I wondered how many others like it there were in Britain, and how I’d explain myself when I finally had to confess I had this one. I didn’t wonder about it much, though, just the way I didn’t wonder whether I’d still be alive in the spring. Nobody in a Blenheim aircrew wondered about such distant futures. The next singalong in the pub was as far as we got.

I knew our Enigma honeymoon was temporary. At the end of January we would have used up the rotor-dial settings Felix Baer had left behind. And if the Germans suddenly changed the rotor sequence at random, we’d be stuck. Intelligence would have to figure out how to get anything else out of the machine. Until then I had the most wonderful secret weapon in the world, and I didn’t have a plan for what would happen to it when I couldn’t use it anymore.

That’s perhaps not an easy thing for anyone else to understand. But you couldn’t fly if you thought about being alive next spring.

We were bombed after Christmas and again in the first week of January. “It’s the Windyedge Blitz!” said the villagers in the pub, pleased to get attention that usually went to Aberdeen. One attack hit moorland, sending sheep and red deer running in terror, turning heather to confetti. The second attack blew up the three-hundred-year-old breakwater at the bottom of the cliffs in Windyedge village. No one was hurt, and it didn’t make the national news.

The Germans used the Kingsleap Light for navigation. So did we. The lighthouse keeper was told to step up security and keep it dark unless he got a special release code from Cromwell himself.

JU LXXXVIII AND CX ESCORT DEESIDE S GREEN LIGHT XIV I

That was straightforward once you translated the Roman numerals: a Junkers bomber and Me-110 night fighters navigating via Kingsleap on 14 January 1941. We didn’t take on the Me-110s, which would have made mincemeat of us. Silver pretended he’d spotted them in the air—just about plausible, coming from Silver, with his night vision under a full moon. He hadn’t seen a thing, but Chip sent a warning home anyway. Cromwell called the fighters from Deeside to go after them and they never got near the coast.

U-BOAT MANEUVERS FRASERBURGH N XVIII I

That was a gift—like our Bell Rock adventure.

By the end of January, Madeira Section had sunk two submarines and Pimms was at four—one more, or a battleship, and I reckoned we in Pimms could call ourselves aces.

And when it happened at last we’d go to the Limehouse to celebrate, and Louisa would be at the piano, and Mrs. Warner would choose records, and we’d sing and toast one another as if we’d never been in the sky three hours earlier with dry mouths and cold hands, dicing with death.