Decoy Read online

  ‘So I’ll get back to sea, sir?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Watts said cheerfully. ‘I shall reply that your application is dismissed — I’ll probably use some polite phrase like “cannot be acceded to”, which is the sort of bashi-bazouk babu jargon patented by the Civil Servants. Anyway, why the hurry to leave ASIU?’

  Ned shrugged his shoulders. ‘I just want to get back to sea, sir. After all, that’s what I’m trained for.’

  ‘Listen,’ Watts said, suddenly impatient, ‘the way you waded through the dockets and finally solved that convoy business has got you a DSC. It took less than a month. If you’d been at sea in one of the King’s ships for that month, you’d have spent most of your time censoring the matelots’ mail, adding up mess chits or filling in the returns your predecessor let pile up or getting the additions to the Confidential Books up to date. In other words, my lad, while with ASIU you were helping to beat Hitler, but the rest of the jobs merely keep the Admiralty penpushers satisfied. Right?’

  ‘I suppose so, sir,’ Ned said gloomily.

  ‘Suppose?’ Watts exploded. ‘Listen, I was commanding a flotilla of destroyers when they hauled me in for this job. You were simply the number one of a destroyer, and when you finally took command as the senior surviving officer, you had it sunk under your feet by bombers. So now I command a desk and a bag of nuts, including you, Jemmy, the Croupier and the rest of them in that room. Yet their Lordships — and the Prime Minister, incidentally — reckon they’re getting a bargain.’

  He looked round at the kettle, which had begun to boil, and bawled: ‘Joan!’

  She walked in with three small aluminium filters. ‘No need to shout, sir.’ There was just enough emphasis on the ‘sir’ to make it a term of abuse. ‘Kettle takes exactly four minutes to boil…’

  Watts looked at Ned, his eyebrows raised: he was admitting that despite practising on his former wives, he could not win where women were concerned.

  As Joan poured hot water into the filter, spreading a tantalizing smell of fresh coffee across the room, Watts said casually: ‘I met your mother at a party at the Ancasters’ the other evening.’

  ‘Did you, sir?’ Ned kept his reply equally casual.

  ‘Yes. Remarkable company. She has a lively mind.’

  ‘Gets it from her son, sir.’

  ‘We went out to dinner afterwards,’ Watts said, ignoring Ned’s comment. ‘Most enjoyable evening. Best I’ve had for many months.’

  ‘Indeed, sir? She didn’t mention it.’

  Watts glowered at Ned and then saw the comment was humorous, not malicious. ‘She looks so young.’

  ‘Much too young to have a grown-up son, sir.’

  Joan put the filters in front of the men. ‘Now, you two, discuss Ned’s mum out of office hours. This’ll take two or three minutes to drip through.’ With that she left the room again, carefully shutting the door as if to make it clear that Captain Watts would not be disturbed.

  ‘My application for sea service, sir — ’

  ‘Forget it, Ned,’ Watts said quietly. ‘I can’t say anything for the time being except that the Navy — indeed the whole bloody country — faces an unexpected crisis. No,’ he held up a hand, ‘can’t tell you the details at the moment. You’ll hear more about it from the PM tomorrow. Providing,’ he added, ‘the security people get your new clearance through in time.’

  ‘Security clearance, sir?’ What the devil was that all about? Hell fire, he had been at sea only a few days ago shooting at Germans. ‘Has DNI discovered that I’ve been passing trade secrets to the Germans? Seems a bit odd giving me a gong one week and running a security check on me the next!’

  ‘Easy, Ned, easy. T’aint like that at all. And Naval Intelligence, or the Director thereof, has nothing to do with it. This is a different sort of check. The security boys — for the country, not just the Navy — have a set of rules. If Buggins has to see secret documents or receive secret information up to a certain level — say B3 — then he has to have at least a B3 security clearance. If he moves on to other and more secret work, he might need an A2 clearance, and so on. Each needs an increasing depth of checking.’

  ‘I should have thought ASIU rated fairly high.’

  ‘It does — about D7 metaphorically, compared with what is likely to be your next job, which by comparison would be A1.’

