Men of War (2013) (8 page)

“I
agree, sir, but what exactly are you suggesting we do about it?”

“A
watch,” Tovey folded his arms. “We need a group of men in the know on this, men
who can be trusted absolutely, competent men, and we need them to set a watch
on every hour of every second of every day that passes from this moment on.”

Chapter 5

“I
see…” Turing raised an eyebrow, thinking through the implications of what Tovey
was now suggesting. “And what are they to watch
for
, sir?”

“Intruders,
Turing. Visitors from this future time. I know, it’s maddening to think they’re
even out there. Even speaking of it in these terms makes it seem as though the
future is a tangible place where this ship can drop anchor as it pleases. Yet
one thing is clear: if they can return to our time, we’ve certainly seen that
they can also muck about and cause a good deal of trouble here, and they have
to be stopped.”

“Is
the government to be directing this effort, Admiral?”

Tovey
looked at the desk, rubbing an itch on his long thin nose, his eyes alight with
inner concern. “The government? Can you imagine the likes of Admiral Pound in
on this notion we’ve been discussing? Can you even consider that the Prime
Minister would give it a fair hearing? Something tells me that the less the
government knows or hears about this, the happier it will be. But there are
institutions
within
government that are a bit more flexible in their
views.”

“MI6?”
Turing jumped to the obvious conclusion.

“Well
think on it, Turing. You had that Enigma code in your head for some time before
you came out with the solution and turned it over to the government. Do you see
what I mean here?”

“I
do, sir. We often receive, analyze and discuss information here that never
really comes to light anywhere else. Some of it plays out to hard intelligence
and becomes actionable. That’s the lot we send over to Whitehall—over to the
government, if you will. But I assure you, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
For every cypher we decode and send through there are ten more we’re tussling
with, and another ten in the trash bin. Yes, we’ve broken the enemy’s code, but
it’s not like reading a book. We get bits and pieces of things, and then we try
to put together the best possible picture of what may be in the enemy’s mind.
We go to the government with it only when we think we have some certainty in
hand.”

“My
thoughts exactly,” said Tovey. “Yet consider their view of things—these men
from Geronimo. It
is
like reading a book for them, They know everything
that has happened from our time to theirs. Well, what we need now, Professor,
is a group of sound minded and imaginative men like yourself to go over the
bits and pieces on this matter and put the puzzle together. What we need is to
know what is in the enemy’s mind, the mind of these men from tomorrow who so
brazenly call upon us in ships of war. Yet more than that, we need watchful
eyes. You see, if this ship or any other like it, should return, we’ll want to
know about it.”

“I
think we might bring Peter Twinn in on this. He’s been in the thick of it with
the German Naval Enigma code, and now that Dilly Knox has been taken ill he’s
assuming more responsibility at the Abwehr Enigma section.”

“You
choose the men, Turing, but be very discrete about it. Secrecy is crucial in
this matter. Obviously people are going to have to know something about it, but
I don’t think we need to paint them the whole picture. It strains the bounds of
credulity every time I think about it myself. There are a few hat bands over at
Whitehall who have some interest in this
Geronimo
, but the way this war
pushes one thing on to another, I don’t think they’ll press on the matter. In
fact, you and I are the only two men alive at this moment who really have this
thing by the scruff of the neck. Let’s keep it that way for the moment.”

“I
understand what you say about Whitehall, Admiral. We’ve been rather busy here as
well with all the signals and code traffic for this Operation Torch. The whole
group has been on overtime, but I think I can bring a few men in on this,
discretely, as you say. We can put good people to work on a given task without
them knowing the aim, if that’s what you mean, sir. We do it all the time
here.”

“Good.
Now on another matter, that bit you put in my head about the men who might have
died, and yet lived as a result of the actions taken by this ship… well it was
quite disturbing. I don’t want to sound morbid, Professor, but we may want to
consider what can be done about that as well.”

“I
see… What
can
we do about it, sir?”

