Too Bad to Die Read Online Free PDF

encoder, sifting through millions of variations in those settings for the one correct combination that could translate gobbledygook into plain German text. Ian had no idea how the bombes worked. Turing had tried to explain it to his layman’s mind in terms he would understand. But the Prof spoke in stuttering, truncated words that seemed to reel off his own rotors. Snatches of code, opaque in meaning.
    â€œExpect the world to make sense. Certain co-co-co-
here
nce. Isn’t the key. Not to codes. Not to life. Co-co-herence
hides
meaning. Seas hide a shark. Ha! Contradic-ic-ic-tion’s what matters. Fin on the sea’s surface. Tells you the shark’s
there.
Contra
dic
tion gives up the gh-gh-ghost.”
    From a single contradiction,
Ian translated,
you can deduce everything.
    The Enigma’s contradiction was that no letter could ever be encyphered as itself. If the bombe’s trial settings produced that result for an intercepted German message, the combination was instantly discarded. Which meant one less set of variables in the cipher universe. And so on, and so on, for days and hours, disproving every incorrect combination of settings until only the right one remained. The combination that broke the code.
    Ian had met Turing two years ago, in the old loft of the converted stable that was Bletchley Park’s Hut 8, where the Enigma naval ciphers were parsed by Turing and his team. The mathematician never met another person’s eyes and avoided physical contact; he winched lunch baskets up into the loft with a block and tackle and sent requests back down on slips of paper with his dirty plates.
    â€œC-c-could learn
heaps
from a single Enigma r-r-rotor,” he’d said when Ian climbed up the treacherous ladder and introduced himself. “Or a c-c-codeb-b-book. German bits left b-b-b-behind
when there’s a raid.”
    What he was saying, Ian figured out, was that they needed the right sort of men on the ground after an enemy rout. The sort who knew how to spot treasure among the wreckage of German Signals equipment or torpedoed ships, and pocket it for analysis at Bletchley. It would save Turing time. But nobody was actually looking for such things in the heat of battle; anything haphazardly salvaged appeared in Hut 8 like a bit of the True Cross.
    The Prof’s words had lingered in Ian’s mind. Like everybody in Naval Intelligence, he tried to do whatever Alan Turing asked. On the train back to London, Ian scribbled down a few words:
Special unit. Targeted collection. Intelligence support.
Rushbrooke’s predecessor at Naval Intelligence, Sir John Godfrey, was enthusiastic about the idea.
    â€œIt must be a small group of fellows,” he warned. “Thoroughly trained in survival techniques. Nontraditional warfare.
Commandos,
we’ll call them. Churchill will like that name.”
    Co-Co-Co-Commandos.
    â€œI want to volunteer, sir,” Ian had said, with the first real pulse of excitement he’d felt since the beginning of his war.
    But no, Godfrey replied with a regretful shake of the head. Ian was too valuable. Too creative in the deception operations he’d unleashed against the Germans over the years. He knew far too much about the inner workings of Naval Intelligence. They could not risk his capture in the field.
    A year later, Rushbrooke said the same.
    And so it was
Peter
Fleming who’d volunteered for Commando training in the wilds of Scotland instead . . .
    The closest Ian came to action was the deck of a landing boat off Dieppe, when his Red Indians, as the intelligence commandos were called, had gone in on a raid. Ian’s heroics that night were limited to comforting an eighteen-year-old kid under fire for the first time. He might look like a hero—tall, broad-shouldered, Byronically handsome, with a broken nose women swooned over—but he was denied all opportunity to prove himself. Ian was a
planner.
The brains of every