The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  Those young Australian blockheads were going after that Ju-88 with Phyllis on board. I could see the tracers flaming from Harry Morrow’s guns.

  I dived after him. I couldn’t stop Morrow, not once a fight started. But I had to be there if he needed me.

  Ellen:

  God help me, I prayed.

  I sat on the floor with my eyes squeezed shut and teeth grating and my hands clutching the hard, cold edge of the seat on either side of me. I knew that if I came up alive without being sick it would be a flipping miracle.

  ‘All right, lass?’ came bloody Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart’s voice in my head. Through the headset, I mean.

  I winked an eye open to take a keek at my pilot. He was frowning. He was listening.

  I squeezed my eyes closed again. But my ears were open. And then I heard it, too. Someone in the German plane was whistling.

  Ignacy’s Polish voice spoke into my open ears. ‘The musical Jerries are out today,’ he said. ‘This fellow knows the classics.’

  Jamie:

  I may have a classical education but I don’t have a musical one, and I didn’t recognise the mournful tune over the crackling static.

  Silver did. He agreed with Ignacy. ‘That’s Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture. The tune’s all right, but his rhythm is off.’

  Louisa:

  ‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘Don’t shoot! Tell Jamie not to shoot!’

  Ignacy glanced at me, startled. He couldn’t hear me over the deafening engines.

  I scrambled up beside him and peeled the leather helmet away from the side of his head so I could scream in his ear.

  ‘It’s Odysseus. Odysseus! Tell Jamie not to shoot!’

  Ignacy’s voice came calmly into my ears through the microphone in his mask.

  ‘Tell him yourself. Don’t yell like that.’

  I could see the Pimms planes below us on the German bomber’s tail.

  The mournful whistle, only two bars, shrilled in my ears, then cut out as Ignacy held down a button on a handheld microphone that he raised to my mouth.

  Ellen:

  And the next thing I heard made me let out in a gasp of surprise the long breath I was trying to hold.

  ‘Jamie, Jamie, it’s me, Louisa! Don’t shoot that plane! It’s what the German courier played, Odysseus, you know who I mean! It’s a message – it’s an SOS—’

  Then Jamie’s voice, answering her. He said one word only.

  ‘Mendelssohn?’

  And finally Tex’s drawl came in from the back, and he agreed with Louisa.

  ‘It’s literally an SOS,’ Tex said. ‘That Kraut is whistling SOS in Morse code.’

  Jamie:

  ‘BREAK, MORROW,’ I yelled at Harry, still firing his guns below me. ‘BREAK, YOU TOSSER, HOLD YOUR FIRE.’

  Louisa:

  The silhouettes of the Blenheim and the Junkers 88 below us suddenly separated, curving in different directions, like a stalk of sugarcane split down the middle.

  The German plane headed out to sea. The British planes made long, lazy curves up through the sky to join us, one after the other.

  I gasped with relief, then was torn with doubt.

  SOS?

  That doesn’t mean ‘Don’t shoot.’ It means ‘Send help.’

  The plane was a distant speck heading east towards Norway, and the whistling pilot wasn’t getting any help.

  Jamie:

  Ignacy was outraged. I’m pretty sure the only thing that stopped him going after that Ju-88 himself was Louisa sitting next to him.

  ‘What the hell, Scotty?’

  The German bomber was an ink splodge on the horizon.

  ‘Mendelssohn’s banned in Germany,’ I told him. ‘And it’s bloody “Pimms Leader” to you.’

  ‘What the hell, Pimms Leader?’

  ‘We’re supposed to be holding fire anyway, and I’m not shooting down a dissenter on Christmas Day.’

  ‘That is not what I meant by what the hell!’

  ‘Well, what did you mean then?’

  ‘What is all this nonsense about Odysseus and a German courier?’ Ignacy asked me.

  The whole of B-Flight had heard us. All six of my flight crews had heard – eighteen men. Well, seventeen not counting myself.

  Phyllis might have heard. And even if she hadn’t, she was in the same plane as Dougie Kerr, who couldn’t keep his mouth shut for five minutes. I’d have to collar her the second we were back at RAF Windyedge – but dammit, then she’d interrogate every one of us in debriefing. Someone was bound to sing.

