“Johnson knew that too, sir. He’s wanted out ever since being posted here. He’s been badgering Pullen about it for weeks.”
“I know. Not calculated to raise my sympathy.”
“Sir.”
He took another deep drag, and exhaled forcibly. “Even so, I should have thanked him for his opinion. I shouldn’t have snapped at him. We owe those men everything.”
“They’re the genius code breakers, but we girls do this job in operational intelligence at least as well as the men. We’re as clever at math as they are, but because academia is a man’s world and nobody gave us the professorships and fellowships, we’re not used to having elevated opinions of ourselves. It means we’re tougher than they are, more used to taking knocks. Put a man like Johnson in this room where the life-and-death decisions are made, and he’d probably go to pieces.”
Fan felt her face flush. She had never spoken to him like this before. He gave her a wry smile, took another deep drag and then carefully pressed the half-finished cigarette into the ashtray, putting it out. His look hardened. “You asked a question, and I owe you an answer because of what you’re about to be drawn into. What I’m going to tell you now is beyond top secret. I mean, beyond ultra top secret.”
“Sir.”
He glanced at the clock, and then pointed at the mauve-and-red ribbon on the left breast of his uniform jacket. “You know what this is?”
“The Distinguished Service Order.”
“I got that after my third patrol out of Malta, in August 1941. We’d shadowed a small Axis convoy out of Benghazi heading north, and we finally got into position in rough seas off eastern Sicily. I put three torpedoes into the largest ship, a converted liner. I knew it was a troopship, but it turned out to be carrying walking wounded back to Italy for convalescence. Two thousand men went into the water, and maybe two hundred were picked up by the escorts.”
Fan looked at him. “Walking wounded return to fight another day. You were saving Allied lives.”
He pursed his lips, staring at the files on the desk. “War is never black and white, even this one. The virtue of destroying an enemy like Hitler or Mussolini is not in question, but it’s what we have to do to get there.”
“I can see why Johnson’s question hit a raw nerve.”
“It wasn’t so much that. I was thinking of the decision I’m about to make now.”
“My assessment remains the same. We save TS-37.”
He reached over and closed both files. “I’m not asking for your opinion any more.”
She stared at the closed covers, dumbfounded. “Sir?”
“We’re not saving any convoys today.”
She felt an icy grip in the pit of her stomach. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m afraid our convoy conference was something of a sham. I had to make it seem as if it were normal procedure, right down to entering this room with you as usual. We decided to bring you on board some time ago. Do you remember Churchill’s visit last month?”
“Of course. You and Captain Pullen were holed up in this room with him for hours. We could smell the cigar smoke for days afterward.”
“Pullen is one of very few others at Bletchley who are party to what I’m about to tell you. Very few. Do you remember Churchill speaking to you in the hut afterward?”
“I was flattered. He only talked to a few of us, and he chose me.”
“It wasn’t random. After Pullen and I recommended you, he wanted to check you out himself.”
“You recommended me? For what?”
He picked up the half-finished cigarette from the ashtray, pinched off the burned end and relit it. He took a deep drag, holding it in for a few moments, then stubbed out the remainder. “One useful aspect of the conference is that it gave you an up-to-the-minute picture of the air and sea assets off West Africa. Well, there’s another asset, and it’s top secret. One of our own submarines is in position off Sierra Leone.”
“In position, sir? Is she a U-boat hunter?”
“She’s one of four specialized long-range boats Churchill ordered constructed early last year, soon after the Japanese war began. With the sea war in the Mediterranean swinging firmly in our favor, we took four of the best surviving captains and crews from the Malta and Gibraltar flotillas to man the new submarines. Officially they were men who had stacked up the requisite number of patrols for shore deployment or were being stood down through stress or illness, but in reality they were all reassigned to a top-secret operation. Two months ago we added four American boats to the flotilla, crewed by men with extensive operational experience in the Pacific. It’s no coincidence that I’m a submariner too. My assignment to Bletchley late last year was part of this operation. Churchill also vetted me personally.”
Fan was struggling to understand. “Why after the Japanese war began? Why is that significant? What have the Japanese got to do with this?”
Bermonsey pulled out another cigarette and tapped it on the table, but left it unlit. He glanced at the door and spoke urgently, his voice lowered. “Four days ago in the Indian Ocean off Mozambique, U-180 rendezvoused with the Japanese submarine I-29. We know about it because a sharp-eyed girl in the bombe cribbing hut spotted an Ultra decrypt about to go on the slush pile with an apparently unintelligible word that she realized was Japanese. The word was Yanagi, meaning Willow. It’s the Japanese code name for submarine missions to exchange technology with Nazi Germany.”
“I remember another Japanese sub, I-30,” Fan said. “Last August, wasn’t it? Lord Haw Haw in the Nazi radio broadcast made a big splash about the arrival of the submarine at the U-boat base at Lorient, having avoided Allied detection.”
Bermonsey nodded. “That was during our dark period, while we were unable to penetrate the new naval Enigma. A really bad time for us; worse for the men at sea. Ever since the Axis Powers’ Tripartite Pact in September 1940, Bletchley has been tasked to look out for anything indicating missions like that of I-30. We had no way of detecting that one, but since cracking the naval code again early this year, we’ve been keeping an eagle eye out. The decrypt on the twenty-sixth was the first indication we’ve had of another exchange, though by then of course it was too late to do anything about it.”
“What were they exchanging?”
“In the case of I-30 last year, it was high-value raw materials and design technology. The Japanese sent mica and shellac, and the blueprints for an aerial torpedo; in return, the Germans sent industrial diamonds, an example of the Würzburg air defense radar, a Zeiss artillery fire director, sonar countermeasure rounds, that kind of thing. Fortunately, most of the return cargo, including the blueprints, were destroyed when the sub struck one of our mines off Singapore. In the case of U-180 and I-29, it’s different, even more worrying. After we identified the Ultra decrypt, our intelligence networks have been working overtime to establish what might have been exchanged. It now seems certain that a passenger on board U-180 was the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who has been in Berlin being sweet-talked about how the Nazis would support him should the movement rise against the British in India. His transfer to Japan is a concern, because once there he might be sent to Burma and coerce more Indian Army sepoys to go over to the Japanese and the so-called Indian National Army. But of even greater concern, particularly to Churchill, was what I-29 was bringing in exchange. Our agents in Penang report that her main cargo was more than two tons of gold.”