They Laughed at the “Slow Black Cat” Drifting Over the Solomons—Until Night Convoys Vanished One by One and the Ocean Began Answering in Voices Through the Radio
The first time Lieutenant Haruto Koga saw a PBY Catalina, it was in daylight—so bright the sea looked like hammered metal and the clouds seemed painted on.
He and the other pilots were returning to base, engines humming, canopies speckled with salt, when the lookout on the coastal ridge began waving like a man trying to swat the sun out of the sky.
Koga followed the gesture and squinted toward the northern horizon.
At first he saw nothing but glare and distance. Then—slowly—a silhouette formed, low and heavy, skimming the sky as if it was unsure whether it belonged to air or water.
A flying boat.
A strange, long-winged creature with a hull like a canoe and twin engines that looked too small for its bulk. It moved unhurriedly, almost lazily, like a seabird that had decided it did not care about predators.
One of Koga’s wingmen laughed over the radio.
“Look at it,” the pilot said. “A fat crow wearing a sailor’s coat.”
Another voice chimed in. “Americans can’t build fighters, so they fly boats.”
The squadron’s chatter filled with amusement. Even Koga, usually careful with his words, felt a small curl of contempt.
It was slow. It was large. It was—by every rule Koga had trained with—an easy target.
Yet it didn’t run.
It didn’t dive away.
It simply turned, as if marking their position with the calm certainty of something that did not fear being followed.
Koga watched it until it disappeared behind a cloud.
In the squadron debrief that afternoon, the Catalina wasn’t even mentioned as a threat. It was filed away as a nuisance, a patrol aircraft—useful for scouting, perhaps, but hardly something that could change the war.
The older officers referred to it with a dismissive nickname they’d picked up from intercepted chatter:
Kuroneko. Black cat.
“A slow black cat,” Captain Ishida said, smiling as he rolled a cigarette between his fingers. “It prowls at night and cries when it’s hungry.”
Laughter, again.
Koga didn’t laugh loudly, but he smiled politely.
He regretted that smile later.
Because the first convoy disappeared three nights after he saw the Catalina.
It was supposed to be routine—three transports, a light escort, and a destroyer to cover them through a narrow channel between islands. Supplies, ammunition, food. The kind of lifeblood every outpost needed.
The convoy left at dusk.
By midnight, their radio had gone quiet.
At first, the operations room assumed a storm. Then they assumed equipment failure. Then they assumed the convoy had been delayed by reefs.
By dawn, when a scouting plane found oil on the water and floating debris glinting like broken mirrors, no one was smiling.
The escort destroyer was gone.
The transports were gone.
No survivors.
And the most unsettling detail was not what had been destroyed, but how.
There were no reports of a surface battle. No frantic distress calls. No drawn-out engagement.
Just silence.
Like the sea had opened its mouth and swallowed everything whole.
In the days that followed, rumors spread through the base like heat.
Some said American submarines had moved closer.
Some said local coastwatchers were guiding enemy forces.
Some said mines had been laid.
Captain Ishida insisted it was coincidence. “The ocean is large,” he said. “Sometimes ships simply disappear.”
But then a second convoy vanished.
And then a third.
All at night.
All on routes that were supposed to be safe.
All with that same frightening lack of warning.
Koga began to notice changes in the men around him. Laughter became thinner. Cigarettes were smoked faster. Pilots slept with their boots on.
Even the sea looked different—less like a familiar border and more like a vast, patient predator.
One evening, as Koga walked past the radio hut, he heard something that made him stop.
Not voices.
Not speech.
A sound like breathing.
Low, rhythmic, and faintly distorted.
The radio operator inside was pale, his hand hovering over the dials as if he didn’t want to touch them.
Koga stepped in. “What is that?”
The operator swallowed. “We’ve been hearing it at night. It comes and goes. It’s not a message.”
“Then what is it?”
The operator’s eyes flicked toward the darkening window. “It sounds like… the ocean talking back.”
Koga’s skin prickled. “Stop talking nonsense.”
But his own voice lacked conviction.
The operator adjusted the frequency slightly. The sound shifted—turned into a crackle, then back into that low, steady presence.
“Record it,” Koga ordered.
The operator nodded and reached for a reel.
That night, Koga sat in the operations building while maps were spread out and route pins were moved like pieces in a game that had stopped being fun.
An intelligence officer, Lieutenant Tanaka, pointed at the Solomons chain on the map.
“Convoys are being hit near these channels,” Tanaka said. “Always after midnight. Always in areas where visibility is poor, where moonlight is broken by cloud.”
Captain Ishida scoffed. “Then it’s submarines. We’ll send more destroyers.”
Tanaka hesitated. “There’s another possibility.”
The room’s attention sharpened.
Tanaka glanced at Koga, then continued carefully. “American patrol aircraft.”
More scoffing.
“A patrol plane cannot sink ships,” Ishida snapped.
Tanaka’s voice stayed calm. “Not in the day. But at night…”
Koga’s mind flashed back to the Catalina silhouette, heavy and slow.
Ishida waved a hand. “Even if it sees us, it cannot strike.”
Tanaka tapped a folder. “We have reports from other sectors. A black-painted Catalina. Night operations. Torpedoes or bombs dropped from low altitude. The Americans call them—” he paused, searching for the term, “—Black Cats.”
The room went quiet.
Ishida’s cigarette paused halfway to his lips.
Koga felt a slow chill.
So the nickname wasn’t a joke.
It was a warning.
That night, Koga volunteered for patrol duty.
