Decoy (12 page)

Jenson raised an eyebrow. ‘I doubt it, but anyway, don’t forget the “switchboard” plugs. There are thirteen pairs — thirteen, half the total number of letters of the alphabet. Each pair of plugs allows one letter to be linked to another — A to P, for example. On a really important cipher, all thirteen pairs could be used, so that there are a few more permutations…’

Ned noted the slight emphasis on ‘few’. ‘How many?’ he asked.

‘Well, the thirteen plugs means you have to multiply 25 by 23 by 21 and so on, and the answer is about eight followed by a dozen noughts, but there are other ways of introducing more permutations, so the final answer is about two hundred followed by a dozen noughts.’

‘I’m beginning to see why everyone this side is worried about Triton!’ Ned exclaimed.

‘Not so much just Triton,’ Jenson corrected. ‘We want to look at the cross-wiring on the fourth rotor they are going to put to work on the Mark III. A choice of eight rotors… I’ll spare you the mathematics. Now, any questions?’

‘Yes, ’fraid so,’ said Jemmy. ‘I don’t see the need for the first three letters in the preamble after the unit’s call sign, whether an Army, Air Force or Navy unit.’

‘Ah, we assume that’s so that no one German service (or even unit) can read a signal intended for someone else. Himmler’s Gestapo wouldn’t want Goering’s Luftwaffe to read their signals. So each unit has its own monthly manual giving the rotor settings which change every midnight and the operator or Enigma clerk knows at once whether he has the manual for that particular group, or key. If he hasn’t, I expect he goes off for a smoke or continues reading his magazine. If he has, then he consults the manual and sets up his rotors.’

‘You seem to know a lot about the Triton business?’ Ned commented cautiously.

‘Yes, Triton and Mark III. In fact I’m probably to blame for the three of you getting your present orders. My report went to the Prime Minister, and my old friend Henry Watts was sent for, as I guessed would be the case.’

‘I went with him,’ Ned said. ‘Now, with Hydra, you know more or less exactly what’s going on in the Atlantic?’

‘Yes. There are delays at times because of the random settings until we break the individual signals, but rarely longer than twenty-four hours.’

‘So when the Germans bring in Mark III with its extra rotor, and new manual, and start using Triton…?’

Jenson took his glasses off and began polishing them again. ‘It will be a disaster. You understand by now that Triton (or Hydra, or any other cipher for that matter) is a particular setting of the rotors and of the plugs. What we have to know about a new Enigma with four rotors is how the four rotors and four alternative rotors are each wired up to their discs, or cross-wired, rather. Four rotors can be arranged eight ways…’

‘Yes,’ Jemmy said, ‘so eight way with four rotors, and four more to choose from is — ’ he stopped, defeated by the mathematics.

‘There are a lot of permutations of the cross-wiring,’ Jenson agreed, replacing his spectacles. ‘With three rotors it is more than two hundred followed by twelve noughts. Just think of a three-figure number and add a dozen or so noughts…’

‘Without a Mark III Enigma, the eight rotors and manual, what are you going to do?’ Ned asked out of curiosity.

Jenson’s face suddenly went blank, like a hurt child refusing to cry out. ‘I have a wife and three small children, and there are more than fifty million other people on this island quite apart from all those in Occupied Europe,’ he said simply. ‘To stay sane, I don’t think about it. I can only wish you luck, gentlemen: whether all these millions live or die now depends on you.’

The Marine sergeant instructor held up a black object the size of a large orange. ‘And this,’ he said, ‘is — ’

‘A black banger!’ exclaimed Jemmy.

The sergeant was not intimidated by naval lieutenants, even if they wore medal ribbons and were — as in the case of this smart alec here — famous submarine commanders. Anyone fool enough to serve in submarines when it was hard enough to stay alive on the top of the water deserved what came to him.

And, struth, what a bloody twitch; wonder he didn’t break his bloody neck. There he goes, nearly twitches himself off the bloody chair. Black bangers, indeed; all that farting around beneath the waves must have sent him round the twist. Come to think of it, all three of ’em are a bit off, like Aunt Alice’s piano: all the bloody notes are flat, no matter what key you hit, white or black, though he was not quite sure what the black ones did.

