by Roger Bax
I remembered now whom he meant. It was a woman he’d met on our trip and got a lot of information from about what happened when the Russians went into Tallinn. I said, “You mean the dressmaker—Rosa?”
“That’s the dame. I delivered a letter for her to some friends of hers in Texas. My, was she bitter about the Russians! I wish I could remember her second name.”
“She could be very useful,” I said. “Definitely worth trying to trace. She might help with the ticket, and she’d be someone to go to in a jam.”
“I expect Svetlana will remember her address,” said Denny confidently. For the moment, we left it at that.
“What worries me most,” I told Steve, “is the difficulty of communicating with you after you’re back in Moscow. However carefully we make our arrangements before you leave here there are bound to be a lot of uncertainties until the very last minute. We can hardly conspire through the open post or by cable. It seems to me we should need to have a long talk with you about once a week.”
“It’s a bit far to commute,” said Steve, with a grin.
The difficulty loomed larger the more we thought about it. We should have to depend on Steve for making all the arrangements and for letting us know that they were made. Suppose, for instance, that in the last week or so Marya found she wouldn’t be going to Tallinn after all, or Svetlana fell ill, or the time of the rendezvous had to be changed. How could he let us know?
I poured Steve out some more whisky, and the sight of it must have stimulated him. He said: “I wouldn’t have any trouble sending you short messages while you were still in London. I could send service cables to my bureau here and you could pick them up. They’d play. There could be a key word at the beginning of the cables which showed they were for you. I shouldn’t be able to give you a lot of information, unless we worked out an elaborate code, but I could give you the answers on some of the points we’d left open.”
“I don’t see how,” said Denny. “I thought the censor always stopped cables he didn’t understand.”
“Ah, but he would understand. Let’s take an example. You’ll want to know that I’ve fixed up something satisfactory about, say, Svetlana’s ticket. I can’t cable that in so many words, but I can cable asking our chap Donovan to send me out a couple of silk shirts. We can arrange beforehand that that means it’s okay about the ticket. Or I could cable the bureau to send flowers to an old friend in Bootle. That could mean I was having trouble. If we make a list in advance of all the main items of information on which you’ll need assurance, with the alternative answers, we can cover all the chief possibilities without risk. How’s that for an idea?”
It seemed fine to us, but it didn’t get us over the main problem. I said, “That’s going to be all right while we’re in touch with your office, but if all goes well we’ll be on the high seas in a few weeks from now, and we’ll have to allow ourselves at least two months to get to the Baltic.”
“Hell,” said Steve, “the Mayflower got to America in three months!”
Denny and I laughed. I said: “Well, we’re not the Mayflower. We shan’t dare stick our noses out except in a flat calm.”
I could see Steve wasn’t inclined to accept our own estimate of our sailing abilities, but he didn’t try to argue about our proposed timetable. He was wrestling with another idea, and when he produced it it was something worth waiting for.
“Why shouldn’t we use my broadcasts for communicating?” he said. “I’m on a regular schedule, so you’d know just when you could get me.”
“H’rrrmp!” I said. “It would be a pleasure. But I still don’t get it. What about the censor?”
“We’d have a real code. I’ve always wanted to try that sort of thing.” Steve’s eyes shone. He was right back to the days when Treasure Island had been the real world to him. “I’ll have to work it out, but it’ll be something quite simple. How’s your shorthand, Philip?”
“Rusty,” I said, “but I think I could get you down if you spoke slowly.”
“That’s all I need. Of course, there wouldn’t be a message in every broadcast. I should give you a harmless keyword at the beginning of the talk if there was something coming that you needed to hear, and if I didn’t give it you could switch off. For instance, I could start the broadcast with the word ‘today’ if there was meat in it. ‘Today all Moscow is in holiday mood’—that sort of thing. Then you’d take it down verbatim and extract what you needed. Say every ninth word, counting the keyword ‘today’ as the first word. The censors are pretty dumb—look how they always pass anything ironical that we send. If they can’t smell out a simple subtlety like saying ‘all the Russians simply love the N.K.V.D.’ they’re not likely to start counting words.”
“I’m getting carried away,” I said. “For heaven’s sake let’s not get over-confident.”
I took a drink and thought about Steve’s plan. I knew the Moscow censors as well as anyone, and I realized that Steve was right. They didn’t look much below the surface and they certainly wouldn’t search for a code unless they suspected that one existed. The fact that messages would be comparatively rare would be an additional safeguard.
“It’s a cinch,” said Steve. “I’ll knock something out tonight—a trial message of some sort—and we’ll give the system the once-over tomorrow. I’m sure it’ll work. If it does, you’ll be kept informed right up to the last minute. You’ll have to take a good portable radio to sea with you. If I go to Leningrad I’ll even be able to broadcast from there. I’ll be able to give you an eleventh-hour situation report. Gee, what a story it’s going to be!”
A picture flashed through my mind of Denny trying to hold Dawn in half a gale while I bounced about in the bilge trying to get a broadcast down in shorthand by the light of a hurricane lamp. It would be a story all right!
There wasn’t very much more we could discuss that night. I felt we’d made good progress, particularly in deciding on the general area of operations. The next thing was to get hold of a chart of the Tallinn district and some good guide-books about the town and neighbourhood, and to give a little more thought to the nautical side of the undertaking. We talked for a while about general matters and then the party broke up. We arranged to meet again the following evening at the same time. Steve said he planned to be in London for just under a fortnight, but naturally he’d got a lot of people to see.
Next morning early I went along to the Admiralty chart agents and bought a copy of the Baltic Pilot. I also got some fairly large-scale charts of the Tallinn approaches and of the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, showing the northern coast. We should need a lot more charts later on, but these seemed to be the essential ones for preliminary planning. I was very happy about the way circumstances had conspired to make us choose Tallinn. To reach it, we shouldn’t have to go very far into the Gulf or to spend long there. It was within comparatively easy sailing of Stockholm if we had a fair wind, and though it was set in a bay, like so many ports, its approaches didn’t look quite such an obvious trap as the approaches to Riga.
I was eager to settle down to serious study of the charts, but I thought I had better assemble as much raw material as possible before we went into a huddle again that night. By the late afternoon I had acquired half a dozen books about the Baltic States, the Baltic Sea and Tallinn. As it happened, they turned out to be either very much out of date or much too slight and general for my purposes. There was no recent Baedeker, and most of the books related to the time when Estonia had been either a part of old Tsarist Russia or—for a brief period—an independent State. But after all it was topography rather than history that we were interested in, and I managed to find one passable map of the district.
Steve arrived at the flat just before nine looking disgustingly pleased with himself, and I concluded that he’d made progress with his cypher. He could barely wait until Denny arrived before producing a couple of sheets of manuscript and settling himself down to read out what was written there. I grabbed a pencil, and af
ter a preliminary ‘H’rrrmp’ Steve started off in his rich bass.
“Hello, X.Y.Z.,” he said, “this is Steve Quillan calling you from Leningrad.” He stopped reading and said: “That’s the stock introduction. It doesn’t count for words.” Then he went on: “Today I’ve been touring this battered city, studying all the reconstruction work in progress. Leningraders have sure set themselves tremendous tasks. One of the architects, a blonde vital woman of about forty, told me that on all occasions Leningrad has reckoned to show the way to other parts of Soviet Russia in making good progress with its economic plans and that with luck and hard work it should keep its lead. Most of the buildings here that were blitzed during the long hard siege of 1942 and 1943 have now been completely rebuilt or renovated, and as you walk down the old Nevsky Prospekt you might think you were back in the ’thirties …”
Steve’s voice trailed off. “Got that?” he asked.
“Easily,” I said. “Now I know why Svetlana likes being your secretary. Carry on.”
“That’s all for now,” said Steve, “unless you’d like me to tell you more about the Nevsky Prospekt. You’ve got all you need. I’m afraid it’s a bit rough but I had to dash it off rather quickly.”
