So let the rest of us alone, okay?" Amos said, fed up now.

"I ought to," Reeder said. "I ought to just keep my mouth shut and let you dumb jerks go down there and get killed. And I'd do that, only he's going to kill me too if you guys won't listen."

"All right, say it," Amos told him.

"That's better. Okay, that channel's mined. Right? And for us to get through it, we've got to get rid of those mines. Right? So they send out a little copra boat, all innocent with a native crew and—what do you know?—a genuine Japanese copra king skippering it. Okay? Now I want you guys to think about this little detail. Who knows where we are? Nobody at Underwater Demolition does; Lieutenant Beach thinks we're in Iowa. Nobody on the plane I came out on knew anything about it. Nobody on that island knew anything about it. See? Nobody knows where we are, nobody."

"I do," Max said.

"Go ahead, kid yourself," Reeder snapped at him. "I tell you nobody knows. The Navy thinks this Tanaka has got four ace underwater men, but all he's got is us—nobody. No names, nothing; we're not on any payroll list or muster. We're not even in the Navy any more. So, why?"

He looked around at them. "I'll tell you why. Be-

cause that's exactly the way Tanaka wants it." He turned to John. "He's got a radio. Right?"

"Yeah," John admitted. "Right."

"And he's got the code board. Our code. He can talk to Pearl and tell them anything he wants to. Now remember that, you guys. He can tell them anything he wants. But without that code we can't say a thing. Is that right, John?"

"That's approximately exactly right."

"Now are you beginning to see the light?" Reeder asked.

"I don't, so tell me," Max said.

"You heard the man," Reeder said. "He can go anywhere in this boat. They don't bother these little copra boats. Oh, no. Of course not. Because they know we're coming. They're waiting for us."

"Oh, come on!" Amos said.

"You guys kill me," Reeder said. "It's so simple. He takes us to that channel, and we all put on our little tanks and jump into the water and go swimming around looking for mines."

"That's the general idea," Amos said.

"Okay, now what's the whole purpose of this trip? To find out what sort of mines are in that channel. Right? And to find out what to do about them. As soon as we find out what they are and what to do about them, we radio back to Pearl and tell them. Fine! Only one little hitch: we're never coming up out of that channel. Because we're going to be dead."

"Why?" Max asked.

"Because that's part of this whole setup," Reeder

said. "As soon as Tanaka gets rid of us, he's going to radio Pearl. In our code. Nice, short message. 'Chan-nel all clear. Mission accomplished. Come ahead with the whole fleet.' And when the fleet gets there, that channel is going to be so full of mines you couldn't get a rowboat through it."

"That's a real neat plan," Max said.

"Yes, it is," Reeder agreed. "And it's the only way any of this makes sense."

Amos couldn't completely dismiss what Reeder had said; it was so logical and practical and simple. On the other hand, Tanaka's explanation was logical and practical and simple too.

"We can't waste any more time," Reeder said. "We've got to do it tonight. So let's figure out what's the best way."

If Tanaka was not the enemy, Amos thought, there was still the big thing: Could he and John and Max do it? Could just three men in the channel accomplish anything? If they found mines that they couldn't disarm, at least they could let the Task Force know. They could turn it back before any ships got hit.

John looked over at him. "You haven't said anything, Amos."

"There's not much to say. If Reeder's right we're in a lot of trouble."

"I know I'm right," Reeder said. "Tanaka's a Japanese. He's what this war is all about."

Amos was thinking beyond that. "We could do it

without Tanaka. Only we can't get to Sundance without him."

"The crew could," Max said.

"What could we tell them? We don't know where Sundance is, or even its real name."

"Get with it!" Reeder said. "We're not going to Sundance! As soon as we get rid of him, we'll get that coding board and tell Pearl what's going on."

"We could do that," John said.

Max said, "The only time I ever used a scuba was in a swimming pool. I've never been down in the ocean with one."

"If we don't go, all they can do is court-martial us," John said. "That's better than dying, Amos."

"Now you're making sense," Reeder said.

"Amos," John said quietly, "even if Reeder's all wrong and the Navy really did set up this whole thing, the Navy didn't intend for us to be here. This is for Master Divers, real experts."

Max said, "I don't know anything about mines, Amos."

"If they knew we were out here instead of the hotshots they think are here, they'd call this thing off," John said. "It's a mistake, Amos."

"If all we do is find mines we can't handle, at least we can tell Pearl to call it off," Amos said. "We'll have done something."

