Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  He pivoted, just able to make out the black airman’s shape prone in the dirt beside him.

  “Gotta move a little faster when trouble starts coming in your direction,” Scott whispered. “Good thing you weren’t in a fighter, Hart. Stick to bombers, nice and steady and solid bombers. Don’t need to react quite so quickly in bombers. And maybe when you get back to the States you better stick to noncontact sports, too. No football, no boxing for you. Golf would be good. Or fishing. Or maybe just read a lot of books.”

  Tommy frowned. He felt a sudden surge of competitiveness within him. In prep school and then as an undergraduate, he’d been an excellent tennis player. And growing up in Vermont, he’d learned to be an expert skier. He wanted to say something about the capacity to stand on the lip of some snow-covered ridge, cold wind cutting through woolen clothing, staring down the side of some steep trail, and the abandon that he would call up from deep within to launch himself over the edge and down. He thought it took a different sort of recklessness and bravery. But he knew it wasn’t the same as climbing into the ring to face down another man bent on harm and hurt, the way Lincoln Scott had. That was something more primal, and he wasn’t sure he could do that.

  He thought suddenly that there were many questions about himself that needed answering, and that he had postponed asking almost every one of them of himself.

  “You gonna be okay, Hart?” Scott asked sharply.

  “I’m fine,” Tommy replied, shaking the questions from his imagination. “A little spooked. That’s all.”

  Scott hesitated, still slightly amused, then added: “All right, counselor. Lead the way. Tight formation. Wing to wing.”

  Tommy scrambled to his feet, regaining his bearings. He took a long, slow breath of the nighttime air, like inhaling black vapors, and realized that it had been almost two years since he’d been outside of the hut in the dead of midnight. Prisoner-of-war camp demanded the most simplistic of routines: Lights out shortly after dark. Go to bed. Go to sleep. Fight off nightmares and sleep terrors. Wake up at dawn. Rise. Be counted. Do it all again.

  In his months inside Stalag Luft Thirteen there had been perhaps a dozen nighttime air raids close enough for the camp sirens to be sounded, but the Germans hadn’t provided any bomb shelters inside the wire, nor had they allowed the men to construct any, so prisoners weren’t scrambled out into the dark to seek protection from their own high in the air above them. Instead, at the first alarm, the Germans merely sent ferrets through the camp rapidly padlocking the doors to each hut. Their fear was that kriegies would try to use a raid as a diversion to escape, and in this they were probably correct. There were always some prisoners willing to risk everything on a whim. Escape was a powerful narcotic. The men addicted might use any advantage available—even when they understood that no one had as yet been successful at escaping from Stalag Luft Thirteen. The Germans knew this, and locked the doors as the sirens sounded. So the airmen waited out the approaching deep whomp-whomp-whomp of bombs in silence and near-panic inside their huts, knowing that any one bomb in the arsenals that they themselves had once carried through the sky could level any of the flimsy wooden huts with ease, killing everyone inside almost as an afterthought.

  Tommy did not know why the Germans didn’t lock them into the huts every night. But they didn’t. Probably because they would have had to lock down every window as well, which would have taken hours to accomplish. And then the kriegies would have constructed false doors and escape hatches to give themselves access to the night. So during a raid the doors were locked and the windows left open, which made no real sense. Tommy always supposed that had bombs actually started to fall on the camp, there was no way of telling what the kriegies would do, so he believed the exercise of locking the doors was actually useless. Still, the Germans did this, without explanation. Tommy presumed there was some stiff and inviolable Luftwaffe regulation they were following, even if it made utterly no sense.

  His eyes slowly adjusted to the night surrounding him. Shapes and distances that were so familiar in the daytime sluggishly took on form and substance. Black silence enveloped him and he became aware of Scott’s steady breathing at his side.

  “Let’s move,” the Tuskegee airman urged softly, but insistently.

  Tommy nodded, but took one long look up into the sky above them. The moon was nearly full, shedding helpful sheets of wan light over their course, but what he looked for were the stars. He counted the constellations, recognizing forms in the familiar arrangements above, warmed to the great swath of filmy white that was the Milky Way. It was, he thought, like seeing an old friend approaching in the distance, and he half-raised a hand as if he were about to wave a greeting. He realized that it had been months since he’d stood outside in night’s quiet and read the heavens above. He reminded himself that he was the navigator, and with a long, last glance at the blinking dots of light above, he darted forward, heading toward the Abort.

  The two men zigzagged from shadow to shadow, moving swiftly toward the distinct joined odors of lime and waste emanating from the Abort. The familiar, musty smell that to the men in their prior lives might have been overwhelming and disgusting was, to the kriegies, as routine as bacon frying on a Sunday morning back home.

  Their feet made padding sounds against the damp earth. They did not talk until they reached the entrance to the Abort, where Tommy hesitated, kneeling down in a spot of greater darkness, letting his eyes penetrate the night around them, searching for the next move.

  “Where to, counselor?” Scott said under his breath. “What are you looking for?”

  Tommy narrowed his eyes, thinking hard. After a moment, he turned and whispered to Scott. “You’re the strong man. All right. Imagine you’ve got to carry Vincent Bedford. Fireman’s carry, over your left shoulder. He weighs what? One fifty-five? One sixty?”

  “One sixty, maybe one seventy, max. He was a skinny little bastard. But he ate better than the rest of us. A middleweight.”

  “Okay. One seventy. But deadweight. How far can you carry that body, Scott? Left shoulder.”

  “I wouldn’t use my left shoulder . . .”

  “I know that.”

  In the darkness, he could see the fighter pilot’s head nod in comprehension. “Not too far. Probably farther than you might think, because the killer’s adrenaline would be pumping something furious. But still, not too far. It’s not like carrying some buddy whose life you want to save. So, maybe a hundred yards. A little more or maybe a little less, depending on how nervous you are.”

  Tommy measured to himself. He started to calculate an equation, using distance, factoring in the sweep of the searchlights and proximity to the huts. There was a spot, he thought, close enough so that it would be this Abort that the killer chose, and not one of the others. And a route to the Abort that provided some safety.

  He nodded his head, but thought the why of the murder still eluded him.

  “He needs to avoid the searchlight and the goons by the wire and not make a sound that might wake up some kriegie, and this is where he ends up. So where do we go, lieutenant?” Tommy said. “Give me your best guess.”

  Scott hesitated for a second, his head pivoting, surveying the darkness ahead of them, then he whispered, “Follow me.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment from Tommy, the black airman darted across the alleyway between the two huts, past the entrance to the Abort. Working his way slowly, staying close to the wall of Hut 102, he maneuvered to the end of the building. Tommy jogged to keep pace.

  From where they were standing in the shadows, both men could see the wire, thirty yards ahead, sweeping away from them, angled out to enclose the exercise and assembly areas. A guard tower rose up in the pitch black, another fifty yards distant. In the moonlight they could see the profiles of a pair of goons, on the platform. Tommy knew the tower contained both a searchlight, now shut off, and a thirty-caliber machine gun. He shuddered. He was about to speak when Lincoln Scott filled in his very words, spoken in a whisp
er.

  “Not this way. Not with those Krauts up there. Too risky.”

  From somewhere in the darkness, a Hundführer’s dog barked once, only to be shushed by his handler. The two Americans shrank back against the wall.

  “The other way, then,” Tommy said. “Longer, but . . .”

  “. . . safer,” Scott finished.

  He immediately began working his way back to where they had started. Moving quietly, it took the two men almost a minute to reach the front of Hut 102. To their left, across the open space of the yard, were the stairs to Hut 101, which they’d exited earlier.

  Lincoln Scott took a single step out toward the stairs to Hut 102, then immediately shrank back. His movement caused Tommy Hart to hug the wall, and within seconds, he saw why: The searchlight that had dogged them at the start of their excursion was playing about, erratically lighting up the corner of another hut a short distance away.

  The same damn problem as at the other end, Tommy thought abruptly. He could feel his breathing coming in short, wheezy gasps. The searchlight was death. Maybe not certain death, but possible death, and he hated it with a sudden and total anger.

