Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  They were in the lead plane, and the captain from West Texas was looking out over New York City, talking in a rapid-fire monologue, excited about seeing the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the very first time. “Hey, Tommy,” he’d called out over the intercom, “where the hell’s that big ol’ bridge?” And Tommy had replied with a small laugh, “Captain, they’ve got lots of bridges here in New York and they’re all big. But the George Washington? Just take a look to the north, captain. About ten miles right up the river.” There had been a momentary pause, while the captain looked, and then he’d abruptly put the Mitchell into a short dive. “Come on, boys,” he said, “let’s have some fun!”

  The formation had followed the Lovely Lydia down to the deck, and the next thing Tommy knew, they were flying right up the Hudson, the easygoing whitecaps of spring water glistening beneath their wings. The captain steered the entire group under the bridge, their engines echoing and roaring as they passed beneath some astonished motorists, who’d stopped in mid-span as the flight passed below them, close enough so that Tommy could see the wide eyes of one small boy who waved frantically and joyously at the bombers. The intercom was filled with the whoops and hollers of excited crewmen. The radio crackled with the shouts from the pilots of the other planes in the formation.

  Everyone knew what they’d done was dangerous, illegal, and foolhardy, and they were likely to get their butts chewed out at the next checkpoint, but they were all young men who thought it still a delightfully fine and outrageous idea on a beautiful, breezy afternoon. The only thing that might have made the daredeviltry better would have been some young women to admire it. Of course, Tommy thought, this was months before any of them knew anything about the lonely and ugly deaths that awaited so many of them.

  He looked down the empty corridor of Hut 101 in Stalag Luft Thirteen and remembered that moment and wished he could feel that sort of excitement once again. Risk and joy, instead of risk and fear. He thought that was what the reality of war stole from him. The innocent chanciness of youth.

  Tommy sighed deeply, shook the memory from his head, and walked down the corridor. His boots echoed in the empty space. He flung open the door, and stepped down into the dirt of the camp ground, the sunlight blinding him for an instant. As he raised his hand to shield his eyes from the glare, he saw two men standing just a few feet apart from each other, both watching him. One was Captain Walker Townsend, who had abandoned his baseball glove. The other was Hauptmann Heinrich Visser. The two men had obviously been speaking together. But their conversation stopped when he hovered near.

  Chapter Nine

  THINGS THAT WEREN’T WHAT THEY SEEMED

  By midday, Tommy had finished interviewing the remaining witnesses arrayed against Lincoln Scott and all had told him obvious bits and pieces of the same story—tales of anger and enmity between two men that transcended the prisoner-of-war camp, and spoke more about the situation back home in the States.

  All the kriegies on Captain Townsend’s witness list had seen the hatred displayed by the two men. One man told how he’d watched Trader Vic pick up Scott’s Bible and taunt him, picking out random passages and applying racist interpretations to the Good Book’s words, insults that seemed to make the black flier seethe with anger. Another declared he’d seen Scott tearing in half the scrap cloth that later became the handles to both the pan and the knife. A third described how the two men had fought when Bedford accused Scott of the theft, and how quick the Tuskegee airman had been with his fierce right cross, catching Vic in the upper lip. If Scott had hit him in the jaw, the kriegie said, Bedford would have dropped in his spot.

  As he wandered through the camp, alone with his thoughts despite the presence of five thousand other American airmen, Tommy added each small piece of testimony from each witness together, and recognized that the confidence displayed by Captain Townsend and Major Clark was well founded. Portraying Scott as a killer was not going to be an overly difficult task. Indeed, by failing to conform, by remaining aloof and independent, the black flier had consistently behaved in a manner that was likely to make most of the kriegies believe him capable of this different type of killing. It was the simplest leap of imagination: from loner to murderer.

