Enigma

by Robert Harris

  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 funny 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.

  ‘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.’

  3

  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 rent forfeit,”’ 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.’

  4

  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 of 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.