She was an eighty-two-year-old woman with a sprained wrist and knees that did not bend, and she had, in cold blood and full awareness, killed a young man ten hours earlier.

I know she did it to protect me. I think she did it to protect me. I don’t know if she could have done anything else. Dietrich Althammer was an enemy soldier. He was violent and frightening and dangerous—there wasn’t any question about that now. But no matter how I danced around the facts and made excuses for her, a man who was alive that morning was dead that night, and Jane had done it.

I wondered if she had done it before.

I lay awake beside this familiar stranger, wondering, and counted the Blenheim bombers as they roared out to sea under the waning moon, all six of B-Flight’s aircraft, one after another.

It was just after midnight on Valentine’s Day. XIV II.

I must have fallen asleep at last, because I didn’t hear any of them come back.

Jamie:

The joke was, as the Valentine’s Day moon came round, that of course we weren’t sent to Utsira. No one was sent there—no one but me had seen that baited message about mythical U-boats.

“This’ll remind you of last year’s Norwegian Campaign, if any of you were around for that,” Cromwell told us. All of us except Bill Yorke shook our heads; none of the rest of us had been operational a year ago. Ignacy and Derfel and Silver and I had fought in the Battle of Britain last summer, but we’d only been flying in combat for seven months. Wing Commander Cromwell sighed and cleared his throat.

“You’re being sent on another retribution mission. You’ll be targeting Stavanger, the Norwegian aerodrome they’re using to get at Windyedge, and Coastal Command would like you to take flash bomb photographs of the new field at Lista while you’re at it. A-Flight will attack Stavanger, and B-Flight will move on Lista again. We want to do damage on the ground—exactly what they’re doing here. Get in and out quick as you can and keep away from the antiaircraft artillery.”

It was a routine op. It wouldn’t be safe. But it wasn’t unreasonable.

Cromwell hadn’t asked us to do anything unreasonable since—since mid-December? Since he confined me to barracks for getting the planes out of Windyedge when it first got bombed. And he’d complimented me at the same time for doing a good job. He sighed and barked and grumbled at me, and I argued with him. But now he listened.

For a few seconds I was lightheaded with relief that I wasn’t leading anyone to Utsira—and a moment later my stomach was in knots with a new anxiety.