  Ellen, I could trust Ellen to deal with Phyllis. But I’d have to warn her before we landed—

  ‘I’ll tell you on the ground,’ I said, trying to shut up Ignacy – and everybody else. ‘“Careless talk costs lives.”’

  Louisa:

  When we landed at RAF Windyedge, Ignacy climbed out first, so he could help me get through the hatch and on to the wing. Derfel came behind, guiding me.

  I’d completely forgotten about Bill Yorke. He’d been in the back with the radio and the rear gun the whole time, not saying anything – or not saying anything I could hear, at any rate. He had his own hatch to climb out of and was waiting for me when my feet landed on the ground. He threw a careless arm over my shoulders.

  I hadn’t felt sick in the air. I’d been so worked up with excitement and awe and fear – I’d been wondering at the beauty of the sky and panicking at the possibility of being part of an air battle, and astonished that Felix Baer might be near me again in another German plane, and I had not devoted a moment to my stomach. But back on earth I suddenly felt sick.

  I swallowed and swallowed, shrinking under the heavy arm of the strange gunner.

  ‘Where did you learn German code names, then?’ Bill Yorke asked casually. ‘Do we have a little Colonial spy in our midst?’

  Ellen:

  I had my own wee mission now – one desperate chance to catch Phyllis as she got out of the plane, before she was able to talk to the lads. The second my feet were on the ground I sprinted for Harry Morrow’s Blenheim, just pulling up behind us.

  I had to pause for a moment because I couldn’t keep down the oatmeal any longer. But then I kept on running.

  Louisa:

  What that gunner said to me felt like a bomb going off in my head, and when Ellen stumbled and was sick, I lost everything too.

  Jamie:

  Yorkie leaped away from Louisa in horror, checking down his front to make sure she’d missed him.

  I grabbed him by the wrist and shoulder of his leather jacket and shook him until I hoped his teeth were rattling in his hard head.

  ‘Stow it, Yorke, you don’t know what’s going on because you’re not supposed to! Are you going to accuse me of spying, too, for calling off the attack? And Tex, for recognising an SOS? Also keep your mucky hands off the lasses.’

  Yorkie staggered back against the Blenheim’s wing, trying to decide whether it was worth going for me. Ignacy and Derfel watched with intense interest – who’d win this time?

  ‘I get that a jumped-up flyboy doesn’t want to tell a lowly air gunner what’s going on,’ Yorkie snarled. ‘But I don’t get why the hired girl knows.’

  Louisa was bent over on the grass beside the rear fuselage of the plane, the back of one hand up over her mouth. Silver dodged around us to kneel beside her with his handkerchief.

  ‘Because she was here when the German agent dropped off the code strings we’re using,’ Silver said, looking up at us. ‘The Windyedge-based ground crew was all here too. Only they’ve been told to shut up about it, so they do.’

  Code strings! It sounded deadly important in its magnificent vagueness.

  Oh God, Silver was the best mate a body could have. The best.

  I took a step back so Yorkie couldn’t use his height against me. ‘Flying Officer Yorke, I said I’d brief everyone on the ground, and I will,’ I said coldly. ‘But call your commanding officer a “jumped-up flyboy” again and I’ll see to i
t you’re docked a month’s pay.’

  The lads all knew that wasn’t an empty threat.

  ‘Understood.’ Yorkie straightened his collar and tie. Almost as an afterthought, he dropped me a contemptuous ‘Sir’.

  Then he stormed off towards the operations hut.

  ‘You handled that as well as could be expected,’ Silver said, grinning.

  Part Three

  Calypso

  Jamie:

  Felix Baer. That was the German pilot’s name.

  He brought the Enigma machine to Windyedge. He flew the plane we didn’t find when we tangled with the Messerschmitt 109 in November; I’d imagined him as a lost wingman, but he turned out to be a resistance agent who somehow eluded the fighter chasing him.

  Can you hear me?

  I hear nothing.

  Was it also Felix Baer whistling an SOS in the Junkers 88 we let go on Christmas Day?

  I wondered about him. I wondered what he’d risked to get that cipher machine over here.

