The Hornet's Sting by Mark Ryan Page A

at last was the cover they craved. No one would hear a little sports plane above the thunderous roar of the train.
    ‘Contact!’ yelled Sneum.
    Kjeld gave one mighty downward heave on the propeller and ducked clear as the engine burst noisily to life, with the blades soon scything at the air under their own power. The buzz was beautiful, like a promise of freedom, and adrenalin surged through the pilots’ bodies.
    As the Hornet Moth began to roll through the turnip fields for the first time in ars, clouds of dust flew up in all directions and effectively blinded Tommy in the cockpit. They had a few hundred meters of rough terrain to negotiate before they reached the smoother designated take-off field. During these risky moments, Pedersen ran alongside to act as guide: Sneum could still see his friend, even if he couldn’t see what was directly in front of him. Later Tommy recalled: ‘He had a crazy look on his face, his revolver was cocked and he was ready to shoot anyone who dared to interfere. He had told me that he would kill as many Germans as he could with his pistol and the rest with his bare hands.’ Pedersen pointed and waved so that Sneum could steer the machine through tiny breaks in the ditches between fields. Steadily they headed towards the grassy field that sloped down in a northerly direction and would act as their natural runway.
    As Tommy swung the plane into position, Pedersen jumped aboard and tried to take his seat, positioned to the right and fractionally behind his partner’s. But the makeshift flagpole had complicated matters by rolling across Kjeld’s allocated place, where it now lay jammed. Pedersen had no time to release it gently, so he wrenched it upwards with all his strength. The broomstick and towel shot straight through the cockpit’s plexiglas roof, ripping a sizeable hole above their heads. Sneum admitted later: ‘I swore at him when he did that. On top of everything else, it meant we would have a cold draught whistling down our necks for as long as we were in the plane.’
    Guiltily, Kjeld pulled in the flag of peace and laid it to one side. Knowing there was no time for further recriminations, Sneum coaxed more life out of the engine and sent the flimsy plane hurtling forward. Both men knew this was the point of no return. Happily, the field seemed surprisingly smooth. Tommy feared that one bump might diminish precious speed, but he was able to use the incline of the hill to achieve a furious pace before pulling the joystick towards himself.
    There was just one problem—the plane wouldn’t take off. Even with the help of the slope, the amount of fuel she was carrying made her just too heavy. The Moth flirted with the air for no more than a few seconds before thumping stubbornly back down to earth. They should have been climbing steeply by now, because pylons and high-voltage cables lay straight ahead; and a hundred meters further on was the ten-meter-high embankment that carried the railway track through the next field. The situation was critical. Even if the temperamental Moth belatedly decided to fly, it no longer seemed possible to make it over the cables. However, it was also too late to abort the take-off. And as if all that were not enough to deal with, Tommy noticed a disturbing development to the left, where another train was snaking its way over the embankment. Even if they could somehow negotiate the cables that stretched like tripwires between the pylons, the formidable wall beyond them had effectively just grown even higher.
    Suddenly there was a fresh sensation of weightlessness. The Hornet hovered a foot or two above the grass for five seconds before dropping again, as if exhausted by her effort. By this stage, they were already over halfway down the hill. Time and space were running out fast, and humiliation beckoned: to be shot down over the North Sea was one thing; to crash after fifty meters was quite another.
    Then, finally, the Moth took to the air and stayed