Hornet Flight by Ken Follett Read Free Book Online

kiss on the cheek. She and Bets had never become close, and Hermia sometimes suspected Bets was jealous of her closeness to her mother.
    Hermia took them upstairs. Bets looked askance at the drab little room with its single bed, but Hermia’s mother said heartily, “Well, this isn’t bad, for wartime.”
    â€œI don’t spend much time here,” Hermia lied. In fact she spent long, lonely evenings reading and listening to the radio.
    She lit the gas ring to make tea and sliced up a small cake she had bought for the occasion.
    Mother said, “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Arne?”
    â€œNo. I wrote to him via the British Legation in Stockholm, and they forwarded the letter, but I never heard back, so I don’t know whether he got it.”
    â€œOh, dear.”
    Bets said, “I wish I’d met him. What’s he like?”
    Falling in love with Arne had been like skiing downhill, Hermia thought: a little push to get started, a sudden increase in speed, and then, before she was quite ready, the exhilarating feeling of hurtling down the piste at a breakneck pace, unable to stop. But how to explain that? “He looks like a movie star, he’s a wonderful athlete, and he has the charm of an Irishman, but that’s not it,” Hermia said. “It’s just so easy to be with him. Whatever happens, he just laughs. I get angry sometimes—though never at him—and he smiles at me and says, ‘There’s no one like you, Hermia, I swear.’ Dear God, I do miss him.” She fought back tears.
    Her mother said briskly: “Plenty of men have fallen in love with you, but there aren’t many who can put up with you.” Mags’s conversational style was as unadorned as Hermia’s own. “You should have nailed his foot to the floor while you had the chance.”
    Hermia changed the subject and asked them about the Blitz. Bets spent air raids under the kitchen table, but Mags drove her ambulance through the bombs. Hermia’s mother had always been a formidable woman, somewhat too direct and tactless for a diplomat’s wife, but war had brought out her strength and courage, just as a secret service suddenly short of men had allowed Hermia to flourish. “The Luftwaffe can’t keep this upindefinitely,” said Mags. “They don’t have an unending supply of aircraft and pilots. If our bombers keep pounding German industry, it must have an effect eventually.”
    Bets said, “Meanwhile, innocent German women and children are suffering just as we do.”
    â€œI know, but that’s what war is about,” said Mags.
    Hermia recalled her conversation with Digby Hoare. People like Mags and Bets imagined that the British bombing campaign was undermining the Nazis. It was a good thing they had no inkling that half the bombers were being shot down. If people knew the truth they might give up.
    Mags began to tell a long story about rescuing a dog from a burning building, and Hermia listened with half an ear, thinking about Digby. If Freya was a machine, and the Germans were using it to defend their borders, it might well be in Denmark. Was there anything she could do to investigate? Digby had said the machine might emit some kind of beam, either optical pulses or radio waves. Such emissions ought to be detectable. Perhaps her Nightwatchmen could do something.
    She began to feel excited about the idea. She could send a message to the Nightwatchmen. But first, she needed more information. She would start work on it tonight, she decided, as soon as she had seen Mags and Bets back onto their train.
    She began to feel impatient for them to go. “More cake, Mother?” she said.

Jansborg Skole was three hundred years old, and proud of it.
    Originally the school had consisted of a church and one house where the boys ate, slept, and had lessons. Now it was a complex of old and new redbrick buildings. The library, at one