The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  I felt the shock as it hit, somewhere in the back of the plane. But the control surfaces held.

  I called to Ignacy and Harry. ‘Climb away, Pimms!’

  ‘What the—’ yelled Chip – of course he couldn’t see anything, sitting at the radio behind me. ‘That went right past my ear!’

  ‘You OK? Get in the turret—’

  ‘Two German submarines,’ Silver confirmed. ‘Right next to each other. They’ve both come up for air; you’ll see when we turn around. What do you think, Scotty? Apart from their guns they’re sitting ducks.’

  ‘Ouch!’ I kicked at the rudder – it felt as if I’d been stung by a wasp, and instinctively I tried to shake it off. A wasp in the plane in November, what the devil? Must be a leg cramp. I flexed my calf and focused on keeping the wings level.

  ‘They must know we’ve got ships passing,’ I answered Silver. ‘So we’d better try to take them out.’

  It wasn’t as if the hand we were playing was a sure bet. Most of the Blenheims that didn’t make it home got shot down by anti-aircraft fire from the ground or from ships at sea.

  But we’d surprised them this time – those U-boats were at their most vulnerable. They can’t dive when they’re taking on air.

  Silver suddenly started to laugh.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘There’s another – it just came up! You wait and wait for one, and they all come along at once—’

  ‘Like London buses!’ we howled in chorus.

  ‘Hey, pipe down, you two,’ Tex complained. ‘Are we going for them or not?’

  ‘All Pimms aircraft, line up behind me,’ I called to Ignacy Mazur and Harry Morrow. ‘I’m on the near one, Mazur in the middle, Morrow last. Morrow! You know what you’re doing? When your load’s away, climb and head to meet Madeira.’

  ‘Cheers to that, Pimms Leader!’ yelled Harry Morrow. ‘About time we saw some serious combat!’

  We lined up for the bombing run.

  I flew as low as I dared through a hail of anti-aircraft fire. My headset was full of Chip whooping it up in the rear turret as he fired back.

  ‘Great shot, boys! Right between them – Mazur’s load went down on the other side of that middle sub – there she blows! Aw, I can’t tell what happened, it just looks like a giant geyser – no, wait, the Morrow kid made a direct hit!’

  Mazur’s victory yell came crackling over the radio.

  ‘All three, we got all three of the bastards—’

  I looked over my shoulder as I climbed away.

  The side-by-side submarines stood nearly on end as the explosions lifted them out of the water, like great whales breaching in the dark. Their wet hulls gleamed silver in the moonlight and then sank again, going slowly straight down like ships that have struck an iceberg.

  Ellen:

  B-Flight came safe home next morning, but not completely sound, because all three of Pimms Section’s Blenheims were full of holes. Jamie’s one was like a sieve, and he got hit in the leg, just a tiny hole in his flight suit and a neat graze in the back of his calf. He wasn’t a mite fashed. Proud of it, pleased it was him and not anyone else that got hurt. Silver made him strip off his boots and flight suit right there in the shade of their plane to make sure he wasn’t bleeding to death. Jamie looked like a schoolboy sitting on the frosty grass in his rumpled blue uniform and socks, with Silver bent over his leg playing doctors and nurses.

  ‘I’m hoping for a wound stripe,’ Jamie told me, grinning. ‘For my sleeve. A decoration will impress the lads.’

  ‘All you’re going to get is a dab of Dettol and some sticking plaster, mate,’ Silver told him.

  Jamie dragged on his boots and stood up.

  ‘Go on and limp,’ said Silver. ‘Let’s give Cromwell some drama. You’ve got some explaining to do.’

  He took one of Jamie’s arms over his shoulder.

  ‘If you’re a fighter pilot and you shoot down five planes, that makes you an ace,’ Jamie told me, all full of himself. ‘We can’t battle Messerschmitts, so we’re counting U-boats. We’ve just bagged three.’

  ‘You what!’ I cried.

  Those clear hazel eyes were blazing. He looked tired. Excited. Alive.

  I wondered if the wound hurt more than he was letting on.

  He said breathlessly, ‘Just two more, and then I reckon Pimms are all aces.’

  ‘Well done Pimms!’ I exclaimed. ‘You heading to the Limehouse to celebrate?’

  ‘We’ve got to go get debriefed just now,’ Jamie said. ‘After.’

