Here in the east, the wild steppes and thick taiga forests of Siberia remained untamed, a free state. It seemed loosely controlled by groups of warlords, like the Cossack clans that had once ranged in the heartland of Russia. The name Kozolnikov seemed to appear prominently in Irkutsk, along with that of Old Man Kolchak. He was still alive too. Apparently the Bolsheviks were never able to assert control beyond the Urals.
Orenburg, all of Kazakhstan and the Caspian region, along with all of Siberia had remained provinces of the White Russian movement. Now Volkov’s forces in Orenburg referred to themselves as the Grey Legion. He saw odd line drawings of what looked to be airships in the sky. What had happened to the world?
This was my doing, he thought. I did this the moment I took it upon myself to challenge Japan. No! It was Fedorov’s meddling that caused it all. If I could have finished what I started none of this might have happened! He could not leave things be. He had to come back in that goddamned submarine. Was it still out there somewhere too?
He thought for a long time on his sad state, with plenty of time for regrets. Yet something within him folded in on itself, a hard kernel of stone that refused to yield, refused the mantle of shame and held but one thought in mind- revenge. That’s what I said to that Inspector General and his dog from Naval Intelligence. Yes… Revenge is a dish that is best served cold.
At Irkutsk he decided to go and find Old Man Kolchak and see what he was up to. The first thing he did was pull his uniform jacket back out of that pillowcase and put it back on, and proudly. Some would say he tarnished it with all he had done, but let them talk, he thought. I know more than anyone alive in this sad world. If there is any man who is rightfully a prophet, it is me.
This was what Orlov had in mind when he jumped ship, yes? Well, I had something else in mind, and I didn’t jump. The world threw me here, and here I will stay. With all I know, power will come easily into my grasp if I reach for it. And what better place to find it than in the hands of the men who already hold the reins? Yes, he thought. Go find this Old Man Kolchak, and the other one, the young Turk, Kozolnikov. I will soon be very useful to them. That’s how it will begin. But before long… yes… before long they will be answering to me!
Chapter 9
Alan Turing reached for his handkerchief again, still bothered by the pollens of early summer, as he always was in June. As deviously clever as he was, he had not yet discovered a way to defeat Mother Nature, or to defend himself from the perennial attacks of Hay Fever that beset him. Not even the full gas mask he wore as he rode his bicycle to Bletchley Park each day for his work in the cypher busting unit seemed to do him any good, and probably frightened scores of roadside passersby and children when they saw his macabre, masked specter, head down, peddling furiously and breathing hard behind the leering visage of his goggle mask.
The bicycle also seemed to conspire against him at regular intervals, its gear chain slipping and clogging the works, bringing him to an ignominious stop on the long country roads. Then he would be forced to remove his gas mask to see well enough to re-set the chain, and the pollens would find his nose, still breathing heavily with the exertion of his ride. So he took to carefully calculating the interval between gear chain failures, counting each rotation of the pedals, and cleverly intervened, tightening and adjusting it just before the average time elapsed to ward off the failure.
In spite of his Hay Fever, he remained fit and trim, sometimes taking to running the three miles from his cottage to work each day, a bona fide marathon man in his own rite. All the while, his mind was feverishly working on some problem or another, be it an equation or expression in his calculations, a thorny problem in his effort to crack some devilishly complex code, or perhaps dreaming up another of his strange devices, like the Universal Machine that stood as a good foundation to the modern understanding of computers. Find the flaws, he thought. Find the loose ends, the contradictions. From those you can get a lever into the code and deduce everything. Then all it required was the proper machine to aid the decryption effort, and of course good signals intelligence. He was determined to have a solution to the German Naval Enigma code in short order.
His associate, Gordon Welchman, has been working with him on a device, which they called a “bombe,” but the work was frustratingly slow. It was a series of drums arrayed in rows that rotated at 120rpms with each setting off the next in a precise order, and the motion migrating down and down to turn the positions of the lower drums, almost like the gears of a clock…or a bicycle. By brute force of trial and error the machine would test the possible relationship or “connection” between two letters.
It might deduce that E was connected to H until a contradicting case appeared in its machination that proposed E was connected to J or some other letter. Since E could not be connected to both H and J at the same time, it was the contradiction that allowed the code breakers to eliminate one case or another and eventually arrive at the correct connection-a connection that corresponded to the assignments on the German Enigma code machine. In effect, Turing and Welchman were building and using a massive analog computer to help them break the German code. It was all much more complex than that, but the principle was sound, and it was slowly producing results.
They had it up and running just a few months ago, in the ides of March, 1940, and at times its clattering and churning could be heard throughout the whole facility. To Turing, it sounded much like the feverish pedaling on his bicycle, mixed in with the chugging repetition of a printing press. The only problem was that there were too few men on the job, and too few “bombe” machines clattering away to move the effort forward. Building on the work of several Polish cryptographers, Turing was also attempting to decipher the German Naval Enigma code. He boldly announced it could be broken, and eagerly set to work on it.
“Look Gordon,” he said one day, “no one else is doing anything about it and I could have it to myself.” That was an idea particularly appealing to him, as it could become a perfect testing ground for his methods and machines. He kept Peter Twinn busy on the project as well, and innumerable girls providing hands and eyes for the enormous clerical work involved. A little luck also helped when the British captured the German Trawler Polares on April 26, 1940, which held numerous pieces of equipment related to the code.
Known as the “Narvik Pinch” it aided the work immensely. The German Enigma machine operators also helped in many ways. Thinking the code unbreakable, they would often pair three letter sets with a second series that was easily related. It was found that the three letter code set for LON was often followed by DON for London, and the three letter set for BER was often followed by LIN, just as HIT was finished off by LER. If any one of the sets could be identified in a message, the related series was easily deciphered.
By May of 1940 Turing and other dedicated cryptanalysts, notably Hugh Foss, had a breakthrough that led to the deciphering of a complete day’s messages. The success was celebrated ever thereafter as “Foss Day,” but as the code changed daily, there was still a great deal of work to be done to allow reliable deciphering for an entire month.
Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, or Station X as it was sometimes called, was a very busy place. That day Turing was wiping his weary nose, lamenting that his gas mask did not seem as reliable as he hoped on the morning ride, even though he had successfully averted a gear chain failure by stopping at a precise interval to effect a repair. A bit weary and bedraggled by his Hay Fever, he went over to the cupboard and quickly unlocked the padlock and chain which he used to secure his favorite coffee mug from any “unauthorized use” as he called it. Coffee! That was what he needed now to get the gears, wheels and bombes of his own mind working and clattering again.