Free The Hornet's Sting by Mark Ryan

Andersen, ‘is the engine. It’s still very sound. Doesn’t need much doing to it at all. That’s the beauty of her.’
    Sneum processed this information in silence.
    ‘I did have a Klemm,’ continued the farmer, almost apologetically. ‘But I crashed the thing.’
    ‘What’s the maximum range for a Hornet Moth?’ asked Tommy, hoping that everything he knew about the little sports planes was wrong.
    ‘About six hundred kilometers, I think.’
    The confirmation came like a kick in the teeth. Even if a plane were flown due west from Odense, the north-east coast of England would still be out of reach.
    Then Tommy saw two huge fuel drums in the shadows at the back of the hangar. ‘Are they full?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ replied Andersen. ‘Three or four planes used this field as their base before the Germans came.’
    Ideas were flying through Sneum’s mind, but for now he simply shook hands with his host and confirmed that he would soon be in touch.
    ‘Don’t bother,’ said Andersen. ‘At least not until you’re ready to go. Fake a break-in at my workshop when you want the tail fin, but I don’t want to hear from you until you know which night you’re leaving. On that particular night, I intend to be seen by as many witnesses as I can find, as far away from here as possible. And one other thing, Nielsen: if you’re caught in my hangar in the meantime, I’ll say you’re a thief and claim I’ve never met you. I have a family to protect, you understand.’

    Tommy returned to Copenhagen to seek out Kjeld Pedersen, his closest friend from Fleet Air Arm. He recalled later:
    We volunteered at the same time and became great friends. He had a wonderful sense of humour and he was an excellent boxer, much better than I was. He could judge distances to the millimeter and that helped with his jab. We went into the ring together many times, and on each occasion he would be beating me easily due to his superior technical ability. Then I would get mad and give him a beating. We remained friends after leaving the navy, and he joined the police in 1940. He won a bravery award for diving into a canal to rescue a drowning girl. But we both wanted to get away, we never gave up and he always stood by me when plans to escape went wrong.
     
    But Pedersen’s loyalty must have been stretched to the limit by Sneum’s blind faith in his latest scheme, as his dumbfounded reaction seems to suggest.
    ‘We’re flying to England,’ announced Tommy when he found his friend in a deserted corner of their favorite bar.
    ‘Are they sending a plane?’
    ‘No, I’ve found us one here and we’ll fly it ourselves.’
    ‘What sort of plane is it?’ asked Kjeld.
    ‘A Hornet Moth.’
    Pedersen burst out laughing. ‘What? You want to fly to England in a Moth? It hasn’t got the range.’ He was right: even on a direct route from Odense they would drop into the North Sea over a hundred kilometers short of their destination.
    ‘I think it can be done,’ maintained Sneum. ‘We can refuel.’
    ‘Just land in the North Sea and take off again? It isn’t a sea-plane, you know.’
    Sneum looked his friend in the eye. ‘We’ll do it in mid-air.’
    Pedersen’s mouth dropped open. ‘Now I know you’re mad,’ he said.
    ‘Trust me,’ said Tommy. ‘I’ll have us both flying for Churchill’s RAF by midsummer.’

Chapter 7
     

THE JIGSAW PUZZLE
    I N MAY 1941 Sir Charles Hambro, chief of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, took a look at the situation in Denmark and wondered why his organization had achieved nothing tangible there since Ronald Turnbull had been sent to Stockholm. Infuriated, he sent a series of communications to Turnbull’s superiors in SOE’s Scandinavian Section. One of them read: ‘Turnbull wants jerking up. He thinks he is in the Ministry of Information. What is he doing about SO2 [sabotage] work?’
    When the complaint was passed on to Turnbull, two thoughts went through his mind. He revealed later:
    Firstly