Chapter 35 CRACKER Waterhouse has to keep an eye on that safe; Shaftoe is itching to blow it open with high explosives, and Chattan (who firmly overrules Shaftoe) intends to ship it back to London so that it can be opened by experts at the Broadway Buildings. Waterhouse only wants to have another crack at opening it himself, just to see if he can do it. Chattan’s position is the correct one. Detachment 2702 has a very clear and specialized mission which most certainly does not include opening safes from U-boats. For that matter, it does not include going onto abandoned U-boats to recover safes, or other crypto data, in the first place. The only reason they did that was because they happened to be the only people with Ultra clearance who were in the neighborhood, and U-553’s precarious position did not give Bletchley Park time to send out its own experts. But Waterhouse’s desire to open the safe himself has nothing to do with Detachment 2702’s mission, or his own personal duties, or even, particularly, with winning the war. It is something that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is driven to do. His is not to reason why. Even as he was reeling down that stretched line from U-553 to the torpedo boat, battered by waves and wind and rain, with a busted arm and a busted head, not knowing from one moment to the next whether he would make it back to the boat or plunge into the Atlantic, he was remembering the infinitesimal tremors picked up by the half-frozen neurons in his fingertips as he twiddled the safe’s submerged dial. Even as Enoch Root patched him up on board the boat, Waterhouse was constructing a crude mental model of how the safe’s tumblers might be constructed, visualizing the thing in his mind’s eye. And even as the rest of Detachment 2702 collapses into their cots and hammocks and sleeping bags around the chapel of Qwghlm Castle, the splinted and bandaged Waterhouse stalks the polished corridors of that building’s better corner, looking for a couple of used razor blades and a hunk of carbon. The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and the carbon he steals from the closet where Ghnxh keeps the galvanick lucipher. He brings them, plus a brick-sized crystal of hard glue and a blowtorch, back to the chapel, where everyone else is sleeping. Enlisted men are in the nave, as befits Marines who are basically a naval organization. Officers are in the transept: Chattan has the south arm of it all to himself, Waterhouse and Root and the SAS and USMC lieutenants have bunk beds in the north. A small moiety of Detachment 2702’s astounding tarp supply has, then, been hung up across the eastern end of the place, partitioning off the chancel, Holy of Holies, where once the Body and Blood of Christ were housed. Now it contains a Hallicrafters Model S-27 15-tube superheterodyne radio receiver using state-of-the-art acorn tubes in its front end, capable of tuning VHF from 27 to 143 Megahertz and of receiving AM, FM, and CW, and including a signal strength meter which would come in handy if they were really operating a huffduff station here, which they aren’t. The lights are burning behind those tarps and one of the Marines is snoring away in a chair in front of the altar. Waterhouse wakes him up and sends him to bed. The Marine is ashamed; he knows he was supposed to be awake, twiddling that antenna convincingly. read on.. euskalnet.net/larraorma/crypto/slide37.html
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 19:18:48 +0000
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