The frogmen

by White, Robb, 1909-1990

  Somehow, Amos had known exactly that from the first instant he saw the pretty map.

  Max said, "How?"

  "I know how confused and angry you've been," Tanaka said. "But this was the only way to get you there. The enemy wouldn't let any other ship come within hundreds of miles of Sundance. This copra boat can go anywhere, unquestioned. They'll let us sail right under the guns, straight into the channel."

  "And then?" Max asked.

  "Well work out the details," Tanaka told them. "We've still got a long way to go."

  Max said, "I mean, what do we do when we get there?"

  "The water's beautiful," Tanaka said. "It's clear, and because the atoll is closed, there's very little current to bother you. The depth is not too great, either. With a little luck, you might find out all we want to know on the first dive."

  "Dive?" Max said.

  "With what?" Amos asked. "Naked?"

  Tanaka went over to the old wooden lockers built into the starboard wall. Opening one of them, he pulled at the doorframe, and the entire wall swung open into the room.

  Amos noticed that someone had calculated all this very well, for the edge of the wall cleared the bolted-down bench by a fraction of an inch, allowing it to swing entirely out of the way.

  The rubber wet suits hung like flat ghosts from hangers on the wall, four of them, one larger than the others. The face masks, the glass plates glinting in the lamplight, were on a shelf. The scuba hoses hung on pegs, the gray corrugated tubes swinging back and forth with the motion of the ship. There were gloves, fins, belts, harnesses, depth gauges, knives, and watches. In a rack were dozens of air tanks, and, lined up on the floor, were rows of nonmagnetic tools.

  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," Am
os 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 m
e 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."