Enigma (37 page)

“Hello, Donald.”

He turned round and blinked up at her in surprise. “Oh, hello.”
The effort of memory was heroic. “Hello, Hester.”

♦

“It’s almost dark out there,” said Cave, looking at his watch.
“Not long now. How many have you had?”

“Twenty-nine,” said Baxter.

“I believe you said that would be enough, Mr Jericho?”

“Weather,” said Jericho, without looking up. “We need a weather
report from the convoy. Barometric pressure, cloud cover, cloud
type, wind speed, temperature. Before it gets too dark.”

“They’ve got ten U-boats on their backs and you want them to
tell you the weather?”

“Yes, please. Fast as they can.”

The weather report arrived at 21.31.

There were no more contact signals after 21.40.

♦

Thus convoy KX-229 at 22.00.

Thirty-seven merchant vessels, ranging in size from the
12,000-ton British tanker Southern Princess to the 3,500-ton
American freighter Margaret Lykes, making slow progress through
heavy seas, steering a course of 055 degrees, direct to England,
lit up like a regatta by a full moon to a range of ten miles
visibility—the first such night in the North Atlantic for weeks.
Escort vessels: five, including two slow corvettes and two clapped
out, elderly ex-American destroyers donated to Britain in 1940 in
exchange for bases, one of which—HMS Mansfield—had lost touch with
the convoy after charging down the U-boats because the convoy
commander (on his first operational command) had forgotten to
signal her with his second change of course. No rescue ship
available. No air cover. No reinforcements within a thousand
miles.

“All in all,” said Cave, lighting a cigarette and contemplating
his charts, “what you might fairly call a bit of a cock-up.”

The first torpedo hit at 22.01.

At 22.32, Tom Jericho was heard to say, very quietly, “Yes.”

§

It was chucking-out time at the Eight Bells Inn on the
Buckingham Road and Miss Jobey and Mr Bonnyman had virtually
exhausted the main topic of their evening’s conversation: what
Bonnyman dramatically termed the “police raid” on Mr Jericho’s
room.

They had heard the details at supper from Mrs Armstrong, her
face still flushed with outrage at the memory of this violation of
her territory. A uniformed officer had stood guard all afternoon on
the doorstep (“in full view of the entire street, mind you”), while
two plain-clothes men carrying a box of tools and waving a warrant
had spent the best part of three hours searching;; the upstairs
back bedroom, before leaving at teatime with a pile of books. They
had dismantled the bed and the wardrobe, taken up the carpet and
the floorboards, and brought down a heap of soot from the chimney.
“That young man is out,” declared Mrs Armstrong, folding her
hamlike arms, “and all rent forfeit.”

“‘All rentforfeit’” repeated Bonnyman into his beer, for the
sixth or seventh time. “I love it.”

“And such a quiet man,” said Miss Jobey.

A handbell rang behind the bar and the lights flickered.

“Time, gentlemen! Time, please!”

Bonnyman finished his watery bitter, Miss Jobey her; port and
lemon, and he escorted her unsteadily, past the dartboard and the
hunting prints, towards the door.

The day that Jericho had missed had given the town its first
real taste of spring. Out on the pavement the night air was still
mild. Darkness touched the dreary street with romance. As the
departing drinkers stumbled away into the blackout, Bonnyman
playfully pulled Miss Jobey towards him. They fell back slightly
into a doorway. Her mouth opened on his, she pressed herself up
against him, and Bonnyman squeezed her waist in return. Whatever
she might have lacked in beauty—and in the blackout, who could
tell?—she more than made up for in ardour. Her strong and agile
tongue, sweet with port, squirmed against his teeth.

Bonnyman, by profession a Post Office engineer, had been drafted
to Bletchley, as Jericho had guessed, to service the bombes. Miss
Jobey worked in the upstairs back bedroom of the mansion, filing
Abwehr hand-ciphers. Neither, in accordance with regulations, had
told the other what they did, a discretion which Bonnyman had
extended somewhat to cover in addition the existence of a wife and
two children at home in Dorking.

His hands slipped down her narrow thighs and began to hoist her
skirt.

“Not here,” she said into his mouth, and brushed his fingers
away.

