by Dudley Pope
‘Up come the Teuton gunners, and they open fire with their 88 mm gun, which has a flat trajectory and is the weapon used in the Western Desert as an anti-tank gun against the 8th Army, and goes off with a nasty crack rather than a boom. A few cracks, down goes the ancient coal-burner, and if the TK is a keen chap he goes over to the lifeboats or rafts, if any, and takes the captain prisoner. If he’s feeling liverish his chaps will throw a few hand grenades among the survivors or use the U-boat herself to run down the boats and rafts. All done as part of the code of the Teutonic Knights — Krieg ist Krieg, chums.’
Watts put down his cigar and clapped his hands. ‘Oh very good, and what will you do as an encore? A sentimental number with Vera Lynn? You were rattling on about sequences. In your monologue, where you forgot to quote Masefield’s “salt-caked smokestack” (may real sailors forgive him for using the word), you seemed to get lost.’
‘Oh no, sir,’ the Croupier said, ‘I was allowing my listeners to use their imaginations. The sequence stops with the U-boat surfacing and starts again with it diving and resuming its patrol. The question is, how can any worthy sons of Albion get on board in between times? They’re rowing for their lives, catching the grenades lobbed by the Teutons, or swimming (if they’ve survived the crunch) from smashed-up boats or rafts.’
Watts took a puff from his cigar and put it down again, and said acidly: ‘Recently I had to go to a conference with some American naval officers, and noticed they prefaced several of their remarks with the phrase “Be advised”. So Croupier, be advised that I’m the boss of this Fred Karno outfit and you, Jemmy and Ned are supposed to be brilliant young officers who feed me with equally brilliant plans to which I give my approval and get all the credit. Also be advised that I don’t need three flatulent no-men bleating: “It can’t be done.” We all know it can’t be done. Not so long ago we all agreed that there was no way ships could be torpedoed regularly from inside a convoy. Ned went off and found out how it could be done, stopped it, collected a DSC and is now back with us and joining in the “can’t be done” liturgy.’
He inspected the ash on the end of his cigar. ‘Go away, the three of you, and sit under a beech tree in St James’s Park and think up a way. Don’t let anyone hear what you are discussing. You will report here at 8 a.m. tomorrow. Bring your own coffee, unless you want Camp.’
Chapter Four
Jemmy looked round the half-panelled sitting room and subsided into a comfortable old leather armchair with a contented sigh. ‘Nice house, Ned — so convenient for the Palace!’
‘And Victoria Station,’ Ned said. ‘Actually I think the family originally bought it because it’s only walking distance to Parliament.’
‘Family owned it long?’ The Croupier asked. ‘Mortgage paid off?’
‘Paid cash when it was built in the 1670s. One of my ancestors bought it from a speculator called Sir George Downing.’
‘Any relation to the Number Ten bloke?’ Jemmy asked.
‘You’re getting a history lesson. Yes, George Downing built strictly on spec a row of houses which were named Downing Street after him and then several more round here.’
‘How did Downing Street get into the hands of the Mafia?’ the Croupier demanded.
‘I’m not sure. I know George II gave Number Ten to Sir Robert Walpole, who is supposed to be the first Prime Minister as we know the job.’
‘Old George Downing didn’t realize how famous he’d become!’ Jemmy commented.
‘He must have been an interesting character. He graduated from Harvard in the 1640s, went into the slum property building business, and died a knight.’
‘Harvard, 1640s?’ the Croupier exclaimed.
Ned pulled an encyclopaedia from a bookshelf. ‘Yes, founded in 1636, just ten years after that Dutchman, Peter Minuit, bought Manhattan from the Man-a-hat-a Indians for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets.’
‘If we don’t apply our splendid brains to ASIU’s problems,’ the Croupier said gloomily, ‘Adolf the Austrian will be buying the United Kingdom for fifty dollars’ worth of ciphers.’
The house was cold and, without Clare, seemed very empty. Her absence made Jemmy and the Croupier seem strangers for reasons he could not explain. He had gone through to the pantry and looked in the tea caddy, but there was not enough left out of the meagre ration to make a pot for the three of them. A cold, empty house and no tea. War was getting tough. In another six months, he thought grimly, some of Himmler’s SS men will probably be billeted in this house — unless we discover some of that diabolical cunning.
