THE LAST GOOD WAR: A Novel (6 page)

All eyes turned toward Anna. "There goes not only topology, but my whole university program," she thought. But she nodded. In spite of the drudgery of note-taking and record-keeping, the project would be just as interesting as university work. Also, it could be a whole lot more important: the security of the nation might depend on it.

“Thank you, Anna. Now, let's come back to our first problem: What could the Germans have done five months ago to make their messages indecipherable?"

"One," responded Jerzy, "they may have scrapped the old machine, and are now working with a completely different design."

"Well," said Henryk, taken aback, "that certainly puts it on the line. If so, it seems that we have only two ways out. We might be able to steal one of their new machines. I wonder what kind of talent we have in our jails?" he mused, only half joking. "The second option—try to reconstruct the new machine from the messages we've intercepted. What do you think, Marian?"

"That would be tough—much tougher than the first time I did it back in 1932, because then I had both messages and wheel settings. If it's the same machine, with different wheels, I could calculate how many intercepts of the same type—Blue, say—we would need to reconstruct the wheels. I bet it will be a pile, but I may be able to have some rough calculations by the end of the week.

"If they've done something other than introduce new wheels—for example, if they're now using a bigger keyboard and larger wheels to accommodate numbers as well as letters, all bets are off. In that case, I don't know what to suggest."

Jerzy picked up his line of thought. “Another possibility: The Germans may be using double encryption. That is, once a message goes through the Enigma scrambler, they may send it through a second encryption—for example, with a codebook, or by somehow modifying the Enigma machine."

"In other words," responded Henryk, "we're not sure if we just want to steal a new machine, or whether we want our burglars to pick up codebooks while they're at it…. Any other thoughts?"

There was no response. “Let's come back to this later,” said Henryk. “It's time for Jerzy's problem.”

Jerzy puffed on his cigar, laying a pall of smoke over one end of the conference table. "When I got back from vacation, I dropped by the office late Saturday evening and found something peculiar. The staff were all confused. The two machines were no longer giving the same results. I called Henryk about it yesterday. "

There was thunderstruck silence.

"Are they
sure
?" asked Marian.

"Yes, they're sure, and, what's more,
they're right
. I checked. When the wheels are all set to AAA, one machine gives T when you press the A key, as always. The other gives R."

"How long this has been going on?" Marian asked. He seemed indignant. But at the misbehaving machine, or at the delay in letting him know?

"Just since Saturday.... Late last week, one of the machines was balking. The wheels weren't clicking cleanly from one letter to another, and sometimes no letter at all would show up when they pressed a key. They thought maybe a tooth on one of the wheels was broken. Saturday morning, they removed the wheels. There was nothing broken, or even severely worn, as far as they could tell. But the pins were dirty, perhaps breaking the electrical connection. They cleaned the wheels and reinstalled them. They get a result now, but it's wrong. That is, it disagrees with the first machine."

"Then we'd better call in technical services, to go over the machine to see what's wrong.” Henryk was usually calm and businesslike, but now he became forceful. “Just be
certain
they don't touch the first machine. If it misbehaves, too, we won't know what we're doing.”

T
hat week, there were two major developments. The first was Marian's quick calculation. Based on his earlier work, it would take at least two months to reconstruct wheels from intercepted messages, perhaps longer. It would depend on the volume of intercepted traffic.

The second was more encouraging. After several hours of swearing and tinkering, technical services figured out what had happened to the misbehaving machine. When the staff had put it back together, they had accidentally changed the order of the wheels. When technical services switched them back to the right order, the machine again duplicated the results of the first one.

"And that," announced Henryk when the group of four met again, "means we face a far more complicated situation. The wheels can be installed in any order—six different ways. Instead of 17,000 possible encodings, we may have to slog through six times as many—over 100,000.

“But the misbehaving machine may have been simple, blind luck—one of those well disguised blessings. It's possible that our problem of the past five months began when the Germans reordered the wheels. And we have a place to start. We can go back over the intercepts to see if, with brute force, we can decipher a message by putting the wheels in different order. That means we'll need bigger and stronger gorillas; they'll have to go through all possible orderings of the wheels until they find the one the Germans used.”

