So the name had carried the vote. Alistair had to admit it fit the group. The boys were strong, the girls quick as darts, all five seemingly tireless and without fear. Dragonflies did not track their prey, following their meal through the air until they caught up with it. They calculated the insect’s location, direction, and speed, then lay in wait in their prey’s flight path for the chow to fly right into their mouths. That strategy was exactly the scheme the team was to follow in executing their assignments. They would be inserted directly into the enemy’s line of sight without the target being aware of their presence or the objective of their mission. Alistair had worked on the scheme from the day Germany had occupied France and perceived it was only a matter of time before America was drawn into the war. While the borders were still open, he had visited the City of Light and set up his network of Parisians willing to resist the Nazis, then returned to search out ideal candidates for the operations he had in mind. The latest intelligence reports indicated his network was still miraculously in place, but what were the odds his contacts would hold, given the French’s treacherous wide-scale collaboration with the Germans? If they were betrayed, his young agents could be snared in the net.

At the time, Alistair had not pointed out one characteristic of the dragonfly that Brad had failed to mention: In a pinch, if hungry enough, a dragonfly will eat its own kind. Who could blame it? If one of his dragonflies was caught, it was reasonable to assume the member would break under torture and identify his teammates, and who could blame him—or her? Ideally the team should have been trained separately, never laying eyes on one another, but there had not been the time, instructors, or facilities for individual drill. In fact, “team” was a misnomer for the group, since each member was assigned a different mission and would go into France as a unit but operate alone with a central point of contact—the radio operator who, alone, would report to him.

So to protect the group from one another, Alistair made sure the number one rule of the OSS training camp was rigidly enforced. To break it meant immediate dismissal. Candidates were not to reveal their real names or any details of their personal lives to one another. Unless their accent gave them away, team members were not even to know from what part of the country their mates hailed. For use as names initially, each member was assigned a letter of the alphabet, in Dragonfly’s case, A, B, C, D, and E, a cold manner of address designed to discourage intimacy.