Men of War (2013) (28 page)

A
day later
Tashkent
was well out to sea again and heading home to
Seattle. The Russian crew showed great interest in the magazine, and the it
widened more than one eye. Davis noted how the men would pass it from one to
another, pointing at things, clearly bemused. He thought they were looking at
girly photos, and kicked himself for not looking it over before he dropped it
on the mess hall table. But later he saw that it was just photos of strange
looking vehicles, odd devices that looked like folding metal cases with
pictures on them, advertisements for products he had never seen before. He had
no idea he was looking at Toyota Corollas, Dell Laptops, and other modern
devices like cell phones in the ads. To him they were just curious photos, and
nothing more.

The
ship made a brief stop in the Aleutians on the way home, and word of the
strange magazine got round to a British liaison officer, Lt. William Kemp at Dutch
Harbor. The Brits had a few Nissen huts set up on the islands to listen to
Japanese radio traffic and report back home. When the liaison officer saw the
magazine, noted the odd map in one of the articles, and the strange dates
affixed there, he asked one of the Russians to translate a few lines, then
realized he had something very unusual. He gave the man a one pound note for
the magazine, carefully tore out the article, and handed it back to him with a
smile. Back at his desk he penned and attached a brief note: ‘Found published
in Russian periodical!’ The article soon started a very long journey in a plain
leather pouch that would eventually make its way to Bletchley Park.

It was the dates on the map that first caught
Kemp’s eye, 13-14 September, 1942, and
the Russian crewman had
translated something about an operation code name “Agreement,” a raid on the
German bastion at Tobruk that the British had carried out, with disastrous
results. Kemp took the whole thing for some odd way of conveying intelligence
in the midst of drivel. The shocker was this: the date that morning was
September 7, 1942, a full week before this operation was supposedly carried
out!

He
got the article quickly on a signal intelligence pouch, which was flown to
Seattle, and from there to New York, then Iceland, and eventually London. Now
Alan Turing was looking at it with Peter Twinn in Hut 4 at Bletchley Park.

The
whole thing had been translated and transcribed, and the article was very
shocking, raising alarm bells all the way to Naval intelligence in Hut 8. The
article was entitled: ‘British Remember Fallen in Agreement Gone Bad.’ It was
about Operation Agreement, slated to run in just another day, yet here was the
whole thing written up as though it had already happened…as though it were
history! It clearly detailed how the British destroyers
Sikh
, and
Zulu
,
with 350 Marines aboard would leave Alexandria and meet up with the AA cruiser
Coventry
and the 5th DD flotilla for the planned raid on Tobruk in a little over
thirty-six hours.

The
details in the article were astounding! It listed officers involved, and the
fate of ships and men who had yet to even join this fight. More than this, it
described the sad outcome of the raid:
Sikh
damaged by German 88s and
sunk while taken under tow;
Coventry
hit by JU-87 Stukas and scuttled;
Zulu
also sunk; Haselden’s commando raid from the landward side beaten off with
heavy losses, and he himself killed in that action; 576 allied prisoners taken
and valuable code and cypher equipment captured by the enemy. In short, it was
a disaster.

Twinn
was a straight laced man, dressed in a tweed sport coat with vest and tie that
day, his eyes bright above his starched white collar and a shock of brown hair
falling on his right forehead as he leaned over the desk. He was a brilliant mathematician
from Oxford who had been signed on to Hut 4 to train under Dilly Knox on code
breaking methods—for all of five minutes before Knox told him to get started.
Twinn worked with Turing on the Enigma code and was instrumental in solving the
riddle. Now the two of them set their minds on solving this riddle.

“Could
it be a warning?” said Twinn. “They’ve obviously gotten wind of the operation
and they put this out quite plainly to scare us off.”

“But
the details, Peter,” said Turing. “They’ve got the damn thing nailed down with
brass tacks! Dates, times, ships involved—”

“Casualties
and outcome,” Twinn put in. “That’s the giveaway. They want to tell us they’re
on to us and ready to meet this operation with full force. There’s no other way
to look at it.”

