One of the two code breakers in the room, an Oxford mathematician named Johnson, pushed his chair back and put his feet up on the table, taking a pipe out of his pocket. “Yes, that’s possible, but by deliberately not acting you also create a pattern, don’t you? If I were a clever analyst in B-Dienst I might notice a welcome but strange increase in the success rate of U-boat contacts with convoys, and I might then be persuaded to look back over the preceding months and begin to suspect that something was not quite right. Do you see what I mean? Inaction means not only do we do nothing to save those convoys, but we might also compromise Ultra completely. That might be their key to realizing that we’d broken the code. If I were that analyst, having decided that Enigma had been broken, I might wonder why the intercepts were no longer being acted on. I might then begin to suspect that we were protecting our intelligence coup because something big was in the offing, something like a seaborne invasion.”
He glanced at the other code breaker, who nodded in agreement, then put his pipe in his mouth, folding his arms and giving Fan a stolid look. She turned from him and addressed Bermonsey. “I agree. That was going to be my next point. That’s why I recommend that we do take action, and redirect TS-37.”
She sat back, feeling slightly sick as she always did having chosen one convoy over another, trying not to look at the sailing order for the doomed ONS-5. Bermonsey leaned over and pushed the TS-37 file toward the two code breakers in case either of them wanted to view it. “Does everyone agree? Good.” Fan picked up the ONS-5 file, and Bermonsey addressed the table. “Let me tell you where we are today. In March we lost a hundred and twenty merchant ships, for twelve U-boats sunk. In April so far it’s been sixty-four ships for fifteen U-boats. Are we turning the tide? The Admiralty thinks so. They think this coming month will be the crunch. But we have to keep our nerve, now more than ever. Any chink in our armor, anything that lets the Germans suspect that we’re on to them, and we’re all sunk. Right, everyone. Back to the next set of decrypts. Johnson, that second file, if you please.”
Johnson tapped his pipe on the table, catching everyone’s attention. “Come on, Bermonsey. What’s it like?”
Bermonsey stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“You’re the only one here who’s actually done it. Stood behind a periscope. Had a ship in your sights. Given the order. Watched men you’ve condemned die in the sea.”
Bermonsey gave him a cold look. “It’s called war. You kill the enemy.”
Johnson waved his pipe at the file Fan was holding. “What about when it’s not the enemy? What about when a submarine captain has to look through a periscope and murder his own side? How would that feel?”
Bermonsey glared at him. “Keep your mouth shut, Johnson,” he snapped. “Now pass me that file.”
Johnson leaned sideways, his feet still on the desk, sifted the papers, and picked up the file. “I’m not one of your sailors, Bermonsey. You can’t order me around.”
There was a sudden tension in the room. Fan saw Bermonsey look at Captain Pullen, who had heard the exchange. “Johnson, a word,” Pullen said. Johnson sighed theatrically, tossed the file in front of Fan, pocketed his pipe, swung his legs off the desk, and walked out of the room behind the officer.
They all knew what “a word” meant. Ever since Turing had broken Enigma, there had been the problem of what to do with his team of code breakers. Some had remained poised for the next decryption, ready in case the Germans altered the machines as they had done with the naval Enigma in early 1942, leaving Bletchley in the dark for almost a year. Others had been reassigned to work on the Colossus computer and Lorenz, the German High Command code. A few of the less socially awkward ones had been flown off to America to teach at the US code-breaker school. Others had been moved to the special operations hut and naval intelligence to help with the cat-and-mouse game they were now playing, using the decrypted intercepts to swing the Battle of the Atlantic in the Allies’ favor. Some, like Turing himself, had taken to it well; a few had decided that their talents were being wasted. They were all under pressure and occasionally the pot bubbled over. One thing was for certain: they would not see Johnson in this hut again.
Bermonsey reached over, picked up the file and nodded at Fan. As she followed him to the office at the end of the room, her mind was racing. She thought about what Johnson had just said: when it’s not the enemy. What could he possibly have meant?
5
Fan followed Commander Bermonsey into the office and closed the door behind them. Through the window she could see others huddled in their coats hurrying up the path toward the mansion and the bombe huts, the result of the second early-morning train having arrived at Bletchley. She shut the blind and turned to the table in the center of the room. She was carrying the file for the mid-Atlantic convoy, ONS-5, and Bermonsey had the one for convoy TS-37 that had been the subject of the altercation with Johnson. She put hers on the table beside his, and opened them both up. Two files: one meant life for the crews, the one that would be left open; the other might mean death. The conference in the operations room had already decided which file would be shut and which left open, but allowing a final reflection in this room as the clock ticked down to the phone call had become part of Bermonsey’s routine. He stayed standing, leaning on the table and inspecting the files as he always did, staring at the top pages with the convoy orders of sailing. To Fan it seemed as if he were at sea again, a captain addressing the ships’ companies, telling the crews in both convoys that he was not judging their qualities as men but was making a decision based solely on the calculus of war.
She glanced at the clock. Ten minutes to seven. At 7:15 on the dot, Bermonsey would pick up the phone and call the rear admiral commanding the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Center in London; minutes later the order would be issued to reroute one of the convoys. What those at sea did not know, could never know, was the existence of Ultra intercepts that were not acted on, the files that were closed in this room and sent to storage stamped Top Secret, the result of decisions known only to those in the special operations hut, who were under strict instructions not to put down any of their analysis on paper and were sworn to secrecy for life. Fan had been present when Churchill himself had visited the hut and told them that nothing was more important than securing the Atlantic supply line, that the decisions made here could win or lose the war. Nothing could leak out; nothing could be left to chance.
She watched Bermonsey leaf methodically through the contents of the files — the convoy route plans, the cargo manifests, the secret Admiralty orders to the convoy commodores and escort captains — as if he were registering but not reading them, doing little more than glancing at the headings to make sure that everything was in order. She waited while he stood back, and then she plucked up courage and asked him the question that had been burning in her mind. “What did Johnson mean, sir? Not the enemy?”
He stared at her, and for a moment she thought he would snap at her, too. Then he took out a cigarette, tapped it on the table, lit it and drew in deeply, holding the smoke in and then exhaling upward so that it wreathed the single bare bulb that hung above them. He closed his eyes for a moment, then looked down at her again. “You shouldn’t ask questions, Fan, even in this holy of holies. You know that.”