  He knelt down, watching it sweep across the distance, cutting through the darkness like a sabre.

  Scott lowered himself beside Tommy. “I doubt he came this way, either,” he said. “Not weighed down and carrying a body.”

  Tommy half-turned, staring down the black corridor toward the Abort. “I don’t think he was killed anywhere here. Too much noise. Too close to all the windows. If Vic shouted, even just once, someone would hear him. They could hear a fight, too. But the problem is, I don’t see how you could carry a body around either end of the building. So, how the hell does it get here?”

  “Maybe he didn’t carry it around,” Scott said quietly. “You know, the same problem exists for any of the escape committeemen or the tunnelers—anyone in Hut 101 who needs to be out and somewhere else at night, right?”

  “Right,” Tommy said, starting to think.

  “Well, that means there’s another route. One that only a few folks know about,” Scott said. “Only the men who need it.”

  Scott craned his head past Tommy. He lifted his hand and pointed back down the length of Hut 102. “There’s a crawl space,” he said, still keeping his voice soft. “There’s got to be. A way to pass completely under this hut, come out on the other side . . .”

  Scott didn’t continue. Instead he started to creep back the length of the hut, peering under the edge of the building. At the fourth window, shuttered above their heads, he suddenly ducked down and whispered sharply, “Follow me, Hart.”

  With those words, the black airman abruptly wiggled beneath the lip of the hut, his legs and feet disappearing as if they’d been swallowed up by the earth.

  Tommy dropped to the hard ground, bending over, staring underneath Hut 102. For an instant he could detect just the slightest sensation of movement in the utter darkness beneath the barracks and he realized that it was Scott worming his way beneath the floorboards. The narrow blackness of the space under Hut 102 was enveloping. He inhaled sharply, reeling back a step, almost as if the emptiness of the space had reached out and grabbed at him. His heart started to race and he felt a sudden heat on his forehead. He gasped again, almost as if it were hard to breathe, and he told himself: You can’t go in there.

  He would not give a word to the terror that swept over him. It was deep, rooted hard within his heart and reaching down into the pit of his stomach, where it twisted and clenched at his guts. He shook his head. Not a chance, he said. Not under there.

  He forced himself to look again into the crawl space and saw that Scott had traversed the breadth of the barracks and emerged on the far side. There was just enough moonlight for Tommy Hart to make out the distant exit. A skinny passageway that unless you were looking for it wouldn’t be noticed. The hut was probably not more than thirty feet from side to side, but to Tommy this seemed an impossibly long road. He shook his head again, but penetrating past the voice within him that refused to follow was Scott’s urgent whisper: “Come on, Hart! Damn it! Hurry up!”

  He told himself: It’s not a tunnel. It’s not a box. It’s not even underground. It’s just a tight fit with a low ceiling. In the daylight, it wouldn’t be a problem. Just like crawling under a car to work on a transmission.

  He heard again, more insistent: “Come on, Hart! Let’s go!”

  Tommy realized it was his idea to be out of the bunk rooms at midnight. He realized that searching for the murder location at night was his idea. Everything was his idea. He realized that this was something he had to do, and so, trying feverishly to clear his mind of all fears and tremors, locking his eyes on the distant exit, he thrust himself under the building, crawling rapidly with a desperate man’s urgency.

  He scrambled forward, pawing at the loose dirt beneath the hut. His head bumped against the flooring above him, but he pushed ahead, feeling the first awful taste of panic rise in his throat, threatening to freeze all his muscles. For an instant, he thought he was lost, that the exit had disappeared. He imagined he was drowning and he struggled against the wave of fear. He lost track of time, unable to tell whether he’d been in the passageway for seconds or hours, and he started to cough and choke as he scrambled ahead. He could feel the panic taking him over, thought that he was going to pass out and then he burst through, rolling forward, only to be grabbed by Scott, and pulled to his feet.

  “Jesus, Hart!” the black airman whispered. “What the hell’s the matter?”

