Ken Follett - Hornet Flight

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 up indefinitely,” 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.”

“I 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 time the finest in Denmark, was a separate building as large as the church. There were science laboratories, modern dormitories, an infirmary, and a gym in a converted barn.

Harald Olufsen was walking from the refectory to the gym. It was twelve noon, and the boys had just finished lunch-a make-it-yourself open sandwich with cold pork and pickles, the same meal that had been served every Wednesday throughout the seven years he had attended the school.

He thought it was stupid to be proud that the institution was old. When teachers spoke reverently of the school’s history, he was reminded of old fishermen’s wives on Sande who liked to say, “I’m over seventy now,” with a coy smile, as if it were some kind of achievement.

As he passed the headmaster’s house, the head’s wife came out and smiled at him. “Good morning, Mia,” he said politely. The head was always called Heis, the Ancient Greek word for the number one, so his wife was Mia, the feminine form of the same Greek word. The school had stopped teaching Greek five years ago, but traditions died hard.

“Any news, Harald?” she asked.

Harald had a homemade radio that could pick up the BBC. “The Iraqi rebels have been defeated,” he said. “The British have entered Baghdad.”

“A British victory,” she said. “That makes a change.”

Mia was a plain woman with a homely face and lifeless brown hair, always dressed in shapeless clothes, but she was one of only two women at the school, and the boys constantly speculated about what she looked like naked. Harald wondered if he would ever stop being obsessed with sex. Theoretically, he believed that after sleeping with your wife every night for years you must get used to it, and even become bored, but he just could not imagine it.

The next lesson should have been two hours of maths, but today there was a visitor. He was Svend Agger, an old boy of the school who now represented his hometown in the Rigsdag, the nation’s parliament. The entire school was to hear him speak in the gym, the only room big enough to hold all 120 boys. Harald would have preferred to do maths.

He could not remember the precise moment when schoolwork had become interesting. As a small boy, he had regarded every lesson as an infuriating distraction from important business such as damming streams and building tree houses. Around the age of fourteen, almost without noticing it, he had begun to find physics and chemistry more exciting than playing in the woods. He had been thrilled to discover that the inventor of quantum physics was a Danish scientist, Niels Bohr. Bohr’s interpretation of the periodic table of the elements, explaining chemical reactions by the atomic structure of the elements involved, seemed to Harald a divine revelation, a fundamental and deeply satisfying account of what the universe was made of. He worshipped Bohr the way other boys adored Kaj Hansen-“Little Kaj”-the soccer hero who played inside forward for the team known as B93 Kobenhavn. Harald had applied to study physics at the University of Copenhagen, where Bohr was director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics.

Education cost money. Fortunately Harald’s grandfather, seeing his own son enter a profession that would keep him poor all his life, had provided for his grandsons. His legacy had paid for Arne and Harald to go to Jansborg Skole. It would also finance Harald’s time at university.

He entered the gym. The younger boys had put out benches in neat rows. Harald sat at the back, next to Josef Duchwitz. Josef was very small, and his surname sounded like the English word “duck,” so he had been nicknamed Anaticula, the Latin word for a duckling. Over the years it had got shortened to Tik. The two boys had very different backgrounds-Tik was from a wealthy Jewish family-yet they had been close friends all through school.

A few moments later, Mads Kirke sat next to Harald. Mads was in the same year. He came from a distinguished military family: his grandfather a general, his late father a defense minister in the thirties. His cousin Poul was a pilot with Arne at the flying school.

The three friends were science students. They were usually together, and they looked comically different-Harald tall and blond, Tik small and dark, Mads a freckled redhead-so that when a witty English master had referred to them as the Three Stooges, the nickname had stuck.

Heis, the head teacher, came in with the visitor, and the boys stood up politely. Heis was tall and thin with glasses perched on the bridge of a beaky nose. He had spent ten years in the army, but it was easy to see why he had switched to school teaching. A mild-mannered man, he seemed apologetic about being in authority. He was liked rather than feared. The boys obeyed him because they did not want to hurt his feelings.

When they had sat down again, Heis introduced the parliamentary deputy, a small man so unimpressive that anyone would have thought he was the schoolteacher and Heis the distinguished guest. Agger began to talk about the German occupation.

Harald remembered the day it had begun, fourteen months ago. He had been woken up in the middle of the night by aircraft roaring overhead. The Three Stooges had gone up on the roof of the dormitory to watch but, after a dozen or so aircraft had passed over, nothing else happened, so they went back to bed.

He had learned no more until morning. He had been brushing his teeth in the communal bathroom when a teacher had rushed in and said, “The Germans have landed!” After breakfast, at eight o’clock when the boys assembled in the gym for the morning song and announcements, the head had told them the news. “Go to your rooms and destroy anything that might indicate opposition to the Nazis or sympathy with Britain,” he had said. Harald had taken down his favorite poster, a picture of a Tiger Moth biplane with RAF roundels on its wings.