It worked. Unfortunately, it wasn't until the sixth and last try that they got the right ordering of wheels for April. After all that work, they felt they were back on track.

But Henryk was furious. “How could we have been such idiots—such cretin idiots—not to think of something so simple as a reordering of the wheels?”

Their success was not to last. In January of 1938, they faced an indecipherable mess, no matter how the wheels were ordered. They struggled for several months. Then Henryk, in a stage whisper, asked if anyone had a burglar in the family. A few days later, he disappeared.

While he was gone, Jerzy went over to the gorillas, to help with the machine Rejewski was working on. Anna was left behind as the only idiot, struggling without success to make sense of the pile of indecipherable messages. She found herself leafing through them again and again, hoping for an inspiration.

But it didn't come. Day after day, she pored over the intercepts, looking for some sort of pattern where none existed. She was becoming demoralized. At the weekly staff meetings, she found herself saying less and less.

After one of the meetings, Marian invited her to drop by his office. When she did, she noticed, in the uneven lighting of his room, just how worn his face had become in the past several months. But he wanted to talk about her, not himself.

“I'm concerned. We may be demanding too much of you.”

“Not at all. But I'll admit, it's tough.” Anna didn't want to let him know how tired she really was.

“It's not the hard work; it's the frustration,” Marian commiserated. He suspected she wasn't being honest, that she was nearing exhaustion. “The others have been working very hard too, but work on the new machine is coming along splendidly. I'm afraid that we've left you alone with the most frustrating job.”

“Somebody's got to do it. Sooner or later, we'll make a breakthrough. It may be something very simple. It makes sense for someone to sift through the rubbish for clues. It makes sense for me to do it. I don't have the skills to help with the machine. I've been trying a new system—start off each morning with a list of possible tricks the Germans may be using. It gives my day some structure. It also gives me an illusion of progress.” Anna smiled wryly—“most evenings I've succeeded in my task for the day, working through the whole list. Unfortunately, everything on it is crossed out.”

“I think the time has come for us to take a long-run view.”

Anna was surprised. They needed results. Hitler had seized Austria; the threat to Poland was growing. Marian paused. Anna waited for him to finish. After a few moments, he continued.

“I think—we think—that it might be a good idea for you to take an extended vacation, say six weeks.”

“Six weeks?” Anna was astonished.

“You've been slaving away, almost nonstop, for more than a year.” True, thought Anna; she had taken only the one vacation, over Christmas. “Anybody can get overtired and stale. Spend two weeks relaxing, sleeping ‘til noon. Then have fun for a month; you're young. When you come back, you'll be refreshed. That's when you get new ideas.”

Anna couldn't help but smile. It was good advice, but, from what she had heard, Marian was careless in following it himself. Just before he left on his last vacation, one of his historian friends had given him an encoded letter written in 1904 by Pilsudski, who was trying to rally support for an independent Poland. The letter was addressed to the Japanese, who were at the time embroiled in a conflict with Russia—one of the powers occupying Poland. Marian said he was too busy, but made the mistake of taking the letter with him. It wasn't much of a vacation. He behaved oddly, pacing back and forth in an upstairs bedroom. When he got home, he presented his friend with the deciphered message. He also gave his friend gentle, but firm, instructions:
no more encoded letters
.

Marian continued. “Keep a note pad with you; you never know when your subconscious may throw up an inspiration. But make your notes obscure—if anyone sees the notebook, they shouldn't be able to figure out that you're working on a decoding project. Throw in a few distracters—equations on the velocity of weather balloons, and stuff like that, which makes it look as though you really are working on meteorology.”

It was an offer Anna couldn't refuse. She realized just how exhausted she was—and how marvelous it would be to have a social life again. In retrospect, even Zbig seemed attractive. But that was an illusion. Whenever she had begun to feel the least bit serious about him, she couldn't help but think back to her earlier boyfriend, Ryk. He was so much more fun—that secret plane ride and all. She wondered what he was doing. Odd. She was sure that they'd both been in love, but never at the same time. Perhaps she should get in touch with him during her six weeks off. Some day, their timing might be right.

