“In six months, a year at most, I can give you your own can.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“I need you out there for your command experience, now. And, I need you out there, and plenty more like you, to replace the ones who are dragging their feet.”
Suddenly, the blazing log seemed like a superheated boiler pumping out seven hundred degree steam. “Yes, Sir.”
Diagonally across the room were three other mufti-clad civilians in dark suits quietly drinking in the corner. Among them was the red-headed Soviet Navy Lieutenant, Eduard Dezhnev who broke into a smile and shook both hands over his head when he spotted Ingram.
Falkenberg walked up, and with a look at Ingram, said, “We’d best spend some time with the Russians, Ray.”
Spruance waved to the Soviet Consul. “You’ll have to excuse me, Lieutenant. It’s time for me to extend the hand of friendship to our Soviet guests.” He nodded toward Dezhnev who had moved off, inspecting a massive tapestry that ran from ceiling to floor. “Remember that one?”
“Yes Sir. I do.”
“Imagine that. Shooting it out with three German E-boats. He takes two with him as he’s going down.” He looked at Ingram. “Now there’s somebody I’d like to have in the Pacific Fleet. We need people like him out there. And, people like...you.”
Something popped into Ingram’s mind and he blurted. “Like Babcock, Sir.”
Spruance drew a broad grin at the memory. “That’s right. Like Babcock. By the way, did you hear about him?”
“Sir?”
“Kid went AWOL. Hasn’t been seen since last Wednesday. That elevator business must have driven him nuts.”
“That’s a surprise to me, Sir.”
“Me, too.” Spruance shook his head. “I thought I was a pretty good judge of character.” He offered a hand. “Thanks for joining us.” An Army Air Corp General moved up and they started talking.
Falkenberg stepped close. “The Admiral’s not kidding. Wherever he can, he’s digging up the right people for the varsity. You’ll be getting orders in the not-too-distant future, Lieutenant. In the meantime,” he looked around the room, “enjoy yourself.”
Ingram felt as if he’d been just pushed out the window. “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”
Falkenberg must have known what he was thinking. “Don’t worry. It’ll probably be convoy duty or something very boring. Your Corregidor days are over, Lieutenant.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
24 August, 1942
Buenavista, Agusan Province
Mindanao, Philippine Islands
“Can’t see a damn thing on an empty stomach.” Wong Lee lowered the binoculars.
Helen grabbed them and raised the lenses to her eyes.Here, I’ll show you.” She kneeled at the window and peered out onto Butuan Bay. But her view was into the setting sun, making direct sunlight dance in her eyes.
“Well?” demanded Wong Lee.
“Wong, step away, please,” Amador barked. He sat at a little make-shift table in the back of the room jotting notes. Due to the Japanese indiscriminate torture, Don Amador had set a policy early on not to disclose their presence to the villagers.
“Sorry.” Wong moved into the shadows.
“There it is.” Helen pointed to the forty-seven foot Japanese landing barge, well into the bay, perhaps four or five kilometers off-shore. “I can see them pulling in another one.” Ever so gently, she rolled the focus knob, making the scene sharper. Working with block and tackle at the bow ramp, several silhouetted sailors hauled a black cylindrical object from the water. “That’s three torpedoes, so far.”
“Let me.” Wong Lee exhaled smoke and kneeled beside Helen and took the binoculars. “Damn, you’re right.”
Helen stood. “What do you supposed they’re up to?”
“They’re getting ready for dinner is what they’re doing,” said Wong Lee. He looked up to Helen, his blue-black hair blazing in the setting sun. “I’m famished. Isn’t it your turn?” He looked back to Amador who nodded in concurrence.
“Men and their stomachs,” muttered Helen. She walked across the dirt floor for the rucksacks which contained the lechon, roast pork, that Rosarita Carillo had packed for the evening meal. Rosarita had sent along a thermos of tea and, for a treat, another thermos of tuba, a beer made from coconut.
Their hideout for the evening was a four room bungalow built in the 1900s by Fito Ruiz, a Portuguese gambler from Macao. In a mad dash, he consolidated his winnings, and craving solitude, sailed north to the beaches of Northern Mindanao where he took in two Filipina concubines to augment his retirement. In 1922, Ruiz was beheaded by a Moro raiding party and his European style bungalow stood empty for several years. Gradually, it was taken over as a common storehouse by Buenavista’s fishermen. Now the rooms were stocked with nets, line, tackle, floats and boat gear. Except for the left front window, the others were nailed shut; the place stank of grease, rotted fish, drying netting and fuel oil.
