Enigma by Robert Harris

Author:Robert Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Arrow Books
Published: 2011-04-21T22:00:00+00:00

6

For the first time in more than a month, Tom Jericho found that he was busy.

He had to supervise the copying of the Short Signal Code Book, six typewritten transcripts of which were duly produced and stamped MOST SECRET. Every line had to be checked, for a single error could spell the difference between a successful break and days of failure. The intercept controllers had to be briefed. Teleprintered orders had to be sent to all the duty officers of every Hut 8 listening post—from Thurso, clinging to the cliffs on the northernmost tip of Scotland, right down to St Erth, near Land's End. Their brief was simple: concentrate everything you have on the known Atlantic U-boat frequencies, cancel all leave, bring in the lame and the sick and the blind if you have to, and pay even greater attention than usual to very short bursts of Morse preceded by E-bar—dot dot dash dot dot—the Germans' priority code which cleared the wavelength for convoy contact reports. Not one such signal was to be missed, understand? Not one.

From the Registry, Jericho withdrew three months' worth of Shark decrypts to bring himself back up to speed, and, that afternoon, sitting in his old place by the window in the Big Room, proved by slide-rule calculation what he already knew by instinct: that seventeen convoy contact reports, if harvested in the same twenty-four-hour stretch, would yield eighty-five letters of cipher encode which might—might, if the cryptanalysts had the requisite percentage of luck—give them a break into Shark, provided they could get at least ten bombes working in relay for a minimum of thirty-six hours . . .

And all the time he thought of Claire.

There was very little, practically, he could do about her. Twice during the day he managed to get out to the telephone box to try to call her father: once as they all went off to lunch, when he was able to drop back, unnoticed by the rest, just before they reached the main gate; and the second time in the late afternoon when he pretended he needed to stretch his legs. On each occasion, the connection was made, but the phone merely rang, unanswered. He had a vague but growing feeling of dread, made worse by his powerlessness. He couldn't return to Hut 3. He didn't have the time to check out her cottage. He would have liked to go back to his room to rescue the intercepts -hidden behind a picture on top of the mantelpiece'', was he insane?—but the round trip would have taken him the best part of twenty minutes and he couldn't get away.

In the event, it was to be well past seven before he got away. Logie was passing through the Big Room when he stopped off at Jericho's table and told him, for God's sake, to get back to his digs and get some rest. 'There's nothing more for you to do here, old love. Except wait. I expect it'll be around this time tomorrow that we'll start to sweat.

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