  Ned scratched his head. Presumably A1 was the highest security classification. Did it allow you to listen to the PM chatting to President Roosevelt?

  ‘Why would I want an A1 security rating, sir?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘That’s what you’re seeing the PM about tomorrow. I can tell you only this much: you need the highest security clearance just to hear your orders. To carry ’em out,’ he added enigmatically, ‘a metaphorical D7 would be quite enough, and a bloody hell of a lot of luck.’

  Chapter Two

  The policeman saluted gravely as the door closed quietly behind the two men, and as Watts stepped out on to the pavement he glanced up at the low clouds and noted that it would rain soon. He turned right towards the steps at the end of Downing Street and, after glancing round to make sure no passers-by could hear, said: ‘Well, Ned, now you’ve met the great man, what do you think of him?’

  ‘A temperamental volcano stuffed with ideas and erupting spasmodically! But I didn’t follow half of what he said. He was assuming I knew more than I did.’

  ‘Yes, sorry about that,’ Watts said apologetically. ‘My fault — I was being too cautious. Wait until we get back to the office and I’ll tell you the tale.’

  As night slipped down over Whitehall, the two men walked diagonally across Horse Guards Parade towards the Citadel, and Ned confided his fantasy of the building being a Foreign Legion fort in the desert with Foreign Legion patrols emerging to do battle with marauding Tuaregs.

  ‘Beau Geste and all that sort of thing, eh?’ Watts commented. ‘Well, it was a good film. And come to think of it, the fort simile isn’t far wrong, when you think about it. Down in the cellars the Operations Room are fighting the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats who are the marauding Tuaregs. Lose that battle and Britain and the Citadel will be crushed by the Tuaregs. For “Tuaregs” read “Teds”, if I may borrow your old Mediterranean hands’ favourite description. Funny that the Italian for “German” is Tedeschi. It doesn’t sound German enough!’

  ‘It does in Italian,’ Ned said. ‘More so than “Jerry”, which sounds almost affectionate.’

  Watts, as the senior officer, returned the salute of a platoon of soldiers being marched up towards the Mall, the small peak of their caps showing they were Guardsmen, quite apart from the regular pace which made it sound as though a single giant was walking.

  Both men had just sat down in Watts’ office when Joan came into the room with a heavily sealed buff envelope.

  ‘This came from NID “By Hand of Officer”,’ she said, giving it to Watts. ‘Probably what you were waiting for.’

  Watts grunted and reached for a paperknife. Ned saw there was a letter on Admiralty stationery clipped to several typed pages which were stapled together. Someone had run amok with a red TOP SECRET rubber stamp.

  Joan walked to Ned’s side of the desk as Watts quickly scanned the pages. ‘How was the great man?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen him before, so I can’t compare. But from where I cringed, he seemed ten feet tall with a skull the size of St Paul’s dome. No, an enormous bulldog, really.’

  ‘Did he really make you cringe?’

  ‘No, he was charming. Flattering about the convoy affair and well briefed on the next business.’

  Joan was too well trained to enquire. ‘Does he really lisp the way it sounds on the radio?’

  ‘Yes. You notice it for the first few minutes, then it seems to disappear. It doesn’t, of course, but it is
a natural part of the man. Bulldogs don’t lisp, in other words! He made a meal out of my name, though. No one has ever got so much from the “k” before. “Mistah Yawk”.’ Ned tried to imitate the Prime Minister and then shook his head. ‘I can’t imitate him. I just get angry at the thought of that grubby little Welshman in the House trying to claw him down all the time.’

  ‘Don’t be nasty to Welshmen!’

  ‘I’m not, but I hate to see a fly trying to get attention by landing on a giant. Why doesn’t he join up, instead of hiding in the House?’

  Joan shrugged her shoulders. ‘As a “reserved occupation” it’s better than the Ministry of Fuel. But politics — they’d all stand on their heads at the Windmill if they thought it’d get them votes after the War.’

  ‘When you two have…’ Captain Watts said.

