York, then Iceland, and eventually London. Now Alan Turing was looking at it with Peter Twinn in Hut 4 at Bletchley Park.
The whole thing had been translated and transcribed, and the article was very shocking, raising alarm bells all the way to Naval intelligence in Hut 8. The article was entitled: ‘British Remember Fallen in Agreement Gone Bad.’ It was about Operation Agreement, slated to run in just another day, yet here was the whole thing written up as though it had already happened…as though it were history! It clearly detailed how the British destroyers Sikh, and Zulu, with 350 Marines aboard would leave Alexandria and meet up with the AA cruiser Coventry and the 5th DD flotilla for the planned raid on Tobruk in a little over thirty-six hours.
The details in the article were astounding! It listed officers involved, and the fate of ships and men who had yet to even join this fight. More than this, it described the sad outcome of the raid: Sikh damaged by German 88s and sunk while taken under tow; Coventry hit by JU-87 Stukas and scuttled; Zulu also sunk; Haselden’s commando raid from the landward side beaten off with heavy losses, and he himself killed in that action; 576 allied prisoners taken and valuable code and cypher equipment captured by the enemy. In short, it was a disaster.
Twinn was a straight laced man, dressed in a tweed sport coat with vest and tie that day, his eyes bright above his starched white collar and a shock of brown hair falling on his right forehead as he leaned over the desk. He was a brilliant mathematician from Oxford who had been signed on to Hut 4 to train under Dilly Knox on code breaking methods-for all of five minutes before Knox told him to get started. Twinn worked with Turing on the Enigma code and was instrumental in solving the riddle. Now the two of them set their minds on solving this riddle.
“Could it be a warning?” said Twinn. “They’ve obviously gotten wind of the operation and they put this out quite plainly to scare us off.”
“But the details, Peter,” said Turing. “They’ve got the damn thing nailed down with brass tacks! Dates, times, ships involved-”
“Casualties and outcome,” Twinn put in. “That’s the giveaway. They want to tell us they’re on to us and ready to meet this operation with full force. There’s no other way to look at it.”
“Turing glanced at him for a moment, saying nothing, then his eyes darkened on the article again, complete with a map detailing the location of the planned landings, right down to the minute. It was very unnerving. It was as if they had an almost omniscient awareness of the plan.
“I can see them getting the broad strokes of this,” said Turing. “They intercept our traffic even as we do theirs. But the details? They would have to come from someone inside operations to be that specific. Could we have a mole, Peter?” There was a look of warning in Turing’s eyes now.
“Odd that it came from the Russians,” said Twinn. “Could they be trying to tip us off that the code is compromised? After all, they are our allies in this business.”
“So we’d like to believe,” said Turing. “But how did they get the information?”
“It would have to come from someone inside, just as you say, Alan. This isn’t the sort of detail you get from the occasional odd message intercept. They’ve got it all, hook, line and sinker. You may be correct. We could have a problem here. After all, they’ve just been bringing in people off the streets, chess players, artists, a whole menagerie of eclectic minds here. I was just a dizzy eyed mathematician myself, out of work and looking for an opportunity. Now here I am in the thick of it. Would it be too much of a stretch to think that someone was planted by the other side?”
“That would be rather disastrous,” said Turing. “Just like this planned raid is likely to be now. We’ll have to cable Alexandria at once, Peter. The party is off on this one. The operation must be cancelled immediately.”
They started putting their heads together to find out exactly where, or who this information could have possibly come from, though Turing harbored a deep inner misgiving over the source- Russian — another leaf fallen from the Rodina’s tree that seemed almost prescient in its prediction of an event that had not even happened.
Even as Turing thought this he suddenly recalled his long conversation with Admiral Tovey. His own words to the Admiral returned to haunt him: “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.”
