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‘Good morning!’ said Tommy cheerfully, hoping his inner terror wasn’t showing.

‘What are you doing here?’ This German officer in particular didn’t look happy.

‘We’re going home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘Odense,’ explained Tommy, smiling.

The occupiers only had to demand to see their papers and Tommy and Kjeld would be finished. There was a tense silence as the Germans assessed the pair in front of them. Then, putting their pleasures before their duty, they decided to continue their morning ride. The Danish pilots were left to breathe in the dust kicked up by the horses’ hooves.

‘Keep walking,’ said Sneum. ‘Don’t even look relieved.’

Pedersen was too traumatized even to feel relieved, let alone look it.

After a long daytime sleep at separate hideouts, Tommy and Kjeld met at Valby railway station and returned to the hangar. First they warned Andersen of their intentions, so that the farmer could leave for the evening and make sure he was seen by lots of witnesses far away from his plane. Then they set about cutting a hole in the fuselage near the fuel tank, through which they hoped their hose would be able to fit when it mattered. They imagined this would be a simple process. But after each man had chipped away with a knife for a while Pedersen’s blade broke. Gently cursing his friend, Tommy continued more forcefully—and promptly broke his own knife. Now they had to claw and poke at the hole with their bare fingers. By the time they had created a large enough gap for the hose to pass through, twice the allocated time had elapsed and their hands were red raw.

It was already past midnight, and it might still take another three-quarters of an hour to pull the plane out of the hangar and make it ready for take-off. They wondered whether to continue that night. Once airborne, they would take a further hour and a half to cross Denmark to Jutland’s coast, where the greatest danger would come from German fighter aircraft. By then, the longest day of the summer would already have begun, making them sitting ducks in perfect visibility. Reluctantly, they decided it would be suicidal to go on. The escape attempt was postponed for twenty-four hours.

After their close shave with the occupying forces the previous morning, they decided that it would be wiser to leave the hangar under cover of darkness. As they crossed the fields and headed back towards Odense, however, they passed the drill-ground, where they were astonished to see an entire German company preparing for night exercises. The two Danish pilots crouched down in bushes and tried not to make a sound as the Germans trundled past noisily. With an expert eye, Sneum noticed in the gloom that the artillery men were pulling 37mm and 20mm anti-aircraft guns, either of which could bring down a plane before it reached an altitude of three thousand meters. He glanced at Pedersen and saw the same realization etched on his friend’s face. Had they tried to fly away in the Hornet Moth that night, they would almost certainly have been blasted to pieces. As it was, though, they were still in grave danger. If discovered breaking the curfew, they could expect to be arrested and questioned. So the pair sat motionless until the last of the heavy artillery cannons had rumbled away in the darkness. Once again, it appeared that they had survived a major crisis by the skin of their teeth.

‘We’re still leaving,’ insisted Sneum. ‘Tomorrow night.’

Pedersen wasn’t convinced. ‘What if the Germans are still here?’

‘They were here tonight. They won’t be doing manoeuvres in the same fields tomorrow.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t, for sure,’ said Sneum, fixing his friend with a stare. ‘But I do know we have to get out of here.’

At 2.00 a.m. Sneum and Pedersen disturbed the night porter at the Grand Hotel in Odense. He took one look at their filthy poloneck sweaters and turned his nose up at them. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘There are no rooms available tonight. We’re completely full.’

‘But I know for a fact there are rooms,’ said Tommy, bluffing.

‘You’ll have to leave,