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readily available, Grant had seized the opportunity to vacate the Squadron Commander's desk and do the flight himself. Which was very much contrary to regulations, for Grant had been forbidden any further operational flying by the Air Officer Commanding Middle East Theatre himself only six weeks previously.
    He sat at the controls now, alone and happy, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, the two supply sergeants forming his crew asleep in the rear.
    Harvey Grant was twenty-six, a small man whose dark eyes seemed perpetually full of life. Son of a wheat farmer in Parker, Iowa, the greatest influence on his life had been his father's younger brother, Templeton Grant, who had flown with the Royal Flying Corps in France.
    At an early age, Grant learnt that you always watched the sun and never crossed the line alone under 10,000 feet. He soloed at sixteen, thanks to his uncle's tuition, then moved on to Harvard to study law, more to please his father than anything else. He was at the Sorbonne in Paris when war broke out, and promptly joined the RAF.
    He was shot down twice piloting Hurricanes and had eleven German fighters to his credit before the Battle of Britain was over. He'd then transferred to Bomber Command, completing a tour in Wellingtons, a second in Lancasters, by which time he was a Squadron Leader with a DSO and two DFC's to his name.
    After that had come his posting to 138 (Special Duties) Squadron at Tempsford, the famous Moon Squadron that specialized in dropping agents into ocupied Europe or picking them up again, as the occasion required.
    Grant had flown over thirty such missions from Tempsford before being promoted and posted to Maison Blanche to handle the same kind of work, flying blackpainted Halifaxes from the Algerian mainland to Sardinia, Sicily and Italy.
    But all that was behind him. Now he was officially grounded. Too valuable to risk losing, that's what the AOC had said, although in Grant's opinion, it was simply another manoeuvre on the part of the American Army Air Corps to force him to transfer, a fate he was determined to avoid.
    He was southwest of Pantellaria just before dusk, a quartermoon touching the clouds with a pale luminosity, when a roaring filled the night. The Dakota bucked wildly so that it took everything Grant had to hold her as a dark shadow banked away to port.
    He recognized it at once, a Junkers 88, one of those apparently clumsy, black, twin-engined planes festooned with strange radar aerials that had proved so devastating in their attacks on RAF bombers engaged on night raids over Europe. And he didn't have a thing to fight with except skill, for the Dakota carried no kind of armament.
    The cabin door swung open behind him and the two supply sergeants peered in.
    ‘Hang on!’ Grant said. ‘I'm going to see if I can make him do something stupid.’
    He went down fast and was aware of the Junkers, turning and coming in fast, firing his cannon too soon, his speed so excessive that he had to bank to port to avoid collision.
    Which was exactly what Grant was counting on. He kept on going down, was at six hundred feet when the Junkers came in on his tail. This time the Dakota staggered under the impact of cannon shell. The Junkers curved away to starboard again and appeared to take up station.
    ‘Come on, you bastard! Come on!’ Grant said softly.
    Behind him one of the sergeants appeared, blood on his face where a splinter had caught him. ‘Johnson's bought it.’
    ‘Okay,’ Grant said. ‘He's coming in again so get down on your face and hang on.’
    He was no more than five hundred feet above the waves as the Junkers came in for the kill, judging his speed perfectly now, sliding in on the Dakota's tail, opening up with more cannon shell. As the aircraft started to shudder under their impact, Grant dropped his flaps.
    The Dakota seemed to stop in midair. The pilot of the Junkers banked steeply to starboard to avoid a collision and, with no space left to work in at such