by Dudley Pope
Ned said quickly: ‘That would be best, sir. No good just the three of us knowing our way about a U-boat. And any chance of having a chat with some Royal Marine commandos?’
‘They’ll be chary of lending you any of their chaps,’ Watts said.
‘Well, we’ll need some Marines eventually, and our team of sailors will need a brisk course in close combat. The Jollies may have some new toys that can help.’
‘Yes, “black bangers”,’ Jemmy said suddenly. ‘Just the trick. My father’s platoon of Home Guard have some. Like an ordinary Mills 36 hand grenade, but it’s made of Bakelite and when it lands in the middle of a happy little group it goes off with such a frightful bang that everyone is stunned for several minutes, just as though the Archbishop of Canterbury went off his head and started talking sense at a tea party.’
‘I know the things,’ Ned said. ‘Psychological warfare: stun the beggars! If you toss an ordinary Mills grenade into a crowd you can’t hope to kill ’em all, but one of Jemmy’s “black bangers” deafens and shocks them so you can nip in and snip their braces so their trousers fall down; then at your leisure you tie their bootlaces together. You can capture and tether a whole battalion of the Wehrmacht with a case of ten grenades.’
Watts grinned and said: ‘I’ll order a case. They probably make them now in red, white and blue, as well and black.’ He suddenly became serious again. ‘I hope your German is not too rusty?’
Jemmy said diffidently: ‘I had a Swiss nanny. I’m still fluent but I have a heavy Swiss accent.’
‘Mine’s good,’ the Croupier said, ‘but I hate the sound of it.’
‘Rusty,’ Ned answered. ‘Used to be good. Austrian nanny and my mother is fluent. I suppose it will come back with a bit of practice.’
Watts asked Jemmy: ‘Is your accent too heavy to give Ned a few lessons?’
‘No, we’ll probably end up sounding like a pair of Swiss Guards but unless we’re rigged out in that Vatican uniform it won’t matter.’
‘Very well. But be discreet about it. Anyone seeing two naval officers in uniform babbling German will get suspicious.’
‘An obvious prelude to bombarding Berlin with the Rodney by sending her steaming up the Spree,’ Ned said.
‘That’s it!’ Watts exclaimed. ‘We need a cover name for this caper and that’s it, Operation Spree. I’ll have to go through channels and get an official name, but among ourselves — just the four of us — “Spree” is the word.’
‘Can we just run though what’s been agreed so far, sir?’ Ned said tentatively. ‘Now we’re on the spree,’ he added.
‘Yes,’ Watts said. ‘Incidentally, have any of you ever been on the Spree?’
‘I have, when I was about eight,’ the Croupier said. ‘My parents spent a month in Berlin. Pa had business there and we had to go off for the day steaming down the Spree in a large ferry with all these ancient and portly Teds drinking steins of beer and talking business and celebrating with Pa. I remember I was fascinated by Ted tourists wearing embroidered shirts and shorts made of leather, and funny little trilby hats with small coloured feathers stuck in the bands. This little boy, for one, thought going on the Spree was a monumental bore. I remember that German lemonade was too fizzy; when you belched, bubbles of gas went up your nose. Made you sneeze.’
‘You sound like a Zeppelin!’ Watts said.
‘Ha, wish I’d met him too, Graf von Zeppelin, but he was long dead by then. Remember the airship Hindenburg and when she came up the Channel — when was that, 1938?’
‘Must have been earlier because she burned out in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. Anyway, I saw her before that,’ Ned said. ‘A long, thin silver pencil. Lovely day, too, just as though the pencil was lying on a pale blue tablecloth.’
‘The German Zeppelin people were very cross with the Americans, I remember,’ the Croupier said reminiscently. ‘Seems they wouldn’t sell helium to anyone — it’s an inert gas and America’s the only source. So the Germans had to use hydrogen, just as we did with the R 101. One spark and boom, it’s all over: millions of cubic feet exploding — just imagine it.’