I made a quick transcription of my shorthand and underlined every ninth word, reckoning ‘today’ as the first word just as Steve had instructed. Then I wrote out the underlined words consecutively. They read ALL SET BLONDE ON WAY GOOD LUCK and after that there was a lot of rubbish which showed that the message was ended.
I felt shaky with excitement. Although I had known what was supposed to happen it did seem rather a miracle that so terse and relevant a communication should have emerged from Steve’s easy and colloquial chatter.
“You see,” said Steve, “it works. This is the night of August 13. You and Denny are lying somewhere off the coast of Estonia, waiting to go in the next day. Your nerves are all to bits with anxiety. You wonder what’s happened to Svetlana. You pick me up on your radio and you get that message. You feel like a million dollars and turn in with easy minds.”
“Steve,” I said, “you’re a wizard. I wouldn’t have believed it. The only snag I can think of is that if you make many of these propaganda broadcasts your network will give you the sack.”
Steve grinned amiably. “Don’t forget I’m due for a new assignment in October anyway. My chief’ll put it down to Moscow madness—he knows that everyone goes screwy there sooner or later. My predecessor set his room on fire! After all, I shall have to make the messages pretty friendly so as to be sure nothing will be censored out of them.”
That was something I hadn’t thought of. I remembered how, if a censor happened to be in a bad mood, he’d knock out a word here and there just to show his authority—and that would spoil the order of the code. But Steve wasn’t worried.
“In the first place,” he said, “I’ll behave myself so well from now on that they’ll think I’ve undergone a political conversion. I’ll be polite and considerate even to the censors. And I’ll give myself plenty of time before important broadcasts so that if they do cut out anything I’ll still be able to suggest an alternative wording. I don’t see any prospect of real trouble there.”
“Don’t overdo the friendliness, that’s all!” I said. “Remember they’re as suspicious of their friends as of their enemies.”
Denny had been studying the simple cryptogram with some care. He said: “I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but that message is rather an easy one. If you were trying to tell us something really complicated it would be much more difficult. If you were giving us new instructions, for instance, you might have to become quite technical.”
But Steve was confident. “You leave it to Uncle,” he said. “This is just a trial run. Before long I’ll be giving you the specifications of the latest Russian tank in a broadcast on the virtues of the Heroine Mother!”
I was more than content to leave it to him. There was no doubt that Steve’s ingenuity had swept away a big barrier. With a two-way conversation by cable in the early stages, and a one-way information service on the last lap, we should have at least a sporting chance of doing the right thing at the right time.
In good spirits we turned to examine the chart of the Tallinn approaches.
Chapter Five
We spent the next hour planning in detail how best to break another country’s laws. I sat at the table with the atlas and charts, and the other two shared the pile of guide-books. There was quite a library atmosphere about the place.
The first thing was to choose the exact spot where the attempt was to be made. We had little personal knowledge of local conditions. The best we could do was to build up some sort of picture of the Tallinn area from the rather sketchy information in the guide-books and hope that our reconstruction wouldn’t prove too different from the reality.
I’ve drawn a rough map of the area to make the position clearer. It will be seen that Tallinn lies in a bay about eight miles deep, and that the width across the entrance, between Cape Sourop in the west and Aegna Island in the east, is about ten miles. The whole bay faces roughly north-west. The single large island of Nais lies across the approaches, but there’s plenty of sea room on either side of it for ships coming into harbour. The eastern side of the bay is formed by the five-mile-long neck of land called the Viimsi Peninsula, which stretches out to Aegna Island.
In choosing a landfall there were three things to take into account. From the girls’ point of view, the nearer it was to Tallinn the better. They would have less difficulty in reaching the spot and would be less likely to attract unwelcome attention. For Denny and me, however, the exact opposite was true. An incoming dinghy would stand a greater risk of being seen near Tallinn than if it aimed to make contact some miles outside the town. Also there would be farther to row, for Dawn herself must obviously be anchored well away from the harbour to escape notice and to be ready for a quick getaway. Finally, whatever rendezvous we chose must be easily identifiable from the sea in the dark. We couldn’t afford any hide-and-seek business on the beach. We must do without any preliminary rehearsal or reconnaissance, and yet go in with the precision of a commando raid, hitting the exact spot.
