She gestured at the phone. “So what do you do now?”
“Anything that comes out of Bletchley on this line is immediately acted upon. Those were the Prime Minister’s orders, and this is no exception. The rear admiral commanding the Operational Intelligence Center is another in our group, and as soon as he hears the code word we have agreed for this operation he will act on it, sending the order to our sub. To others at the OIC it will appear to be another Bletchley directive, unusual but in no way betraying what is actually being ordered. By leaving the route of TS-37 unchanged, we can predict that U-515 on its present course will make contact with the convoy at about 2300 GMT this evening. At that point our submarine will already be shadowing the convoy. Her orders will be to sink Clan Macpherson soon after the convoy is hit, to make it seem as if it is another U-boat attack.”
“It has to be the ship?”
Bermonsey nodded grimly. “We can’t afford to send our sub after the U-boat. That could be a game of cat-and-mouse that we might lose. We’ve thought of every other possible scenario, and there’s just too much that could go wrong. We could order the sub to wait until the U-boat surfaces beside Clan Macpherson, the only time it would be exposed and vulnerable, but by attempting to take it out that way, the chances are we’d put a torpedo into Clan Macpherson as well. If there were a fight and our sub were forced to the surface, then the whole game would be up, everything we have worked on to try to undermine the gold and uranium trade. The Germans would instantly realize that we’d been on to them, and change Enigma. You know how disastrous that would be. The sub simply cannot allow her presence to be known, either to the escort or to U-515. To Henke it must simply appear that another U-boat was in the vicinity, a maverick captain like himself who was keeping radio silence. The convoy commodore and the escorts will know nothing of any of this, and nobody outside our group here or in the OIC will know that my message was an order not for the convoy to be rerouted but for one of our own subs to sink one of our own merchant ships.”
“What about our submarine captain? He’s going to be ordered to do the unthinkable.”
“We vetted those crews for a reason. They know they’re a top-secret outfit, under the direct command of Churchill. For them, that will be enough. They’re hardened killers. They’ve all had to do what I’ve had to do, watched men screaming and burning in the water through the periscope, men you have put there. When you see that, they’re no longer the enemy, just men. I know he’ll do it because I know I would do it.”
He stood up, straightened his uniform and went to the phone. Fan tried to focus, but her mind was in turmoil. The layers of secrecy suddenly seemed like a hall of mirrors, trapping her inside, leaving her uncertain whether she was looking at illusion or reality. In truth, she had little idea what all the others really did here, that silent shivering army who marched in every morning with her from the train, exchanging quick pleasantries over that first welcome mug of tea, then disappearing into huts all over Bletchley with sentries at the doors. For all she knew, her friend Louise could be part of some other top-secret enterprise. She could not even know how far Bermonsey had let her in, whether he had told her the full story. The need to prevent the Germans from getting gold that could pay for uranium was clear enough. But was that really enough justification for sinking a British ship? Was there something else going on, something on that ship other than the gold?
She looked at him standing by the phone, counting down the seconds on his watch. His eyes had hardened again, and she knew that she was not going to get anything more out of him. He had told her what she needed to know to do her job, and that would be it. That was the way Bletchley worked.
One minute to go. She forced herself to think of the Atlantic again, of the ships battling the spray and the swell. It would still be dark, the end of the dog watch. Exhausted men would be falling instantly asleep in their bunks, fully clothed in case they had to spring into lifeboats; bleary-eyed men would be replacing them, clutching cups of cocoa and staring at the dark smudge of the ship in the line ahead, men barely in control of the cold and the fear. Normally it was an image that gave her some comfort, knowing that one file had been kept open, one convoy given a chance. This time it was different. This time, she would be saving nobody.
Bermonsey lifted the phone off the receiver. It was answered instantly. He turned away from her, speaking urgently. “This is Bletchley. Code name Ark. I repeat, Ark. Execute.”
Part 2
6
“Maurice, can you see anything? It’s too dangerous. You need to come out now.”
Maurice Hiebermeyer watched a clump of mud slowly collapse a few inches from his nose, and listened to the pounding of the blood in his ears. Aysha’s voice seemed distant, as if coming from the end of a very long tunnel, and yet she was only a few meters behind him, standing in the excavation trench just above the level of the Bay of Tunis some fifty meters to the east. He had a sudden flashback to his first excavation with Jack, cheek by jowl down a rabbit hole they had widened in a wood near their boarding school in southern England, straining to reach the Roman pottery they had seen at the bottom of the hole and also keep themselves concealed from the teacher who had been sent to find them. A piece of mud slopped over his face, and he snapped back to present reality. It was only the constant scooping of the digger that had kept the water at bay, and with the machine shut down while he investigated the hole, the water was seeping in again, inexorably. He watched it trickle down the mud into the pool that was already lapping the top of his head, and he tasted the sea on his lips. Aysha was right. She was thinking of their two-year-old son Michael as much as him. Being upside-down in a flooding hole beneath several tons of mud did not present ideal conditions for his long-term survival.
“Nothing structural,” he shouted back, his voice sounding hollow in the confined space. “But I can see mud from the ancient harbor entrance channel, about a meter below where you’re standing. I’m coming out now.”
He peered around, confirming that there was nothing more to be seen, no masonry, no artifacts, just the gray-black ooze of the ancient channel below. He could feel his headlamp beginning to work its way off, lubricated by the sheen of mud that covered the strap. He tried everything to keep it on, angling his head forward, butting it against the side of the hole, but to no avail. “Scheisse,” he muttered as it dropped into the ooze, shining blindingly back at him. He shut his eyes tight and began to work his way out, crawling backward on his elbows and knees. Over the years he had honed self-extraction to a fine art, displaying an agility that belied his girth. At the last moment he quickly reached back in and grabbed the headlamp, and then he was out on his hands and knees in the glaring sunlight at the bottom of the trench, the bucket of the digger resting in the mud beside him and the anxious faces of the workmen peering down from the top of the trench above.