One Shot Kill - Robert Muchamore Page 0,6

the Allies won the war. Communists like Eugene believed a workers’ revolution would sweep Europe. Others like Captain Henderson said the communists were idiots, who should visit Russia as he’d done and see what living under communism was really like.

Rosie was undecided, but The Communist Manifesto did little to help make up her mind. The text was dense and with so much on her mind her eyes skimmed words that failed to penetrate her brain.

When it got to 11 a.m., Rosie began setting up the aerial for her radio set. Like all radio operators she had a personal sked, with fixed times to send encrypted messages, and others when she had to listen to a certain frequency and pick up orders and responses to questions.

This system was secure, but meant that getting a reply to a question took two days, or even longer if storms or German jamming disrupted the signal.

By the time Rosie had stretched the wire aeriel across the field behind the cottage and given the valves in the battery-powered set a few minutes to warm up, it was time to receive.

Just as you can recognise a person’s handwriting, people transmitting in Morse code have their own distinctive signature, known as a fist. Rosie recognised the fist of Joyce Slater as she sat on the dirt floor by the back door, with the radio set alongside, pencil and paper in her lap and a cumbersome headset over her ears.

Joyce was Espionage Research Unit B’s wheelchair-bound radio operator and something of an expert in code breaking and puzzle solving. The previous evening, Rosie had received a brief message, stating that there was nothing obviously wrong with the transmissions received from Lorient over the past seven weeks, but that a specialist was doing more detailed analysis. The fact that Joyce was the specialist cheered Rosie, because nobody would do a more thorough job.

The transmission lasted four minutes. The signal deteriorated a couple of times, meaning Rosie missed a few characters, but you never got them all. After pulling in the aeriel, and switching the set off to conserve the battery, Rosie hurried towards a table and began using a printed silk square, known as a one-time-pad, to decode the message.

The news was bad. Every radio operator in occupied territory slipped three-letter security check codes into their messages. According to Joyce’s analysis, Eugene’s chief radio operator had missed out her security checks on three occasions, beginning on 9 May. This should have been recognised as a sign that a radio operator might have fallen into enemy hands, but apparently it had been treated as a simple omission.

From 12 May onwards, the messages from Lorient all contained the correct security check, but Joyce now believed that someone was trying to impersonate the fist of the original operator, because there was a sudden tendency to elongate the last dot or dash in each letter, which resulted in certain letters getting mixed up.

Joyce’s conclusion was that the Lorient circuit’s chief radio operator had been arrested on or around 9 May. When forced to send false information by her German captors, she’d tried giving a warning by missing her security checks. From 12 May onwards, the original operator had been replaced by a German radio operator who was trying to imitate her style.

*

It was late afternoon when Eugene returned. Joyce’s report only confirmed what he’d learned on the street.

‘Everyone’s terrified,’ Eugene told Rosie, as he sat on a battered chair, with an intense scowl and a drumming foot. ‘The few people I found barely spoke to me. In the end I had to turn nasty to get any information at all.

‘Nobody knows how it went down, but the Gestapo must have had someone working inside my organisation for a long time, because they picked everyone up in a single swoop. Madame Mercier died under torture last Friday. They picked up the girls who worked in the laundry, my engineers in the U-boat yards, a few messengers, both wireless operators and people living at the last two houses they transmitted from. As far as I can tell, Alois Clement is the only person who escaped arrest.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Rosie said, as she approached Eugene. ‘Would you like some wine? It’ll help you calm down.’

Rosie passed over an enamel mug and Eugene downed it in three quick glugs.

‘They’ve executed more than a dozen. A couple were shot, but most were hung at the gallows outside Lorient station and left on show.’

Tears welled in Eugene’s eyes as Rosie put