by Ken Follett
When she heard his voice she realized it was Charlie. ‘Good Lord!’ she said. ‘You’ve changed!’
‘I lost a little weight,’ he admitted.
‘You sure did.’ Forty or fifty pounds, she guessed. It made him better-looking. His features now seemed craggy rather than ugly.
‘But you haven’t changed at all,’ he said, looking her up and down.
She had made an effort with her clothes. She had bought nothing new for years, because of wartime austerity, but for tonight she had exhumed an off-the-shoulder sapphire-blue silk evening gown by Lanvin that she had acquired on her last pre-war trip to Paris. ‘In a couple of months I’ll be twenty-six,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I look the same as I did when I was eighteen.’
He glanced down at her décolletage, blushed, and said: ‘Believe me, you do.’
They went into the restaurant and sat down. ‘I was afraid you weren’t coming,’ he said.
‘My watch stopped. I’m sorry I’m late.’
‘Only by twenty minutes. I would have waited an hour.’
A waiter asked if they would like a drink. Daisy said: ‘This is one of the few places in England where you can get a decent martini.’
‘Two of those, please,’ Charlie said.
‘I like mine straight up with an olive.’
‘So do I.’
She studied him, intrigued by the way he had altered. His old awkwardness had softened to a charming shyness. It was still hard to imagine him as a fighter pilot, shooting down German planes. Anyway, the Blitz on London had come to an end half a year ago, and there were no longer air battles in the skies over southern England. ‘What kind of flying do you do?’ she said.
‘Mainly daytime circus operations over northern France.’
‘What’s a circus operation?’
‘A bomber attack with a heavy escort of fighters, the main object being to lure enemy planes into an air battle in which they’re outnumbered.’
‘I hate bombers,’ she said. ‘I lived through the Blitz.’
He was surprised. ‘I would have thought you’d want to give the Germans a taste of their own medicine.’
‘Not at all.’ Daisy had thought about this a lot. ‘I could weep for all the innocent women and children who were burned and maimed in London – and it doesn’t help at all to know that German women and children are suffering the same.’
‘I never looked at it that way.’
They ordered dinner. Wartime regulations restricted them to three courses, and their meal could not cost more than five shillings. On the menu were special austerity dishes such as Mock Duck – made out of pork sausages – and Woolton Pie, which contained no meat at all.
Charlie said: ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to hear a girl speak real American. I like English girls, and I’ve even dated one, but I miss American voices.’
‘Me, too,’ she said. ‘This is my home now, and I don’t guess I’ll ever go back, but I know how you feel.’
‘I’m sorry I missed meeting Viscount Aberowen.’
‘He’s in the air force, like you. He’s a pilot trainer. He gets home now and again – but not this weekend.’
Daisy was sleeping with Boy again, on his occasional visits home. She had sworn she never would after catching him with those awful women in Aldgate. But he had put pressure on her. He said that fighting men needed consolation when they came home, and he had promised never to visit prostitutes again. She did not really believe his promises, but all the same she gave in, albeit against her inclination. After all, she told herself, I did marry him for better or worse.
However, she no longer took any pleasure in sex with him, unfortunately. She could go to bed with Boy but she could not fall back in love with him. She had to use cream for lubrication. She had tried to summon again the fond feelings she had once had for him, when she had found him an exciting young aristocrat with the world at his feet, full of fun and capable of enjoying life thoroughly. But he was not really exciting, she now realized: he was just a selfish and rather limited man with a title. When he was on top of her, all she could think about was that he might be passing her some disgusting infection.
Charlie said carefully: ‘I’m sure you don’t want to talk too much about the Rouzrokh family . . .’
‘No.’
‘. . . but did you hear that Joanne died?’
‘No!’ Daisy was shocked. ‘How?’
‘At Pearl Harbor. She was engaged to Woody Dewar, and she went with him to visit his brother, Chuck, who is stationed there. They were in a car that was strafed by a Zero – that’s a Jap fighter plane – and she was hit.’
‘I’m so sorry. Poor Joanne. Poor Woody.’
Their food came, and a bottle of wine. They ate in silence for a while. Daisy discovered that Mock Duck did not taste much like duck.
Charlie said: ‘Joanne was one of two thousand, four hundred people killed at Pearl Harbor. We lost eight battleships and ten other vessels. Goddamn sneaky Japs.’
‘People here are secretly pleased, because the US is in the fight now. God alone knows why Hitler was dumb enough to declare war on the States. But the British think they have a chance of winning at last, with the Russians and us on their side.’
‘Americans are very angry about Pearl Harbor.’
‘People here don’t see why.’
‘The Japanese kept on negotiating right up until the last minute – long after they must have made the decision. That’s deceitful!’
Daisy frowned. ‘It seems sensible to me. If agreement had been reached at the last minute, they could have called off the attack.’
‘But they didn’t declare war!’
‘Would that have made any difference? We were expecting them to attack the Philippines. Pearl Harbor would have taken us by surprise even after a declaration of war.’
Charlie spread his hands in a gesture of bafflement. ‘Why did they have to attack us anyway?’
‘We stole their money.’