We ruled out the two chief bights that make up Tallinn Harbour proper on the ground that they looked too much like the lion’s mouth. Kakomiag Bay, in the extreme west, was invitingly open to the sea, but I didn’t see anything there suggesting itself as a suitable meeting-point. I regretted, not for the first time, that I hadn’t used my few days in Tallinn more profitably.
Suddenly Steve took his head out of his guide-book and said: “Say, I guess we want to choose a location where the girls would have a good reason for being on a warm August night. What about this place Kadriorg? Just outside the town on the eastern outskirts. There’s an old palace and park there, and a fine bathing beach. So the book says. Maybe the girls could be bathing.”
“What, at ten o’clock at night?” said Denny.
Steve looked a bit dashed. “You never can tell with these darned Russians,” he said. He sank deeper into his chair and went on reading, making little growling noises to himself. But soon he was bolt upright again. “Just listen to this, folks.” He cleared his throat and read out, “‘On warm summer nights the whole of Tallinn goes out in cars to swim at Pirita’.” See what I mean—they do swim at night. The trouble with you British is that your minds are closed to new ideas. Where is Pirita, anyway?”
We found that easily enough. According to the chart it was a little coastal place on the south bank of a river about a couple of miles east of the town. From it a road or track turned northwards up the Viimsi Peninsula. Just across the river the ruins of an old monastery were marked. Since they were on the chart they must be a navigation aid but they wouldn’t be any use to us at night.
“Pirita’s about the right distance from Tallinn,” said Denny. “The girls could take an evening stroll with all the other people and then slip away somewhere.”
“That’
s right,” said Steve, “it’s a pushover.” He had that ‘human interest’ look on his face that I’d seen so often when he was broadcasting. “This Pirita place sounds just what we want. Imagine the scene on the night of August 14.… It’s a warm dry evening. The air is scented with dog-roses …” He caught my eye. “Well, with something, anyway. There are streams of young girls walking out along that road. Some are with their Red Army lovers, going off to canoodle on the banks of the river. Some are walking in pairs, hoping for a pick-up. There’s an atmosphere of holiday and gaiety. There’s a lighted café by the sea, maybe a band and dancing. Everybody’s having fun and making lots of noise. Some people are having a moonlight dip …”
“It’ll be a moonless night,” I said.
“All right, a starlight dip. You’ll allow there may be stars? Right. Our girls go out from Tallinn with the mob, their swimming things tucked conspicuously under their arms. They give the air to any fellows who may try to get fresh and they find their own quiet spot on the beach. That shouldn’t be difficult—you know most folks make for the same ten-yard strip on any beach, just to be sociable. The girls have a little swim, and then they wait for you to come in with the dinghy. How’s that?”
I said, “M’m.” I was seeing more and more clearly the crux of our problem. The only point on the beach we could be certain of hitting accurately was a distinctively lighted one. From that point of view Pirita would be all right—we could find it. But it was precisely such lighted places which would be most dangerous. There’d probably be a glow over the water from all the lights. Even if the girls were a couple of hundred yards away from the crowd there might be swimmers in the water or odd couples on the beach. I voiced my misgivings.
“Okay,” said Steve. “Let’s say the girls take a tram out to Pirita to save their feet—there is one, according to my book—and then they feel like a bit of a stroll up the Viimsi Peninsula. They walk along this coastal track. They might be going to one of the farmhouses out on the Peninsula. They keep going for a couple of miles and presently they reach a swell little bay half-way up the Peninsula, which doesn’t seem to have a name. Got it? It’s probably quite deserted. They sit down on the beach and shine a torch out to sea to guide you in. What about that?”