In a flash, as I flung up my hands to protect my face, a lot of terrifying things happened. Ellen cried, “You idiot, Jack, away wi’ you!” Felix Baer pulled me against his chest, which meant that if the rifle went off in that closed space in the dark, I’d be the first to die. Baer raised his pistol, reached across Ellen, and with a sharp crack, fired a shot out her window that must have missed the guard’s head by a quarter of an inch.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot at him!” Ellen screeched. “You cannae see! You’re too close, you’ll hit us!”

She grabbed the rifle. She couldn’t push it away, but she stopped the guard from aiming it. Felix Baer had his arm across my shoulders, not choking me, but gripping me firm against him.

“Shh, shh,” he said softly in my ear. “Louisa. Stille.”

I held still, cold against his stiff leather coat.

“Lift the barrier, will you, Nobby?” Ellen gasped. “So we can get him to his plane and get rid of him.”

“We fly now,” agreed Felix Baer with authority. He urged Ellen to start forward. “This girl. We fly.”

The defeated guards raised the barrier.

Ellen:

My hands on the steering wheel and the gear stick quaked like birch leaves in a wind. I couldn’t drive in such a state.

I whispered, “Crack on with your chat, will you, Louisa?”

She looked up over her shoulder at the Jerry pilot. “I need to help her,” she said. “Is that all right?”

He let go of her throat, but not the pistol.

Louisa pressed cold hands over mine and squeezed. “He won’t hurt us. He won’t. I think it would kill him. It’s all for show. We’ve only to get him to his plane, and he’ll go back to wherever he came from—”

“He said I have to go along,” I whispered. “‘This girl. We fly.’”

“He might have meant me,” Louisa said. “But I think he meant only to the airfield, not—not to Germany.”

She rabbited on hopefully, and I realized her accent wasn’t just London—it was actually quite posh, too. Not proper posh, not like Jamie Stuart when he was putting it on, but like someone who reads a lot—like someone whose mum was a schoolteacher. Her calm voice worked on me like a granny coaxing a sobbing bairn with promises. At last I took a deep breath and shook off her hands. Die here, or fly to Germany? We had to move, at any rate.

I put the Hillman Minx in gear. It stalled as I moved forward. I took another breath and started the motor again carefully. I didn’t dare steal another keek at Nobby and his mate as we left them.