Testament

by David Gibbins

  They reached the chain that held the shot line to the buoy, and then clawed their way up until they broke surface. Jack grasped one of the rope loops around the buoy and glanced up at Deep Explorer, seeing the crewmen lining the foredeck looking down on them. He raised his free arm in the okay signal, and saw Costas do the same. The swell was pulling the buoy dangerously close to the hull, and he hoped the captain would have the sense to release his anchor line now that they had surfaced, and to stand off while the Zodiac attempted to pick them up. He glanced toward the stern of the vessel, seeing the Zodiac still raised on its davits. After sensing the detonation, they would have kept the inflatable out of the sea until they knew what was going on. They could hardly have expected them to return from the wreck alive.

  Jack tapped his intercom, making sure it was still working. “We’re going to have to open up ship-to-diver comms to give them guidance. The ship’s going to have to stand off, for a start. The swell’s a lot stronger than it was when we went down. Having survived that dive, I don’t want us to end up crushed between the Zodiac and the ship’s hull.”

  “Roger that,” Costas said. “Anything else before they’re able to listen in on us?”

  “Here’s my plan. Once we’re on board, I’m going to radio my friend in Freetown to see if he can get a Lynx helicopter from the British military mission to come out and pick us up pronto. He’s ex-army and I’m still a reservist, so he can make it official. British naval officer and American colleague need rescuing from the clutches of pirates, or something like that. Otherwise, with the weather worsening, I can see these guys on Deep Explorer refusing to fly us off in their own helicopter, using the weather as an excuse to grill us about what we saw. Landor will think he knows which buttons to press to try to get me talking, but I’m damned if I’m going to give him that chance. He and I are way past swapping dive stories now. And the last thing we want is for them to snatch our cameras and see those images of the gold. There’s not much they can do now to recover it, of course, but they could make life very unpleasant for us. We need to get out of here as soon as we can.”

  “Roger that. Ship comms back on line in two minutes.”

  Jack twisted around so that he was floating on his back, the spindrift from the waves lashing his visor. By the time they reached Freetown and had stayed a night with the military mission, their nitrogen saturation levels should be safe enough to fly. He would also put in a request for the IMU Embraer to fly down from England and be waiting for them at Freetown airport.

  He felt bone-tired, but exhilarated. He needed to get home, to transport himself back to the darkest days of the sea war in 1943, to a time when the future of the world hung in the balance.

  He could hardly wait to see where this mystery would take him.

  4

  Bletchley Park, England, April 30 1943

  A bitter wind swept across the forecourt of the compound, and the woman drew her coat more tightly around her as she hurried toward the checkpoint in front of the entrance. It had only been a twenty-minute walk from the station, but already she was beginning to miss the fug of the train compartment, the familiar smell of stale sweat and wet wool and tobacco, the warmth of the men around her. Most were bomber crew back from weekend passes in London, some still fuddled with hangovers but others pale and wide-eyed and staring through the window into the pre-dawn darkness, knowing what lay in store for them in the skies to the east. At Bletchley they had stayed on board while the train disgorged its other passengers, the silent army she could hear coming up the lane behind her. Many were women, civilians like her or girls of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, with a few male army and naval officers among them. As usual she had hurried ahead to avoid lining up in the cold at the checkpoint, and to be the first for a cup of tea at the NAAFI canteen inside.

  She reached the barrier and stopped in front of the two military policemen in greatcoats with rifles and fixed bayonets. A corporal came out of the booth, blowing on his hands, and stood before her. “Papers, please.”

  She knew the drill, and already had her ID, clearance papers and weekend pass in hand. He scrutinized them and then handed them to the officer who had come out of the booth behind him. “Name?” the officer demanded, towering over her.

  She drew down her scarf from her chin to show her face, and looked up at him. “Fanny Turley.”

  “Occupation?”

  “Civilian telegraphist clerk, Admiralty.”

  “What were you doing in London?”

  “Staying with my sister in Clapham.”

  “But your papers give your home address as Shropshire. Why not go there?”

  “My sister’s husband has just been killed in Burma.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about your work here?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone not working here accompany you to Euston station?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your division?”

  “Hut 9b, Special Operations. Atlantic convoys.”

  “Supervisor?”

  “Commander Bermonsey.”

  The officer passed back her papers and nodded her through. He had not shown a flicker of recognition, despite the fact that he had spent an evening the week before trying to chat her up in a pub in the nearby village where she was billeted. He was a professional, as they all had to be in this place. The slightest chink in the armor, the slightest lapse in security, could see the whole code-breaking edifice crumble before their eyes.

