“You have no idea.” I grabbed my gear and jumped out. I didn’t think about whether what I’d do next would get me in trouble—I might never get a chance like this again. “Have you plotted our course? I want to take us on a little detour.”

“Where’d you get this?” Silver asked. He sat at the navigator’s chart table in the Blenheim’s nose, juggling an electric torch and his wind-direction calculator. “This is Tex’s code! Translated! But—”

“You cracked the Kraut?” Chip called from the back. “I thought special codebreakers had to do that.”

“Special codebreakers did do it,” I said evasively.

The intercom crackled as Silver started to talk but changed his mind. Finally he said, “East of the Bell Rock Light! Twenty minutes down the Angus Coast. Well, it’s not far off where we’re meeting tonight’s convoy…” Over the dashboard, I couldn’t see what he was doing as he changed our route. “Are Pimms and Madeira going together?”

“No, I’m going to send Madeira on to Edinburgh alone. Then no one can accuse B-Flight of being late.”

“Will this get you another reprimand?”

“Probably.”

“It’s your funeral,” said Silver cheerfully.

Fifteen minutes after we took off, Chip called out, “I’m getting more of those danged coded signals.”

I shivered in the heavy flight suit, but kept my hands steady on the controls, followed my course, watched the quiet moon.

“Take down as much of it as you can,” I said to him. “Get it all.”

No one questioned me when I ordered Adam Stedman to keep Madeira Section on track for the convoy, and Bell Rock wasn’t far out of our way. The lighthouse there had been shot up by a swarm of German bombers not long ago, so it stayed dark unless British ships were about. Tonight it was lit. That was a good enough excuse for checking it out. I knew I could trust Silver with our secret; I could tell him later, and I wouldn’t need to confess to Phyllis or Cromwell.

“We’ll catch up to you in a jiffy,” I said to Adam. “I want to sweep around the lighthouse.” To Pimms I said, “Stay with me.”

I passed the light, and we kept going, following our strange instructions twenty miles farther out to sea. We could still see Bell Rock gleaming. Silver peered through the observer’s window up front, and I glided lower to get a better view.

Gunshot suddenly exploded around us.

I felt the shock as it hit, somewhere in the back of the plane. But the control surfaces held.

I called to Ignacy and Harry. “Climb away, Pimms!”

“What the—” yelled Chip—of course he couldn’t see anything, sitting at the radio behind me. “That went right past my ear!”

“You okay? Get in the turret—”