  Tommy gasped for breath, like a man rescued from wildly tossed seas.

  “Can’t do it,” he said slowly. “Not in enclosed spaces. Claustrophobia. Just can’t do it.”

  His hands were shaking and sweat streaked down his face. He shivered, as if the night had suddenly turned cold.

  Scott draped an arm around Tommy’s shoulder. “You’re okay,” he said. “You made it. It wasn’t that bad, huh?”

  Tommy shook his head. “Never again,” he said.

  Breathing in harshly, he picked up his head and surveyed the darkness around them. It was like being in another world, to suddenly arrive in the alleyway between two unfamiliar huts. Though there was little difference in reality, it seemed to be odd, unique. He swept his eyes down the corridor.

  And then he saw what he thought he needed to see.

  The huts had been laid out in typical German regimentation, row upon row. But Hut 103 had been angled slightly nearer the end of Hut 102. The stump of a large tree that had been cut when the campsite had been cleared had not been removed, and the building had been pushed closer to the adjacent hut. The narrowing V shape caused by the odd convergence of the two huts created a darker, shadowy spot. He pointed in that direction.

  “Down there,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The two men maneuvered down the length of the barracks once again until they reached the end. He saw that there was some cultivated earth, and he just made out the shapes of some garden plants. But the area was far blacker, protected from the night better than the ends of the other huts. The roofline cut off the moonlight. The narrowing space seemed to defy the searchlight, which lingered on an opposite hut’s roof, spreading some light in the alleyway, but creating many deep shadows as well. And the wire, with its perimeter guards and goon tower, was pushed out to accommodate another series of tree stumps. This made him pause, for he realized that in the day, the same spot would receive less sunlight. And this made it an odd location for any kriegie to place a garden.

  Tommy considered. An easy place to wait hidden. A quiet place. Very dark. He walked forward, then turned, realizing that he was concealed by the darkness, while anyone making their way down the alleyway would be outlined against distant searchlights. He nodded slowly to himself, and spoke directly to his own imagination. A spot, he told himself, that provided much of what a killer needed.

  Tommy felt a rush of excited satisfaction, though one lingering question plagued
him, and dampened his enthusiasm: Why would Trader Vic have stepped into that particular darkness? What had drawn him to that spot, where a man with a stiletto was waiting for him to turn his back?

  Something had beckoned Vincent Bedford to the juncture of the two huts. Something he thought was safe. Or profitable. Either was a possibility with Trader Vic. But it was death that had waited there for him.

  Tommy slowly turned, staring at the huts around him. He dropped to one knee, feeling the clumps of dirt of the garden.

  And why would he have to be moved after he was killed? It would be far less of a risk for the killer to simply leave Bedford’s body where the killing took place. Unless there was something nearby that he did not want to draw attention to.

  “What do you think?” Scott whispered. “This the place? Sure seems like about the best place to do someone real quietlike.”

  “I think I’ll make a point to come back in the daylight,” Tommy replied, as he nodded his head. “See what I can see. But I’d say this spot’s a good candidate for the murder location.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Tommy rose. “All right,” he said. But as he took a step forward, Scott suddenly grabbed his arm.

  Both men froze.

  “What?” Tommy whispered.

  “I heard something. Quiet.”

  “What?”

  “I said ‘Quiet!’ ”

  Both men slipped back to the wall of the hut, squeezing hard against it. Tommy held his breath, trying to erase from the night even the noise of his own wind. And into this silence, he heard a thudding sound. Unmistakable but quick, and he couldn’t make out where it came from. He slowly exhaled, and heard a second noise, almost a scraping or rustling sound. He bit down hard on his lip.

  Scott tugged at Tommy’s sleeve. He held a finger over Tommy’s mouth to signal silence, then gestured for Tommy to stay close. The black airman then started to move, catlike, graceful, but with an undeniable urgency, through the darkness of the alleyway. Tommy thought Scott seemed to be well educated in the ability to move silently. He tried to keep pace, stepping forward as softly as he could manage, hoping his footsteps would be muffled against the surrounding night.