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.
*
In Washington on Monday evening, Bill Cochrane was in the living room of his new quarters. He sat in shirt sleeves and his suit pants in a faded armchair, a brandy by his side and his arms folded behind his aching, sorrowful head. He thought of the three sailors he had seen in Union Station. They would have done better, he thought, to have gotten so drunk that they never could have found their ship again.
He turned on the Philco console at one minute after nine. The President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, came on the air with what had been announced previously as "an extraordinary message to the American people."
In truth, it was. France and Great Britain were finally at war with the little Austrian corporal and his Thousand Year Reich. Roosevelt, speaking from the White House, asked for "an adjournment of all partisanship and selfishness," and asked that Americans join together to work toward "a true neutrality" which would "keep this newest world war from the western hemisphere."
The President added that he could not, however, expect every American to be neutral in thoughts. "A neutral," Franklin Roosevelt concluded, "cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience."
"I know what that means," Bill Cochrane spoke aloud to the console. And he saw the old alliances from the First Great War drifting slowly back into place. And then for another moment he was a boy again, skipping stones into the Rivanna River when his own father went off to war.
Each new generation, he thought, fails to learn from the one before.
J. Edgar Hoover was also very good at grasping Roosevelt's meanings, particularly when beckoned anew to the White House the next day. Roosevelt had allotted ten minutes for Hoover, less if possible.
The President was livid. The Adriana had been in touch by shortwave with the British Naval Chancellery at Foggy Bottom in the hours between her crippling and her annihilation. There was little question that HMS Adriana had been sabotaged on American shores and German naval intelligence had known. A submarine had been sent specifically to stalk and kill her after she left port.
"And you know, of course, J. Edgar," said Roosevelt, his face already drawn with tension, "the only way the German Navy could have known that quickly would have been by wireless."
"That's correct, Mr. President," Hoover answered.
Roosevelt looked up from his desk. He wore a gray cardigan sweater belonging to his eldest son; his eyes were drawn and haggard. "J. Edgar," he said. "If you think this is beyond the scope of your Bureau, other arrangements could be made."