  I wondered if he guessed we were using it.

  As our intelligence officer, Phyllis surely already knew a bit about ‘Odysseus’s’ visit to Windyedge. Ellen softened her up between the Blenheims and the operations hut, confessing how the rogue German pilot held her hostage; how he spent the night at the Limehouse going through Mrs Warner’s record albums; how Louisa recognised the whistled tune during our North Sea Christmas party, the same music he played on the piano in the pub that night.

  Incredibly, when we got to debriefing, Phyllis was as prim and neat in her uniform as if she’d never been off the ground.

  ‘It feels terribly odd to ask you to tell me in the usual way what happened up there, when I saw it all myself,’ she said apologetically. ‘But what happened up there?’

  B-Flight lined up on their folding chairs, except Dougie Kerr, who was still hovering hopefully over the tea trolley as if he expected more shortbread to magically appear.

  Hiding in plain sight seemed safest. I’m a quick liar, but not always a consistent one. I wanted to tell everyone the same story, and keep it simple, so I took on Phyllis and B-Flight at the same time.

  ‘We weren’t ever going to be heroes during a Christmas day ceasefire,’ I answered Phyllis. ‘But there was a good reason not to go after that Luftwaffe bomber today.’

  I turned around, leaning over the back of my chair, to include Pimms and Madeira.

  ‘A German resistance team left Windyedge a list of upcoming U-boat manoeuvres last November – that’s why we’ve had such good hunting this month. We know where a few of them are going to turn up. That whistler on board the Ju-88 is probably the man who left the tip-off.’

  There was a murmur of comprehension as B-Flight fit this with what they already knew.

  ‘So you lads keep quiet about what you heard today and don’t second-guess the next mission, fair enough? We’re privileged to have this information, thanks to a brave man from the other side. We’re on our way to being aces.’

  They straightened in their seats.

  Beside me, Silver fiddled with his box of rosin, grinning down at it.

  I didn’t have to mention the coding machine.

  I wondered how many others like it there were in Britain, and how I’d explain myself when I finally had to confess I had this one. I didn’t wonder about it much, though, just the way I didn’t wonder whether I’d still be alive in the spring. Nobody in a Blenheim aircrew wondered about such distant futures. The next singalong in the pub was as far as we got.

  I knew our Enigma honeymoon was temporary. At the end of January we would have used up the rotor-dial settings Felix Baer had left behind. And if the Germans suddenly changed the rotor sequence at random, we’d be stuck. Intelligence would have to figure out how to get anything else out of the machine. Until then I had the most wonderful secret weapon in the world, and I didn’t have a plan for what would happen to it when I couldn’t use it any more.

  That’s perhaps not an easy thing for anyone else to understand. But you couldn’t fly if you thought about being alive next spring.

  We were bombed after Christmas and again in the first week of January. ‘It’s the Windyedge Blitz!’ said the villagers in the pub, pleased to get attention that usually went to Aberdeen. One attack hit moorland, sending sheep and red deer running in terror, turning heather to confetti. The second attack blew up the three-hundred-year-old breakwater at the bottom of the cliffs in Windyedge village. No one was hurt, and it didn’t make the national news.

  The Germans used the Kingsleap Light for navigation. So did we. The lighthouse keeper was told to step up security and keep it dark unless he got a special release code from Cromwell himself.

  JU LXXXVIII AND CX ESCORT DEESIDE S GREEN LIGHT XIV I

  That was straightforward once you translated the Roman numerals: a Junkers bomber and Me-110 night fighters navigating via Kingsleap on 14 January 1941. We didn’t take on the Me-110s, which would have made mincemeat of us. Silver pretended he’d spotted them in the air – just about plausible, coming from Silver, with his night vision under a full moon. He hadn’t seen a thing, but Chip sent a warning home anyway. Cromwell called the fighters from Deeside to go after them and they never got near the coast.

  U BOAT MANOEUVRES FRASERBURGH N XVIII I

  That was a gift – like our Bell Rock adventure.

  By the end of January, Madeira Section had sunk two submarines and Pimms was at four – one more, or a battleship, and I reckoned we in Pimms could call ourselves aces.

