Chapter 53 LAVENDER ROSE

Randy wants to go down and look at the U-boat in person. Doug says evenly that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive plan first, and reminds him that the depth of the wreck is one hundred and fifty-four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a dive plan.

He wants everything to be like driving cars, where you just hop in and go. He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes, and he can still remember how he felt when he learned that you can't just get in a plane (even a small one) and take off-you have to have a flight plan, and it takes a whole briefcase full of books and tables and specialized calculators, and access to weather forecasts above and beyond the normal consumer-grade weather forecasts, to come up with even a bad, wrongflight plan that will surely kill you. Once Randy had gotten used to this idea, he grudgingly admitted it made sense.

Now Doug Shaftoe's telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks on his back and swim a hundred and fifty-four meters (straight down, admittedly) and back. So Randy yanks a couple of diving books off the bungeed shelves of Glory IVand tries to come up with even a vague idea of what Doug's talking about. Randy has never gone scuba diving in his life, but he's seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward enough.

The first three books he consults contain more than enough detail to perfectly reproduce the crestfallenness that Randy experienced when he learned about flightplans. Before he'd opened the books Randy had gotten out his mechanical pencil and his graph paper in preparation for making marks on the page; half an hour later he's still trying to get a handle on the contents of the tables, and he hasn't made any marks at all. He notes that the depths in these tables only go down as far as a hundred and thirty, and at that level they only talk in terms of staying down there five or ten minutes. And yet he knows that Amy, and the Shaftoe's colorful and ever-enlarging cast of polyethnic scuba divers, are spending much longer at this depth, and are in fact beginning to come up to the surface with artifacts from the wreck. There is, for example, an aluminum briefcase wherein Doug hopes to find clues as to who was on this U-boat and why it was on the wrong side of the planet.

Randy begins to fear that the entire wreck is going to be stripped bare before he even makes any marks on his piece of graph paper. The divers show up, one or two each day, on speedboats or outrigger canoes from Palawan. Blond surf boys, taciturn galoots, cigarette-smoking Frenchmen, Nintendo-playing Asians, beer-can-crumpling ex-Navy guys, blue-collar hillbillies. Theyall have diving plans. Why doesn't Randy have a diving plan?

He starts sketching one out based on the depth of one hundred and thirty, which seems reasonably close to one hundred and fifty-four. After working on it for about an hour (long enough to imagine all sorts of specious details) he happens to notice that the table he's been using is in feet,not meters,which means that all of these divers have been going down to a depth that is way more than three times as deep as the maximum that is even talked about on these tables.

Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one to Amy. The one to Amy has obviously been written by a man who is desperately in love with her. Reading it is like moisturizing with Tabasco.

He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don't even mentionthat.

Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers.

Doug Shaftoe is not going down to the wreck himself. As a matter of fact he looked surprised, bordering on contemptuous, when Randy asked him whether he wouldgo down. Instead, he's going over the stuff that is brought up from the wreck by the younger divers. They began by doing a photographic survey, using digital cameras, and Doug's been printing out blowups of the inside of the U-boat on his laser printer and pasting them up around the walls of his personal wardroom on Glory IV.

Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover containing the words stunning, superb, user-friendly,or, worst of all, easy-to-understand.He looks for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

To: randy@epiphyte.com

From: root@eruditorum.org

Subject: Pontifex

Randy,

For now, let's use "Pontifex" as the working title of this cryptosystem. It is a post-war system. What I mean by that is that, after seeing what Turing and company did to Enigma, I came to the (now obvious) conclusion that any modern system had better be resistant to machine cryptanalysis. Pontifex uses a 54-element permutation as its key-one key per message, mind you!-and it uses that permutation (which we will denote as T) to generate a keystream which is added, modulo 26, to the plaintext (P), as in a one-time pad. The process of generating each character in the keystream alters T in a reversible but more or less "random" fashion.

At this point, a diver comes up with a piece of actual gold, but it's not a bar: it's a sheet of hammered gold, maybe eight inches on a side and about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with a pattern of tiny neat holes punched through it, like a computer card. Randy spends a couple of days obsessing over this artifact. He learns that it came out of a crate stored in the hold of the U-boat, and that there are thousands more of them.