Naturally, it was convenient for a weapons cache. They had dug a sub-basement directly underneath, an area perhaps twelve foot square that although advantageous for storage, quickly became a habitat for a number of creatures, large and small. It was damp and dark with the vegetation renewing itself at an alarming rate. A week ago, Helen could have sworn Wong Lee’s beautiful hair turned pure white for an instant when, after two short screeches, he erupted from the basement and dashed out the bungalow’s front door. It turned out to be a ten foot python and it took two days to get rid of the thing with smoke bombs. The trouble was a myriad of holes and rotted roots riddled the earth. There was no way of keeping snakes out save concreting the whole mess, an impossibility with the Japanese and their surprise visits.
She gave Wong Lee and Amador each three slices of lechon then sat to eat her own portion. Amador finished quickly and sucked juice off his thumbs and forefingers. “Excellent, Rosarita.” He poured some tea and nodded toward the window. “What do you suppose they are trying to prove?”
Helen savored her pork. And after what seemed just a few bites, there wasn’t much left. “Torpedo testing station? I don’t know. One would think they could pick a better place.” Over the past few days, many Japanese ships had been standing in and out of Nasipit, six kilometers to the west. Even now, a small coastal Maru headed for the once quiet lumbering village. Last week, the Japanese had towed in a floating drydock along with something else that looked like a barge-mounted two-story hatbox. Amador called it a work barge and from his runners, it sounded like Nasipit was being converted to a ship repair yard.
Amador had to shade his forehead as he looked out at the sunset’s last rays. “Manuel says they have a torpedo tube mounted on work barge’s bow.” Manuel was Rosarita’ s husband who had been foreman of the Amador Lumber Mill until after war broke out.
“Well. It looks like they’re firing right into Butuan Bay. Three yesterday. Three today.”
“Why? is the question.”
Helen took her last bite and shrugged.
Wong Lee lowered his binoculars and walked over. “They’re heading in. All done for the day. What time do we try?”
Amador checked his watch. “Ummm. In about three hours. It should be quiet then.”
Wong Lee jabbed a thumb toward the window. “Should we tell them about what the Japs are doing?”
Amador bent over a scratch pad and made notes. “All I want to do is make contact. We can worry about that later.”
After the stifling, humid day, the night was warm, and, through the palms, Helen watched a quarter moon fall over Diuata Point and touch the Western horizon of Butuan Bay. Marveling at the infinite shades of gray and deep-blue and yellow, it was as if she had stepped into in a travelogue.
Amador looked up from his writing pad. “What else?”
“Maybe some penicillin?” It was hard for Helen to see; the room was lit by only two candles, emphasizing deep fatigue lines under her eyes. Amador too. They’d been up for the past twelve hours getting rea
dy.
Even so, each hair of Amador’s flowing white mane of hair was in place as if he’d just stepped out of a barber’s chair. He muttered, “Why not? May as well ask for all the Hershey Bars in Pennsylvania while we're at it.”
“I only meant-- “
“--Sorry. I’m a little off-center tonight. I think we all are.” He turned to Wong Lee who fiddled with the radio equipment. “How about you? Any requests?”
“MSG. These mountain lizards taste lousy.”
Amador looked up from his little desk, an upturned crate, “I'm afraid it'll have to be just plain lizard soup and lechon for a while longer.” Then he said to Helen, “We’ll try for Otis again.”
“Tell him, hello.”
“Of course.”
As Amador worked, Helen’s eyes darted around the little space.
Early this morning, Wong Lee, his teeth chattering in eighty degrees of heat and ninety-eight percent humidity, dutifully crawled into the pit, as they called it, and handed up a Japanese Type 92 radio transmitter. He also heaved up a Type 94 receiver; both items stolen from a truck convey. Quickly, he clambered up after, passing the last piece of equipment: A model “F” portable hand generator that weighed only sixteen pounds. But it required seventy revolutions a minute from a single hand-crank to produce twenty-four watts. Now he sat stoically ready to grind, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he thumbed through a ten month old issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
Recently, the Kempetai had staged a surprise raid in Nasipit and uncovered a beautiful Halicrafters transceiver stored under the stairs of Ricardo Albano’s house. After setting the house afire, the Kempetai hung Albano and his family upside down from a tree, setting them afire one by one, leaving Ricardo for last, the family’s ear-piercing screams ripping through Nasipit again and again.
This left the Buenavista cache as the only radio equipment in the Butuan Bay area. But it had been frustrating. After days and days of broadcasting in the blind, there was no reply on the crackling airwaves, the allies fearing a Japanese trick. But recently, Wendell Fertig, an American colonel who led the resistance in Western Mindanao, had sent a messenger giving them the proper call sign for Otis DeWitt. Tonight was to be their first attempt at transmitting with DeWitt’s call sign.
“How about this?” Amador looked up.
