Page 7 of The Words Beneath the Noise

I movedfrom the Scharnhorst intercepts to a batch of Luftwaffe traffic flagged as priority, then to a set of fragments that had been sitting on my desk for three days because no one else could make sense of them. The patterns shifted and reformed under my attention, revealing troop movements, supply routes, the coordinates of targets that were probably already smoking ruins.

Every piece of intelligence we decoded had weight. I felt it sometimes, pressing down on my shoulders, the knowledge that the symbols I translated into words became orders that sent men to kill or die. The convoy routes I uncovered might save a thousand sailors or doom a hundred German submariners to drowning in the cold Atlantic. The troop positions I identified might help our forces advance or ensure that a village full of civilians became collateral damage in someone else's war.

I tried not to think about it too much. Thinking about it made the work impossible, and the work was all I had.

Around midday, Peter Rowe appeared at my desk with a stack of fresh intercepts and a grin that showed too many teeth. He was young, maybe twenty-four, with the eager energy of someone who still believed the war was an adventure rather than a slow grinding horror.

“Hot off the wireless,” he said, dropping the papers on my desk with a thump that made me flinch. “High-level stuff, apparently. Finch wanted you to have first crack.”

I took the top sheet and started scanning. “When did these come in?”

“Last few hours. There's chatter about something big in the Ardennes. Jerry's been burning up the frequencies all night.”

The Ardennes. Dense forest straddling the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, the same region the Wehrmacht had used to bypass the Maginot Line back in 1940 and sweep into France before anyone could stop them. Military strategists considered it impassable for large armoured formations, too thick with trees, too rugged with hills and narrow roads. Which was precisely why the Germans had used it once before to devastating effect.

I'd seen fragments about it all week, pieces that didn't quite fit together. Troop movements that seemed random. Supply requisitions that exceeded normal operational patterns. Panzer divisions being pulled from other sectors and repositioned westward. Something was building out there, something the decrypted traffic couldn't quite reveal. The patterns were wrong, like looking at a cipher where half the key was missing.

“Have these been logged properly?” I asked, reaching for my pencil.

“Course they have. What do you take me for?” Peter laughed, but there was something slightly off about it, a note I couldn't quite identify. “Right then, I'll leave you to it. The genius at work.”

He ambled away, and I watched him go, something nagging at the back of my mind. Peter was always friendly, always cheerful, but lately there'd been an edge to him. A tension in his shoulders when Finch walked past. Extra cigarettes appearing in his pocket when no one could get cigarettes anywhere.

I filed the observation away and turned back to the intercepts.

The Ardennes traffic was dense, layered, encrypted with a sophistication that suggested high-level communications. I worked through it methodically, cross-referencing call signs, mapping transmission patterns, looking for the entry points that would let me crack the outer shell. Three hours passed, maybefour. Someone left tea at my elbow that went cold. The light through the windows shifted from grey to darker grey.

And slowly, horribly, the picture began to form.

German forces were massing. Not for defence, not for retreat, but for attack. A massive push through the Ardennes forest, aimed at splitting the Allied lines and driving for Antwerp. The scale of it was staggering: divisions that intelligence had written off as depleted, armour that was supposed to be destroyed, fuel reserves that shouldn't have existed.

This wasn't a desperate gamble by a beaten enemy. This was a calculated strike, and if it succeeded, it could change everything.

I wrote up my findings in the careful, precise language that military intelligence required, stripped of speculation and qualified with appropriate uncertainty. Then I flagged it as urgent and sent it up the chain to people who might or might not listen.

That was the worst part. Knowing and not being able to make anyone believe you. I'd been right before, about convoys and bombing raids and troop movements, and sometimes they'd listened and sometimes they hadn't, and the times they hadn't still kept me awake at night, counting the cost in lives I couldn't save.

I was still staringat my notes, running the calculations again to make sure I hadn't missed something, when Captain Finch appeared in the doorway of the hut.

He had the posture of a man about to deliver news he expected to be poorly received, spine rigid, jaw set. Behind him,like a shadow given physical form, stood a soldier I'd never seen before.

He was big. Not tall in an ostentatious way, but built like something designed to absorb impact and keep moving. Broad shoulders, solid frame, the kind of physical presence that made the air in the room feel different. His uniform was worn but meticulously clean, dark blond hair cropped military-short, and his face had the weathered quality of someone who'd spent years in places that tried to kill him.

But it was his eyes that caught me. Blue-grey, like winter sky before snow, and utterly watchful. They swept the room in a single economical movement, cataloguing exits and threats and probably the structural weaknesses of the building, and when they passed over me, I felt the assessment like a touch.

Soldier. Front-line, not rear echelon. The kind who'd seen things that left marks you couldn't wash off.

My chest tightened for reasons I didn't want to examine.

“Mr. Pembroke,” Finch called across the room. “A word.”

Every head turned toward me. I felt their eyes, curious and watchful, as I pushed back my chair and made my way to where Finch stood. The soldier's gaze tracked my movement, and I had to resist the urge to check if there was still ink on my face.

Finch led me to the small office at the end of the building, barely larger than a cupboard. The soldier followed, positioning himself near the door in a way that wasn't quite blocking it but made me acutely aware of his presence.

“This is Sergeant Thomas Hale,” Finch said without preamble. “He's been assigned to oversee security for Hut X and its personnel, effective immediately.”

I blinked. “I'm sorry?”