Assassin's Honor (9781561648207) Read Online Free

you’re the perfect man for the case, especially if the code does turn out to be German. You’re the only man in Uncle Sam’s Navy who has seen them in combat close up, and you’ve got the wound to prove it. You’re the one who stole the German navy’s code from them at Samoa in eighty-nine, you’re well versed in their activities in the Caribbean, and you know this region’s coasts better than almost any officer in the squadron. So now, Commander Wake, you know why you were summoned posthaste. You’re the man who’s going to figure out this enigma and tell me what it means.”
    The admiral stood and handed me a dark blue U.S. Navy Department dispatch envelope. “The items are inside. Take them back to your ship. Report back here in three hours and tell me what these people are up to in our area of operations.”

5
The Message
    U.S.S. Bennington
    Key West Naval
    Station Saturday morning
    10 December 1892
    Ignoring the inquisitive looks from my officers and men, I descended to my cabin directly upon returning aboard
Bennington
. Once in my sanctum, the numbers would be tackled first, for they might explain the chart.
    There were three lines of numbers, separated into groups. The first line had five groups, the second had four, and the third had five. It was obviously a coded telegraph message, but not in the standard European commercial, military, or diplomatic code. Most of those were in five-digit groupings of numbers. These groupings had only four numbers each. The admiral’s premonition was right.
    It was the secret code of the Imperial German Navy.
    From my safe, I extracted my copy of the 1888 German naval code, painstakingly copied from the original lead-linedcode book. During one of my last clandestine missions at the Office of Naval Intelligence, in March of 1889, that code book had been surreptitiously removed from a reef near the wreck of the S.M.S.
Adler
, flagship of the German squadron in Samoa.
    The Germans still didn’t know we had it. From what we heard later, they assumed it was lost in the wreck. I had the only copy outside of the Special Assignments Section of ONI, of which I had once been the senior officer. ONI is located within a small office in the bowels of the State, War, and Navy Building, across the park from the president’s mansion. ONI functions as his trusted resource for understanding—and influencing—events around the world.
    The first number group was the mathematical formula to start deciphering the rest of the message. There were eight German formulas, some of which were quite complicated. But I was in luck; according to what I saw, this was one of the simpler ones. The formula would consist of only addition, subtraction, and division, in that order, utilizing each number in the initial group as the operating feature.
    Following the formula, the number groups changed into a complete new set of integers. I had now completed the first phase of deciphering the message.
    Comparing the new number groups with those on the secret code list before me, I found the letter of the German alphabet represented by each numeral or pair of numerals. There was an additional complication. Unlike English’s twenty-six letters, the German alphabet has another four letter-diacritic combinations, for a total of thirty letters.
    At the end of the second phase of deciphering, the translation from numbers into letters, I came up with this message in the German alphabet:
TÖTU NGAB SCHU SSDE
ZEMB ERSE CHZE HNXX
ESWI RDKR IEGB EEND ENXX
    The double
X
s were endings of sentences, a standard practice in all navies. The final phase would be to get the correct sequence of letters formed into separate words. Consulting my German-English dictionary, as my knowledge of that language is woefully lacking, it took a while to find the words formed by the letters. It gave me the following:
TÖTUNG ABSCHUSS DEZEMBER SECHZEHN XX
ES WIRD KRIEG BEENDEN