Mediterranean waves, the route home. And safety.

Tommy Hart shivered again.

His eyes were open to the nighttime, but he saw instead the sun reflecting off the whitecaps below them. For an instant, he wished there was some way he could make the dream real, then make the real a dream, just nice and easy, reverse the two. It didn't seem like such an unreasonable request. Put it through proper channels, he thought.

Fill out all the standard military forms in triplicate. Navigate through the army bureaucracy.

Snap a salute and get the commanding officer to sign the request.

Transfer, sir: One dream into reality. One reality into dream.

Instead, what had truly happened was that after he had heard the captain's command, he'd crawled forward into the Plexiglas nose cone of the B-25 to take one last look around, just to see if he could read a landmark off the Sicilian coastline, just to be completely certain of their positioning. They were flying down on the deck, less than two hundred feet above the ocean, beneath any probing German radar, and they were blistering along at more than two hundred fifty miles per hour. It should have been wild and exhilarating, six young men in a hot rod on a winding country road, inhibitions left behind like a patch of rubber from tires squealed in acceleration.

But it wasn't that way. Instead, it was risky, like skating gingerly across a frozen pond, unsure of the thickness of the ice creaking beneath each stride.

He had squeezed himself into the cone, next to the bomb sight and up to where the twin fifty-caliber machine guns were mounted.

It was, for a moment, as if he were flying alone, suspended above the vibrant blue of the waves, hurtling along, separated from the rest of the world. He stared out at the horizon, searching for something familiar, something that would serve as a point on the chart that he could use as their anchor for finding the route back to the base. Most of their navigation was done by dead reckoning.