“Two German submarines,” Silver confirmed. “Right next to each other. They’ve both come up for air; you’ll see when we turn around. What do you think, Scotty? Apart from their guns they’re sitting ducks.”

“Ouch!” I kicked at the rudder—it felt like I’d been stung by a wasp, and instinctively I tried to shake it off. A wasp in the plane in November, what the devil? Must be a leg cramp. I flexed my calf and focused on keeping the wings level.

“They must know we’ve got ships passing,” I answered Silver. “So we’d better try to take them out.”

It wasn’t as if the hand we were playing was a sure bet. Most of the Blenheims that didn’t make it home got shot down by antiaircraft fire from the ground or from ships at sea.

But we’d surprised them this time—those U-boats were at their most vulnerable. They can’t dive when they’re taking on air.

Silver suddenly started to laugh.

“What? What?”

“There’s another—it just came up! You wait and wait for one, and they all come along at once—”

“Like London buses!” we howled in chorus.

“Hey, pipe down, you two,” Tex complained. “Are we going for them or not?”

“All Pimms aircraft, line up behind me,” I called to Ignacy Mazur and Harry Morrow. “I’m on the near one, Mazur in the middle, Morrow last. Morrow! You know what you’re doing? When your load’s away, climb and head to meet Madeira.”

“Cheers to that, Pimms Leader!” yelled Harry Morrow. “About time we saw some serious combat!”

We lined up for the bombing run.

I flew as low as I dared through a hail of antiaircraft fire. My headset was full of Chip whooping it up in the rear turret as he fired back.

“Great shot, boys! Right between them—Mazur’s load went down on the other side of that middle sub—there she blows! Aw, I can’t tell what happened, it just looks like a giant geyser—no, wait, the Morrow kid made a direct hit!”

Mazur’s victory yell came crackling over the radio.

“All three, we got all three of the bastards—”

I looked over my shoulder as I climbed away.

The side-by-side submarines stood nearly on end as the explosions lifted them out of the water, like great whales breaching in the dark. Their wet hulls gleamed silver in the moonlight and then sank again, going slowly straight down like ships that have struck an iceberg.

Ellen: