He had been one of the founding fathers of the group that came to be called the Watch, marking the amazing disappearance and reappearance of this mysterious ship that they came to call ‘Geronimo.’ Yet well before he ever remembered doing any of that, he remembered having a conversation with Peter Twinn, very much like this one.
It was June of 1940, a long year before those dogged memories of the time he first became aware of Kirov in 1941. That is why they simply couldn’t be real, or so he believed. Because in June of 1940, Twinn had come to him with a mystery wrapped in a plain manila envelope, and he remembered it very clearly. Unlike those other memories of Geronimo, this one still fit nicely into the chronology of his present life. Now he played it all out again in his mind. Twinn had come in, that envelope in hand….
“What is it?” Turing seemed uninterested.
“It’s the prodigal son, that’s what it is.” Twinn pressed the photographs into his lap.
Turing took the first photo, eying it suspiciously. It was a typical aerial reconnaissance photo of what appeared to be a large warship at sea. “Well it certainly is exactly what it looks like,” he said. “A ship.”
“Yes, but not a German ship this time, Alan. Take a good guess as to who owns this one. Then have a look at these close-ups under my arm. I think you’ll be quite amazed.”
Turing set down his coffee mug, reached for his magnifying glass, and took a closer look. “Russian naval ensign,” he said definitively. “That’s clear enough. Where was it taken—the Baltic?”
“Southwest of Iceland, right in the middle of this big operation underway out there now.”
Turing looked again, this time his gaze lingering on the photo, eye roving from place to place behind the big round lens of the magnifying glass, and a strange feeling coming over him that he could not quite decipher. It was an odd ripple, shiver like, that ran up his spine and tingled at the back of his neck, yet he could not see why he would react this way to a simple photograph.
Saying nothing, Turing extended an arm, gesturing for the manila envelope Twinn was holding, his eyes still riveted to the original photo, a furrow of growing concern creasing his brow. He had seen this ship before… That was the feeling at the back of his neck now, and it was bloody dangerous, a rising discomfort and warning alarm in his mind. He had seen this ship before, yet he could not recall the where and when of that, strangely bothered, as his mind was a trap that little escaped from once embraced by the cold steel of his logic.
At that time, none of the odd memories of Kirov had any place in his mind. Instead, they were ghostly feelings, worrisome notions, foreboding thoughts he had difficulty explaining. They all conspired to create one thing—fear, an apprehension that he could just not explain away. Then he found that box in the archives, and his whole world seemed to be turned on its head, or worse. It was folded back on itself, all twisted and out of shape. That box contained hard evidence of the very same Russian ship Twinn brought to him that day, photographs, reports, things initialed by his own hand, and that of Admiral Tovey, yet he was shocked to find they had all been dated a year in the future. It was August of 1940 when he found that box, and everything in it chronicled events that transpired between August of 1941 and August of 1942!
He presented them all to the Admiral, and that was the first time he had ever met the man—he was sure of that. Yet everything in that box argued that was not the case. It was evidence that both he and Tovey had been thick as thieves, in the know about this Russian ship all along, a nice little conspiracy…. But in the future!
That’s when the fears and odd apprehensions began emerging with more clarity in his mind, as if they were old lost memories. Yet they could not be recollections, he reasoned, for they were all about months and days dated to a future time. He worried that when the calendar of his present life finally reached the first of them, in August of 1941, that they would all begin to happen in real life, but he was wrong. Kirov never went to battle in the Atlantic with the Royal Navy as those files and reports showed. It was all rubbish, and he simply could not understand how he could have ever accumulated all that material. The files claimed the ship had first been spotted in August of 1941, when he knew damn well they encountered it a full year earlier.
Then, strangely, the Russian ship vanished in the heat of that battle with the Germans west of Gibraltar in the Atlantic, and it wasn’t seen again for two full months, in August of 1941….
A second coming, he thought. It was arriving just as he had it in all those old memories; just as he had written it up in those reports in the file box! He was possessed with a moment of sudden fear that the ship would turn for the Denmark Strait and become the deadly foe it had been as written in those reports. Then, to his great surprise, he learned it went north instead, to Murmansk.
After that, all his memories of those earlier events in 1941 began to seem very hazy, like an underpainting being slowly covered over as the painter started to creating something new on that same old canvass. He still had them in his head, but when he thought about them, he could no longer mate them up with any sense that he had actually lived them out. When Kirov came that second time, it turned north to Murmansk instead of south to the Denmark Strait, and that single decision had begun to rewrite all the history that Turing had lived through and written about.
Deep in his mind, he still had recollections of huddling with Tovey as the two men worked to solve the puzzle of this mysterious ship… but after the second coming, that had never happened! The memories seemed so real that he would swear he lived them out, but he could not fit them into the chronology of his life. They were so real that he had spent long hours writing up an account of them, which he filed away in a simple box he kept in the archives at Bletchley Park.
In time, all those memories would recede to the background of his mind, like that old file box hidden away under a stack of three others in the archives. The memories would fade, then become unaccountable feelings, hunches, strange fragments of things he could no longer grasp and see clearly. While some men had to slowly awaken to those old memories of an earlier life, others had to forget….
He shook himself, returning to the moment at hand. There was Peter Twinn, and the two of them had yet another mystery to solve, this time involving the German troop movements.
“Anything else of note?” asked Turing, eyeing his empty coffee mug.
“Just the usual—troop movements and such. Jerry gave the Russians Voronezh back. They’ve pulled Model out of that pocket, so a lot of divisions are moving about in the snow over there.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Steiner has pulled back to Kharkov… Let’s see… Ah, the Brandenburgers went there too, but this latest report had them on the trains heading south to Odessa. What in the world would they be doing there? Probably getting a refit.”
“Odessa?” Turing sat up. “What about those Zeppelins?”
“What about them?”
“They staged out of Odessa, and they’re still there now.”
Twinn had retrieved the coffee pot and now he leaned in over Turing’s right shoulder and filled his mug. “My good man,” he said. “What are you suggesting?”
“That’s an elite unit. It was at Volgograd, and in this big row over Kursk. The Germans just staged a rather dramatic attack out of Odessa, and now it shows up there.”