The Treaty of Versailles banned Germany's air force. This is the story of how it survived.

October 1919. Tom Munro is giving joyrides from a field outside Salisbury. He is short of money and short of sleep, and he is still haunted by what he did in a shell crater in 1918. When an old squadron friend, now with the Secret Intelligence Service, offers him £500 to fly a passenger out of Finland, he doesn't ask many questions.

The passenger is Alice Ferguson, a linguist and agent. The job is to land at night, engine off, on a field outside Petrograd and snatch a man from the Cheka. Tom gets him out, but not Alice.

Back in England, Tom finally gets his airline, backed by a shipping magnate who is very keen on routes into Germany. Intelligence wants Tom to watch German aviation while he flies them.

In Hamburg, Alice reappears under a new name, watching crates that are too heavy for farm machinery. In Berlin, a man with an eye patch has Tom and his gunner drugged and beaten. Over the North Sea, a Fokker in military colours flies straight into them. And somewhere between Germany and Russia, the Reichswehr is building the air force the treaty says it cannot have.

Dark Treaty is set against the Kapp Putsch and the first scheduled flights out of Croydon. It is an interwar spy novel written by a man who flew and served in intelligence himself.

William Fernie is an aeronautical engineer and former RAF flying instructor who served sixteen years in the RAF, ending in military intelligence. Dark Treaty is the second book in the Tom Munro aviation and espionage series, after Letters to Louisa and followed by Rapallo's Shadow and The Lipetsk Conspiracy. Each novel can be read as a standalone.