The Hornet's Sting by Mark Ryan

plan was cursed, but he assured himself that the occupiers couldn’t hold parades around the clock, no matter how disciplined they were, and therefore he and Kjeld would still have the opportunity to fly away if they chose their moment carefully.
    They made it back to the capital using the skeleton Sunday transport services, and launched a search for petrol cans or drums. These containers needed to be small enough to carry without attracting suspicion, and practical enough to be used in Sneum’s outlandish plan to refuel in mid-air. No such cans seemed to exist, however, so Tommy asked a trusted workshop to make some to order, along with a hose and filters. He also specified the size and number of bolts they needed to attach the wings and the tail fin to the fuselage. While these orders were being met, Tommy and Kjeld tracked down two former Fleet Air Arm mechanics called Lindballe and Wichmann. They wanted their old colleagues to run an expert eye over the plane, check the carburettor and the magneto, and generally reassure them that the entire scheme wasn’t lunacy.

    The following Saturday, all four men travelled to Odense, carrying a rather conspicuous amount of sackcloth, and slipped into the hangar as darkness fell. They used the sackcloth to seal the cracks in the walls, and when they were sure no tell-tale light could escape, they switched on their torches to begin work in earnest.
    By dawn, they had cleaned the carburettor, given the magneto the all-clear, examined the wiring and changed the oil. However, they still couldn’t start the engine—the only sure way to discover if all was well—because the sound would be heard far and wide. At least there seemed to be nothing wrong with the compression when they turned the propeller by hand, so Lindballe and Wichmann cheerfully gave the engine a clean bill of health. Whether they would have been so confident if they were destined to fly across the North Sea in the Moth is open to question.

    When the carbon steel bolts were finally ready, Tommy and Kjeld began the painstaking process of reassembling the plane. Tommy admitted to his friend that a large amount of guesswork would be involved in this process. They attached the wings to the fuselage in the folding position, but as they completed this delicate task it was impossible to be sure that they had stayed faithful to the original angles and elevations. Any miscalculation, even by a few degrees, and the Moth would nosedive or flip in the slightest turbulence.
    Every night for a month Tommy and Kjeld made the best of their limited materials to cobble together their fragile dream. They relied upon lashings of copper wire to fasten the ill-fitting bolts, and hoped the pressures of flight would not tear apart these makeshift bindings. The pilots regularly turned the propeller in a bid to ensure that the oil would flow freely when it mattered.
    The last piece of the jigsaw was the tail fin, which still lay in a box in Poul Andersen’s workshop. Sneum followed the farmer’s instructions to the letter. ‘To keep Andersen out of it I had to break the padlock so that the Danish police and the Germans could see there was evidence of a break-in,’ he remembered. Tommy took the vital component and crept back to the barn before anyone noticed.
    With the tail finally attached, the plane at least looked as though it might be capable of flight. By now, the petrol cans were ready at the Copenhagen workshops too, so the pilots began to transfer them across the country to Odense in small paper parcels. There were four zinc cans, each with a capacity of two gallons, and twelve smaller tins that could hold about one and a half gallons apiece. Once they were all safely stockpiled in the hangar, the fuel was transferred from the huge drums into the more manageable containers. Tommy and Kjeld then ensured that the fuel tank in the plane itself was full to the brim, and prepared to put the finishing touches to their plan.
    But the long