London was an inferno. Under a star filled sky the city should have been sleeping. Instead it was burning. Thousands of feet above the conflagration Tommy Venables had perhaps the best view of the burning city than anyone else on earth. He wished he didn't. He could scarce believe that the firestorm below was the same city he had visited as a boy. He remembered window shopping with his aunt and staring at rows of the latest toys not to mention stopping off in a cafe to enjoy a cream soda and macaroon. Those halcyon days seemed a million years past. Now the city was ringed and stabbed with great fires. Scores of them. Perhaps hundreds.

With a gentle movement of the controls Tommy banked his Defiant slightly. The ginger furred tomcat wanted to get a better view of the city below him. The carnage was horrifying yet enthralling. There was something about in the awful savagery of it. He could not tear his eyes away. It made him sick to his stomach. The greatest of all the fires was directly below him. Flames whipped hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud and in the middle of this cloud was a shape. The gigantic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.

According the newsreels Tommy Venables was a dyed-in-the-wool killer. A true marvel of the British fighting spirit. As the other brave fighter pilots of the RAF duelled with the invading German Luftwaffe by day Tommy hunted them by night. At the tender age of eighteen he already had an impressive eight kills to his name. Despite his success Tommy did not like being feted like a film star. He was nicknamed Owl Eyes. It was a sobriquet he despised. The newsreels and propaganda ministry claimed his exceptional skill on the nocturnal battlefield was due to keen instincts and the consumption of vast amounts of carrots in order to improve his night vision.

Tommy loathed the attention of the press almost as much as he loathed carrots. He was a fraud. The naive explanation for his success masked the truth of radar. When crammed into a machine such as the Boulton Paul Defiant, it allowed Tommy to home in on Luftwaffe bomber streams in the darkest of nights. Tonight he barely needed the technological marvel. He could see the black outlines of the bombers below him silhouetted by the fires below.

For all his fame Tommy had not fired a single burst of machine gun fire himself. In truth all eight kills had been made by the young Welsh corgi sat directly behind him in the Defiant's turret. Flying Officer Holden was not good newsreel fodder. He was short, podgy and possessed of a facial tick and manic grin that made him appear quite mad. The perpetually cheerful Welshman whistled while he worked. He did it while planed down wood to make a chair. He also did it with his face lit up by the muzzle flashes of four .303 inch Browning machine guns. To him the killing was just another job.

Even Flying Officer Holden was finding it hard to be cheery tonight. As Tommy banked about to find a candidate for business Holden should have been keeping his keen eyes on the night sky for the enemy. The Germans had their own fighters in the skies above London. However it was hard to concentrate while the capital was burning. It was a place much larger than his home town of Pwllheli. There were many more families down below. Families with mothers and fathers much like his own. Holden looked away to a dark shadowed space below. Abruptly he saw a whole batch of incendiary bombs fall. Far below they flashed terrifically then quickly simmered down to pin points of dazzling white. He knew that it was ferociously burning phosphor. These white pin points would go out one by one as the unseen firemen and volunteers smothered them with sand, heroes all. But some other pin points would burn on and soon a yellow flame would erupt from the white centre. They had done their work. Another building was burning.

Forward in the cockpit Tommy had seen the incendiaries fall too. His head turned to and fro as he sought below for the culprits. When he saw the outline of a sole twin engined bomber his eyes narrowed. Once he had seen the bomber, the rest happened automatically with cold and clinical precision.

"Contact. Below. Port quarter. Height 14,000." His voice was quiet. Calm. Had it not been for the radio it would have been lost behind the roar of the engine. Behind him Holden checked his weapons and swivelled his turret left and right. They were ready.

The sound of the Defiant's Merlin engine increased in pitch. They were diving in under the tail of the bomber. The pointed nose and swept wings identified it as a Heinkel. It was soon a mere few hundred feet above them and slightly forward. Once clear of the city the bomber would turn sharply and head for home. Holden bared his teeth. He hated the murdering bastards one and all he kept a steady bead on the oblivious German whilst Tommy crept closer and manoeuvred into a more favourable position beneath it. At this range and with an unsuspecting target Holden could not miss. He didn't. A concentrated two second burst hit the bomber in the starboard wing near the bulge that housed the engine.

Tommy shut his eyes as the Defiant shook. The turret bounced wildly behind him as the deafening chatter of the guns sounded out the death of the bomber. Holden kept firing and gave a whoop of glee as flames gouted from the engine and engulfed the wing.

"Got him!" howled Holden in triumph. The bomber wobbled above them, then slipped to the right and began a long slow dive towards the burning city. Tommy tried not to think of the desperate crew as they fought for control, fought to put out the fire...and ultimately fought to flee the burning machine. They were men just like him. The Heinkel exploded before it slammed into the burning buildings below. No blossoms of silk graced the night sky. The crew had died with their aircraft.

Suddenly a white void engulfed the Defiant. It held the aircraft suspended, vulnerable and helpless. Inside everywhere was a blinding glare. The light picked out rivets, scraps of aluminium, gleaming where paint had worn off. It bathed every nook and cranny not noticed before in an instant. Tommy threw his hands up to protect his eyes and felt utterly disorientated. The sudden change from comparative safety of darkness to the total exposure in a light that was too bright to look at was almost like a physical blow.

It seemed like every defensive gun in London opened fire on them at once. Tracers streaked past, shells burst all around Tommy and Holden. Holden was screaming over the radio. Begging Tommy to get them back into darkness and out of danger and cursing the fools below that had mistaken them for a German. Before the stunned pilot could gather wits enough to react something punched him hard in the side of the neck. A massive bang tossed the Defiant onto its side and the aircraft pitched forward and began to spiral downward violently.

Wind whistled behind him through gaping holes torn in the Defiant's hide. Safe once more in the darkness Tommy was fighting for control of the stricken aircraft. A wing was burning and splinters from the shell had punctured the glycol header tank. The cockpit was filled with dense white fumes. Tommy tried to jettison the glass canopy to clear it but instead wrenched the handle clean off in his panic. The turret behind him was also filled with fumes. Recovering control took a few seconds. They dragged on for eternity. Tommy was finally able to open the canopy, letting it slide back on it's runner to allow the smoke to billow out of the cockpit and clear the air a little. He needed to keep the Defiant steady so Holden could get out of the turret. They needed to bale out.

The engine was losing power and spluttering. Tommy turned his head sharply and agony tore through it. He tried to shout to Holden to hurry up. As the glycol fumes thinned Tommy froze at what he saw next. The turret was a mess of bent metal and shattered glass. The Welshman's head had been blown off at the neck as cleanly as if an axe had done it. With shaking paws Tommy tore off his oxygen mask and then his helmet. His harness was next and he scrambled up to cock his leg out into the slipstream. An almighty explosion from the burning wing propelled him clear of the Defiant amid a huge sheet of flame.

Tommy fell clear of the aircraft. Plummeting down through the cold air he tumbled head over heels until his parachute opened. It jerked him painfully and he bit his tongue. Tommy drifted down through the cold air with the silk fluttering gently above him. He touched his gloved hand to his neck and it came away soaked and glistening with dark blood. He was bleeding very badly indeed. Stupidly he thought about tying off the wound then realised that would involve strangling himself. He was feeling more lightheaded with every passing second. Would he be alive when he hit the ground? More pressing a worry were the flames below. There was a very good chance he would drop right into a burning building. Not a good way to die. The roar of aircraft sweeping in waves overhead were the last thing Tommy Venables heard before loss of blood did him a mercy. He slipped into unconsciousness.