Princess Elizabeth's Spy(93)

“How are we going to meet the sub?” Audrey asked. “All the ships and boats have been confiscated since Dunkirk.”

“We have a small fishing skiff hidden in the barn,” Boothby answered. “We’ll use that to meet the submarine.”

“In this weather?” Poulter said. “Don’t you think that’s a bit dangerous?”

Gregory narrowed his eyes. His escape from the RAF, from Britain, from all of his problems, was in his reach—he wasn’t about to let the chance slip away. “Do we have another option?”


Beeston Regis was a village just in Norfolk, near the coast of the North Sea. Roman in origin, it was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Besetune. Now, it was just a small village like so many others. The ruins of St. Mary’s Priory drew a few tourists before the war, but other than that, it was quiet, with one main street, boasting one bank, one grocery, one pharmacy, one barber shop, and one beauty parlor.

Mary Manley, a young slim girl of just eighteen, was making her way from the house she shared with her mother, father, and five sisters just outside of town, up the hill to Beeston Bump. She was going to work, as a radio operator at the Y-station. Beeston Bump was one of the many Y-stations in a network of Signals Intelligence collection sites. These stations collected material to be passed to the War Office’s Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley.

It was a damp, dark evening and the higher she climbed, the stronger the icy wind blew. It smelled of salt water and seaweed. Cold and wet, Mary was grateful to reach the concrete bunker and go inside. Once past the entrance, she took off her coat, hat, and heavy wool mittens and put them in her cubby. She flashed her badge to the guard on duty, Lenny Doyle, even though they had known each other since they had been toddlers and he’d stuck chewing gum in her long, honey-colored hair and she’d had to get it cut out. She hated him from then on and got in the habit of avoiding him. But now they worked together. He scrutinized her photograph on her card.

“Come on, Lenny,” she said, “it’s the same as yesterday and the same as the day before that. And it’ll be the same tomorrow.”

“Just doing my job, Mary. Just doing my job.” He handed it back to her.

“Yes, I feel so much safer with you here.”

She marched into the radio room, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking on the concrete, and slid into her seat between two other women before Mr. Leaper could notice she was late.

It was dim in the room, and damp, the smell of wet concrete pronounced. In front of her, the dials of her RCA AR-77 communications receiver glowed. She slipped on her heavy black headphones and listened.

Her job was to eavesdrop on Morse code that German senders were tapping out throughout Europe. She turned her receiver to “her” band of frequencies and listened in.

The German Morse code senders were fast, especially the professionals at BdU, the Kriegsmarine headquarters. However, they each had their own fist. They could recognize them as easily as seeing a familiar face across a room.

This evening, however, Mary heard an unfamiliar fist.

Instead of the typical burst of fast-paced typing, this transmission was slow, with awkward pauses, indicating uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the transmitter.

Still, she recorded the transmission on an oscillograph, creating a radio “fingerprint,” called a Tina, and then transcribed the Morse code that had been sent.

After the tentative sender had finished, there was a rapid-fire burst of code as response from whoever received it. He was a radio operator on one of the Nazi U-boats, one that was very close to the coast.

They went back and forth a few times, the amateur and the Nazi, and then the channel went ominously silent.

Mary felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise. She went to the oscillograph and collected the printout. Usually she just put it in a metal basket to be collected at the end of her shift, bundled up with the rest of the communiqués, and sent on by motorcycle courier to Bletchley Park.

Still …

She got down a Morse code book from a shelf and began to decode.

“Miss Manley!” called Martin Leaper from across the room. He was a narrow middle-aged man with a narrow pencil mustache, and the station’s overseer. The memo Frain had dispatched to all the Y-stations by motorcycle courier was lying on his desk, unread.

Mary didn’t look up from her translating. “Sir,” she said, “you’re going to want to look at this.”

“Yes, Miss Manley?” he said, pursing his lips and walking over.

“Sir, someone here, in England, just signaled to a U-boat.”

“What?”

“It could be a spy!” she ventured. “A spy signaling a U-boat for a pickup!”