A dull, grey day, and even the carefully tended plants in his mother’s window boxes seemed on the verge of surrender.
Suddenly and without warning the sitting room warmed and seemed to be comfortably full of people he could not see: grandfathers, third, fourth and fifth great-grandfathers facing similar problems — and, because the family had continued and the country carried on, presumably solving them. Affairs of state — his ninth great-grandfather was the Earl of Ilex, forced by Cromwell’s Roundheads to flee to France, and who died before the Restoration. Affairs of the heart — his eighth great-grandfather, the Earl’s younger son, had led the buccaneers of Jamaica and then brought his French wife home to live in this house for a few years. Most of the grandfathers between the buccaneer and himself had been Members of Parliament, with cousins successively inheriting the Earldom of Ilex. Being a Member then had been very much a thing one did, like belonging to a good club. Today many of its Members, taking subsidies from trade unions, brewers and the like in exchange for favourable votes, found it necessary to boast that being an MP was to be a member of the most exclusive club in the world, though convicts in Dartmoor probably had a better claim.
Curious how the Yorkes descended from the buccaneering eighth great-grandpa had generally gone to sea. He thought enviously that they had lived in the days when having a large estate and a seat in the Commons were no bar to owning a shipping company or serving in the Navy until one was forty or fifty, and then returning to the estate and going up to Town half a dozen times a year to speak and vote on some pet subject.
All the elder (or only) sons had been given Edward as a first name: all, as far as he could trace, had been called Ned by their families.
How often had one or other Ned Yorke and his political cronies gathered in this room to decide tactics over some new Parliamentary bill just being introduced. How often had a Ned Yorke in naval uniform sat here with fellow naval officers to discuss a coming or present war, or perhaps some new type of ship — the huge three-decker Ville de Paris, captured by Rodney at the Saintes, or the first ironclad. Perhaps Nelson had sat in here. One of the Neds — probably his great-grandfather — must have discussed the Crimean War here before sailing to take part in it and winning one of the first Victoria Crosses ever awarded. His grandfather would have talked of the Boer War; his father the Kaiser’s War. Each in turn had inherited the estate, this house and a reasonable fortune (thanks to the buccaneer who had died a rich man). Affairs of state, service gossip, affairs of the heart (with chaperones present!): this room had heard many such discussions, but after all of them the United Kingdom — indeed the British Empire — had continued.
Now, he realized, with the eleventh Ned Yorke and a couple of war-strained lieutenants, the discussion (once it ever started) really concerned whether the United Kingdom would continue to exist, because if the Battle of the Atlantic was lost, then Britain would become part of Hitler’s loudly proclaimed Thousand Year Reich, which already stretched from the North Cape of Norway to the Tropic of Cancer.
Jemmy emerged from a day dream with a twitch that brought him upright in his chair. ‘Q-ships,’ he said. ‘I thought Uncle sounded a bit on the turn about them.’
‘All very well for him,’ the Croupier grumbled. ‘The Prime Minister and the First Sea Lord prodded him, now he’s prodding u
s. Pity we don’t have people to prod in turn. Still, Q-ships won’t work.’
‘I agree,’ Ned said, ‘but you didn’t make your point clear to him.’
‘What point?’ the Croupier asked.
‘Well, the Q-ship idea won’t work because for the Q-ship to survive, it has to sink the U-boat first. There’s no way it can stun the Teds long enough to get a boat load of boarders over to capture it. The wily Teutons will either drive ’em off or scuttle the boat.’
‘Which means no Enigma machine, no manual, and an Aden posting for all in the ASIU: temperature 120° in the shade on a cool day and lots of sand,’ Jemmy said gloomily, and twitched.
‘The Resistance people,’ the Croupier said morosely, ‘I know Uncle will rule ’em out, but surely they might be able to do something.’
