At Wireless Station 53a, Paula Drysdale was becoming anxious. She had tuned in to André’s frequency according to her Sunday midnight sked and waited, and waited, and waited. André did not sign in; how could he, he was dead. Now although Paula had experienced delayed transmissions many times before, this time her intuition told her there was something radically wrong. Maybe her worry had been heightened by the rumor that wireless operators were being located and captured by the Germans in large numbers, in fact, the statistic was spreading that over the past year three out of four had ‘disappeared’.
Paula sat patiently for a whole hour but then she had to move onto her next contact after telling her shift supervisor of the missed sked. The supervisor informed the coding department which then sent over the standard coded message for Paula to try and initiate contact with André in three hours time; that would be Monday, January 5 at 4:0 a.m.. Paula knew the contact coding for André by heart, but procedure required that she await official sanction before trying. There was a grave danger in her sending an initiating message because, if André and his transmitter had been located, the Germans might be listening in if he had spilled the transmission frequency to them. Hence the three hour wait; maybe in this time the Germans would decide that Grendon was not going to transmit and retire for the night. It was a cat and mouse game.
The three hours past, then, calming a racing pulse, Paula sent out on André’s frequency the short initiation message. But no response; no André. With a slightly sick feeling in her stomach, she continued her night’s work. This was the third operator in six months that she had ‘lost’. She should have become used to the sadness by now, but she had not.