  And when it happened at last we’d go to the Limehouse to celebrate, and Louisa would be at the piano, and Mrs Warner would choose records, and we’d sing and toast one another as if we’d never been in the sky three hours earlier with dry mouths and cold hands, dicing with death.

  HOLD GREEN LIGHT AWAIT FOG

  PREVENT HAPPY WAGON AND SO ON

  What in blazes did that mean?

  Happy wagon?

  Pimms Section raced Madeira home beneath the February moon, beating up the German Navy halfway to Norway. We were out of settings for the cipher machine, but the last January messages we’d picked up were just beginning to play out. This was a fairly ordinary op and hadn’t been mentioned in the code – we dropped a lot of high explosive on a lot of German ships – a Madeira flight crew actually hit one. The ones we didn’t hit fired a lot of anti-aircraft guns back at us. We didn’t hang about after our bombs were gone. It was a long flight, and the navigation was hard work – Chip didn’t dare transmit for bearings because we were so close to Norway, so Silver had to stare at the stars. We were knackered by the time we made it safely back to Windyedge.

  Wonderful to see the green glow of the Kingsleap Light guiding us in. I touched down ahead of the other planes, braked, adjusted the power, and turned to taxi back to the hangar. The weird Enigma message was still nagging at me.

  PREVENT HAPPY WAGON AND SO ON

  I wondered if it was another translation error, like storm front and Windyedge. What was happy in German? Dratted classical education – all I could think of was Latin.

  In Latin, of course, it is felix.

  *

  I thumped one fist against the cockpit window, spluttering with the discovery, steering with my feet on the rudder pedals.

  But if felix was the Latin translation of happy, what did wagon mean? The Latin translation of bear was ursa – baer in German – like Ursa Major, the Great Bear, the stars we’d been staring at all night. A fragment of The Odyssey came back to me: the Bear, surnamed the Wain …

  Of course. The Great Bear. The Wain. If you know what a wain is.

  It’s a wagon, of course, and ‘the Wagon’ is what the Germans call the Great Bear.

  PREVENT HAPPY WAGON

  Wherever Felix Baer was now, the Nazis were on to him.

  By mid-morning, when the order came to scramble back into our planes, we were every one of us dead asleep in our bunks.

  The Pimms aircraft had been refuelled and rearme
d. That meant we were the ones who got told to hop to it.

  When I’d whipped us up to get the Blenheims out of the firing line the first time Windyedge came under attack, I’d been in my underwear. This time when I leaped out of bed to answer the telephone call from operations, at least I was in my pyjamas. I pulled on trousers and boots over the top and tripped over Silver pulling on his boots as I turned to haul the blankets off the slumbering Australians.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Chip asked, throwing off his own blankets.

  ‘One Ju-88 on its way to Windyedge,’ I panted. ‘All by itself. A fishing boat spotted it and then Coastal Defence picked it up on their screens. They’re scrambling some Spitfires from Deeside, but it’s coming from the south-east so we might get there first. Get moving, Pimms!’

  High in the pearl-grey sky, with Scotland a smudge on the horizon behind us, we reached the lonely German bomber before the Spitfires. Ignacy and I went in first.

  ‘Looks like they have a hit already,’ Ignacy said. ‘It is trailing smoke—’

  ‘That’s a banner,’ came Chip’s voice. ‘Tied to their tail. Wonder what they’re advertisin’!’

  The Junkers had white sheets over its Luftwaffe and Nazi markings. There wasn’t a banner, but a piece of loose webbing was trailing out behind the aircraft like a thin streamer of smoke.

  Instead of shooting at us as we swooped towards them, their pilot flashed his lights and waggled his wings like billy-o.

  ‘Hold your fire, Mazur,’ I told Ignacy. ‘This fellow’s trying to surrender.’

  I heard the Polish pilot’s groan of disappointment.

  ‘Oh, Scotty. Excuse me, I mean Pimms Leader – not this again!’

  ‘Flashing lights and a white flag,’ I said. ‘You’re absolutely forbidden to shoot at him. Don’t worry, it’ll still be jolly good fun, we’ll bring him home with us! Anyone ever performed a formal interception?’