" 'We'?" John asked.

Max said in a faraway voice, "I just don't know what good I could do down there, Amos."

"You could get killed," Reeder said. "That'd be helpful."

"We can't get there without Tanaka," Amos said.

"'We/ Amos?"

Amos looked over at John. "I don't know whether I can stop you guys from killing Tanaka, but I'm going to try."

"Listen to Our Hero," Reeder said. "He wants to get killed."

"No, I don't, and I don't want to kill anybody either."

Max said, "Amos, if we won't go along, would you go down there by yourself?"

Amos hadn't thought that far ahead, but now he did. "What difference does it make how many people are in the water? When you're working on a mine, it's just you and the mine."

"All by yourself," Max said, sounding dazed.

"Why?" John asked. "Do you really think they've got a right to ask us to do a thing like this?"

"I don't know," Amos said. "I saw a dead Marine on the beach back there. Kind of a young guy. I don't guess anybody asked him if that's where he wanted to be."

"Look out, you guys," Reeder said, "you'll get hit by the flagpole."

Amos began to laugh. "You're right, Reeder, the flag's coming around again. You guys want to know something? I've been busting my butt trying to get sea duty; that's how I got those two courts-martial waiting for me Stateside. Well, now I'm here, and it

isn't the way I figured it. I sort of thought I'd be with a whole lot of shipmates fighting and ... I guess it isn't that way."

"It isn't that way," John said. "It never is. I was in a real happy ship at Guadalcanal; good bunch of guys. But when the torpedo came into the engine room I got sudden lonesome."

"You really going to do it all by yourself, Amos?" Max asked.

"I might get lucky and find something I know all about," Amos said. "At least I can look."

"We," Max said. "I don't know what I can do down there, but I'll go along for the ride."

John leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the sky. "I don't think you want me along, Amos. I'm bad news. It got so when I reported aboard a ship people cried like babies. That destroyer was the first to sink under me and then a cruiser tried to take me down at Savo Island. Then the Liscome Bay, off Makin, tried to blow me up. She really tried, too. When she exploded, it rained human flesh down on the New Mexico, fifteen hundred yards astern. I'm bad news, Amos, but if you want me along, I guess it don't make no never-mind to me, because they can't kill me."

Reeder put his head down in his hands. "You guys are really nuts. When we get to that island there are going to be a million people all over this boat."

"There's nothing we can do about that," Amos said.

Sundance Atoll was lovely, lying green and misty in the blue sea, the main, volcanic island rising into a bank of clouds. There was no evidence of the weapons implanted there; no long barrels of the coast-defense or anti-aircraft guns showing, no gray warships, not a plane in the sky. The channel was empty of all boats. The only sign of life was a native outrigger being paddled along the coast.

Amos, concealed in the engine room, watched Tanaka pull the throttle back and heard the diesel beside him slow down.

He glanced back at Reeder, suited up and ready.

Amos had put off the inevitable confrontation for

as long as he could but, just before dawn, he had finally found enough courage to go up to Reeder's fort. "It's time to go below and check your gear, Reeder," Amos told him.

"Just count me out, Ensign."

"No. But I'll give you two choices. If you stay aboard, there's no place to hide you in this boat. If they search it and find you, we won't be able to get any sort of message to Pearl. This whole thing will be a waste. If you go with us, Tanaka will pick us all up tomorrow night, and we'll go home."

"If I stay, Tanaka kills me. Right? If I go, I take my chances."

"You figure it out."

Reeder squatted there a long time. "For once, Ensign, you may be right. I'll have a chance in the water. Not much of one, but a chance."

It had been so easy that Amos had just smiled at him.

Tanaka eased the throttle back a little more and then leaned down and said, "We may get a real break. There's a squall coming in fast. I'm trying to make it so we'll be alongside the lava when the rain starts."

"Won't this change of speed make them suspicious?" Amos asked.

"They'd be suspicious if I didn't slow down," Tanaka told him. "They're very fussy about speed in the channel. Must have some equipment on shore they don't want broken up by wake waves."

"That's lucky for us."

"This squall may be real luck. If it rains hard enough, I'll take a chance on stopping entirely when we get alongside the lava."

Amos glanced back at Max and Reeder to see if they had heard. John and Max nodded, and Reeder grinned.

