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Tommy still thought his tactics worthwhile, though, especially if they had confused Meinicke’s staff on Fanoe long enough to delay the scrambling of a night-fighter. Meinicke had often said that spending the war in Denmark, with no real enemy to fight, suited him just fine. Sneum hoped that the German’s colleagues, who shared responsibility for monitoring the Danish skies, would have the same non-confrontational approach to the mystery aircraft.

Almost two kilometers up in the sky, plotting a course that ran safely south of Fanoe and its gun batteries, Sneum continued to rely upon a combination of experience and guesswork as he turned time and again in ever-thickening cloud. Both men’s lives depended upon Tommy’s instinctive skill; and for that reason he preferred not to worry Kjeld unduly as a nagging suspicion began to take hold inside him. For while they may have fooled the Germans, they might also have begun to fool themselves. In short, they might be lost.

‘We were in clouds with no visibility and we didn’t know where the bloody hell we were,’ Sneum admitted. ‘In fact, we were fifteen or twenty kilometers too far north.’

Tommy prayed for a tiny window in the wall of swirling cloud, not big enough to be noticed from the ground but sufficient to spot a reassuring landmark. He didn’t get one. He still had the compass, and was still taking into account the thirty-degree discrepancy in every calculation he made. However, he had changed direction every two minutes for so long that by now the compass provided little comfort. Mentally it was becoming a struggle to keep up with the new information that his technology was throwing at him.

Having checked with the Luftwaffe, Meinicke’s staff on Fanoe would have concluded that none of their planes was supposed to be airborne. So now Sneum’s old friend might well have been faced with a tricky dilemma. He had only one plane at his disposal, a Messerschmitt 109 fighter. The rest had been sent east a few days earlier, in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. The single remaining Messerschmitt and her pilot were being held in reserve for an emergency. The rogue plane heading slowly in their general direction would hardly have constituted a life-or-death crisis, but some sort of action would have to be taken sooner or later. It must have felt like a no-win situation for Meinicke, because if he ordered his pilot to shoot down a foolhardy Dane displaying no malicious intent, it would be a public relations disaster in what had been a relatively peaceful occupation. After all, the Germans were supposed to be keeping the local population on their side, not stirring them to resistance by shooting them in cold blood. On the other hand, if the plane kept coming, Meinicke would have to be uncharacteristically ruthless in order to safeguard the radar installation.

Meanwhile, Sneum felt no need to convey his private concerns about their confused course to Pedersen, because he calculated that the west coast of Jutland was now only minutes away. More often than not, the coast would herald a break in the cloud. If that happened, distinctive landmarks would probably be visible below to tell them precisely where they were.

The plan was to fly out into the North Sea between the islands of Romoe and Mandoe. That was almost as far south as you could go without flying into German air space, and there were no gun batteries in the area. Sneum’s brother, Harald, had told them the previous afternoon that they could expect a mild south-easterly breeze—hardly a problem. He had been confident of his calculation, having been supplied with up-to-date information by friends in the Meteorological Office. Although Tommy suspected he had drifted from his intended flight path, he presumed they would still be able to spot either Romoe or Mandoe from wherever they hit the coast. But as the Hornet Moth broke clear of the cloud, the pilots were confronted with a very different sight: ‘Puffs of black