Now all of a sudden he's reading stuff by guys whose names are preceded by naval ranks and succeeded by M.D.s and Ph.D.s and they are going on for dozens of pages about the physics of nitrogen bubble formation in the knee, for example. There are photographs of cats strapped down in benchtop pressure chambers. Randy learns that the reason Doug Shaftoe doesn't dive to one hundred and fifty-four meters is that certain age-related changes in the joints tend to increase the likelihood of bubble formation during the decompression process. He comes to terms with the fact that the pressure at the depth of the wreck is going to be fifteen or sixteen atmospheres, meaning that as he ascends to the surface, any nitrogen bubbles that happen to be rattling around in his body are going to get fifteen or sixteen times as large as they were to begin with and that this is true whether those bubbles happen to be in his brain, his knee, the little blood vessels of the eyeball, or trapped underneath his fillings. He develops a sophisticated layman's understanding of dive medicine, which amounts to little because everyone's body is different-hence the need for each diver to have a completely different dive plan. Randy will need to figure out his body fat percentage before he can even begin marking up his sheet of graph paper.

It is also path-dependent. These divers' bodies get partly saturated with nitrogen every time they go down, and not all of it goes out of their bodies when they come back up-all of them, sitting around Glory IVplaying cards, drinking beer, talking to their girlfriends on their GSM phones, are all outgassingall the time-nitrogen is seeping out of their bodies into the atmosphere, and each one of them knows more or less how much nitrogen's stuffed into his body at any given moment and understands, in a deep and nearly intuitive way, just exactly how that information propagates through any dive plan that he might be cooking up inside the powerful dive-planning supercomputer that each of these guys apparently carries around in his nitrogen-saturated brain.

One of the divers comes up with a plank from the crate that contained the stacks of gold sheets. It is in very bad shape, and it's still fizzing as gas comes out of it. Fizzing in a way that Randy has no trouble imagining his bones would do if he made any errors in working out his dive plan. There is some stenciled lettering just barely visible on the wood: NIZ-ARCH.

Glory IVhas compressors for pumping air up to insanely high pressures to fill the scuba tanks. Randy develops an awareness that the pressure has to be insanely high or it won't even emerge from the tanks while these guys are down at depth. The divers are all being suffused with this pressurized gas; he half expects that one of these divers is going to bump into something and explode into a pink mushroom cloud.

To: randy@epiphyte.com

From: cantrell@epiphyte.com

Subject: Pontifex

You forwarded me a message about a cryptosystem called Pontifex. Was this invented by a friend of yours? In its general outlines (viz, an n-element permutation that is used to generate a keystream, and that slowly evolves) it is similar to a commercial system called RC4, which enjoys a complicated reputation among Secret Admirers-it seems secure, and has not been broken, but it makes us nervous because it is basically a single-rotor system, albeit a rotor that evolves. Pontifex evolves in a much more complicated & asymmetrical way than RC4 and so mightbe more secure.

Some things about Pontifex are slightly peculiar.

(1) He talks about generating "characters" in the key-stream and then adding them, modulo 26, to the plaintext. This is how people talked 50 years ago when ciphers were worked out using pencil and paper. Today we talk in terms of generating bytes and adding them modulo 256. Is your friend pretty old?

(2) He speaks of T as a 54-element permutation. There is nothing wrong with that-but Pontifex would work just as well with 64 or 73 or 699 elements, so it makes more sense to describe it as an n-element permutation where n could be 54 or any other integer. I can't figure out why he settled on 54. Possibly because it is twice the number of letters in the alphabet-but this makes no particular sense.

Conclusion: the author of Pontifex is cryptologically sophisticated but shows possible signs of being an elderly crank. I need more details in order to deliver a verdict.

—Cantrell

"Randy?" says Doug Shaftoe, and beckons him into his wardroom.

The inside of the wardroom door is decorated with a big color photograph of a massive stone staircase in a dusty church. They stand in front of it. "Are there a lotof Waterhouses?" Doug asks. "Is it a common name?"

"Uh, well, it's not a rarename."

"Is there anything you'd like to share with me about your family history?"

Randy knows that as a possible suitor to Amy, he will be undergoing thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him. "What kind of thing are you looking for? Something terrible? I don't think there's anything worth hiding from you."

Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now open aluminum briefcase from the U-boat. Randy supposes that merely opening it required coming up with a detailed plan. Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian.

Randy sees a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, a fountain pen, a few rusty paper clips. But it looks as though a lot of sodden paper was taken out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out and trying to read it. "Most wartime paper was crap," he says. "It probably dissolved into mush within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it's gone. However, the owner of this briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat. Check out the glasses, the pen."

Randy checks them out. The divers have found teeth and fillings in the wreck, but nothing that qualifies as a body. The places where people died are marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.

"So what I'm getting at is that he had a few scraps of good paper in his briefcase," Doug continues. "Personal stationery. So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?"

"No. But I could do a web search . . ."

"I tried that," Doug says. "Turned up just a few hits. There was a man by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties. And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use the name: a hotel, a theater, a defunct reinsurance company. That's about it."

"Well, if he was a mathematician, he might have had some connection with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?"

"Check this out," Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil, but it's impossible to read because the flaps of the envelope have been spread apart. "May I?" he asks. Doug nods and hands him a couple of latex surgical gloves. "I don't have to file a diving plan for this, do I?" Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.

Doug is not amused. "It is deeper than it looks," he says.

Randy flips the envelope over, then folds the flaps back together, reassembling the inscription. It says:

WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE.

Chapter 54 BRISBANE

Through a small dusty window Xed with masking tape, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse gazes out at downtown Brisbane. Bustling it ain't. A taxi limps down the street and pulls into the drive of the nearby Canberra Hotel, which is home to many mid-ranking officers. The taxi smokes and reeks-it is powered by a charcoal burner in the trunk. Marching feet can be heard through the window. It's not the tromp, tromp of combat boots, but the whack, whack of sensible shoes worn by sensible women: local volunteers. Waterhouse instinctively leans closer to the window to get a look at them, but he's wasting his time. Dressed in those uniforms, you could march a regiment of pinup girls through all the cabins and gangways of an active battleship and not draw a single wolf whistle, lewd suggestion, or butt-grab.

A delivery truck creeps out of a side street and backfires alarmingly as it tries to accelerate onto the main drag. Brisbane is still worried about attack from the air, and no one likes sudden loud noises. The truck looks like it is being attacked by an amoeba: on its back is a billowing rubberized-canvas balloon full of natural gas.

He's on the third floor of a commercial building so nondescript that the most interesting observation one can make about it is that it has four stories. There is a tobacconist on the ground floor. The rest of the place must have been empty until The General-beaten like a red-headed stepchild by those Nips-came to Brisbane from Corregidor, and made this city into the capital of the Southwest Pacific Theater. There must have been an incredible amount of surplus office space around here before The General showed up, because a lot of Brisbaners had fled south, expecting an invasion.

Waterhouse has had plenty of time to familiarize himself with Brisbane and its environs. He's been here for four weeks, and he's been given nothing to do. When he was in Britain, they couldn't shuffle him around fast enough. Whatever his job was at the moment, he did it feverishly-until he received top-secret, highest-priority orders to rush, by any available means of transportation, to his next assignment.

Then they brought him here. The Navy flew him across the Pacific, hopping from one island base to the next in an assortment of flying boats and transports. He crossed the equator and the international date line on the same day. But when he reached the boundary between Nimitz's Pacific Theater and The General's Southwest Pacific Theater, it was like he'd glided into a stone wall. It was all he could do to talk himself onboard a troop transport to New Zealand, and then to Fremantle. The transports were almost unbelievably hellish: steel ovens packed with men, baked by the sun, no one allowed to go abovedecks for fear they'd be sighted, and marked for slaughter, by a Nip submarine. Even at night they couldn't get a breeze through there, because all openings had to be covered with blackout curtains. Waterhouse couldn't really complain; some of the men had traveled this way all the way from the East Coast of the United States.

The important thing was that he made it to Brisbane, as per his orders, and reported to the right officer, who told him to await further orders. Which he's been doing until this morning, when he was told to show up at this office upstairs of the tobacconist. It is a room full of enlisted men typing up forms, trundling them around in wire baskets, and filing them. In Waterhouse's experience with the military, he has found that it's not a good sign when one is ordered to report to a place like this.

