The Soldier Spies (Men at War 3)

“I’ll check on that,” Stevens said. “And Dick, you just said ‘we’ haven’t tried flying. You are not to fly Aphrodite aircraft. If that sounds like an order, it is.”

“I know,” Canidy said, dryly sarcastic. “Like a vestal virgin, I’m being saved for something important, right?”

“Yes,” Stevens said,“as a matter of fact, you are.”

Stevens took the front page of the Frankfurter Rundschau from the table and put it back in its envelope.

“That’s it,” he said. “You can go back to your party.”

Chapter FOUR

Broadcast House

London, England

1015 Hours 8 January 1943

The producer in the booth pointed his index finger at the left of two men sitting in the studio. The man he pointed at leaned barely forward.

“This is the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation,” the man said.

The producer pointed his index finger at the engineer in the booth beside him. The engineer lifted the balls of his fingers from the edge of the phonograph record he had cued.

The chimes of Big Ben went out over the air.

The producer pointed his finger at the man sitting at the right of the table in the studio.

“And now some messages for our friends in Germany,” the man said to his microphone. He read down a neatly typed list of brief, cryptic messages until he came to number eight.

“The Kurfürstendamm is slippery with ice,” he read, then read it again, slowly, with precision:“The Kurfürstendamm is slippery with ice.”

The message sounded meaningless. But it would be carefully recorded in Berlin by radio operators of the several German intelligence agencies, including the SS-SD, and by the Ministry of Information, who would study it in an attempt to take some meaning from it. It would be compared with all other messages mentioning the Kurfürstendamm, or Berlin, or slippery, or ice. All possible meanings would be noted, however far-fetched, and copies would be made and distributed, so that information would be available for reference when the next “message for our friends in Germany” using any of those words came over the air. All the effort would be futile, for that message was in fact meaningless.

The BBC announcer did not read message number 9. For there was an insert mark between number 8 and number 9. The message he read next had been given to him less than thirty minutes before. And a notation at the bottom of the sheet of paper instructed him to read the message each night for ten nights.

"Gisella thanks Eric for the radio,” he read very carefully, and then again, “Gisella thanks Eric for the radio.”

Then he returned to his original sheet:

"Bruno sends greetings to Uncle Hans. Bruno sends greetings to Uncle Hans.”

Chapter FIVE

Whitbey House

Kent, England

8 January 1943

Somewhat chagrined to be wakened by a sergeant with the message that if he wanted breakfast, he’d better shag ass, Lt. Commander Edwin W. Bitter dressed quickly and went looking for the mess. When they arrived the night before, he had been led to a room by another sergeant, and he had been sleepy and a little drunk. So when he went into the corridor now, he didn’t remember which way to go to return to the main hall.

Whitbey House reminded him of a museum. He would not have been astonished to see uniformed guards standing around, or a group of school-children being given a tour down the wide corridors.

He turned the wrong way and had to retrace his steps after finding himself at a dead end. When he finally found the main hall, he felt like a fool. It was equipped with a direction sign. Lettered arrows had been nailed to the pole. Two of them pointed to “Washington” and “Berlin.” And near the bottom was one with “Mess” lettered on it.

As he got close, he heard the murmur of voices and could smell coffee and bacon. At the entrance to a long, high-ceilinged room a PFC sat at a table and collected thirty-five cents for the meal.

He saw that the mess at Whitbey House served both enlisted and commissioned personnel, and there were far more people than Bitter had expected. He made a quick guess of one hundred fifty, including twenty-five or thirty uniformed women. He wondered at first if this was yet another manifestation of Canidy’s disdain for those customs of the service that decreed separation by rank.