John Schettler - Men of War

“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.”