looked up out of her window. “We have to watch every angle,” she explained. He noticed that she was getting hoarse with the constant shouting over the noise of the engine.
The Messerschmitt appeared ahead.
It dropped out of the cloud a quarter of a mile in front of them, dimly revealed by moonlight reflected off the ground, heading away. “Full power!” Karen shouted, but Harald had already done it. She jerked back on the stick to lift the nose.
“Maybe he won’t even see us,” Harald said optimistically, but his hopes were immediately dashed as the fighter went into a steep turn.
The Hornet Moth took several seconds to respond to the controls. At last they began to rise toward the cloud. The fighter came around in a wide circle and pitched up to follow their climb. As soon as he was lined up, he fired.
Then the Hornet Moth was in the cloud.
Karen changed direction immediately. Harald cheered. “Dodged him again!” he said. But his underlying fear gave a brittle tone to the triumph in his voice.
They climbed through the cloud. When the glow of moonlight began to illuminate the swirling mist around them, Harald realized they were near the top of the cloud layer. “Throttle back,” Karen said. “We’ll have to stay in the cloud as long as we can.” The aircraft leveled. “Watch that airspeed indicator,” she said. “Make sure I’m not climbing or diving.”
“Okay.” He checked the altimeter, too. They were at 5,800 feet.
Just then the Messerschmitt appeared only yards away.
It was slightly lower and to the right, heading across their path. For a split second, Harald saw the terrified face of the German pilot, his mouth opening in a shout of horror. They were all an inch from death. The fighter’s wing passed under the Hornet Moth, missing the undercarriage by a hair.
Harald trod on the left rudder pedal and Karen jerked back on the control stick, but the fighter was already gone from view.
Karen said, “My God, that was close.”
Harald stared into the swirling cloud, expecting the Messerschmitt to appear. A minute went by, then another. Karen said, “I think he was as scared as us.”
“What do you think he’ll do?”
“Fly above and below the cloud for a while, hoping we’ll pop out. With luck, our courses will diverge, and we’ll lose him.”
Harald checked the compass. “We’re going north,” he said.
“I went off heading in all that dodging about,” she said. She banked left, and Harald helped with the rudder. When the compass read two-fifty he said, “Enough,” and she straightened up.
They came out of the cloud. They both scanned the sky in all directions, but there were no other aircraft.
“I feel so tired,” Karen said.
“It’s not surprising. Let me take control. Rest for a while.”
Harald concentrated on flying straight and level. The endless minor adjustments started to become instinctive.
“Keep an eye on the dials,” Karen warned him. “Watch the airspeed indicator, the altimeter, the compass, the oil pressure, and the fuel gauge. When you’re flying, you’re supposed to check all the time.”
“Okay.” He forced himself to look at the dashboard every minute or two and he found, contrary to what his instincts told him, that the aircraft did not fall to earth as soon as he did so.
“We must be over Jutland now,” Karen said. “I wonder how far north we strayed.”
“How can we tell?”
“We’ll have to fly low as we cross the coast. We should be able to identify some terrain features and establish our position on the map.”
The moon was low on the horizon. Harald checked his watch and was astonished to see that they had been flying for almost two hours. It seemed like a few minutes.
“Let’s take a look,” said Karen after a while. “Pull the revs back to fourteen hundred and dip the nose.” She found the atlas and studied it by the light of the flashlight. “We’ll have to go lower,” she said. “I can’t see the land well enough.”
Harald brought the aircraft down to three thousand feet, then two. The ground was visible in the moonlight, but there were no distinguishing elements, just fields. Then Karen said, “Look-is that a town ahead?”
Harald peered down. It was hard to tell. There were no lights because of the blackout-which had been imposed precisely in order to make towns hard to see from the air. But the ground ahead certainly seemed to have a different texture in the moonlight.
Suddenly, small burning lights began to appear in the air. “What the hell is that?” Karen yelled.
Was someone aiming fireworks at the Hornet Moth? Fireworks had been banned since the invasion.
Karen said, “I’ve never seen tracer bullets, but-”
“Shit, is that what they are?” Without waiting for instructions, Harald pushed the throttle forward all the way and lifted the nose to gain altitude.
As he did so, searchlights came on.
There was a bang and something exploded nearby. “What was that?” Karen cried.
“I think it must have been a shell.”
“Someone’s firing at us?”
Harald suddenly realized where they were. “This must be Morlunde! We’re right over the port defenses!”
“Turn!”
He banked.
“Don’t climb too steeply,” she said. “You’ll stall.”
Another shell burst above them. Searchlight beams scythed the darkness all around. Harald felt as if he were lifting the aircraft by willpower.
They came around 180 degrees. Harald straightened out and continued to climb. Another shell exploded, but it was behind them. He began to feel they might yet survive.
The firing stopped. He turned again, flying on their original heading, still climbing.
A minute later they passed over the coast.
“We’re leaving the land behind,” he said.
She made no reply, and he turned to see that her eyes were closed.
He glanced back at the coastline disappearing behind him in the moonlight. “I wonder if we’ll ever see Denmark again,” he said.
33
The moon set, but for a while the sky was clear of cloud, and Harald could see stars. He was grateful for them, as they were the only way he could tell up from down. The engine gave a reassuringly constant roar. He flew at five thousand feet and eighty knots. There was less turbulence than he remembered from his first flight, and he wondered whether that was because he was over the sea, or because it was night-or both. He kept checking his heading by the compass, but he did not know how much the Hornet Moth might be blown off course by wind.
He took his hand off the control stick and touched Karen’s face. Her cheek was burning. He trimmed the aircraft to fly straight and level, then took a bottle of water from the locker under the dashboard. He poured some on his hand then dabbed her forehead to cool her. She was breathing normally, though her breath was hot on his hand. She seemed to be in a feverish sleep.
When he returned his attention to the outside world, he saw that dawn was breaking. He checked his watch: it was just after three o’clock in the morning. He must be halfway to England.
By the faint light, he saw cloud ahead. There seemed to be no top or bottom to it, so he flew into it. There
