“Ah, shit,” the Apache said. “You just make sure you sign up for this huntin’ trip and I’ll get you on a horse and ride you until your soft ass comes apart at the seams.”
“I’ll personally take both your asses apart at the seams,” Flanagan said. “Get squared away for the trip to the hotel.” The sailors who had bunched up to listen to the exchange between Charlie Two Blankets and LaMark broke up and went below to get themselves ready for two weeks at the hotel.
In the ship’s Wardroom the Lieutenant in charge of the Relief Crew, which would repair whatever had to be repaired on the Eelfish and paint ship, pushed his coffee cup to one side and smiled at Mike Brannon and Bob Lee.
“I’m obliged for your hospitality, gentlemen, and I appreciate how little needs to be done and how clean your ship is. We’ll move you tomorrow and take off torpedoes.” He paused and lit a cigaret.
“You’d have to do duty here to realize how dirty some ships are when they come in, how much gear has broken down. When we get an Eelfish it’s a big break.” He rose and left the Wardroom. Brannon turned as Olsen came through the green curtains and sat down.
“The crew will be ready when the buses get here, sir,” Olsen said. “The Squadron Office sent word that when you’re ready to go ashore they’ll provide a car. You and I are being quartered in a house the Navy’s rented for the duration. If it’s all right with you, I’ll go over with you when you’re ready.”
“Might be a while, John. I’ve got to write a letter to Captain Hinman’s widow.” He paused and drew a long, shaky breath.
“I don’t know what to say. I never met her. I knew his first wife — she was killed when they bombed Pearl Harbor. We were at sea on our way to Pearl. When we got to Pearl they told Captain Hinman that his wife was dead.
“You can imagine how he, how all of us felt. Then, near the end of last year, after we’d got into some trouble for modifying the torpedo exploders, they sent me to take over the Eelfish in New London and they sent him on a bond-selling tour, war bonds.” He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigaret and nodded his thanks to Olsen as Olsen extended his cigarets.
“The Navy assigned a Wave Public Affairs Officer to go with him on the bond-selling tour. He wrote me a lot of letters about that tour. Only thing that made it bearable was the Wave officer. Art said she was a hell of a bright woman and very pretty. Well, it happened, they fell in love and got married. The bond tour ended and he got the Mako back and went to sea. They’d only been together a few weeks.” He looked down at the table.
“It’s not only a duty, I feel I owe it to him, to her, to write to her. I’m no damn good at this sort of thing, John.” Olsen saw a wetness in Brannon’s eyes.
“Maybe,” Olsen said in a low voice, “maybe I could sort of draft the letter for you, sir. I didn’t know either of them, but I think I could do it, if it’s okay?”
Brannon rose, turning his face away from Olsen.
“I’d be very grateful to you if you did, John. Her name is Joan, Joan Hinman.” He pushed through the green curtains and went aft.
CHAPTER 5
In a basement room located behind a supply office in a building on the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, a man in a worn smoking jacket and scuffed bedroom slippers shuffled across the floor to a desk piled high with charts and papers.
“How’s it going?” he asked the man behind the desk. The man looked up at him, rubbed his eyes, and yawned, lines of utter weariness etched in his face.
“It doesn’t go,” he said.
“You’ll get it,” the man in the smoking jacket said. He shuffled over to a table standing against one wall of the room, and rummaged in a cardboard box and found a sandwich. He unwrapped the food and ate it, staring reflectively at the men who were working at desks in the crowded room.
The men he commanded were an odd group. Some were officers who the Navy had decided were good enough to be kept on but not good enough, for various and obscure professional reasons, to be promoted to higher rank.
Others were enlisted men, among them the ship’s band of the U.S.S. California. When that battleship had been holed by Japanese aerial torpedoes and had settled to the bottom in the harbor on December 7, 1941, the ship’s band had, fortunately, escaped injury. But their instruments went down with the ship. Literally unemployable, in the eyes of the Navy, the ship’s band members had been assigned to the basement room to work in what was called the “Combat Intelligence Unit,” a cover name for a top-secret communications group of intelligence experts who were desperately trying to crack the complicated Japanese military codes.
The members of the California’s band had shrugged and gone to work, guided and instructed by the half-dozen professional code breakers in the basement room. The musicians proved to be adept at cryptanalysis, and some experts were led to believe that there was a subtle connection between the mysteries of cryptology and music.
The immensity of the task of breaking the Japanese military code was almost beyond human comprehension. The five-digit code was not extraordinarily difficult in itself, it was the refinements the Japanese had introduced that drove cryptanalysts almost to tears.
Once a message had been encoded in five-digit code groups, that numerical code was then further enciphered. To do this the Japanese had prepared a list of 100,000 five-digit number groups. The Japanese encoder took the encoded message to that list of 100,000 five-digit code groups and picked a place at random on the list. Starting at that place the five-digit numbers in the encoded message were subtracted, group by group, from the numbers on the master list.
To decode the message the recipient had to know where in the 100,000 group list the encoder had started his subtraction and then perform the reverse mathematics. Without knowledge of the actual list of five-digit number groups in the 100,000-group list a cryptanalyst was faced with a task that might take years to solve — if it could be solved at all.
However, the use of such a massive list of master code groups raised the possibility of garbles and mistakes. The Japanese recognized this and decided to use only number groups from the master code list that were divisible by three. This reduced mistakes, but it soon gave the American cryptanalysts in the small basement room a surprise tool — which they used to good effect.
A further complication for the cryptanalysts arose immediately. Japanese is written, mainly, in Chinese characters called kanji, but Japanese can also be written in a phonetic form called kana. One form of kana used Roman letters, but another form had its own code to represent the more than fifty symbols of the phonetic system.
The cadre of men in the secret basement room had started their work prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were hampered in that work by a distaste for all forms of intelligence operations that was shared by most ranking U.S. military leaders.
That attitude had a precedent: In 1929 the then-Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, had refused to fund the State Department’s code-breaking intelligence operation with the remark, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.”
The work that had been done by the State Department’s “Black Chamber” was divided between the Army and the Navy. By 1941 the two military services, in a rare display of cooperation, had joined their code-breaking resources and had become efficient enough to be able to intercept and decode Japanese diplomatic messages and deliver them to the State Department and the White House before the Japanese diplomats in Washington received those same decoded messages. Too often the remarkable successes in breaking Japanese diplomatic codes were ignored, too often such messages were delayed in reaching people who had authority to initiate action. Morale among the code breakers went down.