Authors: Robert Harris
His memory replayed the scene frame by frame: the footsteps, the
flash of light, the turn of her head, her cry, the halo of her
hair, the way she had vanished…That was something else. Could she
really have walked the entire distance to the hut in the time it
took him to fumble for his pass?
Just before eight o’clock he gathered the cryptograms together
and slipped them into the folder. All around him, the cryptanaiysts
were preparing to go off shift—stretching and yawning and rubbing
at tired eyes, pulling together their work, briefing their
replacements. Nobody noticed Jericho walk quickly down the corridor
to Logie’s office. He knocked once. There was no reply. He tried
the door. As he remembered: unlocked.
He closed it behind him and picked up the telephone. If he
delayed for a second his nerve would fail him. He dialled “0” and
on the seventh ring, just as he was about to give up, a sleepy
operator answered.
His mouth was almost too dry to get the words out. “Duty
Officer, Hut 3, please.”
Almost immediately a man’s voice said, irritably: “Colonel
Coker.”
Jericho nearly dropped the receiver.
“Do you have a Miss Romilly there?” He didn’t need to disguise
his voice: it was so strained and quavering it was unrecognisable.
“A Miss Claire Romilly?”
“You’ve come through to completely the wrong office. Who is
this?”
“Welfare.”
“Oh bloody hell!” There was a deafening bang, as if the colonel
had thrown the telephone across the room, but the connection held.
Jericho could hear the clatter of a teleprinter and a man’s voice,
very cultured, somewhere in the background: “Yes, yes, I’ve got
that. Right-oh. Cheerio.” The man ended one conversation and
started another. “Army Index here…” Jericho glanced at the clock
above the window. Now it was past eight. Come on, come on…Suddenly
there was more loud banging, much closer, and a woman said softly
in Jericho’s ear: “Yes?”
He tried to sound casual but it came out as a croak.
“Claire?”
“No, I’m afraid it’s Claire’s day off. She won’t be back on duty
until eight tomorrow morning. Can I help?”
Jericho gently replaced the receiver in its cradle, just as the
door was thrown open behind him.
“Oh, there you are, old thing…”
§
Daylight diminished the huts.
The blackout had touched them with a certain mystery but the
morning showed them up for what they were: squat and ugly, with
brown walls and tarred roofs and a premature air of dereliction.
Above the mansion, the sky was glossy white with streaks of grey, a
dome of polished marble. A duck in drab winter plumage waddled
across the path from the lake looking for food, and Logie almost
kicked it as he strode past, sending it protesting back to the
water.
He had not been in the least perturbed to find Jericho in his
office and Jericho’s carefully prepared excuse—that he was
returning the Shark intercepts had been waved away.
“Just dump ‘em in the Crib Room and come with me.”
Drawn across the northern edge of the lake, next to the huts,
was A-Block, a long, two-storey affair with brick walls and a flat
top. Logie led the way up a flight of concrete steps and turned
right. At the far end of the corridor a door opened and Jericho
heard a familiar voice booming: “…all our resources, human and
material, into this problem…” and then the door closed again and
Baxter peered down the passage towards them.
“So there you are. I was just coming to find you. Hello, Guy.
Hello, Tom. How are you? Hardly recognised you. Upright.” Baxter
had a cigarette in his mouth and didn’t bother to remove it, so it
bobbed as he spoke and sprayed ash down the front of his pullover.
Before the war he had been a lecturer at the London School of
Economics.
“What have we got?” said Logie, nodding towards the closed
door.
“Our American “lee-ay-son officer”, plus another American—some
big shot from the Navy. A man in a suit—a lounge lizard from
Intelligence by the look of him. Three from our Navy, of course,
one of them an admiral. All up from London specially.”
“An admiral?” Logie’s hand went automatically to his tie and
Jericho noticed he had changed into a pre-war double-breasted suit.
He licked his fingers and tried to plaster down his hair. “I don’t
like the sound of an admiral. And how’s Skynner?”
“At the moment? I’d say heavily out-gunned.” Baxter was staring
at Jericho. The corners of his mouth twitched down briefly, the
nearest Jericho had seen him come to a smile. “Well, well, I
suppose you don’t look too bad, Tom.”
“Now, Alec, don’t you go upsetting him.”
“I’m fine, Alec, thank you. How’s the revolution?”
