In the dream, he didn't suggest turning and attacking.

In the dream, they didn't get shot down.

And in the dream, no one died.

Raymund Thomas Hart, a skinny, quiet young man of unprepossessing appearance, the third in his family after both his father and grandfather to carry the saint's name with its Unusual spelling, lay cramped in his bunk in the darkness. He could feel damp sweat gathered around his neck, though the spring night air was still chilled with the leftover cold of winter. In the short moments before the wooden supporting beams eight feet underground snapped under the weight of the rain-soaked earth and the air filled with the whistles and shouts of the guards, he listened to the thick breathing and snores of the men occupying the bunk beds around him.

There were seven other men in the room, and he could recognize each by the distinctive sounds they made at night. One man often spoke, giving orders to his long-dead crew, another whimpered and sometimes cried. A third had asthma, and when the weather turned damp wheezed through the night.

Tommy Hart shivered once and pulled the thin gray blanket up to his neck.

He went over all the familiar details of the dream as if it were being played out like a motion picture in the darkness surrounding him. In the dream, they were flying in utter quiet, no engine sound, no wind noise, just slipping through the air as if it were some clear, sweet liquid, until he heard the deep Texas drawl of the captain over the intercom: "Ahh, hell boys, there ain't nothin' out here worth shootin' at. Tommy, find us the way home, willya?"

In the dream, he would look down at his maps and charts, octant and calipers, read the wind drift indicator and see, just as if it were a great streak of red ink painted across the surface of the blue