  Tommy kicked at the dirt and thought: If Scott had made friends, if he’d been outgoing, communicative—then the vast majority of the kriegies would have ignored the color of his skin. Tommy was sure of this. But, by setting himself alone and apart from his first minute at Stalag Luft Thirteen—no matter how justified he might have been in taking that route—Scott had created the makings of his own tragedy. In a world where everyone was struggling with the same fears, illness and death and loneliness, and the same hungers, food and freedom, he had behaved differently, and that behavior, as much as distrust over the color of his skin, was the cause of the hatred arrayed against him.

  Tommy was persuaded that the murder charge was buttressed by that antagonism, which, from the prosecution’s viewpoint, was probably ninety percent of their case. The bloodstains, being absent from the bunk room on the night of the murder, the discovery of the knife—all these things when taken together painted a compelling portrait. It was only upon examining each separately that the supposition unraveled somewhat.

  Somewhat, he thought. Not completely.

  A troubling doubt crept into his empty stomach and he bit down on his lower lip, pensive.

  Tommy stopped, taking a moment to look up into the sky above, the typical penitent’s search for guidance from the heavens. The normal sounds of the camp surrounded him, but they faded away, as he considered the situation. He thought to himself at that moment that for much of his young life, he’d waited for events to happen to him. He blindly believed—even if incorrectly—that he’d been a passive participant in so much. His home. His school. His service. That he’d managed to stay alive to this point was more by the accidents of good fortune than by anything he’d deliberately seized for himself.

  He understood that this waiting for life to happen to him might not work much longer. Certainly, it wasn’t going to work for Lincoln Scott.

  As he walked, he shook his head, sighing deeply. He felt no closer to understanding why Trader Vic was killed than he had on the morning of the murder. And, absent the ability to get up before the tribunal and offer an alternative, he realized Scott’s chances were slight.

  There was a spot of sunshine striking against the exterior wall of Hut 105, making it glisten and seem almost new, and Tommy walked over to it. He slumped against the hut and slowly sank to the hard ground, where he stayed, seated, turning his face toward the warmth. For a moment the sun burned his eyes, and he raised a hand to his forehead. From where he was sitting, he could see through to the wire, and beyond to the woods. There was sound coming from the distance, and he bent toward it, straining to determine what it was. After a moment, he recognized the occasional noisy thud and crash of a tree being felled, and he guessed that just beyond the line of dark trees that marked the start of the forest was where the Russian slave-prisoners were clearing space. It wouldn’t be long, he guessed, before the sounds of hammers and saws would be heard as construction began on another camp to hold more Allied airmen. This was what Fritz Number One had told him was under way, and he had no doubt that the ever-present sight of B-17 contrails high in the sky during the day and the deep nighttime rumblings of British raids on nearby installations and rail lines meant that the Germans were acquiring new Allied crews with depressing frequency.

  For a long moment he listened to the faded sounds coming from the forest and he supposed that it was back-breaking work being performed by men close to starvation, sick, and near death. He shuddered briefly, imagining what life was like for the Russian prisoners. Unlike the Allied fliers, they had no building compound. Instead, they camped in all weather under makeshift lean-tos and leaky tarpaulins stretched as tents, behind temporary barbed-wire rolls. No toilets. No kitchens. No shelter. Snarling dogs and trigger-happy guards watching over them. Ther
e were no Geneva Convention rules governing their imprisonment. It was not unusual to hear the occasional sharp report of a rifle, or burst of machine-gun fire from the woods, which all the kriegies understood to mean that some Russian had realized the inevitability of his death, and had done something to hasten it.

  Tommy shook his head briefly, and thought: Death must seem like freedom to those men.

  Then he looked at the tall fences of barbed wire enclosing Stalag Luft Thirteen and realized: Imprisonment must seem like death to some men right here.

  He felt an odd quickening in his stomach, as if he’d seen something that was surprising. He stared at the wire again. Not a bad spot, he thought abruptly. The guard tower to the north is a good fifty yards away and the one to the south another seventy-five. Their searchlights wouldn’t quite overlap, either. Nor did the fields of fire belonging to the machine guns mounted on either side of the tower. At least, that was what he guessed because he knew himself not to be expert in these sorts of details, although others inside the camp were.

