Chapter Three

Twenty-three hours before he crashed behind enemy lines, Alec Corbin-Dawes told the first lie of his adult life. “This corned beef pie is just as good as my mum makes back in Derby.”

The Frenchman nodded, pleased. He’d been rich in his former life, before the war had forced him to share his chateau with a squadron of flyers who cared little for the sanctity of marble floors and the importance of the Degas hanging in the foyer. Though much of the man’s wealth had been leveraged for the good of his country, his name still resonated with power, and now Alec needed some of that power if he were to embark on his unsanctioned mission. Hence the lie.

Nineteen hours before his petrol line was severed at five thousand feet, Alec carried the signed approval letter the Frenchman had given him and showed it to the guards at the munitions depot, gaining unfettered access to the weapons within. His plane was a barely adequate Avro 504, a two-seater used for training these neophytes who seemed far too willing to lift into the sky and die. Alec had been posted here across the Channel and far from home to teach them how to manhandle an aircraft that was likely to become their coffin. As a training platform, the Avro was not equipped with a gun.

Fourteen hours before he fell, Alec finished mounting the Lewis machine gun on his crate, the Avro now casting a more sinister shadow on the ground. He loaded it completely, stuffing it with bullets, though hitting a flying target while careening through the air at ninety miles an hour was more luck than anything else. You were statistically more likely to shoot your own propeller off.

Ten hours before he watched the ground rush up at him, he joined the Frenchies in their canteen, smiling gently as they sang “La Madelon” and tried to drink enough to forget the math: the average lifespan of a flyer on either side of the Front was thirty days. Alec had been brought here to teach them because he’d managed to survive for over a year. They’d made him a lieutenant and counted his kills on a board behind the bar.

Three hours before he closed his eyes upon impact, he awoke from scant sleep and slipped from his billet even before the first dawn patrol had departed. No one flew at night because there was no point; you simply couldn’t see. Alec pulled the chocks from the Avro’s wheels and paid a half-drunk enlisted man five francs to spin the prop when he fired her up. Without permission, without second thoughts, he wrapped a blue scarf around his neck and rattled the plane along the dirt track until one pull of the stick tugged him up toward a sky full of sparkling stars.

One hour before he lay in the German dirt, too fractured to move, he remembered what his sister had said on the day she’d left England: “If you ever tire of drowsy Derby, little brother, come find me.”

“You’re only one minute older than I am,” he’d reminded her.

“One is enough.”

“Stay,” he’d said.

“Come find me.”

Three minutes before he opened his one working eye to see a rifle in his face, an Albatros D.V whispered into position behind him. Alec enjoyed an uncanny symbiosis with airplanes, and had he not been stuck in the ungainly Avro, he could have shrugged off his pursuer and probably turned him into prey. As it was, the single-seat Albatros devoured him, its dual Spandau guns shredding the back half of his plane.

The last thing he saw was a woman with green eyes.