They looked strange in the gray rubber wet suits, only their faces showing inside the round holes of the helmets. Each of them had a two-tank pack, fins, gloves, and a miscellany of gear strung from a weight belt.

They had spent part of the night building a tunnel through the copra sacks so that they could crawl to the rail without being seen, and had decided to go over with Max first, then John, Reeder, and Amos.

Their supplies had been packed in copra sacks, with copra stuffed in to make them look the same as all the rest and were now stowed along the gunwale, ready to be pushed over at the signal.

"Looks good," Tanaka said, leaning down into the engine room. "It's raining all across the lagoon now, and it should be really pouring when we get abeam of the lava. Are you ready, Amos?"

"As I'll ever be," Amos said, motioning for Max to move up and get into position.

"Just a few more minutes," Tanaka said. "I'll give you the word."

Amos looked at the huge man ahead of him. "When you go over, Max, bite down on that mouthpiece."

"Chomp, chomp," Max said.

It seemed to be getting darker in the room.

"You set, John?" Amos asked.

John just nodded, adjusting the straps of the canvas gear bag hanging from his weight belt.

"Reeder?"

"Natch," Reeder said, leaning awkwardly against the wall to ease the weight of the gear.

Amos heard the sudden, sharp sound of the rain as it struck the boat and saw the water soaking into Tanaka's trousers, turning the white to gray.

As the squall swept over them, the light outside turned soft and dark, almost like twilight, and Amos heard Tanaka say, "Oh, greatl"

The diesel changed its tone as Tanaka took it out of gear, and in a few seconds the boat lost way and began to roll awkwardly, not moving ahead at all.

"We're dead in the water," Tanaka said, leaning down, his face streaming rain. "Gear's going over."

Amos could see one of the crew rolling their supplies over the side. "Let's go," he said.

Max moved into the tunnel under the copra sacks first, and then John. Amos motioned for Reeder to

At the end of the tunnel Amos found that it was raining so hard he couldn't see twenty feet ahead, and the concealment made him feel better.

With the boat dead in the water, they would come down where the supplies sank, and there'd be no problem with propeller turbulence.

Max had already gone over, but John was still at

the rail, fiddling with the gear bag. Reeder crouched in the scupper, waiting for him to go.

"Dive, John!" Amos said.

But John just grinned and pulled a black rubber-covered box out of the canvas bag. He held it up in the rain, waving it slowly back and forth.

"CommanderI" John called. "Be sure to come back and pick us up. This is the coding board."

John pushed himself outward and fell into the water, the rubber case in his hands.

Tanaka's face turned a queer, muddy gray as the rain streamed down it.

Reeder and Amos went over the side almost together, but Reeder went in much too close to the curved hull of the boat and, when the turbulence of his dive cleared, Amos looked around to see if he had hurt himself.

It was dark in the water, but Reeder looked okay. He recovered from the jump and started swimming downward.

As Amos headed down after him, all he could think about was the Irish pennant trailing from the bow. When he got back aboard, he would haul in that frayed length of rope.

The water was dark, and getting darker the deeper Amos went. When he stopped breathing to listen, he could hear the dry-frying sound of rain on the surface.

The wall of lava beside him looked only a little grayer than the water itself.

The bottom began to appear—a rough area of gray-black boulders and coral, the colors dim. Now he could make out Max and John, who were hovering just above the coral.

For a second Amos felt a slap of panic, but then he saw the gray sacks with their supplies lying among the rocks and coral.

At a depth of twenty feet, Amos joined Max and John, all of them keeping clear of the sharp-edged coral.

The boat was still not moving, for he could see no swirl of water at the stern. He couldn't find Reeder either, and that irritated him. The man must have come down at an angle, and if he didn't have sense enough to stay in one place, they could lose a lot of time looking for him.

Amos turned and looked at the lava wall. The appearance of it was shocking, and as he stared at it in disbelief, he remembered his argument with Tanaka about that wall.

Amos had not liked the plan. He couldn't see why it was necessary to put them into the channel in the afternoon, leaving them there clinging to the wall all that day, all that night, and all the next day, and not picking them up until the following night.

Tanaka had not budged. His argument was that the copra boats could not move in the lagoon at night. There was no way, Tanaka claimed, that he could pick them up at night and get back into the channel the next day.

Sometime in the far distant past the volcanoes that made up the backbone of the largest of the atoll's islands had exploded and sent a wide river of melted, boiling rocks flowing down to the sea. This collision of boiling rock with cold sea water had formed an absolutely tortured surface of stone.