“Coming along, comrade. Coming along.”
Logie patted Jericho on the arm. “Don’t say anything when we get
inside, Tom. You’re only here for show, old love.”
Only here for show, thought Jericho, what the hell does that
mean? But before he could ask, Logie had opened the door and all he
could hear was Skynner—“we must expect these setbacks from time to
time”—and they were on.
♦
There were eight men in the room. Leonard Skynner, the head of
the Naval Section, sat at one end of the table, with Atwood to his
right and an empty chair to his left, which Baxter promptly
reclaimed. Gathered around the other end were five officers in dark
blue naval uniform, two of them American and three British. One of
the British officers, a lieutenant, had an eye-patch. They looked
grim.
The eighth man had his back to Jericho. He turned as they came
in and Jericho briefly registered a lean face with fair hair.
Skynner stopped speaking. He stood and held out a meaty hand.
“Come in Guy, come in Tom.” He was a big square-faced man with
thick black hair and wide bushy eyebrows that almost met above the
bridge of his nose and reminded Jericho of the Morse code symbol
for M. He beckoned to the newcomers eagerly, obviously thankful to
see Allied reinforcements. “This is Guy Logie,” he said to the
admiral, “our chief cryptanalyst, and Tom Jericho, of whom you may
have heard. Tom was instrumental in getting us into Shark just
before Christmas.”
The admiral’s leathery old face was immobile. He was smoking a
cigarette—they were all smoking cigarettes except for Skynner—and
he regarded Jericho, as did the Americans, blankly, through a fog
of tobacco, without the slightest interest. Skynner rattled off the
introductions, his arm sweeping round the table like the hand of a
clock. “This is Admiral Trowbridge. Lieutenant Cave. Lieutenant
Villiers. Commander Hammerbeck—” the older of the two Americans
nodded “—Lieutenant Kramer, US Navy Liaison. Mr Wigram is observing
for the cabinet Office.” Skynner gave a little bow to everybody and
sat down again. He was sweating.
Jericho and Logie each collected a folding chair from a stack
beside the table and took up positions next to Baxter.
Almost the whole of the wall behind the admiral was taken up by
a map of the North Atlantic. Clusters of coloured discs showed the
positions of Allied convoys and their escorts: yellow for the
merchantmen, green for the warships. Black triangles marked the
suspected whereabouts of German U-boats. Beneath the chart was a
red telephone, a direct link to the Submarine Tracking Room in the
basement of the Admiralty. The only other decoration on the
whitewashed walls was a pair of framed photographs. One was of the
King, signed, looking nervous, presented after a recent visit. The
other was of Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, commander in chief of the
German Navy: Skynner liked to think of himself as locked in a
personal battle with the wily Hun.
Now, though, he seemed to have lost the thread of what he was
saying. He sorted through his notes and in the time it took Logie
and Jericho to take their places, one of the Royal Navy men—Cave,
the one with the eye-patch—received a nod from the admiral and
started speaking.
“Perhaps, if you’ve finished outlining your problems, it might
be helpful for us now to set out the operational situation.” His
chair scraped on the bare floor as he rose to his feet. His tone
was insultingly polite. “The position at twenty-one hundred”
Jericho passed his hand over his unshaven chin. He couldn’t make
up his mind whether to keep his overcoat on or take it off. On, he
decided—the room was cold, despite the number of people in it. He
undid the buttons and loosened his scarf. As he did so, he noticed
the admiral watching him. They couldn’t believe it, these senior
officers, whenever they came up to visit—the lack of discipline,
the scarves and cardigans, the first-name terms. There was a story
about Churchill, who’d visited the Park in 1941 and given a speech
to the cryptanalysts on the lawn. Afterwards, as he was being
driven away, he’d said to the director: “When I told you to leave
no stone unturned recruiting for this place, I didn’t expect you to
take me literally.” Jericho smiled at the memory. The admiral
glowered and flicked cigarette ash on the floor.
The one-eyed naval officer had picked up a pointer and was
standing in front of the Atlantic chart, holding a sheaf of
notes.
“It must be said, unfortunately, that the news you’ve given us
couldn’t have come at a worse moment. No fewer than three convoys
have left the United States in the past week and are presently at
sea. Convoy SC-122.” He rapped it once with the pointer, hard, as
if he had a grudge against it, and read out his notes. “Departed
New York last Friday. Carrying fuel oil, iron ore, steel, wheat,
bauxite, sugar, refrigerated meat, zinc, tobacco and tanks. Fifty
merchant ships.”