  ‘Ah yes, sir. I have plenty of work to do,’ Joan said brightly. ‘There’s that report you finally dictated last week — I’ll type that up. One lump or two? Oh I mean one carbon or two?’

  ‘Go and comfort Jemmy,’ Watts growled, and when she left the room said to Ned as he waved the letter, ‘This is your clearance. I broke the rules because I hadn’t received it when I took you to see the PM. I talked to the Security boys before we left and they assured me that you were “secure” and the clearance was on its way round. Still, I could see the PM was a little puzzled by your lack of excitement.’

  ‘I’m still a bit puzzled, sir. We want a Mark III Enigma machine with all its rotors. I know what an enigma is, but the one the PM’s interested in obviously has a capital letter and is a machine of some sort. A triton, too. Neptune’s triton?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Watts said. ‘Enigma and Triton. You’ll be heartily sick of both words before you’re finished. And you’ll be so enveloped in secrecy that long after the war has ended you’ll hesitate before mentioning so much as Elgar’s Enigma Variations. But first, what I’m going to tell you is so secret that few ministers know of it, and only the operational commanders-in-chief and a few of their chaps who need the information for daily use. Even to hear about it, you need an A1 clearance — ’ he waved the papers, ‘which you now have.’

  ‘Do any of the others in ASIU know about it?’

  ‘Good grief, no!’ Watts exclaimed. ‘I knew very little until last week: just the tiny part that concerned ASIU. Then suddenly they fetched me in and told me everything.’

  Ned thought for a few moments. Whatever it was, this was both urgent and the priority for Britain’s survival: the PM had made that very clear. Ned recalled the resounding words: ‘If we had to sacrifice a third of our surface fleet and half our bombers to achieve it, I’d agree and think I had a bargain.’ But the PM had gone on to emphasize that the job would probably best be done by ‘perhaps a couple of dozen men possessed of incredible courage and diabolical cunning — and you, Yorke, are just the man to lead ‘em,’ he had added with a lopsided grin. ‘Diabolical cunning, that’s what they need, eh, Watts?’ And Watts had agreed, as though Ned knew what the deuce the ‘diabolical cunning’ was intended to achieve. Capture Hitler’s moustache, puncture Goering, steam up Himmler’s spectacles, pour mock turtle soup over Ribbentrop’s dinner jacket? The scope for upsetting the German war machine was enormous — given diabolical cunning, he thought wryly.

  ‘I’m now going to tell you what you need to know, but,’ Watts added grimly, ‘if you are ever taken prisoner you’ll bite the L tablet with which you and your diabolically cunning chums will be issued. You’ll see why in a few moments.’

  ‘L tablet?’ Ned asked, puzzled.

  ‘L for lethal,’ Watts said impatiently. ‘Swift suicide to avoid interrogation. Now, we’ll start at the beginning. Ciphers. Station A wants to send a secret signal by wireless to station B a thousand miles away. Anyone listening on that frequency can hear the transmission and note down the signal. If it’s in plain language he can understand it; if in ciphers — well, his cryptographers can probably break it.’

  Ned stared at him, unbelievingly. ‘Do you mean our top Fleet ciphers are not safe?’

  ‘You can raise quizzical eyebrows, my lad, but when you’ve heard what I’ve got to say, you’ll wonder if anything is safe. Anyway, enciphering a message, as you well know, means the sender at Station A changes each letter according to a system, or cipher, that he knows and transmits what seems to be a jumble of random letters which are gibberish to anyone except Station B, which knows the system and can change the jumble back into the original signal.’

  ‘I understand that much, sir,’ Ned said heavily, having enciphered several scores of signals while at sea and deciphered traffic from the Admiralty — signals which often turned out to be queries about someone, owing to a clerical error, being paid a few shillings a week too much.

  ‘Good,’ Watts said, equally heavily. ‘Now for the cryptographers. Say the signal from Station A to Station B, which are both British, was also picked up by Station X, which is German. The string of gibberish is handed over to the German cryptographers, who are a collection of mathematical wizards and chess fiends, and they start to break it. They look for repetitions, so they can work out the substitute letters for, say, the commonest letters, which I think are E, I, S and H. Gradually they work out the signal because the same substitute letter is always used for the same letter throughout the signal. In particular cipher, say, E is always enciphered as W, I is always B and so on. If they know who sent the signal and to whom it was addressed, they’re usually helped in deciphering the beginning and the end of the signal.’

