Enigma (36 page)

“Also the same. For now.”

Jericho went back to his desk and manipulated the original crib
under the new cryptogram.

K L Y S Q N L P

D D F G R X??

Again, there were no letter clashes. The golden rule of Enigma,
its single, fatal weakness: nothing is ever itself—A can never be
A, B can never be B…It was working. His feet performed a little tap
dance of delight beneath the table. He glanced up to find Baxter
staring at him and he realised, to his horror, that he was
smiling.

“Pleased?”

“Of course not.”

But such was his shame that when, an hour later, Logie came
through to say that a second U-boat had just sent a contact signal,
he felt himself personally responsible.

SOUY YTRQ

At 11.40, a third U-boat began to shadow the convoy, at 12.20, a
fourth, and suddenly Jericho had seven signals on his desk. He was
conscious of people coming up and looking over his shoulder—Logie
with his burning hayrick of a pipe and the meaty smell and heavy
breathing of Skynner. He didn’t look round. He didn’t talk. The
outside world had melted for him. Even Claire was just a phantom
now. There were only the loops of letters, forming and stretching
out towards him from the grey Atlantic, multiplying on his sheets
of paper, turning into thin chains of possibility in his mind.

♦

They didn’t stop for breakfast, nor for lunch. Minute by minute,
throughout the afternoon, the cryptanalysts followed, at third
hand, the progress of the chase two thousand miles away. The
commander of the convoy was signalling to the Admiralty, the
Admiralty had an open line to Cave, and Cave would shout each time
a fresh development looked like affecting the hunt for cribs.

Two signals came at 13.40—one a short contact report, the other
longer, almost certainly originating from the U-boat that had
started the hunt. Both were for the first time close enough to be
fixed by direction finders on board the convoy’s own escorts. Cave
listened gravely for a minute, then announced that HMS Mansfield, a
destroyer, was being dispatched from the main body of merchantmen
to attack the U-boats.

“The convoy’s just made an emergency turn to the southeast.
She’s going to try to shake off the hearses while Mansfield forces
them under.”

Jericho looked up. “What course is she steering?”

“What course is she steering?” repeated Cave into the telephone.
“I said,” he yelled, “what fucking course is she steering?” He
winced at Jericho. The receiver was jammed tight to his scarred
ear. “All right. Yes. Thank you. Convoy steering 118 degrees.”
Jericho reached for the Short Signal Code Book.

“Will they manage to get away?” asked Baxter.

Cave bent over his chart with a rule and protractor. “Maybe.
It’s what I’d do in their place.”

A quarter of an hour passed and nothing happened.

“Perhaps they have done it,” said Puck. “Then what do we
do?”

Cave said: “How much more material do you need?”

Jericho counted through the signals. “We’ve got nine. We need
another twenty. Another twenty-five would be better.”

“Jesus!” Cave regarded them with disgust. “It’s like sitting
with a flock of carrion.”

Somewhere behind them a telephone managed half a ring before it
was snatched out of its cradle. Logie came in a moment later, still
writing.

“That was St Erith reporting an E-bar signal at 49.4 degrees
north, 38.1 degrees west.”

“New location,” said Cave, studying his charts. He made a cross,
then threw his pencil down and leaned back in his chair, rubbing
his face. “All she’s managed to do is run straight from one hearse
into another. Which is what? The fifth? Christ, the sea must be
teeming with them.”

“She isn’t going to get away,” said Puck, “is she?”

“Not a chance. Not if they’re coming in from all around
her.”

A Wren moved among the cryptanalysts, doling out the latest
cryptogram: BKEL UUXS.

Ten signals. Five U-boats in contact.

“Grid square?”said Jericho.

♦

Hester Wallace was not a poker player, which was a mistake on
her part as she had been blessed with a poker face that could have
made her a fortune. Nobody watching her wheel her bicycle into the
shed beside the canteen that afternoon, or seeing her flick her
pass at the sentry, or squeezing up against the corridor wall in
Hut 6 to let her march by, or sitting opposite her in Intercept
Control—nobody would have guessed the turmoil in her mind.