Cave spoke in a clipped, metallic voice, without looking at his
audience. His one good eye was fixed on the map.
“Convoy HX-229.” He tapped it. “Departed New York Monday. Forty
merchant vessels. Carrying meat, explosives, lubricating oil,
refrigerated dairy produce, manganese, lead, timber, phosphate,
diesel oil, aviation spirit, sugar and powdered milk.” He turned to
them for the first time. The whole of the left side of his face was
a mass of purple scar tissue. “That, I might say, is two weeks’
supply of powdered milk for the entire British Isles.”
There was some nervous laughter. “Better not lose that,” joked
Skynner. The laughter stopped at once. He looked so forlorn in the
silence Jericho almost felt sorry for him.
Again, the pointer crashed down.
“And Convoy HX-229A. Left New York Tuesday. Twenty-seven ships.
Similar cargoes to the others. Fuel oil, aviation spirit, timber,
steel, naval diesel, meat, sugar, wheat, explosives. Three convoys.
A total of one hundred and seventeen merchant ships, with a gross
registered tonnage of just under one million tons, plus cargo of
another million.”
One of the Americans—it was the senior one, Hammerbeck—raised
his hand. “How many men involved?”
“Nine thousand merchant seamen. One thousand passengers.”
“Who are the passengers?”
“Mainly servicemen. Some ladies from the American Red Cross.
Quite a lot of children. A party of Catholic missionaries,
curiously enough.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Cave permitted himself a crimped smile. “Quite.”
“And whereabouts are the U-boats?”
“Perhaps I might let my colleague answer that.”
Cave sat down and the other British officer, Villiers, took the
floor. He flourished the pointer.
“Submarine Tracking Room had three U-boat packs operational as
of zero-zero-hundred Thursday—heah, heah, and heah.” His accent
barely qualified as recognisable English, it was the sort that
pronounced “cloth” as “clawth” and “really” as “rarely”, and when
he spoke his lips hardly moved, as if it were somehow
ungentlemanly—a betrayal of the amateur ethos—to put too much
effort into talking. “Gruppe Raubgraf heah, two hundred miles off
the coast of Greenland. Gruppe Neuland, heah, almost precisely
mid-ocean. And Gruppe Westmark heah, due south of Iceland.”
“Zero-zero Thursday! You mean more than thirty hours ago?”
Hammerbeck’s hair was the colour and thickness of steel wool,
close-cropped to his scalp. It glinted in the fluorescent light as
he leaned forwards. “Where the hell are they now?”
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea. I thought that was why we were heah.
They’ve blipped awf the screen.”
Admiral Trowbridge lit another cigarette from the tip of his old
one. He had transferred his attention from Jericho and now he was
staring at Hammerbeck through small, rheumy eyes.
Again, the American raised his hand. “How many subs are we
talking about in these three wolf packs?”
“I’m sorry to say, ah, they’re quite large, ah, we estimate
forty-six.”
Skynner squirmed in his chair. Atwood made a great show of
rummaging through his papers.
“Let me get this straight,” said Hammerbeck. (He was certainly
persistent—Jericho was beginning to admire him.) “You’re telling us
one million tons of shipping—”
“Merchant shipping,” interrupted Cave.
“—merchant shipping, pardon me, one million tons of merchant
shipping, with ten thousand people on board, including various
ladies of the American Red Cross and assorted Catholic
Bible-bashers, is steaming towards forty-six U-boats, and you have
no idea where those U-boats are?”
“I’m rather afraid I am, yes.”
“Well, I’ll be fucked,” said Hammerbeck, sitting back in his
chair. “And how long before they get there?” “That’s hard to say.”
It was Cave again. He had an odd habit of turning his face away
when he talked, and Jericho realised he was trying not to show his
shattered cheekbone. “The SC is the slower convoy. She’s making
about seven knots. The HXs are both faster, one ten knots, one
eleven. I’d say we’ve got three days, at the maximum. After that,
they’ll be within operational range of the enemy.”
Hammerbeck had begun whispering to the other American. He was
shaking his head and making short chopping motions with his hand.
The admiral leaned over and muttered something to Cave, who said
quietly: “I’m afraid so, sir.”