Page 58 of Go Home
“So I’ll be trying to track down Cox and bring him in,” added Marcus.
Winters nodded.“Okay.But given how close this is getting to you, Kate, I want your security elevated.Local PD outside your apartment at night, and the rest of the time, you stick to base.Is that clear?”
They went their separate ways.Kate sat at her desk with the code, aware that colleagues were arriving for their Sunday shifts, the office slowly filling up with fresh faces and neatly knotted ties.Meanwhile, here she was, groggy after a snatched couple of hours of sleep, wired from all the coffee, her hair a mess as she stared at another incomprehensible sheet of symbols, willing it to give up its secrets.
The symbols seemed to represent the letters of an alphabet; that much she could work out by counting.But whose alphabet?The clue might be in the nature of the symbols chosen.There was an ant and an owl, a weasel, a horse, a goat kid, a quiver of arrows, a Fez hat and a yucca plant…
Okay, maybe the clue wasnotgoing to be found in the nature of the symbols.
But there was a sliver of hope.Kate knew that had seen this code before.She hadn’t used it to encode or decode a message.But something about that particular assembly of symbols – most of them seemingly taken from nature – she had been taught or read about.There was a story to go with them, something to do with World War II.She couldn’t remember it now, but there had to be, surely, only one person who could have told her.She picked up the phone.
Gabe was old-school: landline, answering machine, a recorded message that made him sound like Yoda.He finally answered after three attempts.“I don’t make donations over the telephone,” he said.
“Gabe, it’s me.Sorry.Were you sleeping in?”
“I wasn’t asleep.I was trimming Winnicott’s ear-fur.I think the reason he doesn’t come in when I call him is because he can’t hear me.”
“Gabe, Winnie doesn’t come in because you haven’t trained him.”
Winnicott, or Winnie, was the name of Gabe’s notoriously willful Newfie/Saint Bernard mix.Everyone looked small, standing next to Winnicott, but Gabe… Marcus said Gabe should attach Winnie to a chariot.
She told him about the message.She’d spotted some fifty-six symbols, repeated with varying frequency: four turkeys, four lambs, three owls and three horses, two ants and a solitary bear…
“Send me a picture,” Gabe suggested.She sent him two.
“It makes me think of that Christmas song,” Kate said.“You remember – four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle-doves…”
Gabe had obviously received the pictures as he started a peculiar, tuneless humming, a noise he only made when concentrating hard.
“You said you thought you’d seen it before.”
“Yeah.Something to do with the Second World War.”
“Does Platoon 382 ring any bells?”
She thought about it.“First Navajo unit in the Marines?”
“Bravo, Kate.The so-called ‘Code Talkers’ used words from their own language to denote letters in the English alphabet.The code was never broken.Do you know there are virtually no non-native speakers of Navajo, due to the immense complexity of the grammar?”
“I thought I recognized some of the symbols.”
“In February and March 1945, six Navajo code-talkers communicated round the clock during the Battle of Iwo Jima.They’re the reason for the Allies’ victory.”
“And they were so valuable that each one of them had his own bodyguard,” Kate said, the story coming back to her.“Isn’t that right?”
“Not quite.Due to the Code-Talkers’ physical features, they were constantly being mistaken for Japanese, so the bodyguards were there to protect them from their own side.But those guards also had orders to kill them if it looked like they were going to be captured.”
“What a job.”
“Oh, the guards were a story all on their own!There’s a book about them.The Saint Jude’sClub.That was what they called themselves.They were the absolute dregs of the US military.Would all have been thrown out if there wasn’t a war on.Heavy drinkers, brawlers, thieves, impossible to lead or control.Just right for the job, you could say.”
“Why Saint Jude’s?”
“Kate.I’m shocked.A good Catholic girl like you doesn’t know?St.Jude.Patron Saint of Lost Causes.”
She soon found the full details of the Navajo code and was able to start to decrypt the message.The sixty-three symbols translated into a short message, just fourteen words long.
AND THE FIRST GOLGOTHA
