Hornet Flight

them. Karen said, “I hope they don’t think we’re enemy spies and shoot us down.”

It was dreadfully possible. Harald tried to think of some way of telling the RAF they were friendly. “Flag of truce,” he said. He pulled off his shirt and pushed it out of the broken window. The white cotton fluttered in the wind.

It seemed to do the trick. One of the Spitfires moved in front of the Hornet Moth and waggled its wings. Karen said, “That means ‘Follow me,’ I think. But I haven’t got enough fuel.” She looked at the landscape below. “Sea breeze from the east, to judge by the smoke from that farmhouse. I’ll come down in that field.” She put the nose down and turned.

Harald looked anxiously at the Spitfires. After a moment they turned and began to circle, but maintained their altitude, as if watching to see what would happen next. Perhaps they had decided that a Hornet Moth could not be much of a threat to the British Empire.

Karen came down to a thousand feet and flew downwind past the field she had chosen. There were no obstructions visible. She turned into the wind for landing. Harald operated the rudder, helping keep the aircraft in a straight line.

When they were twenty feet above the grass, Karen said, “Throttle all the way back, please.” Harald pulled the lever back. She lifted the nose of the aircraft gently with the stick. When it seemed to Harald that they were almost touching the ground, they continued to fly for fifty yards or more. Then there was a bump as the wheels made contact with the earth.

The aircraft slowed down in a few seconds. As it came to a halt, Harald looked through the broken window and saw, just a few yards away, a young man on a bicycle, watching from a pathway alongside the field, staring at them openmouthed.

“I wonder where we are,” Karen said.

Harald called out to the bicyclist. “Hello there!” he said in English. “What is this place?”

The young man looked at him as if he had come from outer space. “Well,” he said at last, “it’s not the bloody airport.”

EPILOGUE

Twenty-four hours after Harald and Karen landed in England, the photographs Harald had taken at the radar station on Sande had been printed, enlarged, and pinned up on one wall of a big room in a grand building in Westminster. Some had been marked with arrows and notes. In the room were three men in RAF uniforms, examining the pictures and talking in low, urgent voices.

Digby Hoare ushered Harald and Karen into the room and closed the door, and the officers turned around. One of them, a tall man with a gray moustache, said, “Hello, Digby.”

“Good morning, Andrew,” Digby said. “This is Air Vice Marshal Sir Andrew Hogg. Sir Andrew, may I present Miss Duchwitz and Mr. Olufsen.”

Hogg shook Karen’s left hand, as her right was still in a sling. “You’re an exceptionally brave young woman,” he said. He spoke English with a clipped accent that made him sound as if he had something in his mouth, and Harald had to listen hard to understand him. “An experienced pilot would hesitate to cross the North Sea in a Hornet Moth,” Hogg added.

“To tell the truth, I had no idea how dangerous it was when I set off,” she replied.

Hogg turned to Harald. “Digby and I are old friends. He’s given me a full report on your debriefing, and frankly I can’t tell you how important this information is. But I want you to go over again your theory about how these three pieces of apparatus work together.”

Harald concentrated, retrieving from his memory the English words he needed. He pointed to the general shot he had taken of the three structures. “The large aerial rotates steadily, as if constantly scanning the skies. But the smaller ones tilt up and down and side to side, and it seemed to me they must be tracking aircraft.”

Hogg interrupted him to say to the other two officers, “I sent a radio expert on a reconnaissance flight over the island this morning at dawn. He picked up waves of two point four meters wavelength, presumably emanating from the big Freya, and also fifty-centimeter waves, presumably from the smaller machines, which must be Wurtzburgs.” He turned back to Harald. “Carry on, please.”

“So I guessed that the large machine gives long-range warning of the approach of bombers. Of the smaller machines, one tracks a single bomber, and the other tracks the fighter sent up to attack it. That way, a controller could direct a fighter to the bomber with great accuracy.”

Hogg turned to his colleagues again. “I believe he’s right. What do you think?”

One of them said, “I’d still like to know the meaning of himmelbett.”

Harald said, “Himmelbett? That’s the German word for one of those beds. .”

“A four-poster bed, we call it in English,” Hogg told him. “We’ve heard that the radar equipment operates in a himmelbett, but we don’t know what that means.”

“Oh!” said Harald. “I’ve been wondering how they would organize things. This explains it.”

The room went quiet. “Does it?” said Hogg.

“Well, if you were in charge of German air defense, it would make sense to divide your borders up into blocks of airspace, say five miles wide and twenty miles deep, and assign a set of three machines to each block. . or himmelbett.”

“You might be right,” Hogg said thoughtfully. “That would give them an almost impenetrable defense.”

“If the bombers fly side by side, yes,” said Harald. “But if you made your RAF pilots fly in line, and sent them all through one single himmelbett, the Luftwaffe would be able to track only one bomber, and the others would have a much better chance of getting through.”

Hogg stared at him for a long moment. Then he looked at Digby, and at his two colleagues, then back at Harald.

“Like a stream of bombers,” Harald said, not sure they understood.

The silence stretched out. Harald wondered if there was something wrong with his English. “Do you see what I mean?” he said.

“Oh, yes,” said Hogg at last. “I see exactly what you mean.”

On the following morning Digby drove Harald and Karen out of London to the northeast. After three hours they arrived at a country house that had been commandeered by the air force as officers’ quarters. They were each given a small room with a cot, then Digby introduced them to his brother, Bartlett.

In the afternoon they all went with Bart to the nearby RAF station where his squadron was based. Digby had arranged for them to attend the briefing, telling the local commander it was part of a secret intelligence exercise; and no further questions were asked. They listened as the commanding officer explained the new formation the pilots would use for that night’s raid-the bomber stream.

Their target was Hamburg.

The same scene was repeated, with different targets, on airfields up and down eastern England. Digby told Harald that more than six hundred bombers would take part in tonight’s desperate attempt to draw some of the Luftwaffe’s strength back from the Russian front.

The moon rose a few minutes after six o’clock in the evening, and the twin engines of the Wellingtons began to roar at eight. On the big blackboard in the operations room, takeoff times were noted beside the code letter for each aircraft. Bart was piloting G for George.

As night fell, and the wireless operators reported in from the bombers, their positions were marked on a big map table. The markers moved ever closer to Hamburg. Digby smoked one anxious cigarette after another.

The lead aircraft, C for Charlie, reported that it was under attack from a fighter, then its transmissions stopped. A for Able approached the city, reported heavy flak, and dropped incendiaries to light the target for the bombers following.

When they began to drop their bombs, Harald thought of his Goldstein cousins in Hamburg, and hoped they would be safe. As part of his schoolwork last year he had had to read a novel in English, and he had chosen War in the Air by H. G. Wells, which had given him a nightmare vision of a city under