Jackdaws

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?”

“That was Thursday, and he was rushed. When they’re in a hurry, it can be difficult to be sure what they mean-you know, was that two dots run together, or a short dash? Wherever he was sending from, he wanted to get out of there fast.”

“And then?”

“Friday he didn’t broadcast. But I didn’t worry. They don’t call unless they have to, it’s too dangerous. Then he came on the air on Saturday morning, just before dawn. It was an emergency message, but he didn’t sound panicky. In fact I remember thinking to myself~ He’s getting the hang of this. You know, it was a strong signal, the rhythm was steady, all the letters clear.”

“Could it have been someone else using his transmitter that time?”

She looked thoughtful. “It sounded like him… but yes, it could have been someone else, I suppose. And if it was a German, pretending to be him, they would sound nice and steady, wouldn’t they, because they’d have nothing to fear.”

Paul felt as if he were wading through gumbo. Every question he asked had two answers. He yearned for something definite. He had to fight down panic every time he recalled to mind the dreadful prospect that he might lose Flick, less than a week after she had come into his life like a gift from the gods.

Jean had disappeared, and returned now with a sheaf of papers in a plump hand. “I’ve brought the decrypts of the three signals received from Helicopter,” she said. Her quiet efficiency pleased him.

He looked at the first sheet.