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."
"Oh."
"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 hachimaki around his forehead. These hachimakis are 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 not accomplished just yet, and so I have other matters to attend to," the major says significantly.
"Shall I just see myself out then?" Waterhouse asks.