At that point, Vandermeier kissed Eddie.

The captain threw his arms around him, pressed his lips to Eddie’s, then said: ‘I love you.’

Chuck’s heart filled with fear. There was no good ending to this now.

Eddie punched Vandermeier in the stomach, hard. The captain grunted and gasped. Eddie hit him again, in the face this time. Chuck stepped between them. Before Vandermeier could fall down, Chuck bundled him into the back seat of the taxi.

He leaned through the window and gave the driver a ten-dollar bill. ‘Take him home, and keep the change,’ he said.

The taxi pulled away.

Chuck looked at Eddie. ‘Oh, boy,’ he said. ‘Now we’re in trouble.’

(iv)

But Eddie Parry was never charged with the crime of assaulting an officer.

Captain Vandermeier showed up at the Old Administration Building next morning with a black eye, but he made no accusation. Chuck figured it would ruin the man’s career if he admitted he had got into a fight at The Band Round The Hat. All the same everyone was talking about his bruise. Bob Strong said: ‘Vandermeier claims he slipped on a patch of oil in his garage, and hit his face on the lawn mower, but I think his wife socked him. Have you seen her? She looks like Jack Dempsey.’

That day, the cryptanalysts in the basement told Admiral Nimitz that the Japanese would attack Midway on 4 June. More specifically, the Japanese force would be 175 miles north of the atoll at 7 a.m.

They were almost as confident as they sounded.

Eddie was gloomy. ‘What can we do?’ he said when he and Chuck met for lunch. He worked in naval intelligence too, and he knew the Japanese strength as revealed by the codebreakers. ‘The Japs have two hundred ships at sea – practically their entire navy – and how many do we have? Thirty-five!’

Chuck was not so glum. ‘But their strike force is only a quarter of their strength. The rest are the occupation force, the diversion force and the reserves.’

‘So? A quarter of their strength is still more than our entire Pacific Fleet!’

‘The actual Japanese strike force has only four aircraft carriers.’

‘But we have just three.’ Eddie pointed with his ham sandwich at the smoke-blackened carrier in the dry dock, with workmen swarming all over her. ‘And that includes the broken-down Yorktown.’

‘Well, we know they’re coming, and they don’t know we’re lying in wait.’

‘I sure hope that makes as much difference as Nimitz thinks.’

‘Yeah, so do I.’

When Chuck returned to the basement, he was told that he no longer worked there. He had been reassigned – to the Yorktown.

‘It’s Vandermeier’s way of punishing me,’ Eddie said tearfully that evening. ‘He thinks you’ll die.’

‘Don’t be pessimistic,’ Chuck said. ‘We might win the war.’

A few days before the attack, the Japanese changed to new code books. The men in the basement sighed and started again from scratch, but they produced little new intelligence before the battle. Nimitz had to make do with what he already had, and hope the Japanese did not revise the whole plan at the last minute.