Britain a warning not to attack Poland, and on Thursday, Hitler published the terms of a peace plan which he claimed Poland had rejected. In reality, the terms had never been presented.
On the same evening, Siegfried transmitted triumphantly at eleven o'clock. He no longer used the German language. Instead, he switched to the German naval code, a complex five-digit cipher system drawing upon a code book given him that morning by Duquaine. The book contained several thousand numerical five-digit code groups, each one representing a different word, letter, or phrase.
The complete code book would have been of extreme interest to either the F.B.I. or M.I. 6-they had been able to capture only a partial one. The entire code book might have revealed, for example, that the five-digit group for ship was 54734. But the book would not reveal the key to the German High Command's system of super- encipherment. This was the additive, a second five-digit group known only to the particular spy and his spymaster. The additive might be 12121. With the additive, in such an enciphered message the word ship would appear as 54734 plus 12121, or 66855. Since each spy might use a different additive, the result was a virtual infinity of codes.
Siegfried prepared his message in advance. His hand was diligent upon the telegraph key. He reminded Hamburg that some handsome flowers had been planted aboard the Adriana. Then he added that the Adriana had pulled out of port the preceding evening. She was unescorted and would develop severe engine problems as soon as she reached the continental shelf. The German Navy could then pursue the matter.
Hamburg asked Siegfried if he wanted a new assignment. The spy answered that he already had given himself a grand one and added-to a long silence from the other end-that this would be his final assignment.
Hamburg replied with a clarification request. Siegfried shot back: CLARIFICATION IN DUE COURSE. YOUR SIGNAL AS HOPELESS AS YOU ARE. END. CQDXVW-2
Then Siegfried shut down, his total transmission time being ninety-seven seconds. He congratulated himself. Short and to the point. The way it should be done. Siegfried loathed unnecessary risks.
'Crap!' an irate Bluebird said to another. 'He's gone.'
The blips had disappeared so quickly that the Bluebirds had fumbled the opportunity. The first sixty-two seconds of Siegfried's transmission had been lost while a Bluebird groped for the wire recorder. The rest had been recorded. Wheeler and Cochrane were telephoned at their homes.
'We picked up the man who discusses flowers in German,' a Bluebird told Cochrane over the telephone. 'Or, what I mean is, sir, that we picked up his signal. Just his signal, sir.'
Cochrane started to Bureau headquarters, as did Wheeler. They met on the marble steps and charged into Deciphering and Cryptology to find Hope See Ming and Lanny Slotkin furiously working cipher combinations.
'No good!' said Lanny, a stall away from Mrs. Ming. “No good at all!”
Lanny was used to having his way with formulas. Not tonight, though.
'Numbers!' he raged. 'He's gone on a complicated numerical code. This is going to be tougher than a bull's ass!'
Hope See Ming worked calmly but with equal futility. Her command of English, Cochrane noted, was highly selective, particularly when Lanny spoke.
'You're the resident genius, Lanny,' Wheeler said with a sudden tension that Cochrane had not seen before. 'Why can't you figure it?'
'Weren't you listening? It's a code!'
'Well, why do we pay you, you smart the little Yid? Crack it anyway.'
'Give me time. Give me time,' Lanny Slotkin fumed. 'I've never seen a scramble like this before.'
'No one else has, either,' Cochrane said.
Which included the Virgin Mary the next morning.
'Doesn't even follow the format of the previous transmissions, does it?' Mary said. 'Are you sure Monitoring transcribed it right before you brought it in here to Mary?'
Cochrane referred her directly to a wire recording. She sat, listened, nodded her white head, and tapped along with her fingers.
'Are you sure our Bluebirds had the right frequency?' she asked next.
'Too sure,' Cochrane answered. Monitoring Division, he explained, knew how to monitor, after all.
Wheeler snarled angrily. 'He was off the air so fast that they didn't even have time to say 'triangulation detection,' much less attempt it.' Wheeler shrouded himself in white smoke from his pipe. 'Think he's our bomber?' he asked.
'It's worth a try, isn't it?' Cochrane answered. 'Same precision and secrecy on the air as with bombs. How many pros could be working this area, anyway?'
'Maybe a lot,' Wheeler said.
'Maybe only one,' Cochrane answered.
The two men stood by a sixth-floor window which overlooked the Washington Mall. City lights were long since out, but the slender Washington Monument rose like a gray giant in the reflection of the quarter moon.
'Our Siegfried's been busy lately, Bill,' mused Wheeler in a low, brooding rumination. 'Lots of dots and dashes. Lots of numbers that mean nothing to us and everything to him. All of Europe's going to hell and our Siegfried-boy is busy as a rooster in a chicken coop and he’s doing to us exactly what he’s doing to the chickens.' A long cone of white smoke, then: 'What's he doing next, Bill? Got a guess?”
Bill Cochrane answered with a frustrated shrug. 'I don't know,' he admitted. “What I know is that all hell is going to break out soon.”
“How do you know that?” Wheeler asked.
“Instinct,” Cochrane said, barely thinking about it. “It’s in the air. Same as those blips. I can feel it coming.”
*
Friday, September 1. German armies invaded Poland from the west. Chamberlain's Government demanded that they withdraw. Luftwaffe bombers attacked Warsaw day and night while the British and French armies mobilized.
Six hundred seventy nautical miles southeast of Nantucket an enormous explosion ripped through the engine room of the HMS Adriana. Seven crew members, all boiler and furnace men, died in the blast. Another five were critically injured. Part of the ship was aflame for four hours, but the blaze was eventually quelled. But there was a greater problem now. There was a fissure in the center of the hull and The Adriana was taking on water. There was a red alert on board, and help from the nearest American port remained two days away in choppy seas.
On – Saturday, September 2, a civilian evacuation of London began. And on Sunday, September 3, England and France declared war on Nazi Germany. So when dawn broke in the northwest Atlantic Ocean that same morning, the Adriana was officially a ship of a combatant nation.
A German U-boat lined her up from a distance of two miles. The Adriana 's sonar had picked up the submarine since ten hours out of Red Bank. But now the frigate was helpless and the U-boat advanced for the kill. Audaciously, the German submarine commander pulled to within a half mile of his prey, knowing the British vessel had no defense.
Six torpedoes were launched.
The first hit the Adriana in the stern, almost squarely in the rudder. It blew out the entire screw propeller and rocked the ship mercilessly with the subsequent explosion. The Adriana convulsed first with fire, then with water. The panic among the crew would have spread in all directions, except it did not have time.
A second of the six torpedoes found its mark, blasting The Adriana at the midpoint on the port side, thirty feet below the waterline. The explosion blew the ship sideways in the water and left a wound as wide as ten trucks in the frigate's side. The damage would have been enough to sink The Adriana by itself, but the weakened hull was in no condition to withstand the vibrations of the hit, either. Thus the second torpedo broke the ship in two, as the entire hull began to go. Fuel leaked into the fires left by the dual explosions and then there were further smaller explosions. Then there was black smoke everywhere, and suddenly the bow of the ship was raising itself toward the lightening morning sky, and then there was one final shattering explosion brought on by another torpedo. The ship blew into more pieces than anyone aboard would ever be able to comprehend.
There was no time for lifeboats. The Adriana capsized within five minutes and went under, like a child's toy in a boat pond, within nine. The entire crew of 186 English seamen, plus seven British and two American civilians, went down with her.