  He suddenly thought to himself: If I were a member of the escape committee, this would be a spot I would give serious consideration to. He narrowed his eyes, trying to guess the distance to the forest. One hundred yards, minimum, he thought. A football field. Even if you managed to blitz through the wire with a pair of homemade shears, it was still too far for anyone not willing to risk everything on a single dash for freedom.

  Or was it?

  Tommy scraped up a handful of loose, sandy earth, and let it stream through his fingers. It was the wrong dirt. This he knew from talking with men who’d worked on the unsuccessful tunnels. Too hard and dry, too unstable. Forever caving in. Vulnerable to the probes from the ferrets. He shuddered at the idea of digging beneath the surface. It would be stifling, hot, filthy, and dangerous. The ferrets also occasionally commandeered a heavy truck, loaded it with men and material, and drove it, bouncing along, around the outside perimeter of the camp. They believed the weight would cause any underground tunnel to collapse. Once, more than a year earlier, they’d been right. He remembered the fury on Colonel MacNamara’s face when the long days and nights of hard work were so summarily crushed.

  It was the same look of frustration and despair that the colonel wore a few weeks back, when the two men digging had been buried alive. Tommy looked over at the barbed wire. No way out, he told himself. Except the worst way.

  And then, in that second, he wondered whether this was true.

  To his left, he suddenly spotted an officer with a metal hoe working a small patch of garden, dutifully cultivating the rows of turned earth over and over again. There were similar gardens all along the length of Hut 106. All were well-tended.

  Dirt, he thought, fresh dirt. Fresh dirt being blended with old.

  He wanted to stand, look closer, but with a great internal tug at his emotions and a lassoing of the ideas that began to spring to his mind, he remained where he sat.

  Tommy took a long, slow breath, releasing the air like a man ascending through the water. He lowered his head, trying to make it seem as if he were lost in thought, when in reality his eyes were darting back and forth, searching the area around him. He knew someone was watching him. From a window. From the exercise yard. From the perimeter path. He did not know precisely who, but he knew he was being watched.

  Abruptly, from the front of the hut, he heard a sharp wolf whistle, the double-pitched sound that in happier places meant a pretty woman was sashaying past. Almost immediately afterward, there was the sound of a metal waste container being slammed shut twice, another double report. Then he heard a single kriegie voice call out: “Keindrinkwasser!” in a distinctly flat, twangy American accent. Someone from the Midwest, Tommy thought.

  He stretched out his arms, like a man who’d been dozing, and lifted himself to his feet, dusting off his pants. He noticed that the officer who’d been tending the garden across from where he was seated had disappeared, and this made him very curious, though he took pains to hide this observation. A few moments later, Fritz Number One came sauntering around the front of the hut. The ferret was making no attempt to move through the camp with any concealment; he knew that his own presence had already been noticed by the fliers assigned to stooge duty that day. He was merely reminding the kriegies that he was there, as always, and alert. When Fritz Number One saw Tommy, he walked over to him.

  “Lieutenant Hart,” he said, grinning, “perhaps you have a smoke for me?”

  “Hello, Fritz,” Tommy replied. “Yes, if you’ll escort me to the British compound.”

  “Two smokes then,” Fritz answered. “One for each direction.”

  “Agreed.”

  The German took a cigarette, lit it, took a deep drag, and slowly blew out smoke. “Do you think the war will end soon, lieutenant?”

  “No. I think it will go on forever.”

  The German smiled, gesturing with his hand for the two of them to start moving across the compound toward the gate. “In Berlin,” the ferret said slowly, “they talk of nothing except the invasion. How it must be thrown back into the sea.”

  “Sounds like they’re worried,” Tommy said.

  “They have much to worry about,” Fritz answered carefully. He looked up into the sky. “A day like this one would be right, don’t you think, lieutenant? For launching an attack. That is what Eisenhower and Montgomery and Churchill must be imagining back in London.”

