“And you thought of one?”

“I told you, shooting them down doesn’t work because the bomb still goes off.”

“So you’ve found a way to keep the bomb from going off?” she said, thinking, He can’t have. The RAF was never able to devise a way to disable the V-1s’ bombs in flight.

“No. I found a way to turn them round and send them back across the Channel. Or at any rate away from the target.”

“This isn’t the lassoing-it-with-a-rope plan, is it?”

“No.” He laughed. “This doesn’t require a rope or cannons. All that’s needed is a Spitfire and some expert flying. That’s the beauty of it. All I do is catch up to the V-1 till the Spitfire’s just below it—”

And edge your wing under the V-1’s fin, she thought, and then angle your plane slightly so the fin tips up, disrupts the airflow, and sends the rocket careening off course.

She had read about the practice of V-1 tipping when she was prepping for this assignment. But it was an incredibly dangerous thing to attempt. The contact could send the Spitfire into a disastrous tailspin. Or, if the Spitfire came up on the V-1 too fast, they could both explode.

The sickening thought flickered through her mind that this was the reason the net hadn’t prevented her from driving him out of the way of those V-1s. It hadn’t mattered that she’d saved his life because he was going to be killed tipping them.

“And then we come up under the wing,” he was saying, and demonstrated, bringing one of his hands up under the other, “and tilt it ever so slightly”—he nudged the hand on top—“so that it tips.” The hand on top angled up and then veered off. “The rocket’s got a delicate gyroscopic mechanism. Most of the time we needn’t even touch it.”

He demonstrated it again, this time without his hands touching, and as she watched him, boyishly intent on explaining how it worked, she had the same feeling she’d had in Whitehall that afternoon, that there was something familiar about him.

“The slipstream does the work for us,” he said, “and the V-1 goes spiraling down into the Channel, or, if we’re truly lucky, back to France and the launcher it came from, without us so much as laying a finger on it. We’ve downed thirty already this week.”

And that’s why the number of rockets has been down, she thought. Not because of Intelligence’s misinformation campaign, but because Stephen and his fellow pilots have been playing “Tag, you’re it” with the rockets.

“—And not a single casualty on the ground,” he was saying happily. “But that’s not the best of it. What I came to tell you—”

“Triumph!” someone called from the corridor.

Finally, she thought. “In here!” she called back.

“Triumph?” Stephen said. “I thought your name was Kent.”

“They’ve been calling me that since the motorcycle incident,” she explained, wondering why Fairchild hadn’t appeared. “That and De Havilland and Norton,” she said. “The name of every motorcycle they can think of, in fact. Oh, and also Lawrence of Arabia. Because he crashed his motorcycle, you know.”