‘I’d rather deal with Ned’s question,’ Watts said. ‘We’ve agreed so far that I arrange for you to inspect the captured U-boat but we decide later whether there’ll be just the three of you or your whole party; that the three of you (it may have to be restricted to Ned) visit BP and have a good look at an actual Enigma machine and get a briefing from the code and cipher boys; that you do a bashing and clubbing course with the Jollies and see what new in-fighting weapons are currently in fashion… And finally, I get you a supply of Jemmy’s black bangers. That’s all, isn’t it?’ he asked, eyebrows raised.
Ned nodded, admiring the man’s mind. No touching one finger after another to tick off five very diverse items; no, his mind seemed like a five-barred mousetrap, each bar coming over with a brisk crash.
‘Now you have to select and collect your gang of “diabolical cunnings”,’ Watts said. ‘Any idea where such cunnings are kept?’
After glancing at the Croupier and Jemmy, Ned said: ‘We’ll work out a list of the jobs we’ll all need to do; then we’ll think who best can do them.’
‘Very well, but remember that whoever you choose have to be in Britain: I can’t get men back from the Med or some other unlikely spot.’
‘No, sir, but –’
‘No “buts”,’ Watts said firmly. ‘It’s no bloody good you coming to me and saying you want ERA Bloggs, last seen on board a sub at Malta, and CPO Raspberry, last seen lurching away from the destroyer pens in Gib with a couple of tarts in tow.’
‘Quite, sir,’ Ned said. ‘Our chaps are more likely to be doing jankers in some Service prison.’
Chapter Five
The two Army sentries checked the three passes of the passengers in the Navy Humber, then demanded one for the Wren driver. She did not have one and the sentry with a corporal’s stripes on his sleeves shook his head apologetically at Ned. ‘I’m sorry, Commander, no one is allowed past the gate without a pass. We can’t even,’ he said hurriedly, anticipating Ned’s protest, ‘let the gentlemen we know and who’ve worked here for years through if they’ve forgotten their pass.’
Ned said: ‘You are quite right. Have you a telephone?’
‘In the guardhouse. I’ll take you there, sir.’
Within a couple of minutes he was explaining the problem to the civilian with whom they had an appointment.
‘Can one of you drive?’
‘Yes. But what about the Wren?’
‘Leave her with the guards. She’ll enjoy herself drinking cups of weak tea.’
Ten minutes later Ned had parked the car and was tugging the sleeve of a bemused Jemmy as he stood twitching in front of one of the ugliest Victorian mansions that any of them had seen.
‘Look at it!’ Jemmy spluttered. ‘I can just see some vulgar Victorian nabob, pockets full of money from textile mills or coalfields, instructing his architect what he wants built. Gothic, Perpendicular, Byzantine — it’s all jumbled up here and you can see it adds up to a Victorian terrace stretched out and inflated. Oh yes, he forgot to order a tower, a minaret, rather, from which the crier can call the hours of prayer to the Faithful.’
‘Come on,’ Ned said, ‘you’re neither a prospective tenant nor buying it. Look.’ He pointed at some low wooden huts of the type found at every Service establishment. ‘Perhaps that’s more to your taste.’
‘Ah yes, Ministry of Works Georgian. George VI, that is. Built of green wood that swells so that no window opens and you have to charge every door with your shoulder. Rot starts within six months: fungus flourishes under floorboards in a year.’
He was still grumbling as they were ushered into a sparse, cold, high-ceilinged room where an unpainted deal trestle table carried a scrambler telephone, ‘In
’ and ‘Out’ trays, an ashtray almost full of cigarette stubs, and a dirty cup resting in a moat of cold tea within a fraction of an inch of slopping over the side of the saucer. The rest of the furniture consisted of three chairs from which the single coat of varnish was being worn away, and another small table nearby holding a mahogany box about a foot square and eight or ten inches high. The box stood out amid the shoddy Ministry furniture because it looked as if the original owner of the house had left behind a canteen of cutlery.
The man now standing in front of the larger table was comfortably dressed in tweeds, round-faced and cheerful with sandy hair thinning across the crown, and he wore horn-rimmed spectacles with lenses so thick that they might have been made from the bottom of lemon pop bottles.