Her complexion was, as ever, pale, her forehead slightly creased
by a frown that discouraged conversation. She wore her long, dark
hair like a headache, savagely twisted up and speared. Her costume
was the usual uniform of the West Country schoolmistress: flat
shoes, grey woollen stockings, plain grey skirt, white shirt and an
elderly but well-cut tweed jacket which she would shortly take off
and hang over the back of the chair, for the afternoon was warm.
Her fingers moved across the blist in a short, staccato pecking
motion. She had hardly slept all night.

Name of intercept station, time of interception, frequency, call
sign, letter groups.

Where was the record of settings kept? That was the first matter
to determine. Not in Control, obviously. Not in the Index Room. Not
in the Registry. And not next door in the Registration Room,
either: she had already made a quick inspection there. The Decoding
Room was a possibility, but the Type-X girls were always
complaining they were cramped for space, and sixty separate Enigma
keys, their settings changed daily—in the case of the Luftwaffe,
sometimes twice a day—well, that was a minimum of five hundred
pieces of information every week, 25,000 in a year, and this was
the war’s fourth year. That would suggest a sizeable catalogue; a
small library, in fact.

The only conclusion was that they had to be kept where the
cryptanalysts worked, in the Machine Room, or else close by.

She finished blisting Chicksands, noon till three, and moved
towards the door.

Her first pass through the Machine Room was spoiled by nerves:
straight through it to the other end of the hut without even
glancing from side to side. She stood outside the Decoding Room,
cursing her fears, pretending to study the noticeboard. With a
shaking hand she made a note about a performance of Die Fledermaus
by the Bletchley Park Music Society which she had no intention of
ever attending.

The second run was better.

There was no machinery in the Machine Room—the origin of its
name was lost in the glorious mists of 1940—just desks,
cryptanalysts, wire baskets filled with signals and, on the wall to
the right, shelf after shelf of files. She stopped and looked
around distractedly, as if searching for a familiar face. The
problem was, she knew nobody. But then her gaze fell upon a bald
head with a few long, ginger hairs combed pathetically across a
freckled crown, and she realised that wasn’t entirely true.

She knew Cordingley.

Dear old, dull old Donald Cordingley, the winner—in a crowded
field—of the Dullest Man in Bletchley contest. Ineligible for
military service due to a funnel chest. By profession: actuary. Ten
years’ service with the Scottish Widows Assurance Society in the
City of London, until a lucky third place in the Daily Telegraph
crossword competition won him a seat in the Hut 6 Machine Room.

Her seat.

She watched him for a few more seconds, then moved away.

When she got back to Control Miles Mermagen was standing by her
desk.

“How was Beaumanor?”

“Engrossing.”

She had left her jacket over her chair and he ran his hand over
the collar, feeling the material between his thumb and forefinger,
as if checking it for quality.

“How’d you get there?”

“A friend gave me a lift.”

“A male friend, I gather.” Mermagen’s smile was wide and
unfriendly.

“How do you know that?” “I have my spies,” he said.

♦

The ocean was alive with signals. They were landing on Jericho’s
desk at the rate of one every twenty minutes.

At 16.00 a sixth U-boat fastened on to the convoy and soon
afterwards Cave announced that HX-229 was making another turn, to
028 degrees, in her latest and (in his opinion) hopeless attempt to
escape her pursuers.

By 18.00 Jericho had a pile of nineteen contact signals, out of
which he had conjured three four-letter loops and a mass of
half-sketched bombe menus that looked like the plans for some
complex game of hopscotch. His neck and shoulders were so knotted
with tension he could barely straighten up.

The room by now was crowded. Pinker, Kingcome and Proudfoot had
come back on shift. The other British naval lieutenant, Villiers,
was standing next to Cave, who was explaining something on one of
his charts. A Wren with a tray offered Jericho a curling Spam
sandwich and an enamel mug of tea and he took them gratefully.

Logie came up behind him and tousled his hair.

“How are you feeling, old love?”

“Wrecked, frankly.”

“Want to knock off?”

“Very funny.”

“Come into my office and I’ll give you something. Bring your
tea.”

The “something” turned out to be a large, yellow Benzedrine
tablet, of which Logie had half a dozen in an hexagonal
pillbox.

Jericho hesitated. “I’m not sure I should. These helped send me
runny last time.”

