The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 37: The Correspondent

Pavlov's Wireless Operator was a young man named Ilan Hait. He manned a radio in the fourth floor of the apartment building, its antenna raised up through one of the many holes in the bombed-out roof.

Despite his position on the top floor of the building, Hait did not work as a look-out. The radio was too valuable to place near an external wall. Rifle or machinegun bullets could potentially penetrate the brick and destroy radio's delicate machinery. So it was for the machine's safety, not Hait's, that he was placed as close to the very center of Pavlov's House as possible.

Jillian coveted Hait's radio. She had been sneaking out in the middle of the night, up the stairs and out onto the broken roof. From there she lay on her belly and grimaced against the wind that howled off the Volga while she broadcast her O.S.S. reports. She didn't speak into the transmitter from fear of being overheard and caught. Instead she set her spy radio to the covert channel she had been assigned and broadcast her messages in code, turning the receiver on and off to simulate a series of dashes and dots.

She had originally learned that technique from other foreign correspondents who often lacked access to teletype machines in the field. They'd developed the method to transmit their stories in morse code. Now Jillian used the same methodology, but she didn't broadcast in morse code, she did so in America's spy code.

Jillian was putting herself, the Russian soldiers, and all the orphans at risk. Soviet Intelligence Officers could, potentially, overhear her signal and notice the unfamiliar code. Even if they couldn't crack it, they could triangulate her signal and determine the location of her broadcast. The NKVD wouldn't hesitate to arrest everyone occupying Pavlov's House in their zeal to catch a spy. Jillian just hoped the NKVD was too busy right now to bother. So far that hope had been realized. The Stalingrad NKVD weren't engaging in their typical skullduggery because they were too busy acting as shock troops on the front line.

Any moment that could change. With the great victory of Operation Uranus the name of the recent Russian sneak attack, an NKVD unit might start monitoring radio traffic again, trying to intercept German communications. Every time Jillian left the house it was dangerous. Not only was she in danger of waking a sleeping soldier and getting caught with the spy radio, not only was she at risk of being spotted in the moon or starlight and shot by a German sniper, she was also in danger of being overheard by the NKVD.

But every night Jillian faced that danger, broadcasting or re-broadcasting messages with everything she could learn about the successful Russian Offensive. America had to know.

That took a lot of courage, but it also took a lot of electricity. The battery Jillian had stolen from Natasha's mother's car was almost out of power, and Jillian didn't expect to find another. There were plenty of abandoned vehicles in Stalingrad, but they were military vehicles: tanks, half-tracks, and kubelwagens. Military vehicles didn't have battery-powered ignitions. Once her battery died, Jillian's radio would be silenced.

Ilan Hait operated a different kind of radio. Unlike Jillian's spy set, high tech and compact, Ilan's radio wasn't designed to be hidden in a valise. Quite the opposite – Ilan's radio weighted over a hundred pounds. But it was designed to break down into pieces so the different members of the platoon could carry it through battle. When assembled it took up as much space as a bookshelf.

But Ilan's radio had one major advantage over Jillian's model: Ilan's radio could be re-charged by hand. When the battery died, members of Pavlov's platoon took turns cranking it, and soon it was operational again. Jillian had decided she needed the use of that radio.

"Don't you like music?" she asked of Hait the night after the two Red Army pincers met up in Kalach. She spoke in Yiddish, using words she had learned from her grandmother.