by Colin Smith
***
Around the Russian compound police station it was becoming obvious that something was up. Chauffeured staff cars came and went. Hare screeched to a halt in a new jeep, shouted something to his driver, and rushed inside. The night watch of bearded young Russian Orthodox priests in their black stove pipe hats and grubby cassocks, guardians of the icons in the nearby onion domed church, watched this unprecedented after dinner activity with mixed feelings. In Russia the Germans scourged the Bolshevik anti-Christs and they had heard that the faithful had welcomed their Nazi deliverers in the name of the blessed Romanov martyrs. Had Rommel at last broken through in Egypt?
In the basement lock up the prisoners awaiting trial, mostly Arabs accused of minor thefts and soldiers sobering up in the knowledge that military escorts would soon be transferring them to even less salubrious beds in their own guard rooms, were also aware that this was no ordinary night. For the last hour they had heard nothing but car doors slamming, boots scraping on the gravel, people saying, “This way sir.”
An ops room of sorts had been set up in the Assistant Super’s office. His desk had been cleared and a large scale street plan covering Jerusalem within and without its ancient ramparts had been placed upon it. Two trestle tables had also been moved in and placed against the walls. On both of these rested heavy wireless transmitters, their metal cases painted sand yellow. Before one set sat an infantry signaller with his headphones on.
This was for the use of the commanding officer of the infantry battalion on internal security duty in the city. It happened to be the same battalion whose accident during the demonstration at Sarafand had saved the lives of the High Commissioner’s party. They had expected to be on the El Alamein line by now and its officers felt they had been shabbily treated. Whatever happened at Sarafand was hardly their fault. The battalion was commanded by a surprisingly young Lieutenant-Colonel who, Calderwell noted, really did have a moustache with points you could see from behind his head. Not far from the police station he had about two hundred of his men waiting in trucks, jeeps and bren-gun carriers and ready to cordon off any section of the city just as fast as they could be led there by the two Palestine Police motorcyclists attached to them.
The other set was Hare’s wireless link to his Direction Finding teams. They were about three miles apart, one on the Mount of Olives and the other on French Hill. The aerial leads from both sets went out of the office’s barred window and up to the flat roof where a twelve foot tall antennae had been set up which, given the distances involved, was excessive but Hare wasn’t taking any chances. As a result of his pleading an extra telephone had been installed on his radio table and the police switchboard at the Russian Compound ordered to give it absolute priority. This was to call the municipal power station.
“You see we know De Wet has some hot stuff and will be itching to send and he’s probably banking on getting a short message through before we can get a proper fix,” Hare explained in conference with Calderwell, the Assistant Super and the battalion commander. “It’s always much harder in a city. Well, I’ve arranged for some help with the electricity authority. Its success depends entirely on whether our man is powering his transmitter from the mains or by battery. Unless he’s in the great outdoors my betting is that De Wet and his pal will save their batteries and plug in. Let’s hope so. As soon as we get a fix on a certain area we’re going to have the power switched off in stages. Apparently, they can almost do this street by street. When his transmitter goes off the air we’re going to have a very good idea where he is. Once the infantry have cordoned it off I can search it by having the DF teams come up close. By then it won’t matter if he’s switched to batteries.”
“Who is this De Wet?” asked the best moustache.
This rather surprised them. Surely somebody would have told him by now?
“We think he’s a German agent,” said the Assistant Super. “He and his accomplice have been posing as South African officers but they’re probably something else by now.”
“I see,” said the soldier who plainly didn’t.
“Who do your men think we’re looking for?” asked Calderwell.
“Arabs I think,” he said.
“Well, as long as they cordon the right place off, don’t let anybody in or out I don’t suppose it matters much who they think they’re after,” said the Assistant Super.
“I don’t suppose it does,” agreed the Colonel.
Somewhere in the back of his mind Calderwell heard the faint ringing of an alarm bell but what he was supposed to be alarmed about? As long as the cordon was watertight it would work. Had to. So he contented himself with, “Let’s hope they’re not in the old city. That can be a real bugger.”
“Yes it can but our chaps will show you how to do it,” assured he Assistant Super. “We’ve sealed off places in there before.” Sometimes Calderwell could be such a pain in the arse, always negative, a real wet blanket.
“Well, if the electricity people can find him as fast as you think they can it’s not a bad plan at all,” the infantry officer said. “Clever stuff.”
“If it bloody works,” said Calderwell with a look that convinced Hare that Calderwell suspected he was sleeping with Mitzi. How did he tell him that he had never quite managed it? He supposed he didn’t.
“Are both your teams in place now?” asked the Assistant Super, dimly aware of some unexplained friction these two.
“Yes, Mount of Olives has just reported in and French Hill has been in place some time. There’s a Marmon-Herrington car and a van for the special operators in each team. We’re also covering from Sarafand, listening to all the frequencies we got on that signals plan. It’s good training for what they’ll be getting up to with 8th Army. Good for me too,” he added. “I’ve just heard I might be going up with them for a while.”