Ned shook his head and said quietly: ‘It’s not that the Resistance couldn’t or wouldn’t do it: they could snatch a Mark III machine and have it on its way to England by Lysander within two or three days, along with the Triton manual. But the moment the Teds know we have a Mark III and manual, they’ll change the rotors, the settings, and cipher, and we’ll be back at square one. In fact they would probably change all the ciphers. The only practical way is to get one from a Ted ship — U-boat or surface — and let the Teds think it was sunk in action. That means the Teds happily write off that particular Mark III and manual as down with Davy Jones.’
Jemmy sneezed unexpectedly. ‘We’re back to U-boats. Hey, what about Ted weather reports? What are they using now?’
‘Aircraft — those bloody great Focke-Wulf Kondors and Kuriers.’
‘Surely they use Enigmas? Can’t we — no, I suppose not,’ he finished lamely as he realized that shooting down a lumbering four-engined aircraft over the sea hardly solved the problem.
‘They probably don’t use Enigma anyway,’ Ned said. ‘They could report on their return, or radio home using an ordinary Luftwaffe weather cipher — there’s nothing very secret about a Met report, especially when that same weather has just crossed Allied territory like Nova Scotia and Greenland. The ships were concerned more with long-range forecasting.’
‘All right, all right,’ Jemmy said. ‘Cross out Goering’s bloody aeroplanes. What about the Ted pongos?’
‘The Teutonic soldiery are still using Mark IIs. Jemmy, just concentrate a moment; we are not interested in Enigma machines as such because we’ve captured Mark IIs in the Western Desert. We know all about Mark IIs using three rotors, and we have broken most of the ciphers used on the Mark IIs.’
‘I know all that,’ Jemmy said crossly.
‘Then why are you rattling on about planes, which mean Luftwaffe and Luftwaffe ciphers?’
‘All right,’ Jemmy admitted, ‘I was getting carried away with the idea of getting any blasted Enigma. Are we sure that, as the Atlantic boats come back to rearm, refuel and perhaps change crews, wily Ted experts with pockets full of nuts and bolts, and clutching metric spanners and screwdrivers, are fitting new Mark IIIs, and that Dönitz has set Der Tag for Triton?’
Ned sighed with exaggerated patience. ‘I’m not sure when, Uncle isn’t sure when, and the Prime Minister isn’t sure when, but the codes and ciphers boys at BP are sure it’ll be soon, and that’s good enough for us.’
‘BP?’
‘Bletchley Park, the Government Codes and Ciphers place in Buckinghamshire. They’re the Enigma wizards. They know what Adolf’s doing with his army, Goering with his flying machines and (up to now) Dönitz with his U-boats simply by picking up the Enigma stuff, finding out the day’s settings for the various rotors, and then deciphering.’
‘If they decipher all the German stuff, which means they cracked Hydra, why are they so worried about Triton?’ the Croupier demanded.
Ned shrugged his shoulders. ‘I know only what Uncle tells me, but obviously some of these top ciphers are hard to crack. Like our Fleet code. It took months for BP actually to break Hydra — a year, I believe — and obviously Triton is going to be a lot tougher, plus the fact that the Mark III has the fourth rotor. BP reckon they’re being optimistic in saying a year. For us that means a year’s blackout on what the Teds are doing in the Atlantic.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Jemmy exclaimed. ‘We’re losing badly enough now, even though we know roughly where every U-boat is. And we know through Enigma,’ he marvelled. ‘I always thought we were doing it by DF!’
‘A direction-finding fix on a brief transmission fifteen hundred miles away can have an error of fifty or a hundred miles,’ the Croupier said, ‘but certainly I never realized…’
Jemmy gave a convulsive twitch and then sighed. ‘Just imagine what the fly-boys could have done if they had had Ultra during the Battle of Britain!’
‘They did,’ Ned said. ‘How the devil do you think we were matching a couple of dozen Hurricanes and Spits against a hundred Ted day after day? Simply because we knew when the big formations were coming and their targets. Our fighters could wait until the very last moment before taking off to intercept. That way they saved fuel and had more flying time.’
‘So it’s no Q-ships,’ Jemmy said despondently. ‘Let’s get the Resistance to put up big posters in Brest offering huge rewards to any U-boat crew that will sail into Plymouth flying a white flag.’