The fiercely bubbling rock looked as though it had been frozen there, leaving an incredibly twisted

and corrugated wall, pocked and pitted, and now overgrown with vegetables and barnacles, limpets and sea anemones, their dangerous, pale-white tentacles waving. Kelp dripped down the tortured surfaces, also waving, and hideous things crawled or walked or slithered around.

To try to cling to this wall all night long would be insane. Bubbles of the molten rock, bursting when they had struck the water, had left broken rims of stone as sharp as broken bottles. The gentlest of open-sea wave action would, literally, cut them to shreds before the night ended.

This flowing river of rock had hardened into a solid mass jutting out from the jungle-covered shore. The surface above the water was absolutely bare, affording them no hiding place, and to both left and right of the lava, on the beach side, there were people. On the seaward side the photographs had shown a small village; on the lagoon side there was some sort of military installation: small, blocky buildings set in a row.

There was no place where they could get out of the water and be concealed from people on shore, but Tanaka had said that he had seen what looked like a small indentation cut into the end of the lava— a place where the waves couldn't hit them.

Amos suspected that this place did not exist. There might be small indentations in the solid wall. There might even be sizable hollows where bubbles of rock had been broken and the years of wave action had formed shallow caves, but there

would be no protected cove where they could rest in safety.

There was no use making any search for mines until they found some place along the wall that offered them a little shelter.

Assuming that Reeder had enoudi sense to come to the wall and look for them there, Amos decided that Max was the one he could see the easiest, so he motioned him to stay with the supplies. Then he motioned for John to search the wall toward the lagoon, and set off along the wall, swimming seaward.

The light was growing brighter now, suffusing the water with a greenish mist, and Amos saw ahead of him what looked like a ledge of lava jutting out into the water.

Swimming closer to it, he noticed that something—an earthquake or some great tidal wave—had broken an enormous slab of lava away from the main flow and had left it, shattered by waves, scattered all over the sea floor.

Amos swam under the ledge and looked around in the large scooped-out area. Since the bottom of the ledge was at least five feet under the water, the place was useless to them except in case a boat, really searching for them, came in close to the wall. They could come in under here, Amos diought, and be completely concealed from anything on the surface.

He was about to swim on when he discovered that what he had at first thought was only a large

patch of barnacles at the back of the indentation was actually a smaller and apparently deeper opening.

Swimming in under the ledge, Amos went down to investigate and found an opening about four feet in diameter and almost round. He couldn't see, in the dim light, how deep it went into the lava, but it appeared to be quite deep.

As Amos started to move into the opening, more out of curiosity than anything else, he saw the mean, doglike head of a large moray eel swaying slowly just inside the hole.

Discouraged, Amos was backing away from the eel when he noticed that, beyond the moray and deep in the hole, there was a dim glow of light.

He was hanging in the water, wondering how to get that eel out of there, when he heard a sharp CLICK.

It was not exactly a sound, more a feeling in his ears; a hard, sharp, metallic blow against his eardrums.

What happened then Amos could not explain, for he had never experienced anything like it. One second he was hanging there, studying a moray, and the next, the water turned into iron, crushing him from every direction. It felt as though his whole body was being compressed.

At the same time, the sea became violent, throwing him around as though he were in some enormous churn.

Amos ended up on the bottom, on his back, his mouthpiece torn from his teeth, his whole tank pack

shifted around to his side, his mask full of sand and water.

The commotion died as Amos blindly found the regulator and started breathing again. Still blind, he emptied and washed out the mask, put it on, and cleared it.

The water was filled with drifting sand and shreds of kelp and seaweed.

Shocked and scared, Amos swam out from under the ledge and looked back toward where Max was supposed to be.

The water was too murky to see more than five feet.

As he swam back along the wall, Amos began to think again.

Evidently there had been some sort of explosion in the water. Maybe a high-explosive shell had landed near them, or a bomb had been dropped by an airplane, or a mine had exploded somewhere out in the channel.

Amos decided that it must have been a mine. Why would anyone fire just one round into the ocean? Or drop a bomb on nothing?

He stopped swimming and looked at his watch. Even at the speed Tanaka had been going, the boat would be through the channel by now and well into the lagoon; at least as far as the first wharves. It was unreasonable to assume that the Japanese would mine the water right alongside their own wharves.

Then he saw movement in the murk, and Max and John appeared, both of them swimming hard.