Helen leaned over his shoulder and read:
TO: GMD
FM: DPA
URGENT NEEDS WEAPONS AMMO NOW USE JAP GUNS ALSO NEED MEDICINE ESP PENICILLIN PLUS RADIO US CURRENCY OR GOLD JAP SCRIPT WORTHLESS PLUS FOOD CLOTHES PREFER AIR DROP BUENAVISTA HELEN SENDS BEST AMADOR
BT
Helen nodded. “How ‘bout the Jap barge and torpedoes?”
“Later. Have to keep things simple.”
“Okay.”
“This time, I'm going to try code”
“How can you do that?” Helen asked.
Wong Lee waved a hand with evident sarcasm. “Where's your secret book?”
“Before the war, when I worked in the Ministry of Finance, we used an emergency code when on travel. We had to use Western Union. It was the only way to communicate. It’s simple, but effective.”
Helen asked, “How do you do it?”
Amador was silent for a moment, then his eyes darted to the lanyard around Helen’s neck. “Ah! The ring.”
“What?” She drew back.
“May I see it, please?” He held out his hand.
Wordlessly, she lifted the lanyard over her head and handed it to him.
Like a jeweler, Amador bent over and examined Ingram’s Naval Academy ring. “Okay. It’ll be a checkerboard code with a simple key. Watch, you may have to do this sometime.” Amador took a fresh sheet and sketched out an alphabet in five rows:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I/J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Then he rolled Ingram’s ring over in his palm. “His year of graduation is 1937. That’s the key.” Across the top, he wrote:
0
1
9
3
7
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I/J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Then he muttered to himself, “Now we need a key for the left-hand column. So we'll use the other digits from zero to nine, that don't appear in the top row.” Thus, he wrote vertically:
0
1
9
3
7
2
A
B
C
D
E
4
F
G
H
I/J
K
5
L
M
N
O
P
6
Q
R
S
T
U
8
V
W
X
Y
Z
“Each letter has two digits. You read across, then up. For example, the letter “H’ is 49. So ‘Helen’ is expressed as: 4927502759. And this conveniently breaks down to two, five letter groups of 49275 and 02759.”
Wong Lee said, “Pretty good.”
“Simple. Experts can crack it, but it’s the only thing I can think of right now.”
Silence fell as Amador began encoding. Wong Lee sat at his generator and lit another cigarette while Helen replaced the ring and lanyard around her neck. She looked out the window once again, marveling at the evening’s beauty, yet trying not to think of the United States or the people who lived there or what they did on Sunday afternoons. Everything seemed so long ago. What was it like to go into town for a root beer float? Or ride a horse? Or watch a movie? Or pull weeds. Or peel onions? Or--
Wong Lee was up and had his arms around her. “It’s okay, hon, don’t cry.”
Helen wiped her eyes. “I’m only peeling onions, damnit.” She pulled away and looked out, her arms folded.
“Huh?” Wong exchanged glances with Amador.
After ten minutes, Amador tore off his sheet. “All right, here it is.”
Helen stepped over and looked at the page:
TO: GMD
FM: DPA
REF: INGRAM USNA + QUEZON
67614 12759 63592 72723 81272 05753 59632 05151 53595 38167 69274 34057 41675 96920 50695 35927 27235 12723 43294 35927 27695 75727 59432 94350 50435 95750 67696 12023 43536 76929 67616 12759 29835 36141 53502 34320 57692 96143 57638 15361 63495 02769 69575 06769 40535 32329 50536 34927 69576 12740 27612 04361 23615 35721 67275 92080 43696 32049 27502 75969 27592 36921 27696 32051 20235 36100
BT
Wong Lee gave a long exhale. “DPA is...?”
“Don Pablo Amador.”
“Why Quezon?” wondered Helen. Manuel L. Quezon was the President of the Philippines who had escaped with MacArthur to Australia the previous March.
“It’s the only way I know of tipping them that it's a government checkerboard code. And here,” Amador pointed to Ingram's name, “I'm betting they'll figure out that's his year of graduation from the U. S. Naval Academy, which gives them the top row.”
“It's worth a try,” said
Wong.
Amador checked his watch. “You know, there’s still time. Maybe I will add a bit about the torpedoes. What do you think?”
Helen nodded. “Can’t hurt.”
“Okay.” Amador redrafted the message then looked up. “This should fool the Hapons. Beyond that, we must hope DeWitt is good enough to figure it out. You ready to crank, Wong?”
Wong Lee stood at the generator. “Let 'er rip.”
“You’ll poop out in two minutes.” Helen walked over to stand beside him.
“Out of my way.”
“Connect the antenna,” ordered Amador.
Wong screwed down the antenna wire then leaned over and began to grind the generator. It whined into life and soon, Amador switched on the transmitter and receiver, their gauges dancing and lights blinking. “Here goes...” Adjusting earphones on his head he started tapping the cw key.
A CODE FOR TOMORROW: A Ingram Novel (The Todd Ingram Series Book 2) Page 10