What was happening here? If the woman in the beret was a colleague of Peter Flemming’s, the pilot must be on the side of the angels, Hermia deduced. It could even be Harald, escaping with the film in his pocket.
She had to stop the woman from shooting the aircraft down.
The park was lit up by the flames from the petrol tanker, and in the brightness Harald saw Mrs. Jespersen aim a gun at the Hornet Moth.
There was nothing he could do. He was heading straight for her and, if he turned to one side or the other, he would merely present her with a better target. He gritted his teeth. The bullets might pass through the wings or the fuselage without causing serious damage. On the other hand they might disable the engine, damage the controls, hole the petrol tank, or kill him or Karen.
Then he saw a second woman runnning across the grass, carrying a suitcase. “Hermia!” he shouted in astonishment as he recognized her. She hit Mrs. Jespersen over the head with her case. The detective fell sideways and dropped her gun. Hermia hit her again, then grabbed the gun.
Then the aircraft passed over them and Harald realized it had left the ground.
Looking up, he saw that it was about to crash into the bell tower of the church.
32
Karen thrust the Y-shaped control column sharply to the left, banging it against Harald’s knee. The Hornet Moth banked as it climbed, but Harald could see that the turn was not sharp enough, and the aircraft was going to hit the bell tower.
“Left rudder!” Karen screamed.
He remembered that he, too, could steer. He jammed his left foot down hard on the pedal and immediately felt the aircraft bank more steeply. Still he felt sure the right wing would smash into the brickwork. The aircraft came around with excruciating slowness. He braced himself for the crash. The wingtip missed the tower by inches.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
The gusty wind made the aircraft buck like a pony. Harald felt they could fall out of the sky at any second. But Karen continued the climbing turn. Harald gritted his teeth. The aircraft came around a hundred and eighty degrees. At last, when it was heading back over the castle, she straightened out. As they gained altitude, the aircraft steadied, and Harald recalled Poul Kirke saying there was more turbulence near the ground.
He looked down. Flames still flickered in the petrol tanker, and by their light he could see the soldiers emerging from the monastery in their nightwear. Captain Kleiss was waving his arms and shouting orders. Mrs. Jespersen lay still, apparently out cold. Hermia Mount was nowhere to be seen. At the door of the castle, a few servants stood looking up at the aircraft.
Karen pointed to a dial on the instrument panel. “Keep an eye on this,” she said. “It’s the turn-and-slip indicator. Use the rudder to hold the needle straight upright, at the twelve o’clock position.”
Bright moonlight came through the transparent roof of the cabin, but it was not quite enough to read the instruments. Harald shone the flashlight on the dial.
They continued to climb, and the castle shrank behind them. Karen kept looking to the left and right as well as ahead, although there was nothing much to see but the moonlit Danish landscape.
“Fasten your seat belt,” she said. He saw that hers was done up. “It will save you banging your head on the cabin roof if the ride gets bumpy.”
Harald fastened his belt. He began to believe that they had escaped. He allowed himself to feel triumphant. “I thought I was going to die,” he said.
“So did I-several times!”
“Your parents will go out of their minds with worry.”
“I left them a note.”
“That’s more than I did.” He had not thought of it.
“Let’s just stay alive, that will make them happy.”
He touched her cheek. “How do you feel?”
“A bit feverish.”
“You’ve got a temperature. You should sip water.”
“No, thanks. We’ve got a six-hour flight ahead of us, and no bathroom. I don’t want to have to pee on a newspaper in front of you. It could be the end of a beautiful friendship.”
“I’ll close my eyes.”
“And fly the aircraft with your eyes shut? Forget it. I’ll be all right.”
She was being jocular, but he was anxious about her. He felt shattered by what they had been through, and she had done all the same things with a sprained ankle and a sprained wrist. He hoped she would not pass out.
“Look at the compass,” she said. “What’s our course?”
He had examined the compass while the aircraft was in the church, and knew how to read it. “Two hundred and thirty.”
Karen banked right. “I figure our heading for England is two-fifty. Tell me when we’re on course.”
He shone the flashlight on the compass until it showed the right course, then said, “That’s it.”
“Time?”
“Twelve-forty.”
“We should write all this down, but we didn’t bring pencils.”
“I don’t think I’ll forget any of it.”
“I’d like to get above this patchy cloud,” she said. “What’s our altitude?”
Harald shone the flashlight on the altimeter. “Four thousand seven hundred feet.”
“So this cloud is at about five thousand.”
A few moments later the aircraft was engulfed by what looked like smoke, and Harald realized they had entered the cloud.
“Keep the light on the airspeed indicator,” Karen said. “Let me know if our speed changes.”
“Why?”
“When you’re flying blind, it’s difficult to keep the aircraft in the correct attitude. I could put the nose up or down without realizing it. But if that happens we’ll know because our speed will increase or decrease.”
He found it unnerving to be blind. This must be how accidents happen, he thought. An aircraft could easily hit the side of a mountain in cloud. Fortunately there were no mountains in Denmark. But if another aircraft happened to be flying through the same cloud, neither pilot would know until it was too late.
After a couple of minutes, he found that enough moonlight was penetrating the cloud for him to see it swirling against the windows. Then, to his relief, they emerged, and he could see the Hornet Moth’s moon shadow on the cloud below.
Karen eased the stick forward to level out. “See the rev counter?”
Harald shone the flashlight. “It says two thousand, two hundred.”
“Bring the throttle smoothly back until it drops to nineteen hundred.” Harald did as she said.
“We use power to change our altitude,” she explained. “Throttle forward, we go up; throttle back, we go down.”
“So how do we control our speed?”
“By the attitude of the aircraft. Nose down to go faster, nose up to go slower.”
“Got it.”
“But never raise the nose too sharply, or you will stall. That means you lose lift, and the aircraft falls out of the sky.”
Harald found that a terrifying thought. “What do you do then?”
“Put the nose down and increase the revs. It’s easy-except that your instinct tells you to pull the nose up, and that makes it worse.”