  Silver looked at the sky. ‘Another winter storm tonight, and the last November moon tomorrow. With weather and luck, no more night flights until December. Plenty of time for the pub.’

  ‘Aye, well, don’t imagine you’ll get a rest,’ I told them. ‘’Specially not you, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart.’

  ‘Not for one single second do I imagine that.’ Jamie gave a hop, trying to look at the back of his leg in step with Silver, who was four inches taller than him. ‘I say, Volunteer McEwen, could you introduce me to Nan’s old auntie? I need to learn a bit more German, and I want to chat to her about some lessons.’

  ‘Scotty!’ Silver scolded. ‘Cromwell will have your head if he hears.’

  ‘I’ll hide in a tree, like Charles II. Silver, do stop fussing – I’ll let you in on things in a moment,’ Jamie said. The grin was back. ‘Oh, and Ellen? Here’s that ten bob I owe your dad—’

  ‘What ten bob?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Does no one trust me? Pass it along.’

  In the Tilly on my own, I unfolded the banknote – very generous if he meant me to keep it. Just like a Beaufort-Stuart, throwing money about, even when they didn’t have any. A pilot’s salary is a deal higher than a driver’s, but it was likely his only income.

  Hidden inside the ten shillings was a sheet of notepaper from Jamie’s wireless operator. It was covered with blether in Chip’s sprawling American print. Rows and rows of five letters apiece, none of it anything like words.

  Pass it along, Jamie had said.

  I thought I might send the ten bob to my dad as he’d bid me. But I knew who the pencil scrawl was meant for, and it wasn’t old Alan McEwen.

  I had a guess what Jamie was up to. And I thought this would help him and I wanted to help him. So I did.

  It should not have been the carry-on it was to get Louisa and Jane alone with me and Jamie for five minutes.

  For several days of dreich misery, sleet whipped at RAF Windyedge, and you’d be surprised how busy our Jamie was kept when he wasn’t in the air. I was kept busy too. Phyllis could write her reports sitting in Nan Campbell’s office or in the bar at the Limehouse, but I had to be at the aerodrome to do my work. Each day I’d bicycle over (to save the Tilly’s petrol), in a great big mackintosh through the wet, up the long lane to the airfield. Then I had to drive Wing Commander Cromwell over to Deeside to meet with 648 Squadron’s A-Flight, or take a mechanic to Stonehaven to collect aeroplane parts from the rail station, or give Jamie and Adam Stedman a lift around the airfield to do inspections.

  There wasn’t room in the hangar for all B-Flight’s aircraft, and icy spitters drove at the wings of the sad planes left outside. The sleet came down so hard that Adam and Jamie crawled up through the escape panels in the floor of each plane instead of opening the overhead hatches, while I sat in the Tilly, blowing on my fingers and watching through the streaming windows. One of the shot-up planes sat for nearly forty-eight hours before Jamie spied that water was seeping through the bullet holes. When he put his head up into the cabin he ducked back out sharpish. I could see him gagging.

  ‘What is it?’ I called, cranking the window down about an inch.

  ‘The cabin’s all full of mildew. Reeking with it! That’s just happened in two days. Ugh. I’d better taxi her into the hangar or she’ll be unflyable. Get someone out here with a starter for me, will you?’

  And I left him and Adam peering up into the plane and holding
their noses while I sped off on that errand.

  Nobody wanted to walk to the pub through the mud and slush and falling sleet after a day like that, and I couldn’t use the Tilly to drive them time and again.

  Next day it was blowing a gale, though the sleet eased. Old Flash rang to say I wasn’t needed at the aerodrome. I could have kissed him. At half past eleven on the button, Jamie’s lot came singing past the limekilns.

  ‘Jane, Jane, go upstairs,’ Louisa urged.

  ‘Won’t you play the piano for them again?’

  ‘I will, but let’s go upstairs on our own just now,’ Louisa said. She started from her chair beside the fire and snatched up Jane’s sticks. ‘For a bit of quiet before the party starts.’

  The old woman caught on. For the first time since B-Flight’s last mission, we four would be under the same roof. Jane took the sticks and hobbled out of the bar.

  ‘What is it your old auntie drinks, Mrs C.?’ Jamie asked, pulling his tanner from the black oak beam. ‘Whisky and a drop of water? I’ll treat.’