Anyway, the sarn’t major, for all his winks and nods and nose-tapping with his finger, had not given much away yesterday. ‘Sergeant Gill,’ he had said, ‘we ’ave a special task assigned to us.’ That comes of working with the Americans for a week or two; every job is a ‘task’ and they’re always ‘assigning’ things. Anyway, the sarn’t major had said three naval officers were coming for a week’s special training in close quarters combat. ‘You’re to assume they have to fight themselves into or out of a large chicken house filled with Jerries, and that they’ve got to kill, wound or otherwise render useless said Jerries without riddling the chicken house with bullets, bits of Mills grenades or other debris.’

Bloody
debris
, that’s what he said. But why should a couple of lieutenants and a to-and-a-half ringer be fooling round in a hen house with a crowd of Jerries? Well, it must be something special because the sarn’t major swore him to secrecy.

‘You could call it a “black banger”, sir,’ the sergeant said, with what he considered just the right emphasis on ‘could’ and ‘sir’ to put the bloody fool in his place. ‘Certainly five seconds after the pin has been pulled out and the handle allowed to fly up to release the detonator, it will hexplode with a very loud bang. Sufficient,’ he quoted parrot fashion, ‘to hinduce complete deafness, stunned sensation and considerable disorientation to anyone within a radius of twelve feet and alarm and discomfort to fifteen.’

‘What happens if a piece of that Bakelite actually hits someone?’ the Croupier asked.

‘Cut, bruises, abrasions,’ the sergeant said airily. ‘this grenade, however, is not intended to be lethal. It is purely a training weapon. It could also be used as a psychological one, too.’

Ned considered the sergeant’s pronunciation of the ‘p’ in the word and decided it sounded more effective.

‘Panic, gentlemen, that’s what the grenade caters for. Panic in confined quarters. If you want to kill ’em, then you use the standard Mills 36 fragmentation grenades –’

‘With which we are familiar,’ Jemmy said. ‘How far can you chuck a “black banger”?’

The sergeant was not used to dealing with pupils adopting a light-hearted manner. ‘Both the Bakelite grenade and the Mills are delivered with a bowling movement, as with a cricket ball, gentlemen.’

‘Unless there’s not much room and a quick lob is all that you can manage,’ Jemmy said, and realized he had fallen into a trap.

‘Ah, sir,’ the sergeant said triumphantly, ‘there you have the problem with grenades. Hit his himportant,’ he said, being generous with his aspirates to emphasize the point, ‘to hinsure the hoptimum distance between the hexploding grenade and the hurler thereof.’

And that, the sergeant thought to himself, was put over word-perfect: page seventeen of the manual, paragraph four, the third and fourth lines, and with three smart alecs it was just as well to get it right. Not, he admitted, that he wanted to see a two-and-a-half ringer with two good gongs stunned stupid by his own grenade, and that twitchy bloke’s name for it, ‘black banger’, was good; in fact, he decided, he would work it into his next course.

‘So for close-range work you have the black Bakelite grenade designed to cause panic, and the Mills grenade which will cause death and destruction. Now we come to the Sten sub-machine gun.’

He picked up a Sten and held it up. ‘Has any of you gentlemen ever used one? No? Well, I’ll start with a bit of ’istory.

‘The gun itself is made of bits of cast-off gas pipe delicately welded together by beautiful young ladies conscripted into the munitions factories. Made in Britain. But the hammunition his a different story. Nine millimetre.’ His eyes opened wider and his eyebrows lifted as he said it, and his voice dropped. Thus, Ned thought, would the rector’s wife refer to the village’s fallen woman.

‘Has you know,’ the sergeant continued, ‘this is not a standard British calibre. Jerries and Eyeties use nine millimetre. And it’s thanks to the Eyeties we’ve got the Sten, which is a lovely gun. Drop it in thick mud, spray it with water, hold it with one hand hanging upside-down from a tree, and the Sten always works.

‘You see, as the Eighth Army chased the Eyeties across the Western Desert (this was before that Jerry general, Rommel, arrived) we captured Eyeties by the scores of thousands and nine millimetre ammunition by the millions. All those millions of rounds and we didn’t have a gun to fire even one of ’em, except some Eyetie pistols and things. So what did we do?’ he asked.

‘Welded up some gas pipe and made the Sten,’ Jemmy said.

The sergeant stared at him in disbelief. This twitching bastard had just shot his story stone-dead. ‘You’ve ’eard about it already, then?’

‘No,’ Jemmy said quite truthfully. ‘I just deduced it. Sherlock Homes was my mother’s father, you see.’

