In any case it was in this search of the past that we came to the Kassel raid and the disappearance of our waist gunners. Over Bohn’s face came a characteristically odd, slightly mischievous grin. “You remember,” said he, “that we were hit by twenty-millimeter shells.” That was not a singular experience for us, I pointed out. But these had hit our gas tanks, he recalled. That did indeed stir something in the archives of my brain. Somewhere I had even made a note of shell holes in gas tanks. I reflected on the miracle of a 20-mm shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion. Now Bohn licked his chops so that I could see that a revelation was on the verge. It was not the case of an unexploded shell in a gas tank, he said. It was not so simple a miracle. At the time Bohn too had thought it was no more than that. On the morning following Kassel, while I slept late and missed my breakfast, Bohn had gone down to ask our crew chief for that shell, as a souvenir of unbelievable luck. Marsden told Bohn that there had been not just one shell but eleven of them in the gas tanks – eleven unexploded shells where only one would have sufficed to blast us out of the sky with no time for chutes. It was as if the sea had been parted for us. Even after thirty-five years so awesome an even leaves me shaken. But before Bohn finished the story there would be both more and less to wonder at. He spun it out. Bohn was told that the shells had been sent to the armorers to be defused. The armorers told him that Intelligence had picked them up. They could not say why. The professorial captain of intelligence confirmed the story. Eleven shells were in fact found in Tondelayo’s tanks. No he could not give one to Bohn. Sorry, he could not say why. Eventually the captain broke down. Perhaps it was difficult to refuse a man like Bohn the evidence of a highly personal miracle. Perhaps it was because this captain of intelligence had briefed so many who had not come back that he treasured the one before him as a fragile relic. Or perhaps he told Bohn the truth because it was too delicious to keep to himself. He swore Bohn to secrecy. The armorers who opened each of those shells had found no explosive charge. They were as clean as a whistle and as harmless. Empty? Not quite, said the captain, tantalizing Bohn as Bohn tantalized me. One was not empty. It contained a carefully rolled piece of paper. On it was a scrawl in Czech. The intelligence captain had scoured Kimbolton for a man who could read Czech. The captain dropped his voice to whisper before he repeated the message. Bohn imitated that whisper, and it set us to marveling as it the revelation were fresh and potent, not thirty-five years old and on its way to being a legend. Translated, the note read: ”This is all we can do for you now.”