“I’m on one engine and Taff is bleeding all over the cockpit. Cover me, Pimms Leader, I’m going to get those German bastards if it kills me. Keep the Messers off my tail. I’m going to sink a couple of those ships.”

“There he is,” Silver said, pointing. “Two o’clock, high. Get behind him so nobody can sneak up on him, and I’ll climb back and see if the rear gun will still fire in case someone comes after us.”

Everything else still worked. I had both my engines and all my control surfaces—only the rear turret dome had been shattered. I tore my mind away from Silver in the back, and what he’d have to deal with before he could climb into the rear gunner’s seat. I focused on Ignacy and Derfel and Bill Yorke in the plane ahead of me.

We sped to meet the battleships. Silver and I had dropped our bombs over Stavanger a lifetime ago. I wondered, briefly and uneasily, why Ignacy hadn’t already got rid of his. Or if he had, how he was planning to get through the flak and sink a battleship with the slow-firing guns in the nose of the Blenheim.

“Pimms and Madeira aircraft,” I called. “Anyone about?”

Silence.

I hadn’t even noticed the Australian schoolboys going down.

“Just us,” Ignacy answered. “Thank you for the cover, Scotty, I am going in now—sorry, Yorkie, but I must take you with us.”

Then he said something in Welsh to Derfel in a low voice.

That’s when I realized what he meant to do.

“We’re aces now, Mazur,” I yelled at him. “Taff, Yorkie! We’re all aces!”

He chose the two ships that were closest together. He calculated the dive so he hit them both, the Blenheim cartwheeling across the deck of one and slamming into the other.

I climbed away through a trail of flame and shrapnel and a hailstorm of antiaircraft fire. No one came after us.

Silver tossed the bundled-up dinghy over the back of his seat and climbed into the front cockpit after it. He sat down next to me again.

“Tex won’t mind if we ditch him. Thought you and I might need this, though,” he said.

“You are showing lack of moral fiber,” I answered hollowly.

We limped a hundred miles back west across the open water, leaking fuel through the bullet holes, and when the fuel ran out I made a Mayday call over the radio, because that’s what I’d been trained to do. If there was anyone out there to hear it, the chances of them being friendly were remote; we were still closer to Norway than to Scotland. Silver opened the hatch above us before I leveled the Blenheim to plow on its belly into the black-and-silver swell of the North Sea.

“My hands are both still in one piece,” Silver said.