“Right,” Scott said.
“Those damn dogs,” Hugh muttered. “You think he can smell how scared I am?” The Canadian cracked a small, joyless laugh. “Shouldn’t be too bloody hard to pick up my scent right about now. And if those damnable lights come any closer, you’ll be able to smell my drawers from a mile away.”
This made both Tommy and Lincoln smile, despite themselves.
The Canadian grasped Tommy on the forearm. “You lead on, Tommy,” he said. “Scott’ll be right behind you, and I’ll be along in a minute or two.”
“Wait until you’re sure,” Tommy repeated. Then, hunched over, he crab-walked up to the front of the hut, right to the last shadow on the lip of the exposed area. He paused there, reaching down and double-checking his shoes to make sure they were fastened tightly and that his jacket was zipped tight, and pulling his cap down hard on his head. He wore nothing that would jangle, nothing that might catch on the steps as he slipped past. He performed a small inventory of his person, checking for anything that might betray him, and could find nothing. He thought, in that second of hesitation, that he had traveled far without reaching his destination, but that some things that had been hidden from him were much closer to coming into focus. Every rational bone in his body argued against exposing himself to the chances of the searchlight, the dogs, and the goons, but Tommy knew these voices of caution were cowards, and realized, too, that there was the chance that dodging the Germans right at that moment might be the least dangerous thing he had to do that night.
Tommy took a deep breath, and balanced forward on the balls of his feet. He looked up, gritted his teeth, and then, without any warning to the others, launched himself around the front of Hut 105.
His feet kicked up small puffs of slippery dust, and he almost stumbled when his boot caught the lip of a small ridge in the dirt. He had the momentary realization that it must have been that same lip that tripped the man before him, but like a skater momentarily thrown off stride, he regained his balance and sprang forward.
Breathing hard, he ducked around the corner, tossing himself against the wall and the welcome darkness. It took him a second or two to calm himself. The beating in his ears was drumlike, perhaps even like the sound of an airplane’s engine, and it faded slowly.
Tommy waited for Scott to traverse the same distance, letting the silence flow around him. He sharpened his eyes and ears, and then turned his eyes to the front door of Hut 107. As he watched and listened, he heard the unmistakable sound of an American voice. He bent toward the sound and what he heard didn’t surprise him. Penetrating the darkness, even though it was whispered, a man said, “Number thirty-eight . . .” And then there was a small, distant noise as someone rapped twice on the wooden barracks door. Tommy strained to see through the night, and caught a glimpse of the door swinging open, and a bent-over form taking the front steps two at a time and leaping inside.
He immediately could see why Hut 107 was selected. The front door was in a lee, seemingly shielded from the direct glare of the searchlights, almost a blind spot, because of the odd angles of the assembly yard and the way the other huts were placed. It was not as close to the back wire as Hut 109, but the additional distance was surmountable. Escape planners never chose the huts closest to freedom, anyway, because they were the barracks most frequently searched by the ferrets. Tommy could see that the forest was a mere seventy-five yards on the far side of the wire. Other tunnels had almost made it that distance, he knew. And, Tommy realized, Hut 107 had the further advantage of being on the town side of the camp. If an escaping kriegie actually made it into the trees, he could keep going straight, instead of trying to navigate with a homemade compass in the deep black of the Bavarian forest.
Tommy pressed himself against the wall, waiting for Scott. He could tell what the delay was: a searchlight was probing the area they had just traveled, moving behind them, trying to scour the alleyways between the huts.
As Tommy waited, he heard another whisper and double-knock. The door to 107 briefly swung open again. He guessed two men, arriving from the other side of the compound.
The searchlight swept back, toward Hut 101, and Tommy heard the heavy tread of Scott’s boots, swinging around the front of the building, as he seized the opportunity. The black flier nearly stumbled as well, and when he threw himself next to Tommy, he was muttering, “Jesus Christ!”
“You okay?”
Scott breathed in deeply. “Still alive and kicking,” he said. “But that’s too damn close. The searchlight is all over the front of 101 and 103. Bastards. I don’t think they saw anything, though. Just typical Kraut behavior. Hugh will be along in a minute, or whenever those goons with that light swing it around somewhere else. You see anything?”
“Yes,” Tommy said quietly. “Men going into 107. Whisper a number and knock twice and the door opens.”
“A number?”
“Yeah. You be forty-two. I’m forty-one. A little lie, but it’ll get us through the door. And Hugh, if he ever manages to get here, he can be forty-three.”
“May take him a minute. The lights were close. And there’s something in the way. . . .”
“I almost tripped, too.”
“Hope he saw that.”
The two men waited. They could just make out the shaft of light moving relentlessly over the territory they’d passed through, hunting the darkness. They knew that Hugh was hunched over, hugging the wall, waiting for his chance. It seemed far longer than it probably was, but finally the light snapped off.
“Now, Hugh!” Tommy whispered.
He could hear the pounding of Hugh’s boots, as the hulking Canadian leapt forward into the darkness. And then, almost instantly, a deep thud, a muffled curse, and silence, as the same indentation that had tripped each of them did the same to Renaday.
But the Canadian did not immediately leap up.
Instead, Tommy heard a low, harsh moan.
“Hugh?” he whispered as sharply as possible.
There was a moment of quiet, and then both men heard the Canadian’s distinctive accent.
“It’s my bleeding knee,” he groaned.
Tommy crept to the edge of the hut. He could see Hugh still sprawled in the dirt perhaps fifteen feet away, clutching his left knee in agony.
