So he turned his attention to the sea ahead of him, where he hoped to sight the convoy. Looking at the chart occasionally and checking his speed, he calculated where he must be. Then he saw it! First a few clouds of smoke far ahead on the horizon. Then little dots below the smoke—dots that were Jap ships. More and more and more of them he saw, line after line in orderly procession. Up ahead and at the sides were destroyers and near the front a battleship—no, two battleships. As he flew on further he made out a carrier in the center and at the end three cruisers and more destroyers kept a rear guard. “Don’t want to get any closer than I have to,” Scoot spoke aloud to himself. “But I want to get all the dope I can and as accurately as possible. Got to stick around long enough to check their speed and course.” He flew on, counting, checking, making another estimate to compare with his first. “About fifty-five ships,” he said to himself. “Eight miles long, three miles wide. Pretty slow—there must be some old freighters in there. About ten knots.” He grabbed a chart and quickly plotted the convoy’s course, wrote brief notations of his conclusions, tucked the paper into a waterproof pouch and stuck it in his pocket. “Won’t trust to memory, anyway,” he said. Then, feeling that he had learned all he could, he banked the plane and turned away, still about two miles ahead of the leading ships. He looked back down at them as he headed eastward once more. “Right now they’re wondering what’s going on,” he said to himself. “Up to now they haven’t thought a thing. They saw the plane coming in and just thought it was a little earlier than they had expected. That maybe made them wonder if I had some special report. But now they really are in a dither! They just can’t figure out why I should come so close and then turn back.” He laughed. “Well, that’s their problem, not mine.” He gave the little plane all the speed he could. If they were going to send up a plane to have a look at him, he wanted to get as far away as possible. They might send up several planes. “If they’re fast, then I’m sunk,” Scoot said. “But why should they send up a flock of planes to look at one Jap seaplane that acts a little funny?” He checked his course often, so that he could land where the submarine could pick him up. And he kept looking behind for the Jap plane that might be coming after him. He did not have to wait long for that. Half an hour away from the convoy he saw the fast little pursuit ship behind him, coming like the wind. He wished his own plane could travel twice as fast, but he could not urge another mile per hour from it. Gradually the gap closed between the two planes. “Now what?” Scoot asked himself. “What should I do? I’ll keep right on this course, first of all. And I’ll just keep flying straight ahead as if I were minding my own business. Nothing much else I _can_ do. That plane’s got three times the speed and ten times the fire power of this one!”