“Turing
glanced at him for a moment, saying nothing, then his eyes darkened on the
article again, complete with a map detailing the location of the planned
landings, right down to the minute. It was very unnerving. It was as if they
had an almost omniscient awareness of the plan.

“I
can see them getting the broad strokes of this,” said Turing. “They intercept
our traffic even as we do theirs. But the details? They would have to come from
someone inside operations to be that specific. Could we have a mole, Peter?”
There was a look of warning in Turing’s eyes now.

“Odd
that it came from the Russians,” said Twinn. “Could they be trying to tip us
off that the code is compromised? After all, they are our allies in this
business.”

“So
we’d like to believe,” said Turing. “But how did they get the information?”

“It
would have to come from someone inside, just as you say, Alan. This isn’t the
sort of detail you get from the occasional odd message intercept. They’ve got
it all, hook, line and sinker. You may be correct. We could have a problem
here. After all, they’ve just been bringing in people off the streets, chess
players, artists, a whole menagerie of eclectic minds here. I was just a dizzy
eyed mathematician myself, out of work and looking for an opportunity. Now here
I am in the thick of it. Would it be too much of a stretch to think that
someone was planted by the other side?”

“That
would be rather disastrous,” said Turing. “Just like this planned raid is
likely to be now. We’ll have to cable Alexandria at once, Peter. The party is
off on this one. The operation must be cancelled immediately.”

They
started putting their heads together to find out exactly where, or who this
information could have possibly come from, though Turing harbored a deep inner
misgiving over the source—
Russian
—another leaf fallen from the Rodina’s
tree that seemed almost prescient in its prediction of an event that had not
even happened.

Even
as Turing thought this he suddenly recalled his long conversation with Admiral
Tovey. His own words to the Admiral returned to haunt him:
“If it were to be
learned that one of these men on our list does something… compromising, then he
becomes an enemy of fate and time as it were. If you mean to set this watch on
the history, then you’ll have to be prepared to do some unpleasant things,
Admiral.”

What
if this article wasn’t merely an effort to inform us that this operation had
been compromised, thought Turing? What if it truly was what it seemed to be—a
peek into the future seen by men who had already lived through and beyond those
days. By that logic Haselden, fated to die in this raid, would be made a Zombie
if the party was cancelled. Turing was suddenly locked in agonizing
contradiction. By saving the lives of the men slated for Operation Agreement he
might now be changing all future history.

“Here’s
the information,” Twinn said excitedly. “It was right here, attached to the
source document in this note. Look here, it says “Found in Vladivostok Harbor.”

“Then
it had to have been found by someone off a lend lease merchant ship,” said
Turing definitively. It came from Kemp at Dutch Harbor. Those ships transit
that route on a regular basis.”

It
had come, of course, from a man named Markov, a junior rate in the engineering
division assigned to the battlecruiser
Kirov
. It had been a magazine on
the coffee table in the waiting area that Markov snatched up during his work
rotation break, and slipped into the reactor test bed room at the Primorskiy
Engineering Center across the bay at Vladivostok. Markov had disappeared on
that same day, in the year 2021, and appeared, strangely, in the same location,
but seventy-nine years in the past. The space he had occupied was the living
room of a private home, and when Marta
Vayatin
walked
in and saw Markov sitting on one of two chairs with an expression of utter
shock on his face, she ran screaming out of the house, raising a ruckus and
setting the police hastening to the scene.

Poor
Markov eventually came to his senses, and ran out as well, immediately seeing
that he was, indeed, in Vladivostok and looking out on the Golden Horn Bay, but
everything looked completely different! The city was much smaller. Most of the
new high-rise apartment buildings were gone! It had a sallow, grey look to it, and
there was virtually no traffic to be seen on the major roadways. In fact, many
of the streets were dirt and gravel tracks wending their way through old
weathered housing blocks. He ran, as fast as his legs would take him, down the
muddied hillside roads toward the harbor quays below, instinctively hoping to
find
Kirov
berthed quietly there as before, a rat coming home to the
ship. The rest was now history—a very personal end to Markov’s place in that
story when he died of both shock and a gunshot wound on the cold concrete quay
of the Golden Horn Harbor.

