Page 6 of The Words Beneath the Noise

This morning, I made it in five minutes by walking fast enough to make my lungs burn. The cold air scraped at my throat, and my shoes, not properly laced, threatened to come off with every step.

By the time I pushed through the door of Hut X, I was breathing hard and probably looked like I'd been in a fight with my own wardrobe.

The hut was already full. Rows of desks stretched toward the far wall, occupied by people bent over stacks of paper, fingers moving across typewriter keys, pencils scratching calculations. The wireless in the corner crackled with static and fragments of intercepted transmissions. Someone was arguing in low tones near the filing cabinets. The overhead lights buzzed at 50 hertz, a frequency that always made my teeth itch, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke and ink and too many bodies in too small a space pressed against me like a physical weight.

I kept my head down and made for my desk, which was positioned near the window at the back. Ostensibly for the light, but really because it was as far from the main door as I could get. Less chance of being startled every time someone came in. Less chance of people stopping to chat when they passed.

Ruth looked up as I dropped into my chair. Her dark eyes swept over me once, cataloguing the rumpled shirt, the shadows under my eyes, the way my hands were still trembling slightly.She didn't comment. Ruth rarely said anything unnecessary, which was one of the many reasons I could tolerate sitting next to her for eighteen hours at a stretch.

“The Scharnhorst intercepts are on your desk,” she said, turning back to her own work. “Morrison tried to crack them this morning. Couldn't find the entry point.”

The Scharnhorst. My stomach tightened at the name. German battlecruiser, thirty-two thousand tonnes of steel and firepower that had been terrorising Allied convoys in the Arctic for months. She'd sunk the aircraft carrier Glorious back in 1940, killed over fifteen hundred men in a single engagement. Every sailor in the Royal Navy knew her silhouette, feared the moment she might appear on the horizon.

And now she was moving again. The Admiralty had been tracking her position for weeks, desperate to catch her in open water before she could slip back into the Norwegian fjords where our bombers couldn't reach her. If these intercepts contained her patrol routes, her refuelling schedule, her planned engagement zone...

“How long did he spend?”

“Three hours.”

I pulled the stack toward me and started scanning. Morrison was competent enough with the standard Enigma traffic, but he thought in straight lines, following procedures, checking boxes. He didn't have the instinct for the places where patterns broke, the small irregularities that revealed the human hands behind the machines.

The letters blurred together at first, my tired brain struggling to focus. Then something caught, a familiar rhythm in the call signs, and the world narrowed to the page in front of me.

This was where I belonged. In the space between chaos and meaning, where encrypted secrets became intelligence that could save lives or end them. Here, my brain stopped fightingitself. The constant background noise of anxiety and self-doubt faded to a whisper, and I could finally, finally think.

Twenty minutes later, I had the entry point Morrison had missed. It was in the weather report preamble, where it usually was. The German operators were creatures of habit, and habits were weaknesses, and weaknesses were doors. Forty minutes after that, I had the first section decoded.

Convoy positions. Departure times. A list of ships and their designated routes.

The information was three days old, probably useless by now. The convoys had already sailed or sunk or scattered across the grey Atlantic. But the methodology mattered. Every code we cracked taught us something about how the Germans thought, how their operators made mistakes, where the patterns lived and died.

I was reaching for the next stack when Noor Bennett appeared at my desk, arms crossed, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Her Women's Auxiliary Air Force uniform was crisp despite the hour, the blue-grey wool and brass buttons marking her as one of the wireless operators who spent their shifts hunched over receivers in the signals hut, pulling encrypted German transmissions from the static. We called them WAAFs, and they were the first link in our chain, the ones who caught the raw intercepts before they ever reached my desk. Her dark hair was pinned back in regulation style, and she looked, as always, like someone who found the entire war vaguely amusing.

“You have ink on your face,” she said.

“What? Where?”

“Left temple. Also your right cheek. You look like a telegraph machine had a nervous breakdown on you.”

I scrubbed at my face with my sleeve, which probably made things worse. “Better?”

“Marginally.” She perched on the edge of my desk, ignoring the papers she was sitting on, which made something in my chest twitch with distress. I resisted the urge to pull them out from under her. “Morrison's in a state, by the way. Apparently you just did in an hour what he couldn't manage all morning.”

“The entry point was obvious.”

“To you, maybe.” She tilted her head, studying me. “Speaking of obvious, Finch has been prowling about all week. Security concerns, apparently. New protocols being implemented.”

“What sort of protocols?”

“Escorts. Personal shadows for certain personnel. Anyone deemed 'essential' gets their own guard dog now.” She raised an eyebrow. “I suspect you'll be top of his list, given that you're the only one who can crack the Lorenz traffic without having a breakdown.”

My stomach tightened. I didn't want a shadow. I didn't want anyone watching me, cataloguing my habits, noticing the way I lost hours to patterns or forgot to eat or talked to myself when I was working through a particularly stubborn cipher.

“That seems excessive,” I said.

“That's Finch. Anyway, forewarned is forearmed.” She slid off my desk, and I immediately straightened the papers she'd displaced. “Try to eat something today, yes? You're looking peaky.”

She walked away before I could respond, and I turned back to my work, trying to ignore the unease coiling in my gut.