  ‘Not for sixpence,’ Nancy said firmly. ‘Not even for you. That’ll be two and six.’

  ‘Highway robbery,’ he complained. ‘How does she afford it?’

  ‘She doesn’t. She had two the day she arrived, and that’s that. Take her a pot of tea if you want to be nice.’

  ‘Feels a bit mean, Nancy.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said, getting a dig in. ‘Wasn’t there something about ten bob you owed someone, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve not got it on me now.’

  Nancy was not to be moved. So it was tea.

  ‘Very proper, too,’ Jamie said solemnly.

  ‘Come on, Jamie Stuart, I’ll help you through the doors with the tea tray,’ I offered.

  ‘I shouldn’t allow Scotty around that fine woman without a chaperone,’ Silver agreed.

  Jamie gave him a half-hearted clout. ‘Jealous.’

  ‘Just wondering what you’re up to!’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I find out,’ Jamie said.

  At last. Four days gone, and I hadn’t once caught Jamie or Louisa alone without Phyllis or Silver tagging along. I held the hall door for Jamie, and led him upstairs and down the passage to Room Number Five.

  Louisa let us in. Jane sat by the unlit fire wrapped in a woolly blanket – of course, it wasn’t three o’clock yet. Some jazz singer was warbling on the wireless, sat like a queen on a doily taking up most of the dresser. Jamie perched the tea tray on a shaky table covered with another doily, and for a wee while we all looked at one another without saying anything.

  Then Mrs Warner said, ‘Show them, Louisa.’

  Louisa leaped to the wardrobe and delved behind furs and a forest of skinkling, gauzy gowns that I could not see either of them ever wearing. She came up with the Jerry pilot’s precious wooden box, and she set that on the bed and undid the lid. There was a school jotter laid over the keys. She picked that up and, solemn as a judge, passed it to Jamie.

  He stood gawping at the thing in the box. It wasn’t quite a radio and it wasn’t quite a typewriter.

  ‘What is it?’ Jamie breathed.

  ‘The cleaning instructions say it’s a cipher machine,’ said Louisa. ‘And – well, I guess it is. You know about the German pilot who landed here, don’t you? He left the machine, and he left lists of settings for it. We worked out the message that you picked up the other night – it’s all in there.’ She waved at the jotter. ‘I did the decoding, and Jane did the translating. So we both know what it says.’ She swallowed, with that worried frown puckering her schoolgirl face. ‘I’m so afraid it will get Mrs Warner in trouble.’

  ‘Not you?’ said Jamie. He stepped closer, hesitated, and then pressed a key. A lamp came on in the top plate of letters.

  ‘Well, me too, I suppose, but Mrs Warner—’ She stole a keek at Jane.

  What the old woman confessed then made my mouth drop open.

  ‘I am German,’ she explained softly. ‘A registered alien.’

  I’d never thought.

  I’d never thought. Here was a body hiding the exact way I hid: behind an accent and a name and face and flesh like anybody’s.

  If people knew where she came from, what would they do? Who’d trust her?

  But Louisa did trust her.

  Mrs Warner held her head up. ‘My stage name was Johanna von Arnim. I was arrested –’ she sounded a mite proud of that – ‘last summer. They said I was a category B detainee. After they arrested me, though, they demoted me to category C. I was in prison for three weeks and then interred in a camp for another four months.’

  So that’s what they did.

  Nan must know. Mrs Warner was her aunt. Crabbit Nancy Campbell was paying a wage to look after an old German woman!

  ‘Did you do anything?’ Jamie asked. ‘To make them arrest you.’

  ‘If you mean, did I cause any risk to national security, I should say not,’ said Jane. ‘But I’m telling you so you know.’

  He nodded. Then he glanced up at me.

  For a moment I imagined it was a challenge, and he wanted me to give my own confession. But my secret didn’t make me a war enemy. With his la-di-da private school and family castle it probably never crossed Jamie’s mind that I was like Jane. He was just asking me if I trusted Mrs Warner.

  I nodded back to him.

  ‘Well,’ said Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart of the Royal Air Force, and offered his hand to Jane to shake. ‘You helped us sink three German U-boats the other night. And I’m telling you so you know.’

