The Shepherd

Christmas Eve, 1957. A young Royal Air Force pilot leaves Germany in a de Havilland Vampire for the short flight to RAF Lakenheath. Over the North Sea, an electrical failure disables his radio and navigation equipment as fog closes the airfields below. With fuel steadily disappearing and no way to establish his position, he prepares for the likelihood that the aircraft will fall into the sea.

A wartime de Havilland Mosquito suddenly appears beside him and uses the old signals of a shepherd aircraft to guide the Vampire towards a landing ground. Once safely down, the pilot discovers that the airfield and the man who supposedly rescued him belong to an earlier period of RAF history. The novella combines technically detailed aviation survival with a restrained ghost story about memory, loss and the persistence of wartime comradeship in post-war Britain.