Blinking myopically he took a step forward. ‘One of you is Lieutenant Commander Yorke? I’m Jenson.’
Ned shook his hand and introduced Jemmy and the Croupier to the man, who seemed to be every cartoonist’s dream of an absent-minded academic but, Ned guessed, was a lot sharper than he looked.
‘You have a letter from some fellow in the Admiralty?’
Ned handed him the letter of introduction from Captain Watts and noticed that he glanced first at the signature before reading it.
‘Ah yes, it all seems straightforward. If you’ll just excuse me a moment…?’ He picked up the telephone and muttered into it: ‘Admiralty in Whitehall, ASIU, Captain Watts, please.’ He replaced the receiver and waited until it rang.
‘Ah, hello Henry, this is Rex. Shall we scramble?’ He leaned over to push across the lever marked ‘scramble’, and carried on talking. ‘I have three of your fellows here with a letter signed by you. Wait a moment — ’ he pulled over a notebook and scribbled a few words. ‘Right, can’t be too careful. Very well, Henry, cheerio.’
He put down the telephone, slid the ‘scramble’ lever back to its original position and pointed at Ned. ‘What are you usually called in your office?’
The unexpected question startled him but Jemmy growled: ‘He’s Ned!’
‘Ah,’ Jenson said and ticked off a name. ‘And you would be?’
‘Jemmy.’
‘After that famous Earl of Sandwich, no doubt.’ He looked up quickly, his eyes huge through the thick lenses. ‘No offence meant, of course; I have a crossword puzzle mind and you have a twitch.’ He turned and said: ‘And you, Lieutenant?’
‘I’m the Croupier. I pay when they want drinks.’
Jenson chuckled and then said: ‘Very well, that’s the first step. I’m sorry about the security but we have a lot of secrets in this Victorian pile. Now I’m the chap who is going to show you an Enigma machine, and explain how it works. I have managed to get a newish model for you — ’
‘A Mark III?’ Jemmy asked hopefully.
‘Good grief, no. I understand you are going to provide us with one of those!’ He walked over to the small table and gestured at the mahogany box. ‘This is a Mark II, the type used up to now by all the German services.’
Was it pedantry, Ned wondered, that prevented Jenson from saying ‘all three German services’? Out of curiosity, he asked him: ‘Who actually sends signals by Enigma?’
‘Oh, goodness me, who doesn’t! The Navy, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, of course; the Gestapo, SS — just about everyone, it seems. Our intercept people are almost swamped.’
He polished his glasses with a piece of toilet paper, torn from the remains of a roll which Ned saw he kept in a corner of his ‘In’ tray.
‘Captain Watts has just asked me to go over the German signals system to make sure you understand fully where Enigma fits in. Do you gentlemen know anything about codes and ciphers?’ When they all shook their heads, he clasped his hands like an earnest clergyman trying to explain a point of canon law. ‘Well, the words “code” and “cipher” are used very loosely by the layman, but there is a difference — hence the official name of this place, the Government Code and Cipher School.
‘A code is where a letter or number (or group of them) are used to mean complete phrases. For example, the figure seven sent by Morse could mean “The Fleet is to put to sea at once”.
‘A cipher is when you scramble the actual sentence, using the same number of letters. If you wanted to send “The Fleet is to put to sea” in cipher you would scramble up the letters of all the words and transmit the jumble. Of course, the receiver of the signal has to know how to unscramble it and read the original meaning.
‘With Enigma, we are concerned only with ciphers,’ he said. ‘In fact ciphers are the key to wars. Ciphers, if you can break them, in effect let you listen to a microphone placed in the enemy’s headquarters.
‘The old way of sending a message in cipher meant referring to a book, rather like a dictionary, to change each letter of the signal into something else — into what would be a meaningless jumble to the enemy. There are problems. For example, take the word “add”. In a particular cipher, A may become H, and D is W, so “add”, in cipher is “HWW”. Any cryptologist worth his salt would spot that, so having worked out that H is in fact A, and W is D, he looks for more clues like that and finally breaks the cipher and reads the signal.’
‘How the hell can anyone send signals that the enemy can’t break?’ Jemmy demanded.