Now that Marian offered her a holiday, she couldn't wait to escape the social wasteland known as the “Meteorology Project.” Social gatherings were rare; people were completely consumed by the Enigma puzzle. The few eligible men seemed to shy away because of her senior position. And the demands of her job had cut her off from her college friends. Oh, well, she sighed. She didn't have many illusions when she took the job. Or did she?

She spent the first week at her family home, west of Warsaw. Marian was right; she did sleep in every day ‘til noon. Then she was ready for the fun part. She was off to visit her first cousin, Krystyna, who was also in her late teens and attended the University of Warsaw, where the fall term was just beginning.

After a few days, Anna began to realize what the last years of the Roman Empire must have been like. A frantic round of parties had begun, each vying to be the best of the year, on the assumption—obvious, but under no circumstances to be uttered—that it might be the last.

The tempo intensified at the end of September, after the Munich conference ceded Czechoslovakia's heavily defended borderlands to Hitler. The sense of impending doom was heightened by the growing number of uniforms around the university; the undergraduate men were increasingly distracted by the demands of the army reserve training program.

In keeping up with the parties, Anna had an advantage. She wasn't taking any classes. She was staying with Krystyna's parents, who had a comfortable apartment only a few blocks from the university. She still had the luxury of sleeping until noon.

One evening—the third evening in a row of partying—Anna went alone; Krystyna would join her at the party with her boyfriend, Pawel, and one of his friends. Quite early, only a little after 10, Anna felt drowsy, and slipped away to an alcove to rest for a few moments on a sofa. Soon she drifted off into a soft, untroubled sleep.

Vaguely, she felt someone sit down on the sofa beside her, and heard Krystyna in the distance, “... my cousin, Anna.”

“Ah, a real sleeping beauty,” responded a voice on the sofa beside her.

She opened her eyes the slightest crack, barely enough to see the hazy outline of a young man in uniform. She could see him just well enough to realize that he was staring at her face. She stirred, fluttering her eyes as she opened them.

They were not the ice blue that he had expected, to match her blond hair. Rather, he was gazing into warm hazel eyes.

He abruptly looked away, toward Krystyna and Pawel on the sofa opposite. He rose quickly to his feet as Krystyna repeated the introduction.

“Anna, this is Kaz Jankowski. As I mentioned, he's an old friend of Pawel.”

Anna held out her hand. Kaz took it, and bowed with the slightest click of his heels. She motioned for him to sit down again. Handsome, she thought. She asked what unit he was in; the Seventh Cavalry, he answered.

“So you love horses, too?”

“Particularly Tiber, my stallion. We all look after our own horses ourselves; it builds a bond. You ride?”

“When I was younger.”

She paused, but then continued; he seemed interested.

“Quite a bit younger. My father put me up on a pony when I was only 18 months old.... I'm afraid I screamed and cried when they took me down.”

“What's the matter with that?” he asked, grinning.

“They almost had to pry me off; I made quite a scene.”

“As I said,
what's
the matter with that?” Kaz repeated, with an even broader grin. “So you've been riding ever since?”

“Mostly when I was young. I guess you've got a point—there was nothing wrong. In fact, I was rewarded. On my fourth birthday, they gave me a pony. 'Lightning' I called her. Not very appropriate. She was barrel-like—as wide as she was tall. With small legs that stuck down like sticks at the corners. Gave me a bumpy ride. But how I loved her—my best friend when I was growing up.”

“Sounds idyllic.” Kaz imagined a slim young figure on her pony, the sun flashing through the highlights of her windblown, flaxen hair.

“It was.” Anna suddenly looked sad. “But then it came to an end. One day, when I was 12, my father took me for a walk in the woods. Slowly and softly, he got me to recognize the truth: the pony was so old, and in so much pain that the only humane thing was to have her put down. The vet would be coming the next morning, after I left for school. I spent rest of the afternoon and evening brushing and hugging my four-legged friend. It was a bittersweet parting.”