Rankin tiptoed out, thankful as any schoolboy that his sentence
should at least have been postponed. On his way to the mess he was
determined to look in for a last chance about his message to “his
ship.” He was thinking of it in those terms himself now; though his
anxiety to get in touch with her was quite beyond his own analysis.
In the little sending-room, heavy with ozone, there was an
atmosphere of frenzied haste. The operator was working frantically
at his sender and straining to listen for the answering whispers
which came only in intermittent dashes or in blurred nothings. The
man continued sitting at his instrument and shot broken sentences at
the officer between the spasms of staccato raspings from his key.
“Sorry, sir--nothing yet--tried five minutes ago--try her again later.
Urgent code stuff comin’ in--awful jumble. Static is somethin’
fierce, ’count o’ this storm brewing.”
In the intervals of hurried speech he worked his key with his right
hand and scribbled simultaneously with his left. He tore the form
from his pad and thrust it at his messenger.
“Commandant! Jump to it! Yes, sir; somebody’s all excited up
somewhere; coding like mad. Trying to give a bearing, but I can’t
get it. There she goes again! If you’ll wait a bit, sir, I’ll try
your ship again soon’s I’m clear.”
Rankin waited, feeling vaguely uneasy about the breakdown of his
ship’s wireless. The key crackled on, harsh, powerful, suggestive of
imminent mystery somewhere. Rankin’s elementary study of the
international Morse presently recognized the recurring dash-dot,
dash-dot as “repeat.” Suddenly the operator sprang to his feet and
stood to rigid attention.
Rankin wheeled, and saw--the commandant! With him was the officer of
the watch.
Once again he was caught. A little thing this time; but still it was
dallying with the thin edge of obedience. Rankin was surprised to
find himself feeling his guilt.
But the commandant noticed him no more than he did the
stiff-standing messenger. That great man’s usually impassive face
was flushed with uneasiness. The sheaf of decoded messages was
clutched into a crumpled ball in his hand.
It must surely be something of the most extreme urgency, thought
Rankin, which would bring the lord of all the navy-yard universe
hurrying to the radio station in person. The commandant’s whole
attention, in fact, was directed fiercely at the operator.
“Get me that bearing!” he shot at him. “I must have that bearing!
Seventy-two west, you say; is that correct? But the latitude, man;
what’s the latitude?”
“Correct as I can catch it, sir. Receiver’s somethin’ awful to-day;
but seventy-two’s what I make it out. An’ I just got latitude
thirty-three, twenty.”
The information seemed to upset the great man entirely.
“Great Heaven! Just what I thought. She’s steaming right into it!
Call the destroyer Woodruff immediately and stand by to send this;
my code number, precedence of everything!”
The operator’s face went blank at the thought.
“Destroyer Woodruff? Sorry, sir. Can’t pick her up. Been trying for
an hour. Wireless must be out of commission.”
“You can’t pick-- My God! Dead in her course, too!” The flush of
excitement on the commandant’s stern face had paled. “Call again,
man! Keep on calling, and don’t stop!”
The tenseness was broken by the flashing crackle which streamed
again from the sender. The commandant waited, tapping his foot in
his agitation. Into his ferment Rankin with all his inexperience of
official propriety intruded.
“Pardon me, sir. May I ask what is the trouble?”
“Eh, what!” The commandant looked at him blankly for a moment. Then
indignation added to his nervous irritation. “What the-- Your
curiosity is out of place, _Ensign_ Rankin.”
“Pardon me. _My ship, sir._” Rankin said it with a feeling of pride,
as though it conferred a right upon him.
“Your--ah, yes. And you missed her! Well, sir, _your ship is steaming
into a whole fleet of submarines_! That’s the trouble. Five of them;
or maybe ten, or a hundred, as far as we can make out from these
confounded code flashes.”
“Whe-e-ew!” The wireless operator whistled his startled amazement
before he remembered that he was merely a machine who heard nothing
and knew nothing of what passed in that little electric-charged
room, a highly sensitized automaton, bound by many oaths to eternal
dumbness; then he hid his confusion under the crisp hissing of his
key.
Rankin echoed his whistle. But his was a personal interest. There
was a danger; and he thought somehow that he ought to be there to
share it. “His ship” had taken a definite meaning in his mind. In
the strained silence which followed, broken only by the intermittent
crackling calls into the void, he pictured her rushing into the
peril, all unwarned and unsuspecting. Vaguely the commandant’s voice
came to him, talking to the operator seemingly out of the distance.
“It is imperative to communicate. We _must_ get in touch.”
It woke him out of his abstraction with a start. A wild idea had
begun to take shape in his brain. Thoughtless of all pros and cons,
he grasped at it with enthusiasm. Eagerly he burst out:
“How about an aeroplane, sir?”
“Ha, an aeroplane!” With the exclamation the commandant’s face
cleared, and for a moment he contemplated the idea as an inspiration
of Providence. Then he shook his head.
