The Shepherd

A De Havilland Vampire pilot is flying home from RAF Celle to RAF Lakenheath on Christmas Eve 1957. Suddenly his aircraft suffers a complete electrical failure mid-flight. With no working compass or radio, he loses navigation and improvises his route.

Lacking instruments, the pilot begins flying in small triangular patterns. He hopes this will attract attention and prompt an air traffic controller to shepherd him toward the nearest airstrip. The maneuver becomes a solitary, anxious bid for guidance.

In the fog he encounters a WWII-era Mosquito fighter-bomber. The Mosquito pilot uses hand signals to issue flight commands, while the Vampire notices JK painted on the Mosquito's nose as a haunting clue. The two aircraft share a silent, tense exchange through signals.

The Vampire follows the Mosquito; with fuel nearly exhausted, the Mosquito signals the oncoming runway and clearance to land. Through the fog, lights appear and the Vampire makes a cautious approach toward a landing.

The Vampire lands on what appears to be a runway, only to discover there are no emergency vehicles awaiting. RAF Minton is revealed to be a storage depot, no longer an active station. The landing ends with more questions than answers.

The on-duty personnel consist of a flight lieutenant and a 70-year-old civilian mess steward named Joe. The stores clerks are on Christmas leave, leaving the depot unusually quiet. The runway lights had been left on, a leftover from Minton's past activity.

A late-night call to RAF Merriam St. George reveals that no local pilots were authorized to fly that foggy evening and the air traffic control tower was not staffed. The shepherding that should have followed the emergency landing simply never happened.

The pilot contacts Gloucester's meteorological squadron and learns that the Mosquitoes the weather squadron reportedly used had been scrapped three months earlier. The new information deepens the mystery of the guiding aircraft.

With official shepherding absent, the pilot rationalizes that someone must have bought one of the old Mosquitoes and flown it that night to lead him to the storage depot. The idea fuels a chilling hypothesis about an unseen operator behind the events.

The flight lieutenant tells him that Joe is preparing a room for him. Joe lights a fire in the room's fireplace and brings the pilot food, staying to talk. He reveals that he has worked at RAF Minton for twenty years.

The pilot notices a framed photo of a young pilot beside a Mosquito, with JK painted on the nose. Joe explains that John Kavanaugh had once occupied this room during the war. The image anchors the present mystery in a living history.

Joe recounts Kavanaugh's wartime habit of refueling his Mosquito and going out alone to guide crippled bombers home. Kavanaugh died on Christmas Eve, 1943, when his plane went down in the North Sea. The revelation ties the present events to a real, tragic legacy.