Reggie got the flight off smoothly the next morning despite some fog low to the ground. Autumn weather had set in, but they rose through the clouds into blue skies above. As soon as they did, they saw two fighter planes head toward them. Reggie tried to outrun them. They hadn’t picked up their wounded yet, and Reggie played tag in and out of the cloud cover with the planes. He thought he had outflown them when a third one appeared just above and opened fire. The others flew close, and they could see Reggie in the pilot seat when they too opened fire on them. The three fighter planes shot through their fuselage and peppered the plane with hits. The C-47 plummeted with a trail of smoke behind it, and hit the ground with a massive explosion from a full tank of fuel. The copilot had radioed back to the base while they were under attack, before they killed him. Reggie was already dead, and one of the corpsmen had taken a direct hit, and he said the nurse in charge was down too. He went off the airwaves after that.

A reconnaissance team went out looking for the wreckage later that day and saw where it had gone down. There was a blackened crater where the plane had exploded close to the location the copilot had given them. There was some debris in the area, and nothing else left. The crew of five had died when the plane crashed, and some before. There had been no other passengers, no wounded aboard.

The crew of the reconnaissance plane was silent on the way back. The successful Luftwaffe kill was confirmed when they reached the base, and the names of those who had died were reported to the commanding officer and the War Office. Their names were listed on a bulletin board in the mess hall, and in the nurses’ dormitory. Word of mouth spread like wildfire, as it always did. Emma sat in her room that night, crying, surrounded by her friends. It was the first of their air evac transport planes that had been shot down in months. Morale plummeted when that happened. Everyone in the squadron had known Pru and loved her.

Emma could only imagine how her parents felt, having lost a son only two months before. And Max had lost both his siblings now. She sobbed in the arms of her fellow nurses. Her American counterparts had come to love Pru as much as she did.