‘Those Teds are so convinced they’re winning that they’re likely to come over and demand that we surrender. Anyway,’ Ned added wryly, ‘that wouldn’t help because Dönitz would know at once he’d lost a Mark III!’
‘You know,’ Jemmy said bitterly, ‘I’ve been a submariner for most of my time in the King’s Navee, from the lowliest of the low, keeping the Confidential Books up to date and trying to stay level with the Notices to Mariners, right up to commanding my own boat and sinking enough Ted and Italian ships to found Seabottom Shipping Limited, the largest line in the Mediterranean, but I feel nothing in common with these Ted skippers.’
‘Why? They face the same problems. A depth-charge can kill them just as easily as you,’ Ned said, curious at the tone in Jemmy’s voice.
‘Yes, we all operate best at 98.4 degrees. But they toss grenades into lifeboats to kill survivors, or ram the boats. Not my cup of tea. That’s murder, pure and simple.’
Ned recalled the time he had spent on board the Marynal, a medium-sized dry cargo ship, solving the convoy problem. Her captain, officers and men all had one grudge against the Germans — the killing of survivors. He could picture the tiny lifeboat, probably overcrowded because a merchant ship was rarely able to launch all its boats, and a U-boat surfacing and coming up close. The Teds would use a loud-hailer to order them to row the last few yards, so they could take off the captain, and the boat would be close below the conning tower. Then a couple of stick grenades would be flung down into the boat… Supposing the survivors could grab the grenades and toss them back before they exploded! But they’d have to catch them, otherwise valuable seconds would be lost scrabbling round under the thwarts trying to find something the size of a jam jar.
Close enough to lob a grenade…
‘Listen,’ he said suddenly to Jemmy and the Croupier, ‘this is only a crazy passing thought but it’s a change from Q-ships.’
Ten minutes later they were leaving the house like a trio of excited schoolboys, and as Ned locked the door Jemmy was insisting they took a cab back to the Admiralty.
‘We don’t want to keep Uncle waiting,’ he said.
‘Uncle doesn’t expect to see us for a week, and we need the exercise,’ the Croupier said. ‘You’re so used to being under the sea or underground or in bed that daylight and open spaces scare you. Don’t worry, no eagle will swoop down and snatch you up as you pass Queen Victoria’s statue.’
‘No, but a harpy might, and my mum warned me against harpies.’
Captain Watts listened carefully as Ned outlined his proposal and puffed at
what he declared was his last cigar.
‘It all depends on luck,’ he said finally. ‘One good storm could do you in.’
‘We haven’t much alternative, sir.’
‘That’s the only reason I’m sitting here listening to you, although for crackpot ideas this one takes the prize.’
He flicked the ash from the cigar. ‘Have you two buffoons anything to contribute?’
‘No sir,’ Jemmy said brightly. ‘We think he’s wonderful. We stand beside him — not too close, of course, and always windward.’
Watts said: ‘This is very secret but it might help. As you know, we’ve already captured a U-boat intact. What you don’t know is that we also got Enigma, Hydra manual, the lot. A Mark II, of course.’
Jemmy’s eyes widened. ‘Any chance of us being allowed to prowl over her? It’d be an enormous help for Ned and the Croupier. U-boats are laid out differently from British boats.’
‘In what way?’
‘In British boats the skipper stands at the periscope with the attack team grouped round him in the control room at the same level, feeding target bearings and so on into their gadgets. They’re close enough to pass him a cigarette. In a U-boat the skipper and periscope are up in the conning tower in a sort of attic, separated by a hatchway from the control room below him. He passes down orders like shouting down a dumb waiter.’
‘Which would you prefer?’ Watts asked, curious.
‘Well, I prefer our way. More cosy. And I like to give the boys a running commentary on what’s going on, and that’s easier when they’re close round you.’
He sat back, giving an occasional twitch, and then said: ‘Well, sir, can we get a look at it?’
‘With your new security rating, I think so. But wouldn’t it be better to wait until you’ve drummed up your group of ruffians so that you can all go?’