  Even her family had no idea what she was doing. When she had abruptly left her job as a schoolteacher in Shrewsbury to work for the Civil Service in London, they had guessed that it might have had something to do with her aptitude for math, but when they asked her, she had revealed nothing more than her job title and that she worked for the Admiralty. Her sister knew that she was based somewhere an hour or so to the north of London, but that was true for so many girls employed in government departments that had relocated to country houses following the Blitz. Her job title, telegraphist clerk, was a typical Bletchley cover, revealing nothing of her true role. Even within Bletchley there were multiple veils of secrecy, with those in one hut knowing little of what went on in the hut next door. But everyone who worked here knew the official name of the establishment, the Government Code and Cypher School, and even the military policemen outside who knew nothing of decryption were aware that keeping this place secure was vital to the war effort.

  She pushed through the door, grateful for the surge of warmth, went straight over to the canteen, and took one of the mugs of sweet tea that were already being laid out. For a few precious minutes she could ignore the smell of watery cabbage and burned fat that seemed to permeate the place, a residue of lunches past and a foretaste of delights to come. She nestled the mug in her hands for a moment, blowing on the tea, before heading off to the door that led out to the central courtyard and toward the huts, knowing that those coming through the checkpoint behind her would soon be crowding around the canteen.

  As she stopped to take a sip, an elegantly dressed young woman came out of the lavatory door beside her, finished applying lipstick, and then snapped shut her handbag, smiling. “Hello, Fan. Good leave?”

  “Euston was absolutely packed, even at six A.M.,” Fan replied. “There must be quite a lot more new recruits among this lot behind me. I see they’ve already begun work extending the compound to the north while I’ve been away. Soon we won’t be able to see the old park at all for the Nissen huts.”

  “There are more Americans here now. Several new ones in your hut.”

  Fan shrugged and drank some more of her tea. “Can’t say I’ve noticed.”

  “Come on, Fan. It’s an open secret you’ve got two new American officers. One of them looks quite dishy.”

  Fan shrugged again, smiling innocently. “I couldn’t possibly comment. Top secret, you know.”

  “You’re hopeless. By the way, your Commander Bermonsey knows we’re billeted together and has been askin
g for you. He was here ten minutes ago, chomping at the bit. He wants you to go straight in as soon as you arrive, lickety-split.”

  “That’s why I made sure to take the first train back. He’s always like that.”

  “This time might be special. He was just like my CO gets in Hut 8 after he’s been at work through the night, all jittery and nervous. My guess is there’s something big on. Just a friendly warning.”

  “All right. See you this evening in billets.”

  “With a dishy American in tow, just for me?” She grinned, waved her handbag, and was gone, sauntering out of the door toward the complex of huts adjoining Bletchley House, the stately home that had been the sole building in the park before the war.

  Louise Hunter-Jones was from a very different social background to Fan, with a posh Mayfair address, and her frippery could sometimes be trying. But what both girls shared was an aptitude for math, something that had led Louise to Girton College, Cambridge, and Fan on a scholarship to the University of Birmingham, and both had been snapped up by Bletchley when the recruiters had contacted university departments looking for recent graduates with first-class degrees, women as well as men. Louise had gone straight in with the naval code breakers in Hut 8, but then had been transferred to supervise one of the bombes, the inscrutable name given by the Polish intelligence people who had invented them to the electromechanical monsters that churned through the permutations to find the daily settings for the German Enigma machines, clattering and shuddering and reeking of machine oil. It always left her pale and drained at the end of the day. For a while she let it be known that she felt she had drawn the short straw, but then her natural enthusiasm took over and she had made the best of it; the extra effort she took with make-up and clothing was part of that.

  Fan, by contrast, had become a statistician, a calculator of probabilities, an adviser to the officer in charge in her hut when they needed to estimate how many of the deciphered U-boat orders they could act on without raising suspicions among the Germans that Enigma had been broken. She did not end each day with her ears ringing and her clothes reeking as Louise did, but dealing with statistics and probabilities took its own toll, the knowledge that what she was doing was not just about saving lives but also making decisions not to, and letting men on the front line in the Battle of the Atlantic sail on into probable destruction and death.

  She pushed open the door and started to make her way across the courtyard beside the central pond, the mansion ahead of her and the rows of long wooden huts where most of them worked to the right. Hearing a familiar light step coming quickly up the path behind her, she turned and watched the runner approach. He was wearing only a vest and shorts despite the cold, and his dark hair was matted to his forehead.

  “Hello, Alan,” she said. He swerved off the path and came to a halt on the grass beside her, his hands on his knees, panting hard. “Good run?”

  He looked at his watch. “Better than last time. Set off at midnight.”

  “At midnight?” she said incredulously. “From where?”

  He looked up at her, nonplussed. “London, of course. Whitehall, to be precise. Had a meeting.”

  “You ran all the way here from London? At night? In the blackout?”

  “Best time for it. No traffic on the roads. Anyway, it’s a full moon.” He peered up at the clouds. “Allegedly.”

  “That’s more than fifty miles.”

  “Early-morning trains are always too crowded these days. Running clears my head.”

