Millie glanced at her watch and sighed. Only halfway through her shift. Six months had passed since the last U-boat message had been broken, and the count of lost ships reflected Hut Eight’s lack of success. One hundred forty-six ships sunk in May, with the same number in June. One hundred and nine sunk in July, and August was already shaping out to match the deadly pattern. All the men, all the cargo, all the ships . . . and nothing Millie did seemed to help.
She looked through the batches of recently intercepted news from German radio stations. If a news station claimed a victory over a certain ship, it was possible a U-boat had sent a transmission about the incident a day or two before, and the sunken ship’s name would likely be one of the words in the message. The right broadcast sent from a location along a lost ship’s convoy route could add up to a break. It was a long shot, but Hut Eight was desperate for any clue that might create a crib for one of the bombe machines to test. With a great deal of luck, the machine might narrow down the possible Enigma settings to something manageable.
One word on a German transcript leapt out at her: Hillingdon.
Millie dropped her pencil. Not the Hillingdon. Not Karl’s ship. Tears blurred her sight as she read through the entire radio broadcast, but it included no information about survivors.
“Are you all right, M-m-miss Stevens?”
Millie wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. She wanted to say everything was fine. The others might even believe her. Most people who worked in Hut Eight were brilliant, but they also had their eccentricities. Mr. Turing, the man standing before her, had some of the most unique—a bicycle with a broken chain that he refused to repair, a practice of shackling his tea mug to the radiator in his office so no one would steal it, and a habit of substituting ties or rope for a belt. Yet he seemed to already know something was wrong.
Millie tapped the transcript. “There’s a fellow I’ve been writing to and seeing when he’s on leave. A German broadcast claims one of their U-boats sank his ship.”
“Does it g-give any details?”
Millie shook her head.
Mr. Turing bit at one of his already nibbled fingernails. “If they have the ship name, then there must have b-been survivors to ask.”
“I think Karl would have spat at them before he gave them any information.”
“Then you can assume someone else spoke and he’s not alone.” Mr. Turing’s voice was high-pitched, and he sometimes had abnormally large pauses between words, but she welcomed his kindness. “Or the ship sank slowly enough for the w-wireless operator to send a signal, and if he had long enough to do that, then there would have been enough time for the rest of the c-c-crew to abandon ship in g-good order.”
Millie nodded and tried to calm the horror swishing inside her chest. Karl had survived U-boats before. Sometimes, an entire crew made it off a torpedoed ship. The Hillingdon hadn’t been a tanker and was unlikely to have exploded the way a ship full of fuel would. And Karl didn’t work in the engine room; that seemed to be the most dangerous location when ships were torpedoed. He would probably need a new ship and a new wardrobe, but she had to believe he still lived.
Mr. Turing looked over the work on Millie’s desk. “Are you trying to find a c-crib?”
“Yes. So we can hope for a message that mentions the Hillingdon from . . .” Millie checked the date of the broadcast. Yesterday. “Monday or Tuesday, most likely.”
“C-c-carry on.” Mr. Turing gave her a smile of encouragement before heading back to his office. As one of the most important people in Hut Eight—maybe in all of Bletchley Park—he had his own space for his work.
Millie searched the convoy information that Uncle Silas had brought from the Admiralty. The Hillingdon had been in one of the OS convoys, outward south from Liverpool. She did the calculations for where the convoy would have been three days ago, then looked at U-boat transmissions sent in the unbreakable Shark Enigma network. The team at Bletchley Park couldn’t read U-boat messages, but the Y service gathered them, and when at least two stations heard the message and reported the direction it came from, the two directions could be lined up. The spot where the directions intersected was the location the message had been sent from. It wasn’t exact. Nor was her calculation of the convoy’s position precise. But a clue was a clue, even when imperfect.
Millie found several messages that were candidates for a U-boat report of the sinking. If Hillingdon was one of the words in the message, the bombe machines could rule out all the settings that wouldn’t work because the Enigma machine never encoded any letter as itself. But the number of possible settings for the naval version of the machine was twenty-six digits long. Could knowing one word in the message eliminate enough of the false settings to give them any chance of finding the real one?
It wasn’t much to go on. But they hadn’t anything better.
* * *
Millie spent every free moment she had with the message she suspected told of the Hillingdon’s demise, but no results came. There simply weren’t enough clues, not when it had been so long since they had cracked a bigram table, not when they had no previous wheel orders. And more importantly, not when new messages came in every day—and her focus needed to be on them, not on an old message that was unlikely to tell her anything she didn’t already know.
After every shift, she raced to her billet, hoping for a telegram from Karl that would let her know he had survived. When she was on night shift, she asked Mrs. Twill to wake her if anything arrived while she slept. But she received no word from Karl. Had she not known the Hillingdon was sunk, she would have assumed the mail was simply delayed or his voyage long. Knowing what had happened made each day without word feel like an age.
When she was a girl and the other students had made fun of her in school, she had been able to outwardly ignore it, most of the time. Even with so much practice at pretending everything was fine despite inner turmoil, this time was different. She had never faced anything this devastating. On her last day off, she’d gone to the Torlin Line’s shipping office in London, hoping for an update on the Hillingdon’s survivors. It hadn’t gone well. They wouldn’t provide information about the ship’s location or intended destination, and Millie couldn’t tell them what she already knew. They just said the ship was delayed. Even when she played the part of worried fiancée, they wouldn’t—or couldn’t—tell her anything about the Hillingdon’s fate.
Uncle Silas had made one of his visits to Bletchley Park soon after the Hillingdon had disappeared. He’d given Millie one extra bit of information: the Hillingdon had fallen out of convoy with engine trouble, and no one had heard from her since.
“Can you ask for more information from the other convoy ships?” she begged when he came back to Bletchley Park and stood beside her next to the lake.
Uncle Silas put his hands in his pockets. “That’s how we sank the Bismark, you know. A German officer with a relative on board asked where the ship was, and we read the location when they told him. I certainly hope the Germans aren’t breaking our transmissions, but we can’t risk making the same mistakes our enemy did.”
“What about a few aircraft for patrols? There’s nothing suspicious about extra patrols when a vessel doesn’t arrive in port. And they announced the sinking on an open radio station.”
“If they have the extra aircraft, I’m sure they’ve already used them. But we don’t know where she went down. Even if we did, by now, the currents would have carried any survivors far from the Hillingdon’s last location.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Millie. I wish it hadn’t happened to his ship.”
Millie folded her arms as if the extra support might hold in some of the pain she felt clawing in her chest. One wrong torpedo from a U-boat equaled the loss of the Hillingdon. Did it also equal the death of her crew? “Is there any chance he’s still alive?”
One of the lake’s frogs croaked several times before her uncle answered. “There’s always a chance. Shipwrecked men have turned up months later. Sometimes a different ship picks them up, but has to maintain radio silence. Or they go ashore in a remote area. Or end up captured by the enemy. Or placed in hospital. There’s always a chance . . . but if I were a betting man, I’d say the odds are against it. I’m sorry.”
Millie squeezed her eyes shut. She’d feared exactly this: that one day Karl would disappear and leave her heart devastated. “He asked me to marry him.”
Her words had been whispered, but her uncle must have heard. “You were engaged?”
She shook her head. “I told him I wasn’t sure because I was worried that something like this might happen. I wish I would have said yes. It couldn’t hurt any more than it already does.”