“If by that time not one of you has found the convoy, you are to go your own ways, looking for whatever you can find on this patrol. And by that time, if you find anything like the big convoy, the only thing to do will be to surface and radio us so we can all close in for the kill. We’ll lose the element of surprise but we’ll get them, anyway.” Next, the Intelligence Officer went over the details of routes and rendezvous spots for each submarine. March saw at once that _Kamongo_ was taking a westerly course from their base, then heading northwest. It seemed to him that this should be one of the most likely routes for a convoy to take from Japan to Truk, and he was pleased. Then Larry Gray asked a question of the Intelligence Officer. “Those rendezvous spots,” he said. “They appear to be in open sea, but I know there are little atolls all over the place. Are they near such islands?” “No, they are not,” the Captain said. “Purposely. The Japs have little garrisons on a great many of those tiny islands that look no more than bumps on the sea. Some of them have radios. If they saw the contact of an American sub and an American patrol plane so far from our bases, they’d report it. That wouldn’t tell the Japs much, but the less they know the better we like it, no matter how unimportant it may seem. No, the meeting places are in open water. The navigators have a little work to do on this patrol.” Larry glanced at March and smiled. March knew it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to find one exact spot in the middle of a big ocean by dead reckoning. After going over all details of the complicated plan thoroughly, the skipper and their execs returned to their own submarines to see that everything was ready for getting under way. Fuel and supplies and torpedoes had been loaded into all the pigboats and there remained only a final check before they could depart. In the night they slipped away from their tender one by one and, traveling on the surface under the protection of night, they headed out to sea silently, on the alert, eagerly looking forward to the task ahead. The crew of each pigboat felt that _they_ would be the ones to find the convoy, the first to go in for the attack. But on the second day not a sign of the convoy had been seen by any of the submarines. “Must be coming more slowly than we thought,” Larry suggested. “We’ll catch up with it before the next patrol stop.” At the time Larry spoke they were on the surface in the late afternoon, watching the big American flying boat slide down out of the clouds and circle above them. March had felt a thrill of satisfaction when he saw it, knowing that it meant he had found his particular spot in the wide Pacific, but Larry just seemed to take it for granted that his navigator would have brought them where they were supposed to be, no matter how difficult the job.