‘Froze their assets.’
‘They can’t see the difference. And we cut off their oil. We had them up against the wall. They were facing ruin. What were they to do?’
‘They should have given in, and agreed to withdraw from China.’
‘Yes, they should. But if it was America that was being pushed around and told what to do by some other country, would you want us to give in?’
‘Maybe not.’ He grinned. ‘I said you hadn’t changed. I’d like to take that back.’
‘Why?’
‘You never used to talk like this. In the old days you wouldn’t discuss politics at all.’
‘If you don’t take an interest, then what happens is your fault.’
‘I guess we’ve all learned that.’
They ordered dessert. Daisy said: ‘What’s going to happen to the world, Charlie? All Europe is Fascist. The Germans have conquered much of Russia. The USA is an eagle with a broken wing. Sometimes I’m glad I don’t have children.’
‘Don’t underestimate the USA. We’re wounded, not crushed. Japan is cock of the walk now, but the day will come when the Japanese people shed bitter tears of regret for Pearl Harbor.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘And the Germans aren’t having things all their own way any longer. They failed to take Moscow, and they’re on the retreat. Do you realize the battle of Moscow was Hitler’s first real defeat?’
‘Is it a defeat, or just a setback?’
‘Either way, it’s the worst military result he’s ever had. The Bolsheviks gave the Nazis a bloody nose.’
Charlie had discovered vintage port, a British taste. In London men drank it after the ladies had retired from the dinner table, a tiresome practice that Daisy had tried to abolish in her own house, without success. They had a glass each. On top of the martini and the wine, it made Daisy feel a little drunk and happy.
They reminisced about their adolescence in Buffalo, and laughed about the foolish things they and
others had done. ‘You told us all you were going to London to dance with the King,’ Charlie said. ‘And you did!’
‘I hope they were jealous.’
‘And how! Dot Renshaw went into spasm.’
Daisy laughed happily.
‘I’m glad we got back in contact,’ Charlie said. ‘I like you so much.’
‘I’m glad, too.’
They left the restaurant and got their coats. The doorman summoned a taxi. ‘I’ll take you home,’ Charlie said.
As they drove along the Strand, he put his arm around her. She was about to protest, then she thought: What the hell. She snuggled up to him.
‘What a fool I am,’ he said. ‘I wish I’d married you when I had the chance.’
‘You would have made a better husband than Boy Fitzherbert,’ she said. But then she would never have met Lloyd.
She realized she had not said anything to Charlie about Lloyd.
As they turned into her street, Charlie kissed her.
It felt nice to be wrapped in a man’s arms and kissing his lips, but she knew it was the booze making her feel that way, and in truth the only man she wanted to kiss was Lloyd. All the same she did not push him away until the cab came to a halt.
‘How about a nightcap,’ he said.
For a moment she was tempted. It was a long time since she had touched a man’s hard body. But she did not really want Charlie. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie, but I love someone else.’
‘We don’t have to go to bed together,’ he whispered. ‘But if we could just, you know, smooch a while . . .’
She opened the door and stepped out. She felt like a heel. He was risking his life for her every day, and she would not even give him a cheap thrill. ‘Goodnight, Charlie, and good luck,’ she said. Before she could change her mind, she slammed the car door and went into her house.
She went straight upstairs. A few minutes later, alone in bed, she felt wretched. She had betrayed two men: Lloyd, because she had kissed Charlie; and Charlie, because she had sent him away dissatisfied.
She spent most of Sunday in bed with a hangover.
On Monday evening she got a phone call. ‘I’m Hank Bartlett,’ said a young American voice. ‘Friend of Charlie Farquharson, at Duxford. He talked to me about you, and I found your number in his book.’
Her heart stopped. ‘Why are you calling me?’
‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Charlie died today, shot down over Abbeville.’
‘No!’
‘It was his first mission in his new Spitfire.’
‘He talked about that,’ she said dazedly.
‘I thought you might like to know.’
‘Thank you, yes,’ she whispered.
‘He just thought you were the bee’s knees.’
‘Did he?’
‘You should have heard him go on about how great you are.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Then she could no longer speak, and she hung up the phone.
(ii)
Chuck Dewar looked over the shoulder of Lieutenant Bob Strong, one of the cryptanalysts. Some of them were chaotic but Strong was the tidy kind, and he had nothing on his desk but a single sheet of paper on which he had written:
YO—LO—KU—TA—WA—NA
‘I can’t get it,’ Strong said in frustration. ‘If the decrypt is right, it says they have struck yolokutawana. But it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no such word.’
Chuck stared at the six Japanese syllables. He felt sure they ought to mean something to him, even though he knew only a smattering of the language. But he could not figure it out, and he got on with his work.
The atmosphere in the Old Administration Building was grim.
For weeks after the raid, Chuck and Eddie saw bloated bodies from sunk ships floating on the oily surface of Pearl Harbor. At the same time, the intelligence they were handling reported more devastating attacks by the Japanese. Only three days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes hit the American base at Luzon in the Philippines and destroyed the Pacific Fleet’s entire stock of torpedoes. The same day in the South China Sea they sank two British battleships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, leaving the British helpless in the Far East.
