end of summer is the time.”
“And the date?”
Fedin smiled to himself. Flipped the pages of a French newspaper someone had left on a chair, then ran his finger down a column. “Seventeen September,” he announced. “Full moon.”
They drove into Belgium, into Holland. German occupation made it easier—northern Europe was more or less under a single government. In the Belgian ports, Ostend and Blankenberge and Knokke-Le-Zoute, and up as far as Rotterdam, they talked to the dockyard workers, because the dockyard workers were the ones who knew what went on. The ordinary civilian saw “invasion fleet” as something tied up on a beach, stretched out for miles, all in a row. But ports didn’t work that way.
Ports wandered inland from the sea; secondary harbors and river docks, canals dug out a hundred years ago for something supremely important that nobody remembered anymore. Waterways for this or that, rank weeds and dead, black water, where cats came for courtship in the moonlight and men got laid standing up. You could hide an invasion fleet in such places, in Zeebrugge and Breskens, and that’s what the Germans had tried to do.
“Four tugboats,” said a Dutchman with a little pipe. “Well fitted out and ready for the sea.”
“How do you know?” Fedin asked.
“We built them, is how.”
Back to Paris. Back to Janina.
In the sweltering room on the top floor of the Hotel Bretagne, she enciphered the data, then settled in to wait for the night, the best time for radio waves. When it was dark, she climbed up on a chair and fed the aerial through a hole in the top of the armoire to a pipe that crossed the ceiling on its way from the roof to the toilet.
She stopped for a moment and, as they’d trained her to do, ran through a mental checklist, a kind of catechism, until she was satisfied that everything was right. Then she plugged the radio into the wall, turned it on, and settled the heavy earphones on her head. Using a delicate thumb and forefinger, she explored the width of her frequency. Her neighbor to the left was very far away, very faint, and keyed at a slower and more deliberate pace than she did. But always there, this neighbor, and still transmitting when she signed off. On her right, a deep bass hum, unchanging, some piece of equipment that ran all night long. A radio beam, she thought, used by the Germans or the English for some esoteric purpose—not her destiny to know about it. An electronic stratagem; a beacon that guided, or a beacon that deceived. She wondered if whoever depended on it, to their triumph or their sorrow, listened to her transmission. Submariners, perhaps. Or pilots. All of them moving around in the dark ocean or the night sky.
119 675 she began. Her call sign. Janina in Paris.
In London, at the Sixth Bureau headquarters in the Rubens Hotel on Buckingham Palace Road, four officers and a radio operator waited in a dark room, cigarette smoke hanging thick in the air. They looked at their watches long before the minute hand advanced. 8:22 p.m. Paris time was one hour later; by now the August dusk had faded away into darkness. 8:24. One minute after the scheduled time of transmission. Of course, life was uncertain, they told themselves. Watches ran slow or fast, even Wireless/Telegraph operators missed trains or heard suspicious sounds, and sometimes equipment failed. 8:27. The operator wearing the headset had an annoying habit of biting his lower lip when he concentrated. 8:28. He fussed with his dial, eyes blank with concentration. Colonel Vyborg took the deep breath that steadied him for bad news. So soon? How could they have her this soon?
Then the operator’s face relaxed, and they knew what had happened before he got around to saying “Here she is.” He said it as though the worrying were beside the point—he had trained her, she could do no wrong.
The Sixth Bureau operator sent 202 855.
Sent 807 449. Hello, Janina.
call signs until their base acknowledged. A false call sign, in essence,
that actually said:
551 223. London agreed.
It wasn’t a perfect night, the wet August evening brewed thunderstorms and the interference crackled as the Sixth Bureau operator bit his lip. The Germans didn’t jam her frequency, but that might mean they were listening silently. That might mean a thousand things.
Meanwhile Janina, dependable, stolid Janina, sent her groups. The sweat ran down her sides and darkened the back of her shirt, the boards creaked as a large man walked down the hall to the toilet, a woman cried out. But for Janina there were only the numbers.
So many numbers. Canals, barges, towns, roads. Three freighters at anchor in Boulogne harbor with no cargo, ammunition train into Middlekerke, Wehrmacht Pioneer insignia seen at Point Gris Nez, phrase
But then: what to leave out? Which rivers, for example, did the RAF not really care to know about? No, Captain Alexander de Milja’s improvised information machine shuddered and clanked, steam whistled from a rag knotted around a broken pipe, but somehow it worked, and it needed far more than fifteen minutes to report what it had found out.
The Funkabwehr—the signals intelligence unit of the Gestapo— maintained offices in the army barracks on the boulevard Suchet. They too had darkened rooms, and operators with headsets wandering among the nighttime frequencies.
“What’s this up at 49?” one of them said, making a note of the time, 9:42 p.m., in his log.
“They were there last night,” his colleague said.
They listened for thirty seconds. “Same one,” he continued. “Slow and steady—refuses to make a mistake, nothing bothers him.”
The first operator threw a switch that played the telegraphy through a speaker, listened a moment, then he picked up a telephone and dialed a single digit. A moment later, Sturmbannfuhrer Grahnweis came through the door.
Grahnweis was a legend, and he didn’t mind that. He was enormously fat—the shape of a renaissance cherub grotesquely overblown—and moved with heavy dignity. He had been at dinner when the call came, a white damask napkin still tucked into the collar of his black Gestapo uniform, and a waiter followed him into the office carrying a plate of venison sausages and a half stein of beer. Grahnweis nodded to his operators and smiled benevolently. He forgave them the interrupted dinner.
Then he listened.
Perhaps he made a little more of it than necessary, but who was going to blame him for a touch of theater? As the numbers tapped out, in the foreground of the atmospheric sighs and crackles, Grahnweis tilted his head to one side and puckered his mouth, then, slowly, nodded in confirmation. Yes, yes. No question about it. The diagnosis is as you suspected, gentlemen. Herr Doktor Grahnweis will take the case.
“Be so good as to serve the dinner in my office,” he said to the waiter.
The desk was vast, and contained his weapons.
There were five: a very good radio receiver, a street map of Paris, two celluloid discs calibrated zero to 360°, with silk threads attached to their precise centers, and a telephone.
Grahnweis had spent his life in radio: as a childhood ham operator in Munich, he’d built his own crystal sets. He had worked for the Marconi company, then enlisted in the army in 1914 and served as a signals NCO on the eastern front. That was followed by unemployment, then the Nazi party—which made great use of radio—in 1927, and finally the Gestapo as a major. “Send the trucks, please,” he said into the phone, cut a piece of venison sausage, swirled it in the chestnut puree, used his knife to top it with a dab of gooseberry jelly. As he chewed, his eyes closed with pleasure, a sigh rumbled deep in his chest, beads of sweat stood on his forehead.
Casually, without putting down his fork, he flicked on his radio receiver, then turned the dial with the side of his hand until he found the transmission on 49 meters.
236 775 109 805 429
“Take your time, my friend,” he said under his breath. “No reason to rush on this warm summer night.”
The trucks drove out of the boulevard Suchet garage within seconds of Grahnweis’ call. They were RDF— radio direction finding— vans built by the Loewe-Opta Radio Company for the practice of what was technically