Finally he is allowed into the presence of an Army major who has several other conversations, and various pieces of important paperwork going on at the same time. That is okay; Waterhouse doesn't need to be a cryptanalyst to get the message loud and clear, which is that he is not wanted here.

"Marshall sent you here because he thinks that The General is sloppy with Ultra," the major says.

Waterhouse flinches to hear this word spoken aloud, in an office where enlisted men and women volunteers are coming and going. It's almost as if the major wishes to make it clear that The General is, in fact, quite sloppy with Ultra, and rather likes it that way, thank you very much.

"Marshall's afraid that the Nips will get wise to us and change their codes. It's all because of Churchill." The major refers to General George C. Marshall and Sir Winston Churchill as if they were bullpen staff for a farm league baseball team. He pauses to light a cigarette. "Ultra is Churchill's baby. Oh yeah, Winnie just luuuuuves his Ultra. He thinks we're going to blow his secret and ruin it for him because he thinks we're idiots." The major takes a very deep lungful of smoke, sits back in his chair, and carefully puffs out a couple of smoke rings. It is a convincing display of insouciance. "So he's always nagging Marshall to tighten up security, and Marshall throws him a bone every so often, just to keep the Alliance on an even keel." For the first time, the major looks Waterhouse in the eye. "You happen to be the latest bone. That's all."

There is a long silence, as if Waterhouse is expected to say something.

He clears his throat. No one ever got court-martialed for following his orders. "My orders state that-"

"Fuck your orders, Captain Waterhouse," the major says.

There is a long silence. The major tends to one or two other distracting duties. Then he stares out the window for a few moments, trying to compose his thoughts. Finally he says, "Get this through your head. We are not idiots. The General is not an idiot. The General appreciates Ultra as much as Sir Winston Churchill. The General uses Ultra as well as any commander in this war."

"Ultra's no good if the Japanese learn about it."

"As you can appreciate, the General does not have time to meet with you personally. Neither does his staff. So you will not have an opportunity to instruct him on how to keep Ultra a secret," says the major. He glances down a couple of times at a sheet of paper on his blotter, and indeed he is now speaking like a man who is reading a prepared statement. "From time to time, since we learned that you were being sent to us, your existence has been brought to the General's attention. During the brief periods of time when he is not occupied with more pressing matters, he has occasionally voiced some pithy thoughts about you, your mission, and the masterminds who sent you here."

"No doubt," Waterhouse says.

"The general is of the opinion that persons not familiar with the unique features of the Southwest Pacific Theater may not be entirely competent to judge his strategy," says the major. "The General feels that the Nips will never learn about Ultra. Never. Why? Because they are incapable of comprehending what has happened to them. The General has speculated that he could go down to the radio station tomorrow and broadcast a speech announcing that we had broken all of the Nip codes and were reading all of their messages, and nothing would happen. The General's words were something to the effect that the Nips will never believe how totally we have fucked them, because when you get fucked that badly, it's your own goddamn fucking fault and it makes you look like a fucking shithead."

"I see," Waterhouse says.

"But The General said all of that at much greater length and without using a single word of profanity, because that is how The General expresses himself."

"Thank you for boiling it down," Waterhouse says.

"You know those white headbands that the Nips tie around their foreheads? With the meatball and the Nip characters printed on them?"

"I've seen pictures of them."

"I've seen them for real, tied around the heads of pilots of Nip fighter planes that were about fifty feet away firing machine guns at me and my men," says the major.

"Oh, yeah! Me too. At Pearl Harbor," Waterhouse says. "I forgot."

This appears to be the most irritating thing that Waterhouse has said all day. The major has to spend a moment composing himself. "That headband is called a hachimaki."

"Imagine this, Waterhouse. The emperor is meeting with his general staff. All of the top generals and admirals in Nippon parade into the room in full dress uniforms and bow down solemnly before the emperor. They have come to report on the progress of the war. Each of these generals and admirals is wearing a brand-new hachimakiaround his forehead. These hachimakisare printed with phrases saying things like, 'I am a dipshit' and 'Through my personal incompetence I killed two hundred thousand of our own men' and 'I handed our Midway plans over to Nimitz on a silver platter.'

The major now pauses and takes a phone call so that Waterhouse can savor this image for a while. Then he hangs up, lights another cigarette, and continues. "That's what it would look like for the Nips to admit at this point in the war that we have Ultra."

