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down at me for a moment, then carefully set down his measuring tape and tools before crawling back to the hayloft. A minute later he was standing in front of me, picking straw out of his hair. “We’ve already been over all this. What’s so important now that I had to climb all the way down here?”
    “Where exactly did this thing come from? Germany?”
    Floyd scuffed his shoes. “Belgium.”
    “No, Floyd.” He was being stupid on purpose, I decided. “You may have found this in Belgium, but this was not built by Belgians. Belgians make French fries and wine and wool, but they do not make precision aircraft. Certainly not during a Nazi occupation.”
    “Well, it is German.” Floyd looked at me, almost pleading.
    That was the nub of the problem. I couldn’t see the angle yet, but this was the finest piece of technology ever produced by the hand of man. Who but the Germans could do it? Besides the United States of America, of course, but it wouldn’t have been sitting around in a Nazi convoy in Belgium if we’d built it. “How do you know that?”
    He looked at me like I was crazy. “I found it on a German truck behind German lines.”
    “Where was it made, Floyd? Where did it come from?”
    “I don’t know. Why does that matter so much?” Floyd was starting to whine, which with him meant he was about to get belligerent. “We want to use it ourselves, not return to sender.”
    “Look, I don’t want to know where or how you swiped the thing. We’re past that — I’ve bought into your deal. It’s just that the metalwork in that aircraft is the most unusual stuff I’ve ever seen. I should be able to recognize it. Aircraft materials are my profession.”
    “Well...” said Floyd. “There’s a big pouch of documents on the back of the f-panzer’s hatch. If you can read German, they might tell you something.”
    This was more like it. “Why didn’t you show me those in the first place?”
    Floyd shrugged. “Slipped my mind.”
    “Fine, fine. Let me have a look.”
    I pulled myself up onto the edge of the truck bed, in the shadow of our mysterious airplane. I really needed to drag a normal chair into the barn, before I hurt my leg even more. Floyd jumped up past me, stepped into the f-panzer for a moment, then brought me a fat manila envelope from inside. I opened it to have a look at my new toy’s pedigree.
    The envelope had a cover letter and a large bound report. The whole thing was typed on SS stationery — original ribbon, not carbon, which was interesting. That meant the Nazi officers in charge had intended for very few, if any, copies to be distributed. There were also all kinds of attachments and appendices, charts, graphs and photos, along with a folder full of flimsy carbon copies of what had to be operational orders. All in all, it looked like manuals and field orders for the aircraft. The fact that I even held these documents in my hand at all confirmed that Floyd had pulled an enormous con on the Army — no military intelligence officer who could still draw breath would have left a trove like this loose inside captured enemy equipment.
    Despite my college classes, I didn’t read German very well. Lack of practice, for one thing. I knew a few technical words, newspaper terms like blitzkreig , but the grammar defeated me, as well as those incredible compound words that just balloon into monstrous collections of meaningless letters. German and English are pretty close in some ways, though, so I could puzzle out words such as Nordeuropa and Arktischer . By and large the meaning of the documents escaped me. It was apparent that I would need some translation assistance. And just as apparent that I didn’t dare show these papers to anyone.
    “Floyd,” I called. “I’m going to the library.”
    “Okay,” he shouted from somewhere above me.
    “And I am not driving that infernal tractor back into town.”
    I could hear him laughing almost all the way back to the parked Willys.

    Augusta