“They’ll get you through the night, though, won’t they? Come on,
old thing. The commandos swear by them.” He rattled the box under
Jericho’s nose. “So you’ll crash out at breakfast? So what? By then
we’ll either have this bugger beaten. Or not. In which case it
won’t matter, will it?” He took one of the pills and pressed it
into Jericho’s palm. “Go on. I won’t tell Nurse.” He closed
Jericho’s fingers around it and said quietly: “Because I can’t let
you go, you know, old love. Not tonight. Not you. Some of the
others, maybe, but not you.”

“Oh, Christ. Well, since you put it so nicely.”

Jericho swallowed the pill with a mouthful of tea. It left a
foul taste and he drained his mug to try and swill it away. Logie
regarded him fondly.

“That’s my boy.” He put the box back in his desk drawer and
locked it. “I’ve been protecting your bloody back again,
incidentally. I had to tell him you were much too important to be
disturbed.”

“Tell who? Skynner?”

“No. Not Skynner. Wigram.”

“What does he want?”

“You, old cock. I’d say he wants you. Skinned, stuffed and
mounted on a pole somewhere. Really, I don’t know, for such a quiet
bloke, you don’t half make some enemies. I told him to come back at
midnight. All right by you?”

Before Jericho could reply the telephone rang and Logie grabbed
it.

“Yes? Speaking.” He grunted and stretched across his desk for a
pencil. “Time of origin 19.02, 52.1 degrees north, 37.2 degrees
west. Thanks, Bill. Keep the faith.”

He replaced the receiver.

“And then there were seven…”

♦

It was dark again and the lights were on in the Big Room. The
sentries outside were banging the blackout shutters into place,
like prison warders locking up their charges for the night.

Jericho hadn’t set foot out of the hut for twenty-four hours,
hadn’t even looked out of the window. As he slipped back into his
seat and checked his coat to make sure the cryptograms were still
there, he wondered vaguely what kind of day it had been and what
Hester was doing.

Don’t think about that now.

Already, he could feel the Benzedrine beginning to take effect.
The muscles of his heart seemed feathery, his body charged. When he
glanced across his notes, what had seemed inert and impenetrable a
half-hour ago was suddenly fluid and full of possibility.

The new cryptogram was already on his desk: YALB DKYF.

“Naval grid square BD 2742,” called Cave. “Course 055 degrees.
Convoy speed nine and a half knots.”

Logie said: “A message from Mr Skynner. A bottle of Scotch for
the first man with a menu for the bombes.”

Twenty-three signals received. Seven U-boats in contact. Two
hours to go till nightfall in the North Atlantic.

♦

20.00: nine U-boats in contact.

20.46: ten.

♦

The Control Room girls took a table near the serving hatch for
their evening meal. Celia Davenport showed them all some pictures
of her fiancé, who was fighting in the desert, while Anthea
Leigh-Delamere brayed endlessly about a meet of the Bicester Hunt.
Hester passed on the photographs without looking at them. Her eyes
were fixed on Donald Cordingley, queuing to collect his lump of
coelacanth, or whatever other obscure example of God’s aquatic
creatures they were now required to eat.

She was cleverer than he, and he knew it.

She intimidated him.

Hello, Donald, she thought. Hello, Donald…Oh, nothing much, just
this new back-break section, coming along with bucket and shovel
after the Lord Mayor’s parade…Now, listen, Donald, there’s this
funny little wireless net, Konotop-Prihiki-Poltava, in the southern
Ukraine. Nothing vital, but we’ve never quite broken it and
Archie—you must know Archie?—Archie has a theory it may be a
variant on Vulture…Traffic runs through February and the first few
days in March…That’s right…

She watched him as he sat alone and picked at his lonely supper.
She watched him, indeed, as if she were a vulture. And when, after
fifteen minutes, he rose and scraped the leftovers from his plate
into the swill bins, she rose as well, and followed him.

She was vaguely aware of the other girls staring after her in
astonishment. She ignored them.

She tracked him all the way back to Hut 6, gave him five minutes
to settle down, then went in after him.

The Machine Room was shaded and somnolent, like a library at
dusk. She tapped him lightly on the shoulder.