Geoffrey and he were walking over the beach at the edge of the sea, smoking their pipes in the afternoon sunshine.
“I’ll call you up from Chelmsford on Thursday night—if the mysterious station is transmitting then,” Falconer said. “Listen, and you will no doubt hear him on about four thousand seven hundred mètres—a rather high-pitched note. If he is going I will call you up on Morse and signal ‘Forty-four.’ I’ll do the same to Lowestoft. Then you can plot with Chelmsford where he is located.”
“He may not be in Moscow at all,” remarked Finlay. “It may be some disguised station.”
“That’s exactly my own idea. But we can, no doubt, locate him, wherever he may be.”
So on the following Thursday night at about nine o’clock Falconer sat in the direction-finding station at the Works long after every one had left, listening intently upon the four thousand seven hundred mètre wave-length. He had waited in patience for about twenty-five minutes when at last there sounded a long shrill whistle, and the Bolshevik station began to poison the ether with its lies.
For five minutes he listened. Then placing his hand upon the transmitting switch, he drew it over and spoke over the wireless telephone to both Lowestoft and Pevensey, giving the code-word, “Forty-four.”
“O.K.” came the answer from both operators, and at once they began to make measurements upon the big maps in front of them.
All three direction-finding stations, at Chelmsford, at Pevensey, and at Lowestoft were now engaged, by working with each other in turn, in determining the exact position of the Bolshevik lie-factory.
In each station shrewd, clever young men, with the telephones over their ears, worked the big ebonite handles of the direction-finder—a piece of wonderful apparatus in a square box with sloping top, and several dials upon which minute scales were drawn.
The operator at Pevensey and the one at Lowestoft exchanged conversations in a jumble of numerals. Then Lowestoft called Chelmsford, and within ten minutes the position of the mysterious station was measured out upon the map, and Geoffrey, bending eagerly, found that it had been located at a point somewhere in the centre of Copenhagen, and not in Moscow at all!