  ‘That’s true of all enciphered signals, except one-time pads,’ Ned commented.

  ‘True, and one-time pads are not practical for ships because Station A and Station B are using a particular page in the pad and destroying it after using it once. Such a cipher is virtually unbreakable but if you issue five hundred different one-time pads, the Admiralty (assuming they’ll be signalling to the ships or getting signals from them) would need to have a quarter of a million corresponding pads.’

  ‘I can see the problem,’ Ned said.

  ‘Now what we really want is a mechanical ciphering machine. A special sort of typewriter with a warped personality so that as you type the signal on it in plain language it actually enciphers the message by changing each letter, except that every time the same letter is repeated in the message, the typewriter gives a different one. For example, say the word was “bibliophile”, just the sort of word the Admiralty would be sending to a corvette. The first B might come out as R, but the second B would be different, say Z. The first I might be W, the second A, the third K, and so on.

  ‘The person receiving the signal would have to have the same kind of special typewriter and he would have to be able to set it to the same cipher to unscramble and punch it out as originally typed on the first machine.’

  ‘What about the enemy Station X in between, eavesdropping, picking up the signal?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean a damn thing because there’s no repetition. Because a particular letter is never enciphered the same way twice, it means the letters are completely random.’

  ‘So it would be impossible for the cryptographers to solve.’

  ‘Almost impossible, unless they had a similar typewriter — ciphering machine, rather — and could get some clue how it achieved its random choice in avoiding repeating the same letter. For instance,’ Watts said, picking up an eraser from his desk. ‘In typing the word “rubber”, the machine would, say, make the first R into E, and the final one into F, while the first B might be G and the second Q, so “rubber” could be transmitted as EDGQYF. There’s no indication that the first letter is the same as the last, nor that the middle two are the same.’

  ‘Our cryptographers are lucky the Teds don’t have such machines!’

  ‘But the Ted have thousands of ’em with scores of different setting; that’s the problem.’

&nb
sp; Ned felt cold. He had been in action often enough to know the truth of the expression about bowels turning to water. Now the perspiration breaking out on his brow and upper lip seemed as chilly as the condensation inside a refrigerator. ‘Possessed of incredible courage and diabolical cunning…and you’re just the man to lead them.’ Mr Churchill’s words echoed in his mind, and he saw that lopsided smile. And a few minutes ago, Captain Watts had talked of L tablets, lethal poison capsules. Poison? Suicide to avoid interrogation (presumably by the Gestapo)? That seemed a bit drastic, just because the Germans were using some sort of cockeyed mechanical typewriter-cum-cipher machine. The problem might make a few frustrated British cryptographers beat their wives and kick the dog, but poison? Or for that matter, what was Mr Churchill talking about when he said that for the new Enigma and Triton he would swap a third of the Navy’s surface ships and half our bombers?

  Watts picked up a pencil and inspected it, giving Ned time to think. Clare would be going on night duty and by now the rescue squads would have dug out everyone trapped in buildings blasted by last night’s bombing. Diabolical cunning. His left hand throbbed painfully, and one of the big pipes along the wall behind him gurgled in a way that would embarrass maiden aunts.

  Watts put the pencil back in the jam jar which, Ned noticed for the first time, contained a dozen more, all well sharpened. He took a deep breath.

  ‘You haven’t put two and two together?’

  ‘No, sir: I can’t even find any twos.’

  ‘Enigma, my dear Ned, is the name of the German cipher machines.’

  Ned groaned. Diabolical cunning, indeed! ‘I can see why the PM wants us to get one — and an instruction manual, too!’

  Watts shook his head. ‘No, it’s not that: we’ve had an Enigma machine since the war began. We’ve been listening into German traffic for many months and the cryptographers have been breaking most of the ciphers within hours of the signals coming off the machine.’