I sat on the floor with my eyes squeezed shut and teeth grating and my hands clutching the hard, cold edge of the seat on either side of me. I knew that if I came up alive without being sick it would be a flipping miracle.

“All right, lass?” came bloody Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart’s voice in my head. Through the headset, I mean.

I winked an eye open to take a keek at my pilot. He was frowning. He was listening.

I squeezed my eyes closed again. But my ears were open. And then I heard it, too. Someone in the German plane was whistling.

Ignacy’s Polish voice spoke into my open ears. “The musical Jerries are out today,” he said. “This fellow knows the classics.”

Jamie:

I may have a classical education but I don’t have a musical one, and I didn’t recognize the mournful tune over the crackling static.

Silver did. He agreed with Ignacy. “That’s Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture. The tune’s all right, but his rhythm is off.”

Louisa:

“Oh!” I cried. “Don’t shoot! Tell Jamie not to shoot!”

Ignacy glanced at me, startled. He couldn’t hear me over the deafening engines.

I scrambled up beside him and peeled the leather helmet away from the side of his head so I could scream in his ear.

“It’s Odysseus. Odysseus! Tell Jamie not to shoot!”

Ignacy’s voice came calmly into my ears through the microphone in his mask.

“Tell him yourself. Don’t yell like that.”

I could see the Pimms planes below us on the German bomber’s tail.

The mournful whistle, only two bars, shrilled in my ears, then cut out as Ignacy held down a button on a handheld microphone that he raised to my mouth.

Ellen:

And the next thing I heard made me let out in a gasp of surprise the long breath I was trying to hold.

“Jamie, Jamie, it’s me, Louisa! Don’t shoot that plane! It’s what the German courier played, Odysseus, you know who I mean! It’s a message—it’s an SOS—”

Then Jamie’s voice, answering her. He said one word only.

“Mendelssohn?”

And finally Tex’s drawl came in from the back, and he agreed with Louisa.

“It’s literally an SOS,” Tex said. “That Kraut is whistling SOS in Morse code.”

Jamie:

“BREAK, MORROW,” I yelled at Harry, still firing his guns below me. “BREAK, YOU TOSSER, HOLD YOUR FIRE.”

Louisa:

The silhouettes of the Blenheim and the Junkers 88 below us suddenly separated, curving in different directions, like a stalk of sugarcane split down the middle.

The German plane headed out to sea. The British planes made long, lazy curves up through the sky to join us, one after the other.

I gasped with relief, then was torn with doubt.

SOS?

That doesn’t mean Don’t shoot. It means Send help.