Russell returned to the desk and followed Crossle’s instructions. Half an hour later he returned with a look of sheepishness. "I didn’t seem to have any luck," he confessed, handing over his worksheet.
Crossle glanced at the sheet with a good-humored smile. "You’ll be able to pick it out more readily when your eyes become accustomed to words jammed together. It reads: Totally disabled. Longitude forty, latitude seventy-three."
"What did you do about it?" Russell asked.
"A destroyer was immediately dispatched to the point designated and discovered that a German submarine had floundered in a depth of fifty fathoms. The messages, apparently, had been sent to another U-boat which was unable to render assistance in time. We sent a diver down who made an entrance by means of a dynamite charge and recovered many valuable German admiralty documents. Among those was a code book of the German Navy."