‘Telepathy,’ Ned muttered. ‘That’s the answer. Or tom-toms at short range.’
‘I agree about telepathy,’ Jenson answered, his face serious. ‘I think it has great possibilities, but I can’t interest my colleagues.’
‘Where does Enigma come into all this?’ Jemmy asked. ‘Just a superior crystal ball?’
Ned decided that Jenson was completely humourless: no joke or wry remark ever intruded into his life (or, rather, was ever recognized).
In the flat tone of a true academic, Jenson began: ‘Enciphering a message which has to be transmitted by a means the enemy can overhear (by wireless, for instance) means that the words of the message have to be scrambled in a completely random way, and the chances of it being broken are lessened if each time the same letter is repeated in the message it becomes a different one in the scramble.
‘For example, say A is Z the first time it is used, K the second, R the third and so on.
‘But war today is fast moving, particularly where armies are concerned. There isn’t time to decipher long signals by turning the pages of a cipher book, particularly while you are being bombed or shelled, and it will probably be raining, too.’
‘Enigma?’ Jemmy prompted hopefully.
‘So the ideal way to encipher a message before transmitting it by wireless is a mechanical means: in other words something like a special typewriter. You type the actual letters of the message in plain language on to the keyboard, but what you read as you hit each key is another letter, so instead of the original plain message you now have an apparently meaningless scramble. And a special refinement would be that, as you type each, it not only produces the enciphered letter but then changes, so that the next time that particular letter comes up, it is enciphered differently.’
‘And that’s what Enigma does?’ Ned asked.
‘That was my bird,’ Jemmy complained.
‘Basically that’s what the Germans did when they produced Enigma,’ Jenson said pedantically. ‘They added a battery, a nice mahogany box, a manual for each cipher — and here you have it.’ He patted the box. ‘Just like a portable typewriter — which is what is really is.’
‘But what happens when someone picks up the signal after Enigma has scrambled it?’ the Croupier asked.
‘Ah, that’s quite simple. That person would need to be listening on an assigned frequency, have a manual for the particular cipher, and an Enigma machine — which have been issued by the hundred.
‘Let’s suppose Hans Schmidt is the wireless operator of the 15th Panzer Division in the Western Desert and t
he Ober Kommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin has a signal for the general commanding.
‘The OKW signals people get the message at headquarters in plain language and will insert the prefix for that particular panzer division, say COD, then type the message on the Enigma machine in the appropriate Wehrmachit cipher, take the scrambled (and thus enciphered) result, and transmit it on that panzer wireless frequency.
‘Out in the Western Desert, wireless operator Schmidt listening on his frequency hears the letters COD in Morse, recognizes it as the call sign of the 15th Panzer division and copies down the Morse signal. It is, of course, the letters COD followed by what seems to be gibberish.
‘That signal is then taken to the 15th Panzer division’s Enigma. Right at the beginning of the message, following COD, is another three-letter group which tells what the machine should be set at, and, if it is very secret, an indication that it must be deciphered by an officer. I’ll show you all that on the machine in a moment.’
‘As easy as that, eh?’ Jemmy grunted.
‘If you have an Enigma, and if you have the appropriate manual for the cipher being used and can set the machine correctly. For the eavesdropper — us, in fact, — it’s more complex. We can usually work out for whom the signal is intended. Our problem is to work out the three-letter setting for the Enigma. Of course, a message can be coded first, and then sent by cipher using the Enigma. It’s rare, but it really provides a headache. A double headache,’ he said and smiled to indicate he had made a joke.
Ned said: ‘I thought there were dozens of different ciphers — Hydra, Medusa, Thetis, Neptun and so on for the Navy…’
‘Oh yes, for all the German services. These are the three-letter settings. The more important the cipher, the more difficult the setting. Look at the machine and you’ll realize that one three-letter setting is not necessarily as easy as another.’
The trio grouped round him at the little table. ‘Just a simple wooden box, and when you open the lid you see — ’ he swung it up and back on its hinge as though to reveal a white rabbit, ‘what looks like a complicated portable typewriter. And in many ways that’s what it is, electrically operated.