“Lucky sod,” said the Colonel. He said it with such vehemence it made his moustache quiver.
There was no reaction from Calderwell. Hare was not at all sure he had heard him. The policeman’s only response was: “So let’s hope the bastard’s feeling talkative tonight.” Then, “Checked your generators?”
***
Lance Corporal Clarence Colley could hardly keep his fingertips on the mug’s enamel while he sipped his scalding tea which was very sweet with a glob of condensed milk stirred into it. Very glad of it he was too. It was amazing how chilly this place got once the sun was down though he had been told it would get even colder at night once they were in Egypt’s Western Desert.
Colley, a driver and mechanic was the generator man on French Hill, a feature named after one of Allenby’s brigadiers who, a quarter of a century before had clashed with the Turkish rearguard thereabouts. It was a rocky place, with a stone Arab shepherd’s house on its lower slopes and twisted olive and carob trees in a dip just below its summit. In daylight, parts of the Old City’s Crusader walls some three miles away were visible through gaps in the flat roofed housing the Arabs were erecting to match the Jewish suburbs mushrooming on the western side of the city.
There were four British soldiers on the hill. Two of them were male special operators, a sergeant and a lance-corporal. The other two driver mechanics for the Marmon-Herrington armoured car and the tall fifteen-hundredweight they called the breadvan because it reminded them of the bakers’ delivery vans at home. Both vehicles served as a mobile set rooms for the special operators. Colley drove the breadvan which, quite apart from the operators’ wireless sets, was laden with the generator and everybody’s personal kit. On the way up it had refused to move on the steepest part until the generator had been removed and carried up.
The Marmon-Herrington had not done much better, sliding about all over the place. Colley, with his mechanic’s eye, was not all that surprised. The South Africans, who made them, thought the world of these armoured cars but they were mongrel mechanics, not much better than those homegrown contraptions the Palestine coppers drove about in. Basically they were the engine and chassis of
a three ton Ford truck with a load of armoured plate welded onto it. For special wireless purposes its Vickers machine gun and the revolving mechanism for its turret had been removed and a Hallicraft wireless fitted on a bench over the emergency water tank. They had just had some old Lewis machine guns attached to the outside of the turret rim, mainly to make it look something like a regular armoured car. Load of bollocks really. Its diamond shaped loop aerial was a dead giveaway. Anybody who knew about direction finding would know what they were up to.
Hare had told them to try and treat this operation as a dress rehearsal for the desert so once they set up and tuned in they had done the Desert Rat thing and brewed the tea on some petrol soaked earth in a cut down fuel can. They had been on standby to go up to Alamein for the last month. Colley thought they had probably all got to the point where they just wanted to get it over with.
To be honest, he was quite curious. A bit scared too of course. They’d been told they would not be far behind the forward tanks. A couple of German speaking Poles were going to be attached to them. Apparently, Jerry was no more immune than the British to breaking into plain speech when he was excited. But they weren’t actually going to be inside the tanks and neither were they infantry so the chances were they would come out in one piece. At least it might shut his Dad up. Colley senior, who had been gassed in France during the last war and bombed at home during this one, had taken in his letters to making scathing remarks about the quality of his eldest son’s campaigning. References to “Cook’s Tours” and “Busman’s Holidays” were frequently employed. He sometimes wished for a small wound just to hear him say sorry. Not that he would.
Colley hadn’t the foggiest idea what special wireless units did until he was posted to one. Of course, there was a good reason for that. They were supposed to be a secret though everybody had them. They had just heard how an Aussie raid had had put the whole of Rommel’s forward listening unit into the bag.
There was a buzz that their own commanding officer was going to be Hare as the captain who had the job, who everybody liked, had recently turned the colour of a banana skin overnight and was now in an isolation ward being treated for a severe attack of jaundice. As far as Colley was concerned this was very bad news. Last week Hare had given him the biggest bollocking he had ever received in the army when his generator went down just before they could get a fix on this wog transmitter or whatever it was they were after.
What had really pissed him off was that it wasn’t really his fault. How were you supposed to know when a fan belt was going to snap? It was all very well for Hare to say that he should have changed it more often but he should try getting them out of the Signals’ Quarter Master Sergeant-Major down at Sarafand. You’d think the bugger paid for them himself.
Colley listened to the sweet hum of his generator now, dominating all other night sounds in its monopitched persistency. He gulped the last of his scalding tea down, felt the glow of it in his guts, contemplated a cigarette, but then thought better of it and picked up his rifle which was leaning against one of the carobs. Since this was a dress rehearsal the senior special operator in charge of the team, a sergeant, had decided that he and the other driver should take turns mounting guard, shoo off any curious locals. He knew the sergeant wouldn’t mind but sentries were not supposed to smoke and it was just possible Hare might turn up. For a second he thought he heard a dip in the tone of the generator that might indicate the beginning of fuel starvation. But when he walked over to it on its stand outside the breadvan, unscrewed the petrol cap and stuck his finger inside the tank it was still almost full. He felt the gravity feed tube and it seemed alright, no leaks.
