Free Men of War (2013) by John Schettler

Force H in the Med as
well. As for the cancelled Dieppe raid, we would have the Canadian 2nd Infantry
Division, five commando units, over 230 ships and landing barges, and over
seventy RAF squadrons on the list. We were going to lose men in that raid,
unquestionably, but which ones?”
    “That’
doesn’t matter, sir. The point is that there are obviously a good number alive
in those units now that might not be breathing. I’ll say another thing about
it. We had men in Number 30 commando assigned to a pinch mission there. They
were out after one of the new four wheel Enigma boxes believed to be in Dieppe,
and that never happened either.”
    “Ah,
yes, Fleming’s group. I had almost forgotten about that. I dare say that Fleming
won’t have the bit between his teeth as much now that Rushbrooke replaced Godfrey as head of the Naval Intelligence Division. We’ll still use
him. He’s setting up a network for us in Spain under Operation Golden Eye, and
his boys are slated to go after intelligence during the upcoming Torch
Operation. Sorry about that failed pinch operation at Dieppe. I hope that
didn’t set your efforts back here, Turing.”
    “No
major setbacks, sir. Fleming has been promising me things for some time, and
seldom delivers. I managed without it.”
    “Good
enough, but as you can see, our list is going to be a long one. How do we
manage to keep an eye on all these men? The manpower required would be
enormous.”
    “Perhaps
I could help, sir. I can’t put a man’s fate onto my perforated machine tapes,
but I could certainly encode his name. Then we could use a machine to do some
pattern matching. Should something unusual come up, and should it match one or
more of the names on the list, why we might then have a closer look at those individuals
with human assets. We could just hand that off to MI5. It’s what they do for a
living, yes?”
    “Something
tells me I would hate to have my name on such a list. It’s damn uncomfortable.”
    “I
agree, sir. Most things having to do with war are somewhat unsavory, but we
muddle through.”
    “War?
You make it sound as though we are at odds with our own people here, Turing.”
    “We
will be, sir. Why do you think we even have an organization like MI5 in the
first place? Yes, they run down foreign agents on British soil, but they keep
an eye on the rest of us as well. If it were to be learned that one of these
men on our list does something… compromising, then he becomes an enemy of fate
and time as it were. If you mean to set this watch on the history, then you’ll
have to be prepared to do some unpleasant things, Admiral. Suppose we suspect a
man on this list for some reason—say he’s been reported captured by the enemy.
He was supposed to be dead, and we all know dead men tell no tales. Yet now
he’s alive, a bit of a zombie, eh? Now he can tell tales. Loose lips
sink ships, to put it plainly.”
    “Zombie?”
    “A
Haitian word for an animated corpse, sir, brought back to life by witchcraft. I
use this metaphorically, but it’s a perfect image for what these men actually
are, and it gets worse. Any one of these walking dead men could do something
significant, and they could also have sons and daughters who might do very much
more. The cancellation of Operation Jubilee is just a small part of the
picture, sir. Geronimo has upset operations all through the Med and also
in the Pacific. Our point of divergence is getting quite wide now, and our list
will be very long indeed. The more time that passes the worse things might be.”
    “Damn
confounding business, Professor. The more I think about it, the more impossible
it seems. There were German soldiers who might have died if these cancelled
operations had gone forward. How in the world do we sort them out? There were
Italian ships tangling with Geronimo in the Med, and now the Japanese. Our list
now grows to a point where it becomes truly daunting, perhaps impossible to
even attempt.”
    “Right,
sir.