“You’re hopeless. By the way, your Commander Bermonsey knows we’re billeted together and has been asking for you. He was here ten minutes ago, chomping at the bit. He wants you to go straight in as soon as you arrive, lickety-split.”
“That’s why I made sure to take the first train back. He’s always like that.”
“This time might be special. He was just like my CO gets in Hut 8 after he’s been at work through the night, all jittery and nervous. My guess is there’s something big on. Just a friendly warning.”
“All right. See you this evening in billets.”
“With a dishy American in tow, just for me?” She grinned, waved her handbag, and was gone, sauntering out of the door toward the complex of huts adjoining Bletchley House, the stately home that had been the sole building in the park before the war.
Louise Hunter-Jones was from a very different social background to Fan, with a posh Mayfair address, and her frippery could sometimes be trying. But what both girls shared was an aptitude for math, something that had led Louise to Girton College, Cambridge, and Fan on a scholarship to the University of Birmingham, and both had been snapped up by Bletchley when the recruiters had contacted university departments looking for recent graduates with first-class degrees, women as well as men. Louise had gone straight in with the naval code breakers in Hut 8, but then had been transferred to supervise one of the bombes, the inscrutable name given by the Polish intelligence people who had invented them to the electromechanical monsters that churned through the permutations to find the daily settings for the German Enigma machines, clattering and shuddering and reeking of machine oil. It always left her pale and drained at the end of the day. For a while she let it be known that she felt she had drawn the short straw, but then her natural enthusiasm took over and she had made the best of it; the extra effort she took with make-up and clothing was part of that.
Fan, by contrast, had become a statistician, a calculator of probabilities, an adviser to the officer in charge in her hut when they needed to estimate how many of the deciphered U-boat orders they could act on without raising suspicions among the Germans that Enigma had been broken. She did not end each day with her ears ringing and her clothes reeking as Louise did, but dealing with statistics and probabilities took its own toll, the knowledge that what she was doing was not just about saving lives but also making decisions not to, and letting men on the front line in the Battle of the Atlantic sail on into probable destruction and death.
She pushed open the door and started to make her way across the courtyard beside the central pond, the mansion ahead of her and the rows of long wooden huts where most of them worked to the right. Hearing a familiar light step coming quickly up the path behind her, she turned and watched the runner approach. He was wearing only a vest and shorts despite the cold, and his dark hair was matted to his forehead.
“Hello, Alan,” she said. He swerved off the path and came to a halt on the grass beside her, his hands on his knees, panting hard. “Good run?”
He looked at his watch. “Better than last time. Set off at midnight.”
“At midnight?” she said incredulously. “From where?”
He looked up at her, nonplussed. “London, of course. Whitehall, to be precise. Had a meeting.”
“You ran all the way here from London? At night? In the blackout?”
“Best time for it. No traffic on the roads. Anyway, it’s a full moon.” He peered up at the clouds. “Allegedly.”
“That’s more than fifty miles.”
“Early-morning trains are always too crowded these days. Running clears my head.”
“You’re mad.”
He gave her an impish grin. “So they tell me.”
“Let me at least get you some tea.”
He shook his head, then nodded toward the huts. “Quick shower, then I’m back in there. Work to do.”
“Louise thinks there’s something on. Bermonsey’s been looking for me.”
His breathing eased and he straightened up. “You know, it was easier earlier on in the war when it was just code-breaking. Then it was a mathematical problem, an exercise in scholarship. Now it’s different.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “Now it’s real people, real lives.”
He stared up at the sky, his hands on his hips, and shut his eyes, the sweat running down his neck in rivulets. Then he looked down and gave her another grin. “See you in the machine.”
She watched as he jogged off to the shower block beside the mansion. He had taken to calling their workplace that, the machine, after someone had dubbed him deus ex machina, the god from the machine, the device in a storyline that saves the plot. Alan Turing had done that, had done incredible things, had made Bletchley work, but now he was no more than the rest of them, a cog in a machine where genius mattered less than the ability to see human lives as little more than chess pieces, as dispensable elements in the calculus of war.
She turned toward the row of low buildings that formed one edge of the compound. They called them huts, but in reality they were a lot more than that: long, purpose-built structures of interconnected offices and workspaces that could hold a hundred or more workers each, both civilians and service personnel. Hers was officially Hut 9b, but was known informally as the special operations hut. She thought about what Alan had said. More and more, this damp corner of Buckinghamshire seemed to be at the forefront of the war. Sometimes, hunched over the map table, choosing one convoy to save over another, it seemed as if the raging Atlantic were just outside, as if opening the door would reveal the mountainous seas and howling wind, the dark shapes of ships and the throbbing of engines as they battled through the night.
She shivered, and remembered the bomber boys on the train. They were someone else’s responsibility, other girls like her and Louise in another secret place, pushing counters across a map, sending some men to near-certain death and giving others a temporary reprieve. She could do nothing to help them. Her boys were the men at sea, the thousands of sailors in merchant ships, British, American, Canadian, Norwegian, Indian and all of the other Allied seafaring nations pitted against the Nazis, plowing their way across the Atlantic and running the gauntlet of the U-boats, living in constant fear of attack. Her twenty minutes in the chill air this morning was nothing compared to the cold felt by those men out there tonight, their ships pitching and rolling as the spray lashed them, trying to maintain station in the darkness. Keeping some of those men alive was what kept her coming back here, day after day, night after night.
She looked up, seeing the milky smudge where the light of the moon was now visible through the morning clouds. The full moon that had guided Alan on his run might be silhouetting those ships in the darkness to the west, making them easier targets for the U-boats. She prayed for cloud over the Atlantic, for rain. She took a deep breath and steeled herself, the adrenalin already coursing through her. She could hear others coming up the path behind her. She pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Fan doffed her coat and warmed her hands at a radiator in the main operations room while she waited for Commander Bermonsey, who was bent over a map table conferring with the two US Navy officers who had so intrigued Louise. They were part of the increased numbers of Americans who had come to Bletchley over the past few months in advance of the planned handover of a large part of the Ultra decryption work to US naval intelligence in Washington. Bermonsey straightened up and saw her, but continued talking to the men. He was awkwardly tall for a submariner, she thought, well over six feet, though with his thick beard and gaunt, handsome features he looked the part. They had been told that before being posted here, he had been the sole survivor among the captains in his flotilla out of Malta, and that his boat had been lost with all hands on its first patrol without him. He had been jittery when he had arrived, pale and haunted, but once he had settled in, he had begun to run the operations room as if he were on the bridge of a ship, something that Fan found she relished; it gave what they were doing the urgency of the life-and-death decisions that she knew he must once have faced at sea.