'That's good,' says the Main Guy before Waterhouse can answer, 'because it is of the highest interest to us as well. You see, now that we are making efforts-and I must emphasize the preliminary and unsatisfactory level of these efforts to this point-to coordinate intelligence between America and Britain, we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse. We receive Hitler's personal communications to his theater commanders, frequently before the commanders do! This knowledge is obviously a powerful tool. But just as obviously, it cannot help us win the war unless we allow it to change our actions. That is, if, through Ultra, we become aware of a convoy sailing from Taranto to supply Rommel in North Africa, the knowledge does us no good unless we go out and sink that convoy.'
'Clearly,' Waterhouse says.
'Now, if ten convoys are sent out and all of them are sunk, even those under cover of clouds and darkness, the Germans will ask themselves how we knew where those convoys could be found. They will realize that we have penetrated the Enigma cypher, and change it, and then this tool will be lost to us. It is safe to say that Mr. Churchill will be displeased by such an outcome.' The Main Guy looks at all of the others, who nod knowingly. Waterhouse gets the feeling that Mr. Churchill has been bearing down rather hard on this particular point.
'Let us recast this in information theory terms,' says the don. 'Information flows from Germany to us, through the Ultra system at Bletchley Park. That information comes to us as seemingly random Morse code transmissions on the wireless. But because we have very bright people who can discover order in what is seemingly random, we can extract information that is crucial to our endeavors. Now, the Germans have not broken our important cyphers. But they can observe our actions-the routing of our convoys in the North Atlantic, the deployment of our air forces. If the convoys always avoid the U-boats, if the air forces always go straight to the German convoys, then it is clear to the Germans-I'm speaking of a very bright sort of German here, a German of the professor type-that there is not randomness here. This German can find correlations. He can see that we know more than we should. In other words, there is a certain point at which information begins to flow from us back to the Germans.'
'We need to know where that point is,' says the Main Guy. 'Exactly where it is. We need then to stay on the right side of it. To develop the appearance of randomness.'
'Yes,' Waterhouse says, 'and it has to be a kind of randomness that would convince someone like Rudolf von Hacklheber.'
'Exactly the fellow we had in mind,' the don says. 'Dr. von Hacklheber, as of last year.'
'Oh!' Waterhouse says. 'Rudy got his Ph.D.?' Since Rudy got called back into the embrace of the Thousand-Year Reich, Waterhouse has assumed the worst: imagining him out there in a greatcoat, sleeping in drifts and besieging Leningrad or something. But apparently the Nazis, with their sharp eye for talent (as long as it isn't Jewish talent) have given him a desk job.
Still, it's touch and go for a while after Waterhouse shows pleasure that Rudy's okay. One of the Other Guys, trying to break the ice, jokes that if someone had had the foresight to lock Rudy up in New Jersey for the duration, there would be no need for the new category of secret known as Ultra Mega. No one seems to think it's funny, so Waterhouse assumes it's true.
They show him the organizational chart for RAE Special Detachment No. 2701, which contains the names of all of the twenty-four people in the world who are on to Ultra Mega. The top is cluttered with names such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then come some other names that seem oddly familiar to Waterhouse-perhaps the names of these very gents here in this room. Below them, one Chattan, a youngish RAF colonel who (Waterhouse is assured) accomplished some very fine things during the Battle of Britain.
In the next rank of the chart is the name Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. There are two other names: one is an RAF captain and the other is a captain in the United States Marine Corps. There is also a dotted line veering off to one side, leading to the name Dr. Alan Mathison Turing. Taken as a whole, this chart may be the most irregular and bizarre ad-hocracy ever grafted onto a military organization.
In the bottom row of the chart are two groups of half a dozen names, clustered beneath the names of the RAF captain and the Marine captain respectively. These are the squads that represent the executive wing of the organization: as one of the guys at the Broadway Building puts it, 'the men at the coal-face,' and as the one American Guy translates it for him, 'this is where the rubber meets the road.'
'Do you have any questions?' the Main Guy asks.
'Did Alan choose the number?'
'You mean Dr. Turing?'
'Yes. Did he choose the number 2701?'
This level of detail is clearly several ranks beneath the station of the men in the Broadway Buildings. They look startled and almost offended, as if Waterhouse has suddenly asked them to take dictation.
'Possibly,' says the Main Guy. 'Why do you ask?'
'Because,' Waterhouse says, 'the number 2701 is the product of two primes, and those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation, are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other.'
All heads swivel toward the don, who looks put out. 'We'd best change that,' he says, 'it is the sort of thing that Dr. von Hacklheber would notice.' He stands up, withdraws a Mont Blanc fountain pen from his pocket, and amends the organizational chart so that it reads 2702 instead of 2701. As he is doing this, Waterhouse looks at the other men in the room and thinks that they look satisfied. Clearly, this is just the sort of parlor trick they have hired Waterhouse to perform.
Chapter 13 CORREGIDOR
There is no fixed boundary between the water of Manila Bay and the humid air above it, only a featureless blue-grey shroud hanging a couple of miles away.
America Shaftoe, or Amy as she likes to be called, spends most of the voyage bustling around on the deck, engaging the Filipino and American divers in bursts of serious conversation, sometimes sitting cross-legged on the deck plates to go over papers or charts. She has donned a frayed straw cowboy hat to protect her head from solar radiation. Randy's in no hurry to expose himself. He ambles around the air-conditioned cabin, sipping his coffee and looking at the photographs on the walls.
He is naively expecting to see pictures of divers landing submarine cables on beaches. Semper Marine Services does a fair amount of cable work-and does it well, he checked their references before hiring them-but they apparently do not consider that kind of work interesting enough to photograph. Most of these pictures are of undersea salvage operations: divers, with enormous grins on their leathery faces, triumphantly holding up barnacle-encrusted vases, like hockey players brandishing the Stanley Cup.
From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows that it is really a sperm-shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.
Amy storms past and throws the cabin door open. 'Come to the bridge,' she says, 'you should see this.'
Randy follow's her. 'Who's the guy in most of those pictures?' he asks.
'Scary, crew cut?'
'Yeah.'
'That's my father,' she says. 'Doug.'
'Would that be Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe?' Randy asks. He's seen the name on some of the documents that he's exchanged with Semper Marine.
