“We’ve lost HMAS Vampire, sir,” McGuinn said, his voice breaking. Havelock slowly set down his pen and swiveled his leather chair to face the windows. Dusty shafts of light angled through the scrim-taped X’s. “Japs sunk her and Hermes off of Ceylon. Only nine lost, but Hermes lost over 300 at last count.”

Havelock didn’t care about the crew at the moment. He could only think of Vampire’s precious cargo, now lying on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. He needed to know if it was safe. This was a question he couldn’t ask the young lieutenant who stood across his desk, now uncomfortably clearing his throat. There were only a handful who knew what the destroyer was carrying.

“And… Commander Moran?” Havelock tried to sound casual but concerned. Moran was one of the handful. After all,Vampire was his ship.

“I’m afraid he went down with her, according to survivors’ accounts,” McGuinn replied, finding it curious that Havelock would inquire only after the captain. Perhaps they were friends.

In fact, Sir John Havelock had never met Commander William Thomas Alldis Moran, Royal Australian Navy. Havelock was a civilian, a scientist who hadn’t left England since the war began, but he’d learned enough about Moran to trust him with England’s top secret. Born in Fremantle, Moran had served as a torpedo man in the British Royal Navy before being promoted to Commander at the relatively young age of 33. By 1940, he was given command of Australia’s HMAS Vampire, a scrappy 300-foot destroyer that saw plenty of action, including surviving the fierce bombardment off of Malaya that sunk two battleships, HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales.

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

The question stirred Havelock from his thoughts. “No, thank you, Lieutenant,” he said with a somber smile and stood to shake the man’s hand. “A pity about this loss. One day we’ll avenge their deaths.”

An oddly belligerent remark from this tweedy scientist, thought McGuinn as he turned to leave the office, wondering why he was told to deliver the news of a specific naval loss to an academic in Cambridge.

Once he was gone, Havelock pushed back his chair with a defiant huff and walked to the door, calling out to his secretary, “Mary, tea please. And get Paget Thomson on the phone. I need to speak with him right away.”