Sir John Havelock surveyed the Royal Society’s meeting room at Burlington House. It was dimly lit and reeked of tobacco smoke. The other twelve members of the MAUD Committee were puffing on pipes, cigars, or cigarettes, and Havelock instinctively filled the bowl of his own briar pipe after hanging up his raincoat. A cut-glass decanter sat on a sideboard, and the men milled around, talking in hushed tones and sipping sherry from matching glasses.

A door at the end of the room creaked open. In strode George Paget Thomson, the leader of the committee, and another man wearing a dark uniform. They made an odd pair—Thomson a bookish, slightly cross-eyed scientist, the other man a lean, serious-looking military type. The banter stopped and the committee members took seats around a large central table. Rain pattered on the window and, though it was midafternoon, the gloom made it feel like late evening.

“Gents, this is Commander Ian Colter from the Royal Navy’s Intelligence division,” Thomson said, without even a greeting. He gestured for Colter to sit while he himself took a chair at the head of the table. “It seems that we may have a window of time in which to mount a salvage operation on the Vampire. Sir John has been in touch with the Australian Navy, and from what survivors have related, the ship sank fairly quickly after being hit, with most damage amidships. That bodes well for a recovery of our cargo.”

Sir John Havelock nodded from his chair halfway down the table and relit his pipe. Though he was overseeing the test phase of the Tube Alloys project, he had not been a member of the MAUD Committee as long as the others; he’d been brought in only when the prototype device was nearly completed. Havelock’s reputation as a physicist and test engineer had preceded him, and he commanded respect from the men around the table.

The possible loss of their only prototype was a devastating blow to the project, and Havelock took it personally. With Vampire and her unique cargo lying wrecked on the seafloor, it would be months before they could attempt another test. That is, unless they could salvage the device before its metal casing and complex wiring were damaged by extended exposure to seawater.

The MAUD Committee, reputed to have been named for physicist Niels Bohr’s housekeeper, had been formed in 1940 by George Paget Thomson at the government’s request. It was responsible for overseeing “Tube Alloys,” Britain’s secret project to develop an atomic weapon. England was at the forefront of atomic research, with the discoveries of both the electron and neutron at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. It was also there that the first successful nuclear fission was carried out. When British intelligence found out that the Germans were working on an atomic weapon in March of 1940, Tube Alloys was quickly made top priority.