♦

Well (as Bonnyman would afterwards confide with a wink to the
unsmiling police inspector who took his statement), the things a
grown man has to do in wartime, and all for a simple
you-know-what.

First, a cycle ride, which took them along a track and under a
railway bridge. Then, by the thin beam of a torch, over a padlocked
gate and through mud and brambles towards the hulk of a broken
building. A great expanse of water somewhere close by. You couldn’t
see it, but you could hear the lapping in the breeze and the
occasional cry of a waterfowl, and you could sense a deeper
darkness, like a great black pit.

Complaints from Miss Jobey as she snagged her precious stockings
and wrenched her ankle: loud and bitter imprecations against Mr
Bonnyman and all his works which did not augur well for the purpose
he had in mind. She started whining: “Come on, Bonny, I’m
frightened, let’s go back.”

But Bonnyman had no intention of turning back. Even on a normal
evening, Mrs Armstrong monitored every peep and squeak in the ether
of the Commercial Guesthouse like a one-woman intercept station;
tonight, she’d be on even higher alert than usual. Besides, he
always found this place exciting. The light flashed on bare brick
and on evidence of earlier liaisons—AE + GS, Tony = Kath. The spot
held an odd erotic charge. So much had clearly happened here, so
many whispered fumblings…They were a part of a great flux of
yearning that went back long before them and would go on long after
them—illicit, irrepressible, eternal. This was life. Such, at any
rate, were Bonnyman’s thoughts, although naturally he didn’t
express them at the time, nor afterwards to the police.

“And what happened next, sir? Precisely.”

He won’t admit to this either, thank you very much, precisely or
imprecisely.

But what did happen next was that Bonnyman wedged the torch in a
gap in the brickwork where something had been torn from the wall,
and threw his arms around Miss Jobey. He encountered a little light
resistance at first—some token twisting and turning and “stop it”,
“not here”—which quickly became less convincing, until suddenly her
tongue was up to its tricks again and they were back where they’d
left off outside the Eight Bells Inn. Once again his hands began to
ride up her skirt and once again she pushed him away, but this time
for a different reason. Frowning slightly, she ducked and pulled
down her knickers. One step, two steps, and they had vanished into
her pocket. Bonnyman watched, enraptured.

“What happened next, inspector, precisely, is that Miss Jobey
and myself noticed some hessian sacking in the corner.”

She with her skirt up above her knees, he with his trousers down
around his ankles, shuffling forwards like a man in leg-irons,
dropping heavily to his knees, a cloud of dust from the sacks
rising and blossoming in the torch-beam, then much squirming and
complaining on her part that something was digging into her
back.

They stood and pulled away the sacks to make a better bed.

“And that was when you found it?”

“That was when we found it.”

The police inspector suddenly brought his fist down hard on the
rough wooden table and shouted for his sergeant.

“Any sign of Mr Wigram yet?”

“We’re still looking, sir.”

“Well, bloody well find him, man. Find him.”

§

The bombe was heavy—Jericho guessed it must weigh more than half
a ton—and even though it was mounted on castors it still took all
his strength, combined with the engineer’s, to drag it away from
the wall. Jericho pulled while the engineer went behind it and put
his shoulder to the frame to heave. It came away at last with a
screech and the Wrens moved in to strip it.

The decryptor was a monster, like something out of an H.G. Wells
fantasy of the future: a black metal cabinet, eight feet wide and
six feet tall, with scores oft five-inch-diameter drum wheels set
into the front. The back was hinged and opened up to show a bulging
mass of coloured cables and the dull gleam of metal drums. In the
place where it had stood on the concrete floor there was a large
puddle of oil.

Jericho wiped his hands on a rag and retreated to watch from a
corner. Elsewhere in the hut a score of other bombes were churning
away on other Enigma keys and the noise and the heat were how he
imagined a ship’s engine room might be. One Wren went round to the
back of the cabinet and began disconnecting and replugging the
cables. The other moved along the front, pulling out each drum in
turn and checking it. Whenever she found a fault in the wiring she
would hand the drum to the engineer who would stroke the tiny brush
wires back into place with a pair of tweezers. The contact brushes
were always fraying, just as the belt which connected the mechanism
to the big electric motor had a tendency to stretch and slip
whenever there was a heavy load. And the engineers had never quite
got the earthing right, so that the cabinets had a tendency to give
off powerful electric shocks.