  “I wouldn’t know. All I did was navigate a plane. Those gentlemen rarely consulted me with their plans. And anyway, Fritz, planning invasions wasn’t my particular cup of tea.”

  Fritz Number One looked momentarily confused. “I do not understand these words,” he said. “What has drinking tea to do with military maneuvers?”

  “It’s another saying, Fritz. What it means is that I don’t have any sort of education or interest in that thing.”

  “Cup of tea?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I will remember.” The two men continued toward the sentries at the gate, who looked up as they approached. “Again you have helped me, lieutenant. Someday I will speak truly like an American.”

  “It’s not the same thing, Fritz.”

  “Same thing?”

  “Not the same as being one.”

  The ferret shook his head. “We are what we are, Lieutenant Hart. Only a fool apologizes. And only a fool refuses to take advantages from what is in front of him.”

  “True enough,” Tommy answered.

  “I am not a fool, lieutenant.”

  Tommy took a sharp breath and measured quickly what the German was saying, listening hard to the soft tones, trying to see into the suggestions beyond the words.

  The two men marched in unison toward the British compound. Right before they reached the gate, Tommy asked in an idle voice that masked his sudden intensity, “The Russians building the new camp . . . how close to completion are they?”

  Fritz shook his head. He continued to speak in a quiet, concealed voice. “A few months, perhaps. Maybe a little time longer. But perhaps never. They die too fast. Every few days the trains arrive at the station in town bringing a new detachment. They are marched into the woods and take over for the men who have died. It seems that there is no end to Russian prisoners. The work goes slowly. Day after day, the same.” The ferret shuddered slightly. “I am glad to be here, instead,” he said.

  “You don’t go over there?”

  “Once or twice. It is dangerous. The Russians hate us very much. In their eyes, you can see they wish us all dead. Once a Hundführer released his dog into the camp. A big Doberman. A vicious beast, Lieutenant Hart, more a wolf than a dog. The fool thought it would teach the Ivans a lesson. Idiot.” Fritz Number One smiled briefly, shaking his head. “He had no respect. This is stupid, don’t you think, Lieutenant Hart? One must always respect one’s enemy. Even if one hates, one must still have respect, no? Anyway, the dog disappeared. The fool stood at the wire, whistling and calling, ‘Here
, boy! Here, boy!’ Idiot. In the morning, the Ivans threw out the skin. That was all that was left. They ate the rest. The Russians, I think, are animals.”

  “So you don’t go over there?”

  “Not often. Sometimes. But not often. But see this, Lieutenant Hart . . .”

  Fritz Number One quickly glanced around to see if there were any German officers in the vicinity. Spying none, he slowly removed a shiny brass object from the breast pocket of his tunic.

  “. . . Perhaps you would like to make a trade? This would make an excellent souvenir, when you finally return home to America. Six packs of cigarettes and some chocolate, maybe two bars, what do you say?”

  Tommy reached out and took the object from Fritz’s hand. It was a large, heavy, rectangular belt buckle. It had been polished carefully, so that the red hammer and sickle embossed on the buckle glistened in the sunlight. Tommy hefted it in his hand and wondered for a moment whether Fritz had traded bread for it, or whether he’d simply removed it from the waist of a dead Russian soldier. The thought made him shudder.

  He handed it back. “Not bad,” he said. “But not what I’m looking for.”

  The ferret nodded. “Trader Vic,” he said, with a wry smile, “he would have seen the value, and he would have met my price. Or come very close. And then he would have turned around and made a profit.”

  “You did much business with Vic?” Tommy asked idly, although he listened carefully for the answer.

  Fritz Number One hesitated. “It is not permitted,” he said.

  “Many things that happen aren’t permitted,” Tommy replied.

  The ferret nodded. “Captain Bedford was always seeking souvenirs of war, lieutenant. Many different items. He was willing to trade for anything.”

  Tommy slowed his pace as they approached the entrance to the British compound, nodding, realizing that the ferret was trying to tell him something, and Fritz Number One put out his hand and just touched Tommy’s forearm. “Anything,” the German repeated.