But we could figure out where he was. With the Jerry’s wireless making so much noise, we might get lucky. It would be good practice for the new Pimms Section.

One of the crews in formation with me was completely wet behind the ears, a trio of fresh-faced Australian classmates who’d come straight here from some posh school in Sydney. They were even younger than me. In our third plane were two survivors of 7 November: Ignacy Mazur, the Polish pilot who’d walked across Eastern Europe so he could get to Britain, and Derfel Cledwyn, his Welsh navigator. They’d moved to Pimms from A-Flight. I wasn’t used to flying with Ignacy. He was hell-bent on shooting down Nazis and had a habit of tearing out ahead of everybody; I had to keep yelling at him to watch for the rest of us. After the shake-up, like me and Silver, Ignacy and Derfel had a new wireless op: Bill Yorke had transferred from another squadron, and we didn’t know how good he was.

So getting a position fix on a German plane would test our new wireless operators, Bill Yorke and the Australian lad, Dougie Kerr. And if it worked it would give Ignacy Mazur the satisfaction of sending someone to chase down a Nazi fighter without putting my youthful Aussie lads in too much danger—the perfect practice op. Although it was real enough, even if we were practicing.

Funny how it’s easier to remember who was alive and flying with you on a hop than to count the ones who died in the air around you.

So we hatched a plan to snare this German plane.

Ignacy and Derfel raced off toward Norway to try to receive the transmission from a different place. I told Harry Morrow, the new pilot, to stay with me—the Australians had not a whiff of combat experience among them, and if it came to an air battle I meant to get them out alive or die trying. Our two planes circled beneath the pearly sky until we’d had three more German radio transmissions, stronger and stronger each time.

Bill Yorke, in Ignacy’s plane, heard it too. When his navigator, Derfel, told us where they were and where the noise was coming from, clever old David Silvermont plotted a web of lines and gave us coordinates for where he thought the Luftwaffe plane might be.

But bloody Ignacy wasn’t satisfied with calling up Spitfires from Aberdeen to finish off the German.

“Pimms Leader, hello, I am going to meet him,” said Ignacy’s voice over my headset.

“You damn well won’t!” I told him. “Get back here with the rest of us.”

“He’ll be surprised,” said Ignacy.

This was mutiny and suicide rolled into one, and of course I couldn’t let him go alone.

So with my wet-behind-the-ears Australian sprogs on my port wing, we set off after Ignacy.