“We’ll
have to put our minds to that. First off I should think we would want to know
who these men are. It would be easy enough to put our finger of the lives lost
as a result of this ship. I don’t think
Repulse
was fated to meet her
end the way she did. The same can be said for any other man who died in
engagements we’ve fought with
Geronimo
, particularly on the American side.
I suppose we can only hope there were no
Einsteins
in
the lot.”

“Right,
sir. It would be easy enough to work up a list of the casualties, but we can’t
do much more with it. I mean it’s not like we can bring any of them back from
the dead.”

“Indeed,
but what about the other side of that equation, Professor. What about men alive
today that might have otherwise been killed?”

“How
do we find them, Admiral? We can’t know the fate of every man alive. How could
we possibly know who was fated to die?”

“We
can’t, I suppose, but we can make some intelligent guesses. Isn’t that how you
go about solving your code riddles? You get bits and pieces, as you say, and
then come to assumptions and conclusions.”

“I’d
love to say I could put a man’s fate on my perforated tape and code it all,
Admiral, but that is a bit of a reach. Yet what you say does offer some
promise. We do know a few things…Let’s start with the first point of
divergence.”

“What’s
that you say?”

“Point
of divergence, sir. What is the first thing this ship could have done to upset
the course of events in our time?”

“Well
I suppose that would be Wake-Walker’s mission. He was going to hit the Germans
with planes off
Furious
and
Victorious
on the North Cape of Norway,
at Petsamo and Kirkenes. I’d like to think that the raid would have gone off
without heavy losses, but I know better than that. We expected casualties, and
a lot of them. Instead, the appearance of this ship sent Wake-Walker’s boys off
on our wild goose chase. A great many men died from those air squadrons. The
question is which ones might have also died if the raid on the North Cape had
gone off as planned?”

“We
can’t know that, sir, but what we could do is compile a list of all the men still
alive from those squadrons and, well… We could keep an eye on them.”

“I
see. Sounds rather tedious, and unsavory as well.”

“After
that, we would have to put the crews of every man in any ship that participated
in these events on the list. Then we would expand to included names of men
slated for operations that we ourselves have cancelled as a result of this
ship. Operation Jubilee immediately comes to mind, sir.”

“That
will make one hell of a list, Turing. There were tens of thousands at sea in
the hunt for this ship—most of Home Fleet, the whole of Force H in the Med as
well. As for the cancelled Dieppe raid, we would have the Canadian 2nd Infantry
Division, five commando units, over 230 ships and landing barges, and over
seventy RAF squadrons on the list. We were going to lose men in that raid,
unquestionably, but which ones?”

“That’
doesn’t matter, sir. The point is that there are obviously a good number alive
in those units now that might not be breathing. I’ll say another thing about
it. We had men in Number 30 commando assigned to a pinch mission there. They
were out after one of the new four wheel Enigma boxes believed to be in Dieppe,
and that never happened either.”

“Ah,
yes, Fleming’s group. I had almost forgotten about that. I dare say that Fleming
won’t have the bit between his teeth as much now that
Rushbrooke
replaced Godfrey as head of the Naval Intelligence Division. We’ll still use
him. He’s setting up a network for us in Spain under Operation Golden Eye, and
his boys are slated to go after intelligence during the upcoming Torch
Operation. Sorry about that failed pinch operation at Dieppe. I hope that
didn’t set your efforts back here, Turing.”

“No
major setbacks, sir. Fleming has been promising me things for some time, and
seldom delivers. I managed without it.”

“Good
enough, but as you can see, our list is going to be a long one. How do we
manage to keep an eye on all these men? The manpower required would be
enormous.”

“Perhaps
I could help, sir. I can’t put a man’s fate onto my perforated machine tapes,
but I could certainly encode his name. Then we could use a machine to do some
pattern matching. Should something unusual come up, and should it match one or
more of the names on the list, why we might then have a closer look at those individuals
with human assets. We could just hand that off to MI5. It’s what they do for a
living, yes?”