It wasn’t officially his assignment—he flew faster aircraft meant for interception. But something inside him demanded he see the threat with his own eyes again.
The sky was dark, the kind of dark that felt thick. Stars glittered above like distant shards, and the sea below was a single black sheet with only occasional pale foam lines where waves broke against reefs.
Koga flew low, listening to his engine, watching for any shape that didn’t belong.
Hours passed.
Then, near midnight, the radio crackled.
Not a voice.
That breathing again—low and steady—filling the channel like a presence.
Koga’s grip tightened.
He scanned the horizon, his eyes straining.
At first he saw nothing.
Then he saw it.
A silhouette, darker than the sky, moving low over the water. Its wings wide, its body bulky. It wasn’t fast. It didn’t need to be.
It moved like it had all night.
The Catalina.
But this one was different from the daytime patrol plane.
Its paint was black—so black it seemed to erase starlight. No markings visible. No glint of metal. Just a shadow floating over the sea like an idea.
Koga’s heart hammered.
He could have called it in. Could have radioed for interception.
But something stopped him.
Because the Catalina wasn’t alone.
Below it, Koga saw faint wakes—thin lines of disturbed water.
A convoy.
His convoy.
The one scheduled to pass through the channel tonight.
And the Catalina was already positioned ahead of it, slow and patient, as if waiting for a precise moment.
Koga’s mouth went dry.
He radioed immediately. “Enemy aircraft sighted. Black Catalina. Low altitude. Bearing—”
Static swallowed the last part.
The breathing returned, louder now, as if the radio itself was drowning.
Koga cursed and tried another frequency.
Nothing.
The Catalina dipped slightly.
For a moment, it looked like it might land on the water.
Then small flashes dropped from beneath its wing—objects falling with a calm inevitability.
Koga’s eyes widened.
A second later, the sea erupted.
Not a towering explosion, but a sudden, violent bloom of fire and spray that lit the night like a wound opening.
One of the transports disappeared into smoke.
The escort ship turned sharply, searchlights stabbing the darkness, but the Catalina had already shifted, gliding sideways like a predator avoiding a spear.
Koga dove toward it.
His aircraft was faster, lighter. He could catch it.
But then the Catalina fired.
Not with a neat fighter’s burst, but with a heavy, sweeping barrage—tracers arcing upward from positions Koga hadn’t expected. The slow aircraft had teeth in places he hadn’t imagined.
Koga jerked his plane hard, feeling rounds snap past.
The Catalina didn’t chase. It didn’t need to.
It simply kept moving, sliding into darkness as if the night itself was a cloak made for it.
Another blast flared below—another ship hit.
Koga’s stomach twisted.
He tried again to radio warnings, but the channel was clogged with that breathing, now mixed with broken static and faint, warped sounds that almost—almost—resembled whispers.
Like the ocean was swallowing words.
Koga chased the Catalina briefly, but it vanished into a bank of cloud and shadow.
When he returned to base near dawn, his aircraft touched down with a heavy thud, and he ran to the operations building.
The room was chaos—officers shouting, radio operators pale, maps being dragged across tables.
Captain Ishida looked up as Koga entered, his face tight.
“Report,” Ishida barked.
Koga’s voice came out hoarse. “The convoy was attacked by a black Catalina. Low altitude. It struck like a hunter—slow, precise. I tried to warn them, but our radios—”
He stopped.
Because the radio operator in the corner was playing back the recording.
The breathing filled the room, low and steady.
And under it—faint, distorted—something that sounded almost like a voice.
Not Japanese. Not English. Just syllables twisted by static.
It could have been nothing.
But in the hush that followed, every man in the room heard what his fear wanted him to hear.
A whisper.
A promise.
The sea, speaking through the wires.
Tanaka spoke first, voice shaking slightly. “It’s not the ocean.”
Ishida stared at the radio as if it had betrayed him. “Then what is it?”
Tanaka swallowed. “Interference. Jamming. The Catalina is carrying equipment—transmitters. They flood our channels, drown our warnings. They don’t just attack ships. They attack communication.”
Koga’s hands clenched.
That was the new kind of defeat.
Not metal against metal.
But silence against coordination.
In the following weeks, the base changed.
Convoys began leaving with radio discipline tightened. Frequencies shifted. Escort ships posted lookouts for low-flying shadows. Anti-air guns were repositioned for upward angles that had once been considered unnecessary.
But none of it fully removed the fear.
Because the Black Cat didn’t need to win every night.
It only needed to make them wonder.
Every dark cloud became suspicion. Every radio crackle became dread. Every sea breeze felt like a whisper.
And Koga—Lieutenant Haruto Koga—stopped laughing entirely.
One night, weeks later, he stood on the coastal ridge where the lookout had waved at the sun the first time.
The sea below was black, breathing quietly against the shore.
A radio operator stood beside him, headphones on, face tense.
“Do you hear it?” Koga asked.
The operator nodded slowly. “Yes.”
The breathing filled the headset.
Koga stared out at the water, eyes scanning.
Then, far out, so low it could have been a trick of distance, a shadow moved across the darkness—wide wings, slow drift.
The Black Cat.
It didn’t hurry.
It didn’t need to.
It knew the night belonged to it.
Koga whispered, not into the radio, but into the wind as if the ocean itself might understand.
“We mocked you,” he said. “And now you hunt us.”
The radio crackled.
The breathing deepened.
And for one chilling second, Koga could have sworn the static shaped itself into something like laughter—soft, distant, and impossibly calm.
Then the horizon flared with sudden fire.
Another convoy.
Another disappearance.
And the night swallowed the screams before they could become words.