Turing
took a long breath, realizing he had to make a very important decision now.
What to do about this raid on Tobruk?

“I
need to make a phone call, Peter. Hold off on this for the moment, will you?” He
walked solemnly out of the room to a secure area, thinking deeply as he went.
Some minutes later he returned, still troubled, but with more sense of
direction. He had called Admiral Tovey to discuss the matter. “The question is
this,” he had told him plainly. “Either we save these men and ships and hope
that works to the good, or we send them in as planned and then see what
happens. If the results mirror the account we have in hand with this document,
why…then we’ve got another problem, Admiral. It would have to mean that someone
was alive, in the here and now, perhaps at Vladivostok, and with knowledge of
our future.”

“Damn
maddening,” said Tovey. There was a long pause before he spoke again. “You
warned me about this, Professor, but I don’t think I want to look into
Pandora’s jar just yet. We can deduce what you say without having to sacrifice
576 men and three ships for the information. Nobody knew the full details of
that mission. You know very well that the target, force composition, and time
of attack are all kept in three separate heads and they only come together for
the final officer’s briefing at the eleventh hour. And I can tell you one other
thing. The final force composition has not even been fixed yet. I spoke with
Cairo on this yesterday. It was only just suggested that we take the AA cruiser
Coventry off
guardship
duty in the Suez and add it to
this mission, and this report you speak of had to have been written weeks ago
if it came all the way from Vladivostok. How could it name that ship? No. I
can’t send these men in there now knowing that this intelligence report exists
on the matter. Cancel the raid, and then I think we’ll have to put all these
men on our list, but I’d rather have them there alive and not dead on the coast
of North Africa. We’ll talk again soon.” The Watch had made its first life or
death choice. It would not be the last.

* * *

Yet
that was not the only effect the coffee table magazine would end up having.
Seventy-nine years later, Anton Fedorov was aboard
Kirov
after a long
shift making rounds to get the vessel seaworthy again. He took a brief meal in
the officer’s dining room, quietly alone with his
Chronology Of The Naval
War At Sea.
He had been reading from the volume he had found here in a
local book store, comparing it to his own copy, which he still kept close at
hand. Whenever he came to a passage that differed, he would highlight it with a
yellow marker.

Yesterday
he had been reading about events in September of 1942 to see if
Kirov’s
recent sojourn in the Pacific had any immediate ramifications and to find out
what may have been written about it. Now his brow was furrowed, eyes worried,
and an odd expression hung on his face. He looked around, like a man who had
lost something, or forgotten his watch, or wallet. Then he quickly turned pages
in the new volume he had bought recently, his finger working its way down the
long, narrow columns of text.

It
was gone! Where was it? He had read about it just the other day, and now it
wasn’t there. The passage describing the operation was entirely missing!
Checking carefully, he looked to see if any of the pages were missing from the
book, finding nothing amiss. Yet he clearly remembered reading about the
British raid on Tobruk that was supposed to happen mid-month in September of
1942. It was no longer there.

He
shifted quickly to his own older volume and, sure enough, there was the
passage. Could he have mixed up the two books and read it there yesterday? No,
he thought decisively. He could clearly remember taking a yellow highlighter
and marking off lines at the top and bottom of the two paragraph entry in the
newer volume to remind himself to double check it with a second source, and
there were no such marks in his old book.

“What
in God’s name…?”

Something
had changed. His mind was a sudden whirl of possibilities as he struggled to
understand what he had just discovered. Something had just changed the history
again! The alteration had been so final that it even affected the new volume he
had purchased, and the thought occurred to him that he might now go to every
such book published and find the same text missing there from page 164. But yet
his own volume, the one that had traveled with
Kirov
, remained
completely unaltered.