  She beamed at him over their clasped hands like a shop girl making eyes at a film star.

  ‘Aren’t we lucky!’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t Windyedge lucky!’

  ‘Yes,’ Jamie said, beaming right back at her. ‘Yes, at last we’re going to be the lucky ones.’

  Louisa:

  He opened the jotter and held it so Ellen could read over his shoulder.

  SEA PATROL SHETLAND HOLD HALF MOON

  ABERDEEN SECTOR CLEAR YEAR END

  ABERDEEN SECTOR CLEAR START XII UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

  JU LXXXVIII SPECIAL DETAIL LISTA TO DEESIDE SOUTH GREEN LIGHT

  ABERDEEN SECTOR AWAIT DS COMPLETION

  I worried that it sounded so mysterious. I said quickly, ‘We think the spacing’s right, but we’re not sure. There was a block of letter Xs between each line, so that seemed like where the breaks ought to be.’

  Jamie Beaufort-Stuart stood studying the page, his face torn between joy and disbelief.

  Jane patted the tufty bedspread, letting him know it was all right for him to sit down.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Warner,’ he said.

  He sat carefully next to the coding machine and laid my exercise book open on the bed beside him. He wasn’t a big man, but it was tight with four of us in the room, and it was hard for me not to be in awe. A real RAF pilot, in uniform, sitting on my bed! I never thought I’d get so close.

  But then, I never dreamed I’d have a German coding machine to share with him, either.

  ‘I wonder how many of these there are in Britain,’ Jamie said softly, running his fingertips lightly over the keys. ‘It must be jolly difficult getting them here. And jolly brave of the chap who brought it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, remembering the piano, the records, the gunshot in the van. Each bit had been awful, but it added up to bravery. ‘He was.’

  ‘Did he tell you how to use it?’ Jamie asked.

  Ellen and I shared a look and then we joined in a high chorus of a laugh, remembering that night.

  ‘He didn’t tell us a thing,’ I said, when I got my breath back. ‘But he left instructions. They’re in the German leaflets. When he knew I was watching, he dropped a hint about where he’d hidden them. We’d never have managed without the leaflets – the settings change every day.’

  Jamie frowned down at the puzzling English phrases in my jotter, narrowing his eyes at it.

  ‘The bi
t about the half-moon makes sense,’ he said at last. ‘When the moon is dark, it’s probably just as difficult for the Luftwaffe to find targets as it is for us. So this means something like “leave Shetland alone till the next half-moon”.’ He pointed further along my pencil jottings. ‘And here it looks like they’re going to lay off Aberdeen while this other thing is going on. The city took a pounding in October. Those Roman numerals must mean a Junkers 88 bomber, a Ju-88. I wonder what their special detail from Lista to Deeside is.’

  ‘Where is Lista?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘Norway. Just about the closest point to Scotland – we think they’re planning to build an aerodrome there, but it’s not much more than some surveyors’ stakes at the minute. We’ve taken pictures.’

  ‘We ought to warn Deeside,’ Ellen said. ‘Else A-Flight might run into trouble.’

  Jamie screwed up his mouth, staring at the machine. Suddenly he seemed less intimidating. He looked stubborn and baffled and not much older than me.

  He nodded. ‘I’ll warn them,’ he said. ‘But I’m not telling Cromwell. I’m damned if I’m going to hand this over to Cromwell! Not when we’ve got an edge on the Luftwaffe at last. I know him, he’ll send the machine off to Coastal Command for fingerprint testing, or make us wait till he tries it himself, or refuse to let anyone else near it. He’ll block us from using it because it’s not in the rule books, especially if he thinks I have anything to do with it.’

  Ellen hesitated, and then blurted out, ‘But Jamie-lad, what if it was sent for someone else to use, and not for 648 Squadron? That Robert Ethan, that Intelligence toff, he isn’t anything to do with you. The Jerry who brought it was supposed to meet him specially.’

  Jamie narrowed his eyes again, thinking about it.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to let the machine go, either. What Jamie had said – Not when we’ve got an edge on the Luftwaffe at last. Not when I was finally able to do something useful to fight back.

  ‘Felix Baer left the settings for me,’ I said. ‘He said my name and looked straight at me, and stuck a key up in the bar like your airmen do with their sixpences. For luck, he said. In English. And he’d hidden a note in it.’