Ruthie released Patton’s hand in order to fasten her seat belt and Patton did not offer it back. She couldn’t guess Nemo’s plan, but at this point she had no choice but to hold on as he suddenly gunned the car down the lane, shooting past the trees at fifty, sixty, then nearly seventy miles an hour.

“If we meet anyone . . .” shouted Ruthie from the back seat over the roaring of the Mini’s engine.

“Not likely at this time of night,” said Nemo. The headlights behind began to recede slightly and then disappeared around a curve. Patton assumed Nemo had chosen this narrow lane as the perfect spot to assert his superior driving skills and leave Fritz and Franz behind, but after another minute or two he slowed slightly, swung wide into a pull-off, threw on the handbrake, and the next thing Patton knew, they were skidding backward as Nemo spun the wheels searching for traction and Ruthie screamed from the back seat. In another couple of seconds they were speeding down the road in the direction they had come, the headlights of the other car rapidly growing ahead of them.

“Are you crazy?” cried Ruthie. “Their car is twice our size. It’ll destroy us!”

“And they know that,” said Nemo calmly, nudging their speed a little higher.

For a split second the other car disappeared behind a bend in the road, then it loomed directly in front of them, no more than a hundred yards away. Facing death that closely, Patton might easily have fallen into a flashback or a searing attack of panic and anxiety, but instead she experienced a moment of the sort of calm she had only ever felt in combat. The roar of the engine, Ruthie’s hysterical screaming from the back seat, the blinding lights ahead, all disappeared. They were at war and she had no choice but to trust her fellow soldier—in this case, Nemo. Her life was now in his hands, which felt liberating. For a split second, she was completely free. She recalled a time a fellow soldier had tackled her to get her out of a line of sniper fire. In the moment she felt his hand on her shoulders and heard a bullet passing by her ear she knew there was nothing she could do but fall. Now she watched as the car in front seemed to close the gap in slow motion. It was like a ballet—peaceful, beautiful, she could almost hear music. Ruthie, she knew, would close her eyes and pray, but Patton watched. Afterward she might be furious at Nemo, she might be annoyed at Ruthie, she might even be dead, but in that instant, she felt peace.