  “You’re mad.”

  He gave her an impish grin. “So they tell me.”

  “Let me at least get you some tea.”

  He shook his head, then nodded toward the huts. “Quick shower, then I’m back in there. Work to do.”

  “Louise thinks there’s something on. Bermonsey’s been looking for me.”

  His breathing eased and he straightened up. “You know, it was easier earlier on in the war when it was just code-breaking. Then it was a mathematical problem, an exercise in scholarship. Now it’s different.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “Now it’s real people, real lives.”

  He stared up at the sky, his hands on his hips, and shut his eyes, the sweat running down his neck in rivulets. Then he looked down and gave her another grin. “See you in the machine.”

  She watched as he jogged off to the shower block beside the mansion. He had taken to calling their workplace that, the machine, after someone had dubbed him deus ex machina, the god from the machine, the device in a storyline that saves the plot. Alan Turing had done that, had done incredible things, had made Bletchley work, but now he was no more than the rest of them, a cog in a machine where genius mattered less than the ability to see human lives as little more than chess pieces, as dispensable elements in the calculus of war.

  She turned toward the row of low buildings that formed one edge of the compound. They called them huts, but in reality they were a lot more than that: long, purpose-built structures of interconnected offices and workspaces that could hold a hundred or more workers each, both civilians and service personnel. Hers was officially Hut 9b, but was known informally as the special operations hut. She thought about what Alan had said. More and more, this damp corner of Buckinghamshire seemed to be at the forefront of the war. Sometimes, hunched over the map table, choosing one convoy to save over another, it seemed as if the raging Atlantic were just outside, as if opening the door would reveal the mountainous seas and howling wind, the dark shapes of ships and the throbbing of engines as they battled through the night.

  She shivered, and remembered the bomber boys on the train. They were someone else’s responsibility, other girls like her and Louise in another secret place, pushing counters across a map, sending some men to near-certain death and giving others a temporary reprieve. She could do nothing to help them. Her boys were the men at sea, the thousands of sailors in merchant ships, British, American, Canadian, Norwegian, Indian and all of the other Allied seafaring nations pitted against the Nazis, plowing their way across the Atlantic and running the gauntlet of the U-boats, living in constant fear of attack. Her twenty minutes in the chill air this morning was nothing compared to the cold felt by those men out there tonight, their ships pitching and rolling as the spray lashed them, trying to maintain station in the darkness. Keeping some of those men alive was what kept her coming back here, day after day, night after night.

  She looked up, seeing the milky smudge where the light of the moon was now visible through the morning clouds. The full moon that had guided Alan on his run might be silhouetting those ships in the darkness to the west, making them easier targets for the U-boats. She prayed for cloud over the Atlantic, for rain. She took a deep breath and steeled herself, the adrenalin already coursing through her. She could hear others coming up the path behind her. She pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  * * *

  Fan doffed her coat and warmed her hands at a radiator in the main operations room while she waited for Commander Bermonsey, who was bent over a map table conferring with the two US Navy officers who had so intrigued Louise. They were part of the increased numbers of Americans who had come to Bletchley over the past few months in advance of the planned handover of a large part of the Ultra decryption work to US naval intelligence in Washington. Bermonsey straightened up and saw her, but continued talking to the men. He was awkwardly tall for a submariner, she thought, well over six feet, though with his thick beard and gaunt, handsome features he looked the part. They had been told that before being posted here, he had been the sole survivor among the captains in his flotilla out of Malta, and that his boat had been lost with all hands on its first patrol without him. He had been jittery when he had arrived, pale and haunted, but once he had settled in, he had begun to run the operations room as if he were on the bridge of a ship, something that Fan found she relished; it gave what they were doing the urgency of the life-and-death decisions that she knew he must once have faced at sea. />
  He strode over to her. “Good. You’re here. Follow me.”

  “Sir.”

  As a civilian, she was not obliged to show him military deference, but she did so anyway. It helped to keep the nature of their relationship clear, and it was more comfortable for him. She guessed the drill for the morning, because it was the same every morning. First they would go to the main chart table, where the night’s decrypts would already have been whittled down to two or at the most three possibilities. There would be an open discussion, and she would provide her analysis. Next, she and Bermonsey would go to the closed operations office at the other end of the hut, where he would make the final decision. At a pre-appointed time, Bermonsey would pick up the phone and call a secret office in the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Center, where the advice from Bletchley would be recast as the commander-in-chief’s orders and sent to the commanding officer, Western Approaches, in Liverpool, or directly to the convoy commodores themselves. Within twenty minutes of Bermonsey picking up the phone, the helmsmen in the ships of the chosen convoy would be changing course. Nobody outside this room would know which other convoys that could have been saved had been sacrificed for the greater good. The steps in the procedure were always the same, like the ritual of a dawn execution, one always with the possibility of a last-minute reprieve.