“Let me see,” Silver said to Chip.

I’d told Chip to write everything down. Silver crawled out of the nose to sit beside me and reached behind the bulkhead to the radio set, and Chip passed him a sheet of paper. Silver frowned at Chip’s scrawled columns of letters.

“What is this, are you trying your hand at nursery rhymes? Fun kistka putt, ichho ere nichts—funkist kaput, tich…?”

“And Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall!” I laughed. “That’s not German.”

“He’s written it like code, in five-letter blocks,” Silver said. “Maybe you can figure it out.”

With one hand on the flight controls and the other balancing the throttles, I glanced at the page and looked away again. I thought about it as I stared at the high gray cirrus cloud, five thousand feet above us even though we were flying at ten thousand feet. The sky looked like a sheet of silk spilt all over with gray river pearls, serene and beautiful. Even after five months of operational flying I still couldn’t marry the pure sky with the menacing enemy radio messages coming out of it from who knows where. It felt like evil magic.

“Funk ist kaputt, maybe?” I guessed. “I think that means radio is broken.”

“You speak Kraut, Cap’n?” Tex sounded more shocked than outraged.

“I don’t speak it,” I protested. “I understand a little. My wee sister went to finishing school in Switzerland, and she’s always wittering away in German. Reads German novels and all. O mein liebster Bruder! Thinks it’s cute. Does my head in.”

I couldn’t fly the plane, keep an eye on the new pilots just off my wingtips, and interpret German radio messages all at once. Silver helped me think. Chip was good at Morse, but not a brilliant detective.

“‘Radio is broken,’” Silver mused. “It’s two planes communicating. Reconnaissance, maybe. The first message has the word Morse in it—I think one plane can’t give or receive radio calls, and he’s telling the other to transmit in code.”

The last flurry of messages Chip intercepted seemed to be someone in a second plane trying, more and more frantically, to contact the first.

There didn’t seem to be any reply.

“What do you think these Germans are flying?” I asked uneasily. “Clapped-out old Blenheims?”

“Ha-ha,” said Silver.

“We don’t want to tangle with a Luftwaffe fighter. We’re close enough to Norway they could be Messerschmitt 109s.”

“Let’s find the guy sending the messages and call a Spitfire from Deeside to put him out of his misery,” said Chip.

There was no question of tackling him ourselves—that would be suicidal, and we knew it. Our guns only fired half the distance of a Messerschmitt’s.