‘Ah, a very smart man ’
e
was,’ the sergeant said, somewhat mollified. ‘I’ve read most of ’is cases. You must be very proud.’

Jemmy nodded shyly and admitted he was. With that, the sergeant produced three more Stens and settled down to explain the mechanism.

After an hour’s break for lunch the sergeant took them out to the range and that evening they dined at the officers’ mess, heads aching and eardrums numbed by chattering Stens and the heart-stopping crash of the ‘black bangers’.

Ned was just leaving the mess for the hut that would be the quarters for himself, Jemmy and the Croupier for the week while they went through the Marine commando course, when a ’phone call arrived.

It was Captain Watts, who started by reminding him it was an open line and then asked: ‘How is it going?’

‘Noisy but instructive. Today they concentrated on our brains, with Stens and grenades. Tomorrow they start on our bodies.’

‘Bodies?’ Watts exclaimed. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘The Tarzan stuff, sir. Swinging across rivers on ropes, climbing trees, that sort of thing.’

‘That reminds me,’ Watts said. ‘Clare wants to know how your hand is standing up to this.’

‘All right so far — I’m wearing a glove. I’m not sure about this rope stuff — the skin is still very soft.’

‘Listen, what the hell use is swinging across rivers on ropes going to be? You need to be able to lob the “black bangers” into tea cups at ten yards, and use a Sten with more accuracy than a garden hose. Why not concentrate on those for the next two days, and then come home to Uncle?’

Ned sighed with relief. ‘Aye aye, sir. The Jollies are keen to help us, but because we can’t tell ’em anything, they think we are going to storm Berchtesgaden and kidnap Hitler.’

‘A couple of days be enough?’

‘Plenty, sir. Both Jemmy and the Croupier are keen cricketers, and I seem to be lucky with the Sten.’

‘Lucky? That’s an odd word to use about a sub-machine gun!’

‘Well, I’ve outshot the instructor five out of the six times we’ve been to the butts!’

‘I bet he’s as mad as hell,’ Watts commented.

‘Oh no, sir: he reckons it proves how well he instructed me.’

‘See if he’s ever been to Whale Island. He sounds like one of their gunnery instructors. I’ve never heard of a Whale Island GI get caught out or admit he’s wrong! I’ll tell Clare and your mother you’re a bit deaf but okay.’

‘I think Clare is on duty tonight.’

’In a way. I’m taking ’em both out to dinner.’

‘I sometimes suspect your motives, sir.’

‘I should hope so,’ Watts said. ‘Makes me feel quite young, to hear you say that! By the way, the chaps you and Jemmy listed are being rounded up. No problems, so far.’

As she opened the front door her stance made him hesitate a moment. Black shadows under her eyes — that was normal after a week of night duty. But she was leaning to the left, the right side of her body still partly hidden by the door, and she was curiously still and now the welcoming smile was falling apart as her lips trembled.

Ned slid inside the hall and as he turned to grasp her saw the right leg below the knee was swathed in bandages and before she had time to speak she was holding him, her body jerking gently with dry sobs.

‘What happened?’ he whispered.

‘St Stephen’s — hit by three bombs. The surgical ward — only three of us… The rest were killed… Twenty-seven.’

‘When? You weren’t on duty last night.’

‘Three night ago, early in the evening.’

‘But Captain Watts took you and mother –’

‘No, that was just a story we made up in case you heard the hospital had been hit.’

‘Your legs — what happened?’

‘I was buried in the rubble for a while. A beam trapped me.’

Realizing that they were still standing at the open door, he led her into the sitting room then hurried back to bring in his bag, and shut the door.

She was lying back on the settee, white-faced but still trying to smile. ‘Just a few cuts,’ she said, gesturing at the bandages. ‘They didn’t even keep me in.’

‘With half the hospital knocked down, that doesn’t surprise me. ‘Where’s mother?’

‘She’s out shopping. She’s been nursing me. Not the biter bit, but the nurse nursed.’

He held her hand and, realizing that he was being too heavy-footed when the situation needed a light touch, he said: ‘I hope she’s bullying you, as you used to bully me.’

‘She is, and I’m beginning to feel sorry for the way I treated you.’

There was something about the way she was lying back on the settee, as though trying to hold her breath. Pain from the leg? Her brow was covered in tiny pearls of perspiration.

‘You ought to be in bed.’

‘No, no… I just caught my ribs as I leaned back on the cushion.’