They seemed unstoppable. Bad news just kept coming. In the first few months of the New Year Japan defeated US forces in the Philippines and beat the British in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Rangoon, the capital of Burma.
Many of the place names were unfamiliar even to seamen such as Chuck and Eddie. To the American public they sounded like distant planets in a science-fiction yarn: Guam, Wake, Bataan. But everyone knew the meaning of retreat, submit and surrender.
Chuck felt bewildered. Could Japan really beat America? He could hardly believe it.
By May, the Japanese had what they wanted: an empire that gave them rubber, tin, and – most important of all – oil. Information leaking out indicated that they were ruling their empire with a brutality that would have made Stalin blush.
But there was a fly in their ointment, and it was the US Navy. The thought made Chuck proud. The Japanese had hoped to destroy Pearl Harbor completely, and gain control of the Pacific Ocean; but they had failed. American aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers were still afloat. Intelligence suggested the Japanese commanders were infuriated that the Americans refused to lie down and die. After their losses at Pearl Harbor the Americans were outnumbered and outgunned, but they did not flee and hide. Instead they launched hit-and-run raids on Japanese ships, doing minor damage but boosting American morale and giving the Japanese the unshakable feeling that they had not yet won. Then, on 25 April, planes launched from a carrier bombed the centre of Tokyo, inflicting a terrible wound on the pride of the Japanese military. The celebrations in Hawaii were ecstatic. Chuck and Eddie got drunk that night.
But there was a showdown coming. Every man Chuck spoke to in the Old Administration Building said the Japanese would launch a major attack early in the summer to tempt American ships to come out in force for a final battle. The Japanese hoped the superior strength of their navy would be decisive, and the American Pacific Fleet would be wiped out. The only way the Americans could win was to be better prepared and have better intelligence, to move faster and be smarter.
During those months, Station HYPO worked day and night to crack JN-25b, the new code of the Imperial Japanese Navy. By May they had made progress.
The US Navy had wireless intercept stations all around the Pacific Rim, from Seattle to Australia. There, men known as the On The Roof Gang sat with headsets and radio receivers listening to Japanese radio traffic. They scanned the airwaves and wrote what they heard on message pads.
The signals were in Morse Code, but the dots and dashes of naval signals translated into five-digit number groups, each representing a letter, word or phrase in a code book. The apparently random numbers were relayed by secure cable to teleprinters in the basement of the Old Administration Building. Then the difficult part began: cracking the code.
They always started with small things. The last word of any signal was often OWARI, meaning end. The cryptanalyst would look for other appearances of that number group in the same signal, and write ‘END?’ above any he found.
The Japanese helped them by making an uncharacteristically careless mistake.
Delivery of the new code books for JN-25b was delayed to some far-flung units. So, for a fatal few weeks, the Japanese high command sent out some messages in both codes. Since the Americans had broken much of the original JN-25, they were able to translate the message in the old code, set the decrypt alongside the message in the new code, and figure out the meanings of the five-digit groups of the new code. For a while they progressed by leaps and bounds.
The original eight cryptanalysts were supplemented, after Pearl Harbor, by some of the musicians from the band of the sunk battleship California. For reasons no one understood, musicians were good at decoding.
Every signal was kept and every
decrypt filed. Comparison of one with another was crucial to the work. An analyst might ask for all the signals from a particular day, or all the signals to one ship, or all the signals that mentioned Hawaii. Chuck and the other clerical staff developed ever-more-complex systems of cross-indexing to help them find whatever the analysts needed.
The unit predicted that in the first week of May the Japanese would attack Port Moresby, the Allied base in Papua. They were right, and the US Navy intercepted the invasion fleet in the Coral Sea. Both sides claimed victory, but the Japanese did not take Port Moresby. And Admiral Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific, began to trust his codebreakers.
The Japanese did not use regular names for locations in the Pacific Ocean. Every important place had a designation consisting of two letters – in fact, two characters or kanas of the Japanese alphabet, although the codebreakers usually used equivalents from the Roman A to Z. The men in the basement struggled to figure out the meaning of each of these two-kana designators. They made slow progress: MO was Port Moresby, AH was Oahu, but many were unknown.
In May, evidence was fast building up of a major Japanese assault at a location they called AF.
The best guess of the unit was that AF meant Midway, the atoll at the western end of the fifteen-hundred-mile-long chain of islands that started at Hawaii. Midway was halfway between Los Angeles and Tokyo.
A guess was not enough, of course. Given the numerical superiority of the Japanese navy, Admiral Nimitz had to know.
Day by day, the men Chuck was working with built up an ominous picture of the Japanese order of battle. New planes were delivered to aircraft carriers. An ‘occupation force’ was embarked: the Japanese were planning to hold on to whatever territory they won.
It looked as if this was the big one. But where would the attack come?
The men in the basement were particularly proud of decoding a signal from the Japanese fleet urging Tokyo: ‘Expedite delivery of fuelling hose.’ They were pleased partly because of the specialized language but mainly because the signal proved that a long-range mid-ocean manoeuvre was imminent.
