She was old by the standards of war, yet USS Pike (SS-173) had not lost her bite. By the summer of 1943, the Porpoise-class submarine had already patrolled the Pacific through some of its darkest days. She had been on the front lines when the war broke out, prowling the waters off the Philippines. She had weathered early operations out of Darwin, ducked depth charges near Wake Island, and fired torpedoes into the teeth of Japanese convoys off Truk. But nothing in Pike’s history to that point matched the success of her eighth war patrol.