His pulse felt light and quick, as though he had a small bird trapped in his chest, beating its wings to get out. The lush-leafed trees and the twilight sky circled above him. The woods were so different from the sugar-bush groves back home in northern Vermont. Everything was different.

“Je vous supplie, monsieur.” I beg you.

The soft plea snapped his attention back to the present. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, the woman was indistinct. He couldn’t tell whether she was old or young, pretty or plain. He couldn’t tell anything about her. Better that way. Better not to know whose life he was about to destroy.

“Please,” the woman said, her voice a whisper on the wind. “Je ne suis pas armée.” She held her hands up, palms out. “Not . . . armed.”

She sounded very young and scared. Hank couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard the sound of a girl’s voice. Maybe last winter, when he’d said good-bye to Mildred at the station in Burlington. The shoulder of his uniform had stayed damp from her tears all the way to New York City.

“I beg you. My friend. Not armed.” With a sweater or shawl hanging from her shoulders, she looked poised to take flight.

Hank had never heard a voice quite like this one. Her English sounded so peculiar—a French accent blended with a British accent, near as he could tell. Her speech was so thick the English words still sounded French to Hank’s ears. Would she betray him in French, then? Or in English?

His leg—his entire lower body—was on fire. If she decided to flee, he wouldn’t stand a chance of catching her. She might be a Nazi sympathizer or spy. He needed to take his shot, or risk being captured.

And then it struck him that he was lying here contemplating murder. Of an unarmed woman.

This was not what he had come here for.

He thought about what the training courses had drummed into him: a pathfinder would jump out of a plane and into enemy territory without hesitation. He would risk everything, commit any act, sacrifice his own life for the sake of his mission. And yet in this moment, Hank could not bring himself to shoot a woman.

Still, if he let down his guard and lowered his weapon, she might alert the German occupying force. But that would still be more acceptable to him than killing an unarmed woman.

Who was she? Friend or foe? Some of the Frenchies had thrown in their lot with the Krauts, others had organized themselves into guerrilla fighting groups, and most simply wanted the damned war to be over. At any rate, he did have the ultimate escape hatch buttoned into a hidden shirt pocket—a cyanide pill.

But the mission. Shit. Shit. Shit and damn it all to hell.

“Don’t move,” he said, his voice low and broken. “Stay where you are.”

This was his most important jump to date. He had volunteered to go in, scouting the territory in advance of a top secret operation. It was top secret, all right, but everybody knew the goal was to liberate the south of France. The Americans and the French were gung ho for the mission, but Churchill was a big holdout. Hank didn’t pretend to understand the politics of it all, but he understood that his work on this scouting expedition was crucial. In order to persuade Churchill, they had to come back with a solid plan. That was why the intel provided by Hank and his unit was so crucial.