Jackdaws

Minutes later, Percy had taken a call from SOE headquarters in London and had learned of Brian Standish's message demanding to know what had gone wrong. Paul had decided to respond by sending the reply drafted by Flick and brought home by her pilot. In case Brian was still at liberty, it told him that the Jackdaws had landed and would contact him, but it gave no further information, because of the possibility that he was in the hands of the Gestapo.

Still no one was sure what had happened out there. The uncertainty was unbearable for Paul. Flick had to go to Reims, one way or another. He had to know whether she was walking into a Gestapo trap. Surely there must be a way to check whether Brian's transmissions were genuine?

His signals bore the correct security tags: Percy double-checked. But the Gestapo knew about security tags, and they could easily have tortured Brian to learn his. There were subtler methods of checking, Percy said, but they depended on the girls at the listening station. So Paul had decided to go there.

At first Percy had resisted. It was dangerous for operational people to descend on signals units, he said; they disrupted the smooth running of the service for hundreds of agents. Paul ignored that. Then the head of the station said he would be delighted for Paul to make an appointment to visit in, say, two or three weeks? No, Paul had said, two or three hours is what I had in mind. He had insisted, gently but firmly, using the threat of Monty's wrath as a last resort. And so he had gone to Grendon Underwood.

As a small boy in Sunday school, Paul had been vexed by a theological problem. He had noticed that in Arlington, Virginia, where he was living with his parents, most of the children of his age went to bed at the same time, seven-thirty. That meant they were saying their prayers simultaneously. With all those voices rising to heaven, how could God hear what he, Paul, was saying? He was not satisfied with the answer of the pastor, who just said that God could do anything. Little Paul knew that was an evasion. The question troubled him for years.

If he could have seen Grendon Underwood, he would have understood.

Like God, the Special Operations Executive had to listen to innumerable messages, and it often happened that scores of them came in at the same time. Secret agents in their hideaways were all tapping their Morse keys simultaneously, like the nine-year-olds of Arlington kneeling at their bedsides at half past seven. SOE heard them all.

Grendon Underwood was another grand country house vacated by the owners and taken over by the military. Officially called Station 53a, it was a listening post. In its extensive grounds were radio aerials grouped in great arcs like the ears of God, listening to messages that came from anywhere between the arctic north of Norway to the dusty south of Spain. Four hundred wireless operators and coders, most of them young women in the FANYs, worked in the big house and lived in Nissen huts hastily erected on the grounds.

Paul was shown around by a supervisor, Jean Bevins, a heavy woman with spectacles. At first she was terrified of the visiting big shot who represented Montgomery himself~ but Paul smiled and talked softly and made her feel at ease. She took him to the transmitting room, where a hundred or so girls sat in rows, each with headphones, notebook, and pencils. A big board showed agents' code names and scheduled times for transmission-known as "skeds" and always pronounced the American way-and the frequencies they would use. There was an atmosphere of intense concentration, the only sound being the tap of Morse code as an operator told an agent she was receiving him loud and clear.

Jean introduced Paul to Lucy Briggs, a pretty blonde girl with a Yorkshire accent so strong that he had to concentrate hard to understand her. "Helicopter?" she said. "Aye, I know Helicopter-he's new. He calls in at twenty hundred hours and receives at twenty-three hundred. No problems, so far."

She never pronounced the letter aitch. Once Paul realized that, he began to find it easier to interpret the accent.

"What do you mean?" he asked her. "What sort of problems do you get?"

"Well, some of them don't tune the transmitter right, so you have to search for the frequency. Then the signal may be weak, so that you can't hear the letters very well, and you worry that you might be mistaking dashes for dots-the letter B is very like D, for instance. And the tone is always bad from those little suitcase radios, because they're so small."

"Would you recognize his 'fist'?"

She looked dubious. "He's only broadcast three times. On Wednesday he was a bit nervous, probably because it was his first, but his pace was steady, as if he knew he had plenty of time. I was pleased-I thought he must feel reasonably safe. We worry about them, you know. We're sitting here nice and warm and they're somewhere be-hind enemy lines dodging the bloody Gestapo."

"What about his second broadcast?"