The Luftwaffe markings, German black cross and Nazi swastika, were covered up with white canvas sheets, bound tight and flat with strips of webbing. Two lads from Windyedge’s short-staffed ground crew were standing stiffly on guard in front of each wing, holding rifles. There wasn’t anyone else about—they’d all trooped into the radio room to talk to the wireless op.

I waved to the guards, but they were taking their job seriously and didn’t wave back.

So then I made a great howling mistake.

When I think on it, I don’t see how I could have known it was a mistake. I went into the operations building. It had been put up before the last lot, the Great War, one of the oldest ops buildings in the nation, and everywhere was a mite mazy and crumbly inside. I went looking for everybody.

The door to the radio room was open. I heard a low voice talking. When it stopped, I heard the high-pitched nagging bleep and click of a Morse code key.

Standing in the open doorway, where he could see who might be coming down the passage as well as all the folk gathered in the room, was the German pilot.

I foolishly didn’t take on who he was.

I thought he was a good-looking lad—tall and clean-shaven, with close cut, mouse-blond hair. He wasn’t in uniform, maybe that’s why I didn’t guess. He wore a dark blue roll-necked sweater, like a sailor, and a knitted scarf, underneath a long leather coat. He didn’t have anything on his head. A leather bag, darker and more worn than his coat, hung on a strap over his shoulder. He stood with his booted feet parked on either side of a small wooden case, like a gramophone.

There wasn’t anything about him to tell me he was a pilot, still less an enemy one.

So I came bold as brass to poke my neb in at the door, and he just took hold of my arm—carefully, like a gentleman at a ball—and when I turned to look at his face in surprise, he raised his other hand.

He was holding a narrow black pistol.

He pulled me close against his squeaking leather coat and pressed the muzzle of the pistol firmly against the side of my head.

I could not have been more easily caught if I had been a rabbit in a poacher’s snare.

That was the moment when I learned hate.

Even more than I feared him, I hated him. I hated all Germans. I was blind with it. I couldn’t move nor think, not even to fight.

And I couldn’t fight, because now I was his hostage.

Jamie:

“Hey, Cap’n, I’m getting another of those bastard Kraut messages in Morse code.”

Chip’s voice crackled through my headset over the roar of the Blenheim’s engines.