What if this article wasn’t merely an effort to inform us that this operation had been compromised, thought Turing? What if it truly was what it seemed to be-a peek into the future seen by men who had already lived through and beyond those days. By that logic Haselden, fated to die in this raid, would be made a Zombie if the party was cancelled. Turing was suddenly locked in agonizing contradiction. By saving the lives of the men slated for Operation Agreement he might now be changing all future history.
“Here’s the information,” Twinn said excitedly. “It was right here, attached to the source document in this note. Look here, it says “Found in Vladivostok Harbor.”
“Then it had to have been found by someone off a lend lease merchant ship,” said Turing definitively. It came from Kemp at Dutch Harbor. Those ships transit that route on a regular basis.”
It had come, of course, from a man named Markov, a junior rate in the engineering division assigned to the battlecruiser Kirov. It had been a magazine on the coffee table in the waiting area that Markov snatched up during his work rotation break, and slipped into the reactor test bed room at the Primorskiy Engineering Center across the bay at Vladivostok. Markov had disappeared on that same day, in the year 2021, and appeared, strangely, in the same location, but seventy-nine years in the past. The space he had occupied was the living room of a private home, and when Marta Vayatin walked in and saw Markov sitting on one of two chairs with an expression of utter shock on his face, she ran screaming out of the house, raising a ruckus and setting the police hastening to the scene.
Poor Markov eventually came to his senses, and ran out as well, immediately seeing that he was, indeed, in Vladivostok and looking out on the Golden Horn Bay, but everything looked completely different! The city was much smaller. Most of the new high-rise apartment buildings were gone! It had a sallow, grey look to it, and there was virtually no traffic to be seen on the major roadways. In fact, many of the streets were dirt and gravel tracks wending their way through old weathered housing blocks. He ran, as fast as his legs would take him, down the muddied hillside roads toward the harbor quays below, instinctively hoping to find Kirov berthed quietly there as before, a rat coming home to the ship. The rest was now history-a very personal end to Markov’s place in that story when he died of both shock and a gunshot wound on the cold concrete quay of the Golden Horn Harbor.
Turing took a long breath, realizing he had to make a very important decision now. What to do about this raid on Tobruk?
“I need to make a phone call, Peter. Hold off on this for the moment, will you?” He walked solemnly out of the room to a secure area, thinking deeply as he went. Some minutes later he returned, still troubled, but with more sense of direction. He had called Admiral Tovey to discuss the matter. “The question is this,” he had told him plainly. “Either we save these men and ships and hope that works to the good, or we send them in as planned and then see what happens. If the results mirror the account we have in hand with this document, why…then we’ve got another problem, Admiral. It would have to mean that someone was alive, in the here and now, perhaps at Vladivostok, and with knowledge of our future.”
“Damn maddening,” said Tovey. There was a long pause before he spoke again. “You warned me about this, Professor, but I don’t think I want to look into Pandora’s jar just yet. We can deduce what you say without having to sacrifice 576 men and three ships for the information. Nobody knew the full details of that mission. You know very well that the target, force composition, and time of attack are all kept in three separate heads and they only come together for the final officer’s briefing at the eleventh hour. And I can tell you one other thing. The final force composition has not even been fixed yet. I spoke with Cairo on this yesterday. It was only just suggested that we take the AA cruiser Coventry off guardship duty in the Suez and add it to this mission, and this report you speak of had to have been written weeks ago if it came all the way from Vladivostok. How could it name that ship? No. I can’t send these men in there now knowing that this intelligence report exists on the matter. Cancel the raid, and then I think we’ll have to put all these men on our list, but I’d rather have them there alive and not dead on the coast of North Africa. We’ll talk again soon.” The Watch had made its first life or death choice. It would not be the last.
Yet that was not the only effect the coffee table magazine would end up having. Seventy-nine years later, Anton Fedorov was aboard Kirov after a long shift making rounds to get the vessel seaworthy again. He took a brief meal in the officer’s dining room, quietly alone with his Chronology Of The Naval War At Sea. He had been