A dim light shone through the rear doors of the van which were entered by a set of steps like those you saw in pictures of a gypsy’s caravan. The doors were partly open and leaking little clouds of cigarette smoke into the night. Colley glanced inside. The first thing he saw was a pair of boots with scuffed soles. These were on the feet of the other driver who lay on the floor wrapped in a blanket trying to get some sleep until Colley came to wake him for his turn at guard. Seated and facing one of the van’s wooden walls, his face cast in a greenish hue from the flickering dials before him, was the sergeant special operator wearing headphones and a throat mike. Above his head was a wheel calibrated with the degrees of the compass for turning the loop aerial on the van’s roof until the best reception of the intercepted signals indicated you had a fix on it. The other special operator was in the Marmon Herrington listening to another frequency. They had rigged a voice radio link between the two vehicles. The sergeant turned, saw him looking in, raised his eyebrows quizzically and stuck his right thumb up, cigarette in his curled fingers.
“Alright?” he yelled over the hum of the generator.
“Alright,” Colley mouthed back, gesturing with his own thumb, knowing the sergeant would not be able to hear a word he said through his earphones.
He walked to the edge of the hill. Below him he could just make out the dark bulk of the Arab farmer’s house. There were no lights on. A night bird rattled among the trees. Colley looked at the wristwatch he had acquired at a pawnshop in Tel Aviv. He was rather pleased with it. It was Swiss or German and had luminous numerals. Not that he needed them tonight. A waxing moon lit up a crowded sky. It was almost eleven o’ clock. Colley thought he heard a shout from the bread van and turned to see if he could make out whether its aerial was moving. A star shot across the heavens.
20 - Close Calls
Jubilation in the ops room. Intercept loud and clear, hardly any frequency drift. Fixes from both DF teams coming in. To the city map with protractor, pencil and ruler. Take the bearings given by each position. Draw lines from Mount of Olives. Draw lines from French Hill. The lines cross in the vicinity of Jerusalem station. Somebody, perhaps it was the Assistant Super, said, “Don’t say he’s on a bloody train!”
“At least it’s not the Old City,” said Calderwell.
Hare was on the telephone to the electricity authority. “Probably just north of the station,” he said. “Can you start now? Street by street. Yes, time it as you do it so we can co-ordinate.”
The phone went down and Hare was on his throat mike to his teams on Hill and Mount. “Well done. We think it’s somewhere close to the railway station. If he’s on the mains supply he should go down any moment now. As soon as we know roughly where he is I’ll call you in for the kill. Understood?”
Calderwell watched and listened, trying not to look too impressed. The smoking was industrial.
***
Lang was almost half way through the message when the room was plunged into darkness and the lights died on his set. “Shit,” he said.
“A power failure?” said the Templer.
“Must be. I shall have to use the batteries.” Lang groped in the Siemens’ suitcase for the pencil torch he kept there.
The Templer lit a couple of candles that had been left in the kitchen. Power failures were not uncommon. For a moment he thought of going to the front door to see whether all the other lights in the streets were out; then he remembered that there wouldn’t be any lights showing anyway because of the blackout.
***
Hare was tuned into Lang’s frequency now and heard his transmission go down. He picked up the telephone to the electricity company. “That’s it. The last one. How many? Four streets. Let’s have the names then.” Somebody gave him pencil and paper. The man at the other end gave him the Hebrew names too quickly and he had to ask him to repeat them, slowly this time. When at last he had them down he said, “You’ve done very well for us. Now switch it back on. His batteries may be low and we want him talking again.” Then he rushed over to the map, waving his piece of paper, pursued by best moustache who had just told his signaller to stand by.
***
Lang was about to use the batteries in when the lights went back on. He retuned then tapped out their call sign. Athens came on the air very quickly and asked if he wanted to change frequenc
ies and whether he would be sending the entire message again. Lang cut them off by bursting into the Wehrmacht’s Q code for wireless procedure.
First of all he gave them QAT which was the impertinent, “Listen...don’t interrupt.” This was followed this by QZP which meant “transmitter trouble”, not strictly true but there wasn’t a Q code for power failure and the whole point of it was to avoid lengthy explanations.
Back came a humble QRV: “I am ready to receive”. Lang tapped out his R38 call sign again three times which was the agreed security check at this point to show that he wasn’t transmitting with a gun to head. He thought, in the circumstances, it might be reassuring for Athens.
They came back with an admiring QRK. They were receiving him well. Rather than delay matters even further by asking them how many groups they had got before the break Lang started sending his message from the beginning.
***
“Two of you take the breadvans down there,” Hare was saying over his set. “Of course, leave the bloody generator with the others. Use your accumulators. Rendezvous at the railway station. He should be back on air again now. You’ll probably be able to pick him up on his way down there. You know where the station is do you? Yes, skirt the Jaffa gate, on the Bethlehem road, Good man. I’ll be waiting for you there.”