“Something
tells me I would hate to have my name on such a list. It’s damn uncomfortable.”

“I
agree, sir. Most things having to do with war are somewhat unsavory, but we
muddle through.”

“War?
You make it sound as though we are at odds with our own people here, Turing.”

“We
will be, sir. Why do you think we even have an organization like MI5 in the
first place? Yes, they run down foreign agents on British soil, but they keep
an eye on the rest of us as well. If it were to be learned that one of these
men on our list does something… compromising, then he becomes an enemy of fate
and time as it were. If you mean to set this watch on the history, then you’ll
have to be prepared to do some unpleasant things, Admiral. Suppose we suspect a
man on this list for some reason—say he’s been reported captured by the enemy.
He was supposed to be dead, and we all know dead men tell no tales. Yet now
he’s alive, a bit of a zombie, eh? Now he
can
tell tales. Loose lips
sink ships, to put it plainly.”

“Zombie?”

“A
Haitian word for an animated corpse, sir, brought back to life by witchcraft. I
use this metaphorically, but it’s a perfect image for what these men actually
are, and it gets worse. Any one of these walking dead men could do something
significant, and they could also have sons and daughters who might do very much
more. The cancellation of Operation Jubilee is just a small part of the
picture, sir.
Geronimo
has upset operations all through the Med and also
in the Pacific. Our point of divergence is getting quite wide now, and our list
will be very long indeed. The more time that passes the worse things might be.”

“Damn
confounding business, Professor. The more I think about it, the more impossible
it seems. There were German soldiers who might have died if these cancelled
operations had gone forward. How in the world do we sort them out? There were
Italian ships tangling with Geronimo in the Med, and now the Japanese. Our list
now grows to a point where it becomes truly daunting, perhaps impossible to
even attempt.”

“Right,
sir. It’s also a rather dark feeling to think the history may now be playing
out in a way it was never meant to—at least from the perspective of the men
aboard
Geronimo
. As you suggested earlier, they have a unique position
of
knowing
what happens in the decades ahead. Why, they’ve most likely
got boxes and boxes of files on it all—enough to fill a thousand libraries.
Should we be vigilant? Of course we must, but here’s the rub, sir…How do we
know if anything has been changed, and what effect it might have had on the
course of events? We don’t sit on the top of the hill like they do. We just see
this particularly unpleasant gully we’ve blundered into with this bloody war. ”

“Good
point, Turing. We might ask the Japanese if they feel their plans have been
changed by this ship. I think we both know how they would answer.”

“Right
sir, but we don’t know what was
meant
to be, or what may have changed.
Was America meant to declare war in September of 1941? This ship had an awful
lot to say about it. It’s very frustrating, sir. Think of it like a good book
we’re set to revise. We want it all to turn out well, with our Ts crossed and
Is dotted. Yet here we are stuck in the early chapters. What we need now is
some way of knowing how the story was supposed to end, yes? Only then can we
decide what to do about this particular chapter and the men that live in it.
Some changes may be for the good as we see it. Suppose this Dieppe raid was a
bloody disaster? In that light its cancellation may weigh in as a benefit. Does
that make any sense, sir?”

“It
makes a good deal of sense. As I say, you are a man of some imagination. But I
don’t think we could ever take that look ahead in the story to see how things
turn out—not unless we manage to get our hands on this ship and take a ride
with them when they pull their next disappearing act. I mean…well they must go
somewhere
,
don’t they?”

“Yes,”
Turing sighed. “They must go somewhere, only where? Getting a man on board that
ship would be no easy task. It’s vanished again. You seem to get on fairly well
with this Russian Admiral. If this ship ever does return why not call him up
and have another chat?”

The
phone rang, jarring and insistent as every phone can be when it isn’t expected
or wanted, but coming on the heels of Turing’s last suggestion both men had the
odd feeling that it was to be a call of some importance. Tovey nodded and
Turing lifted the receiver.