More smoke rings. Waterhouse has nothing to say. So the major continues. "See, we've gone over the watershed line of this war. We won Midway. We won North Africa. Stalingrad. The Battle of the Atlantic. Everything changes when you go over the watershed line. The rivers all flow a different direction. It's as if the force of gravity itself has changed and is now working in our favor. We've adjusted to that. Marshall and Churchill and all those others are still stuck in an obsolete mentality. They are defenders. But The General is not a defender. As a matter of fact, just between you and me, The General is lousy on defense, as he demonstrated in the Philippines. The General is a conqueror.

"Well," Waterhouse finally says, "what do you suggest I do with myself, seeing as how I'm here in Brisbane?"

"I'm tempted to say you should connect up with all of the other Ultra security experts Marshall sent out before you, and get a bridge group together," the major says.

"I don't care for bridge," Waterhouse says politely.

"You're supposed to be some expert codebreaker, right?"

"Right."

"Why don't you go to Central Bureau. The Nips have a zillion different codes and we haven't broken all of them yet."

"That's not my mission."

"You don't worry about your fucking mission," the major says. "I'll make sure that Marshall thinks you're doing your mission, because if Marshall doesn't think that, he'll give us no end of hassles. So you're clean with the higher-ups."

"Thank you."

"You can consider your mission accomplished," the major says. "Congratulations."

"Thank you."

"My mission is to beat the stuffing out of the fucking Nips, and that mission is notaccomplished just yet, and so I have other matters to attend to," the major says significantly.

"Shall I just see myself out then?" Waterhouse asks.

Chapter 55 D

Once, when Bobby Shaftoe was eight years old, he went to Tennessee to visit Grandma and Grandpa. One boring afternoon he began skimming a letter that the old lady had left lying on an end table. Grandma gave him a stern talking to and then recounted the incident to Grandpa, who recognized his cue and gave him forty whacks. That and a whole series of roughly parallel childhood experiences, plus several years in the Marine Corps, have made him into one polite fellow.

So he doesn't read others' mail. It be against the rules.

But here he is. The setting: a plank-paneled room above a pub in Norrsbruck, Sweden. The pub is a sailorly kind of place, catering to fishermen, which makes it congenial for Shaftoe's friend and drinking buddy: Kapit

Bischoff gets a lot of interesting mail, and leaves it strewn all over the room. Some of the mail is from his family in Germany, and contains money. Consequently Bischoff, unlike Shaftoe, will not have to work even if this war continues, and he remains in Sweden cooling his boilers for another ten years.

Some of the mail is from the crew of U-691, according to Bischoff. After Bischoff got them all here to Norrsbruck in one piece, his second in-command, Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, cut a deal with the Kriegsmarine in which the crew were allowed to return to Germany, no hard feelings, no repercussions. All of them except for Bischoff climbed on board what was left of U-691 and steamed off in the direction of Kiel.

Only days later, the mail began to pour in. Every member of the crew, to a man, sent Bischoff a letter describing the heroes' welcome they had received: D

Dear Gtherea hundred feet below the surface of the gelid Atlantic, trapped like a rat in a sewer pipe, cringing from the explosions of the depths charges. He lived a hundred years that way, and spent every moment of those hundred years dreaming of the Surface. He vowed, ten thousand times, that if he ever made it back up to the world of air and light, he would enjoy every breath, revel in every moment.

That's pretty much what he's been doing, here in Norrsbruck. He has his personal journal, and he's been going through it, page by page, filling in all of the details that he didn't have time to jot down, before he forgets them. Someday, after the war, it'll make a book: one of a million war memoirs that will clog libraries from Novosibirsk to Gander to Sequim to Batavia.

The pace of incoming mail dropped dramatically after the first weeks. Several of his men still write to him faithfully. Shaftoe is used to seeing their letters scattered around the place when he comes to visit. Most of them are written on scraps of cheap, greyish paper.

Directionless silver light infiltrates the room through Bischoff's window, illuminating what looks like a rectangular pool of heavy cream on his tabletop. It is some kind of official Hun stationery, surmounted by a raptor clenching a swastika. The letter is handwritten, not typed. When Bischoff sets his wet glass down on it, the ink dissolves.