Richardson called for a motorcycle courier.
"There's one other thing," Saunders said.
"What's that?"
"The first message--the agent seemed to have some difficulty with the Morse. In fact he asked for the keyer to send it twice. They get testy about things like that. Could be nothing. There might have been some interference. But it might be a good idea to tell the boys at MI5 about it."
Richardson thought, Good idea indeed.
When Saunders was gone he typed out a brief memo describing how the agent appeared to struggle with the Morse. Five minutes later the decodes and Richardson's note were tucked inside a leather pouch for the forty-two-mile ride to London.
11
SELSEY, ENGLAND
"It was the oddest thing I've ever seen," Arthur Barnes told his wife over breakfast that morning. Barnes, as he did every morning, had walked his beloved corgi Fionna along the waterfront. Part of it still was open to civilians; most of it had been sealed off and designated a restricted military zone. Everyone wondered what the military was doing there. No one talked about it. Dawn was late that morning--a gray overcast sky, rain now and again. Fionna was off her leash, scampering up and down the docks.
Fionna spotted the thing first, then Barnes did.
"A bloody giant concrete monster, Mabel. Like a block of flats lying on its side." Two tugs were pulling it out to sea. Barnes carried a pair of field glasses inside his coat--a friend once spotted the conning tower of a German U-BOAT and Barnes was dying to catch a glimpse of one too. He removed the glasses and raised them to his eyes.
The concrete monster had a boat attached to it with a broad, flat prow pushing through the choppy seas. Barnes scanned off its port side--"Hard to tell the port side from the starboard side, mind you"--and he spotted a small vessel with a bunch of military types on deck.
"I couldn't believe it, Mabel," he recounted, finishing the last of his toast. "They were clapping and cheering, giving each other hugs and pats on the back." He shook his head. "Imagine that. Hitler's got the world by the short hairs, and our boys get excited because they can make a giant hunk of concrete float."
The giant floating concrete structure spotted by Arthur Barnes that dreary January morning was code-named Phoenix. It was 200 feet long, 50 feet wide, and displaced more than 6,000 tons of water. More than two hundred were scheduled to be built. Its interior--invisible from Barnes's vantage point on the harbor front--was a labyrinth of hollow chambers and scuttling valves, for the Phoenix was not designed to remain on the surface for long. It was designed to be towed across the English Channel and sunk off the coast of Normandy. The Phoenixes were just one component of a massive Allied project to construct an artificial harbor in England and drag it to France on D-Day. The overall code name for the project was Operation Mulberry.
It was Dieppe that taught them their lesson, Dieppe and the amphibious landings in the Mediterranean. At Dieppe, site of the disastrous Allied raid on France in August 1942, the Germans denied the Allies use of a port for as long as possible. In the Mediterranean they destroyed ports before abandoning them, rendering them useless for long periods. The invasion planners determined that attempting to capture a port intact was hopeless. They decided the men and supplies would come ashore the same way--on the beaches of Normandy.
The problem was the weather. Studies of weather patterns along the French coast showed that periods of fair conditions could be expected to last no more than four consecutive days. Therefore, the invasion planners had to assume that supplies would have to be brought ashore in a storm.