Read Waiting for the Violins for Free Online

are under my protection.” She was glad for his protection, but the bulge in his white trousers told her she would have to pay for it.
     
    “See? That’s the way to win a war.” Dora rubbed out the butt of her cigarette. “Hero rescues heroine, shags her, and in the morning he drives away the enemy.”
    Antonia dropped the book on the floor. “Yeah, but what about us? Who do we get to shag?”
     
    *
     
    Antonia took her seat in the classroom, little units of dots and dashes buzzing through her head. After two months of memorizing Morse code, she was finally ready for real wireless transmitters.
    “Welcome to our new ‘pianists,’ the instructor said. “As you are aware, every team sent into the war zone will have a radio operator to maintain contact with headquarters. However, all agents are required to have some knowledge of the skill.
    “Please make up groups of two and put on the earphones,” he said. “We’ll start with you, Miss Forrester. You are to transmit this message, and you, Mr. Devon, will receive and transcribe it. Then you will reverse roles. Are you ready?”
    Thus began an entire morning of back-and-forth transmitting, at first awkward and error-filled and broken by moments of frustration, then increasingly with ease. At the lunch break, the instructor signaled for them to remove the headphones.
    “Very good, both of you. Miss Forrester, you are obviously a bit nervous. Everyone has a distinct ‘fist,’ but for the moment, yours is a bit jittery. We’ll smooth that out in the coming days. We’ll also work on speed. Remember, while you’re transmitting, the enemy’s directional finders can detect you. You’ll want to send your message in less than three minutes and then shut down.”
    “Will we be carrying a radio like this?” Antonia gestured toward the black box on the table that they’d been using.
    “We hope not. We’ve got our men working on developing smaller versions that can fit into a valise.”
    “What about encrypting?” Antonia asked. “Surely we’re not going to transmit open messages.”
    “No, of course not. We use what we call ‘poem codes.’ To be precise, the sender and receiver have a pre-arranged poem, like a Shakespeare sonnet. The sender chooses some phrases from the poem and gives each of their letters a number. The numbers make up the key for some cypher that is then used to transmit the message.”
    Antonia frowned. “What happens if the agent is captured and forced to reveal the poem?”
    “Well, that’s the weakness, of course. Obviously, the idea is to not be captured.”
    Obviously.
     
    *
     
    “Sabotage,” the instructor said, pausing with upraised chalk, “is a fine art.”
    A soft chuckle went through the room of a dozen students.
    One of the men in the front row spoke, a well-muscled soldier whose posture, even when he sat, projected confrontation. “I don’t see what’s so fine art about jammin’ a few sticks of dynamite under a railway track and runnin’ like hell.”
    The rest of the class laughed, and the soldier glanced over his shoulder at his admirers.
    The instructor was unperturbed. “On lucky days, lads like you can do that, and get away with it. But the tracks are patrolled, and you could get caught. And if you just blow up tracks, the enemy can replace them in a day.” He turned to the blackboard.
    “So let’s look at some other tools,” he said, and chalked a list onto the board, naming them as he wrote: “plastic explosives, shaped charges, time fuses, incendiaries in coal piles, abrasive lubricants, land mines disguised as cow dung, and…” he wrote in large letters at the bottom, “especially for you, Mr. Rhydderch, sledge hammers.”
    He turned to face the class again. “Imagine, if you will, the advantage of paralyzing a train full of German troops and supplies halfway to the front. If you strike the locomotive rather than the track, you have an enormous obstacle frozen on that track, an obstacle that