Ormaie 16.XI.43 JB-S
- The narrator relates what has been going on in the Ormaie Gestapo headquarters where she is being held. It's a former hotel known as the Chateau de Bordeaux.
- Her captors have been showing her pictures of the wreckage of Maddie's airplane, with the pilot's cockpit enlarged so she can see the details. They are so thoughtful like that.
- She has also been on kitchen duty for the past few days because one of the workers was sent to prison—a different prison, because the Nazis have quite a collection going—for stealing cabbage.
- She confesses that she let the cook grope her breasts in exchange for old recipe cards to write on. Ick.
- She is afraid she will run out of time or paper or both, and will never be able to finish her story.
- The narrator informs us that her cell (formerly a hotel bedroom) is near the location where they torture prisoners, so she hears the results all the time.
- She and von Linden argue about Orwellian socialism, and she claims that von Linden thinks of her as no more human than a wireless set.
- Now she is writing, but unfortunately Thibaut is in charge at the moment, and she hates him.
- She plans to beg von Linden for another week to keep writing—she'll ask in German, which always puts him in a good mood.
The narrator titles the next section "Random Aircraft," and lists nine different types.
The narrator titles the next section "Air Taxi with the ATA."
- In this section, the narrator relates the story of Queenie's first flight.
- Queenie gets her first shot at air travel when ATA pilot Dympna Wythenshawe shows up at the Maidsend air base with a ferry pilot and an Avro Anson.
- Dympna finds Maddie and convinces her to take the chance to do the flight in order to get some airtime in.
- The two of them together convince a very reluctant Queenie (afraid of heights and of being sick) to come along.
- Queenie has a really rough time of it at first, crouching in the back to keep from looking out the windows, but then Dympna has her climb into the front seat.
- The three women witness a "green flash," a mirage in which the sun looks green.
- This flight leads to Maddie's transfer from the WAAF to the ATA, which means she gets to fly again.
- Meanwhile, Queenie is transferred from her job as a wireless operator to the SOE—the Special Operations Executive.
- Maddie and Queenie are separated for almost a year, and Queenie asks Maddie to write to her at home: Craig Castle, Castle Craig in Aberdeenshire. This is so they can avoid the military censors.
- They see each other three times that year: when Queenie visits and they spend three days exploring the Pennines on Maddie's motorbike; when Queenie's favorite brother Jamie is shot down in the North Sea and has to have all his toes and four fingers amputated due to frostbite; and when Queenie does her parachute training at Oakway, the airfield near Maddie's house.
- The narrator shifts back to the present to describe her fear that her work won't be good enough for von Linden, who examines her hair and mentions kerosene, a popular means of execution.
- She is afraid and can only think of her ancestor William Wallace and of the dying Admiral Nelson saying, "Kiss me, Hardy."