Jericho thought it was the worst job of all. A pig of a job.
Eight hours a day, six days a week, cooped up in this windowless,
deafening cell. He turned away to look at his watch. He didn’t want
them to see his impatience. It was nearly half past eleven.

His menu was at that moment being rushed into bombe bays all
across the Bletchley area. Eight miles north of the Park, in a hut
in a clearing in the forested estate of Gayhurst Manor, a clutch of
tired Wrens near the end of their shift were being ordered to halt
the three bombes running on Nuthatch (Berlin-Vienna-Belgrade Army
administration), strip them and prepare them for Shark. In the
stable block of Adstock Manor, ten miles to the west, the girls
were actually sprawled with their feet up beside their silent
machines, drinking Ovaltine and listening to Tommy Dorsey on the
BBC Light Programme, when the supervisor came storming through with
a sheaf of menus and told them to stir themselves, fast. And at
Wavendon Manor, three miles northeast, a similar story: four bombes
in a dank and windowless bunker were abruptly pulled off Osprey
(the low-priority Enigma key of the Organisation Todt) and their
operators told to stand by for a rush job.

Those, plus the two machines in Bletchley’s Hut 11, made up the
promised dozen bombes.

The mechanical check completed, the Wren went back to the first
row of drums and began adjusting them to the combination listed on
the menus. She called out the letters to the other girl, who
checked them.

“Freddy, Butter, Quagga…”

“Yes.”

“Apple, X-ray, Edward”

“Yes.”

The drums slipped on to their spindles and were fixed into place
with a loud metallic click. Each was wired to mimic the action of a
single Enigma rotor: 108 in all, equivalent to thirty-six Enigma
machines running in parallel. When all the drums had been set, the
bombe was trundled back into place and the motor started.

The drums began to turn, all except one in the top row which had
jammed. The engineer gave it a whack with his spanner and it, too,
began to revolve. The bombe would now run continuously on this
menu—certainly for one day; possibly, according to Jericho’s
calculations, for two or three—stopping occasionally when the drums
were so aligned they completed a circuit. Then the readings on the
drums would be checked and tested, the machine restarted, and so it
would go on until the precise combination of settings had been
found, at which point the cryptanalysts would be able to read that
day’s Shark traffic. Such, at any rate, was the theory.

The engineer began dragging out the other bombe and Jericho
moved forward to help, but was stopped by a tugging on his arm.

“Come on, old love,” shouted Logie above the din.

“There’s nothing more we can do here.” He pulled at his sleeve
again.

Reluctantly, Jericho turned and followed him out of the hut.

♦

He felt no sense of elation. Maybe tomorrow evening or maybe on
Thursday, the bombes would give them the Enigma settings for the
day now ending. Then the real work would begin—the laborious
business of trying to reconstruct the new Short Weather Code
Book—taking the meteorological data from the convoy, matching it to
the weather signals already received from the surrounding U-boats,
making some guesses, testing them, constructing a fresh set of
cribs…It never ended, this battle against Enigma. It was a chess
tournament of a thousand rounds against a player of prodigious
defensive strength, and each day the pieces went back to their
original positions and the game began afresh.

Logie, too, seemed rather flat as they walked along the asphalt
path towards Hut 8.

“I’ve sent the others home to their digs for some kip,” he was
saying, “which is where I’m going. And where you ought to go, too,
if you’re not too high to sleep.”

“I’ll just clear up here for a bit, if that’s all right. Take
the code book back to the safe.”

“Do that. Thanks.”

“And then I suppose I’d better face Wigram.”

“Ah, yes. Wigram.”

They went into the hut. In his office, Logie tossed Jericho the
keys to the Black Museum. “And your prize,” he said, holding up a
half-bottle of scotch. “Don’t let’s forget that.”

Jericho smiled. “I thought you said Skynner was offering a full
bottle.”

“Ah, well, yes, I did, but you know Skynner.”