“Impossible! Why, man, the Woodruff is two hundred miles on her way
to Havana by now!”
“I could make that easily, sir; I’ve flown more than that before
now.”
“And if you should miss her?”
“With a hydro, sir, I could come down alongside and be picked up.”
“Nonsense, boy!” the commandant snapped testily at his thoughtless
enthusiasm. “I don’t mean that. Think, man, think. In any case, with
a sea running like to-day’s, you’d be smashed to splinters long
before you could ever be picked up. But what I mean is, suppose you
should miss her entirely?
“From what I know of those things, your course is a matter of
guesswork, anyway, and you have to keep checking up by landmarks all
the time. Out at sea you’d lose yourself in ten minutes. And when
you’ve missed her, how are you coming back? Two hundred out and two
hundred back, to say nothing if another hundred or so lost in
overhauling her and scouting around. Why, man, there’s not a machine
in the service capable of making that. Certainly not without special
preparation. No, sir; the chance is too desperate for me to order
any man out on a thing like that.”
Rankin’s enthusiasm, fell with a cruel slump, and all the happy
eagerness died out of his face. All these things he had overlooked
in the first flush of his inspiration; and they were all true, too.
The older man, keen old veteran, with practised anticipation of all
possible eventualities, had put his finger with unerring accuracy on
each of the weak spots. Nor did he magnify their weakness at all.
The thing was desperate, a forlorn hope.
Rankin turned them dully over in his mind, looking for a possible
saving clause, but not a one could he find. The eagerness then died
from his face. But slowly its place began to be taken by a cold
determination.
“I--I’d like to volunteer, sir, anyhow--to convey a warning to my
ship.”
“Hey, what? What’s that? You’d like to volunteer?” The snappy
irritation in the commandant’s voice was tempered with a sudden
human understanding. He looked with fierce appraisal into the pale,
hard-set face. The drama had crystallized down to just the two of
them, two strong men looking into each other’s wide eyes with a
single vital question-mark between them.
The rest of the scene and the men in it were forgotten as far as
these two were concerned. But the others stood in strained,
expectant positions as though they had been frozen. The signaler
ceased from his incessant crackle to hang on the commandant’s words.
Twenty seconds--thirty--a full minute; and only the broken, noisy
breathing of somebody was heard. Then the commandant shook his head
slowly, regretfully.
“Impossible, boy! I can’t do it! No, we must find some other way.
Besides”--there was a world of kindliness in the tone--“you see--I’m
sorry--but you’ve been officially declared ‘unfit for aviation.’ I
couldn’t let you go, even if I could contemplate your plan for a
second. No, no, my boy, I’m sorry.”
He walked slowly to the door. There he turned suddenly, and the
voice was snappily terse again.
“Signaler! What have you stopped for? Keep calling, and don’t stop
for anything under any circumstances. If your wrist gives out, get a
relay; and let me know immediately as soon as you connect.
Immediately, by cycle orderly--Mr. Tracy, will you see to that? And
my compliments to the senior officers of the yard to confer with me
in my office immediately, please.”
The officer of the watch saluted. The commandant strode from the
room. And in the immediately following swift bustle Rankin was the
only man with nothing on his hands.
But his soul was full of bitter disappointment and heart-burning.
“Unfit!” The reminder was a cruel stab into his enthusiasm, however
kindly it had been put. He stood inertly, wrestling with bitter
indecision for whole minutes, and then a queer expression, half
smile half grimness, stole slowly over his face and he crept out of
the room.
His next movements certainly looked like desertion, urged by
desperation and tinged with madness. For, once out of the
radio-room, he raced about the yard like one demented. To the sacred
precincts of the instrument-room he rushed, and, making some wild
explanation to the man in charge, he removed therefrom several of
the neat leather cases of queer shapes. Another swift foray procured
him a chart. In like manner he _borrowed_ a car from the long,
neatly parked line of officers’ private conveyances. Whose it was he
didn’t know, and he didn’t care; only he took the one which seemed
to give promise of the greatest speed.
Within five minutes of the commandant’s decision he was disobeying
for the second time that day his orders to confine himself to the
yard. Disobeying with speed and violence, for he was shooting down
the long concrete road which led to the main gate like a dark-red
shell.
Senior Lieutenant Tracy, the officer of the watch, became aware of
the thing hurtling down upon him, and he jumped angrily aside. What
fool was breaking yard regulations like that? He recognized Rankin
as he whizzed past, and remembered the commandant’s order. He called
wildly after him, but Rankin never swerved an inch. Bent low over
the wheel, he fired himself at the gate. Officers’ cars, of course,
were never questioned. The gate opened with profane promptness, and
Rankin whirled out of his prison. Ten minutes later he was roaring
down the road which pointed like a long, straight tape line to
Atlantic City.