“Wait there,” Tommy hissed. “We’ll come get you!”
Scott was at Tommy’s side, ready to leap into the darkness, when a sudden shaft of light smashed the air above their heads, forcing them to throw themselves down to the ground. The searchlight slammed into the roof of Hut 105, and then crawled lizardlike down the wall toward them.
“Don’t move,” Hugh whispered.
The light seemed to step away from Tommy and Scott and then hover just beyond where Hugh lay, still grabbing his knee, but motionless, his face buried down in the cold dirt. It seemed as if the edge of the light were only inches away from his boot and discovery. The Canadian seemed to reach out for the darkness, as if it were some sort of protective blanket he could pull over him.
For an instant, the light poised, blurrily licking at the prone form of Tommy’s friend. Then, languidly, almost as if it were teasing them, it swung a few feet away, back toward Hut 103.
Hugh remained frozen. Slowly, he twisted his face out of the dirt and toward the darkness a few feet away, where Tommy and Lincoln Scott remained frozen in position.
“Leave me!” he said quietly, firmly. “I can’t bloody well move anyway. You go on!”
“No,” Tommy replied, keeping his voice as soft as possible, but stricken with urgency. “We’ll get you when the light goes off.”
The searchlight stopped again, illuminating the ground perhaps twenty feet away from Hugh.
“Leave me, goddamn it, Tommy! I’m finished for tonight! Kaput!” Scott reached out and touched Tommy on the arm.
“He’s right,” Scott said. “We’ve got to go on.”
Tommy spun toward the black flier. “If that light catches him they’ll shoot him! I
’m not leaving him out there!”
“If that light catches him, this place’ll be crawling with Krauts in thirty seconds! And all hell will break loose.”
“I won’t leave him! I left someone behind once before, and I won’t do it again!”
“You go out there,” Scott hissed, “and you’ll end up killing him and yourself and God knows who else tonight.”
Tommy turned, in agony, toward Hugh. “He’s my friend!” Tommy whispered painfully.
“Then act like one!” Scott replied. “Do what he says!”
Tommy turned, searching the shadows for Hugh. The searchlight continued to bounce around, firing light a few feet away from the Canadian. But what Tommy saw astonished him, and must have done the same for Scott, because Tommy could feel the black flier’s grip tighten on his arm.
Hugh had rolled over onto his stomach, and moving with a deliberate and utterly agonizing slowness, was crawling forward, away from the front of the hut, heading steadily, painstakingly, and inexorably toward the assembly yard, pointing himself away from his friends who might have tried to help him, and directly away from the men making their way to Hut 107. He was moving away, as well, from the searchlight’s beam, which was only a momentary relief because he was steadily proceeding into the vast central open area of Stalag Luft Thirteen. It was the neutral area, a black expanse without any place to conceal himself, but Tommy knew that Hugh had realized that if he were spotted there, it would not immediately alert the Germans to anything happening in the darkened row of huts. The problem was, there was no way to immediately return to safety from the center of the exercise area. Over the course of the night’s remaining hours, he might be able to loop around, crawling all the way, back to Hut 101. But far more likely Hugh would have to wait out in the yard until morning or discovery, and either one might mean his death.
Tommy could just make out the Canadian’s faint shape working against the cold earth, as Hugh snaked his way into the yard. Then Tommy turned to Scott and pointed to the entrance to Hut 107. “All right,” he said. “Now it’s just us.”
“Yeah,” Scott replied. “Us and whoever’s inside waiting.”
Silently, the two men made their way over to the deep shadow at the side of the stairs leading into Hut 107. They paused there for just an instant, both Tommy Hart and Lincoln Scott filled with renegade thoughts. Tommy tossed one glance back in the direction where Hugh had crawled off, but he could no longer make out the shape of his friend, who’d been, for better or worse, swallowed up by the darkness.
Tommy reached up, knocked twice, and whispered: “Forty-one and forty-two . . .”
There was a momentary hesitation, then the door creaked slightly as someone inside the hut cracked it open.
They jumped forward, grabbing at the opening, and pushing into the hut.
Tommy heard a voice, alarmed, but still whispering, say, “Hey! You’re not . . .” and then fade away. He and Lincoln Scott stood, inside the door, staring down the corridor.
There was an overwhelming eeriness to the scene that greeted them. A half-dozen candles flickered weakly, spaced out perhaps every ten feet or so. Kriegies lined the corridor, all seated on the floor, their legs pulled up beneath them so as to use less space. Perhaps two dozen of the men were dressed in what they hoped would pass for civilian clothing, their uniforms retailored by the camp’s sewing services, dyed by ingenious combinations of ink and paints, so that they no longer were colored in the familiar khaki and olive drab of the U.S. Army. Many men, like the man Tommy had spotted leaving Hut 101, carried makeshift suitcases or portfolios. Some wore workmen’s hats and carried mock toolboxes. Anything extra that might make them appear to be other than what they truly were.
The man who’d opened the door was still in uniform. Not heading out that night, Tommy realized. He could see, as well, that every few feet there were support staff, still in their uniforms. In all, there had to be close to sixty men silently stretched down the length of the hut’s center corridor. Of these, probably only two dozen were on the escape plan and patiently waiting their turn.
“Goddamn it, Hart!” the man at the door hissed. “You’re not on the list! What are you doing here?”
“You could call this a truth-seeking mission,” Tommy replied briskly.
He said no more, but stepped over the feet of the last man waiting, and started down the corridor. Lincoln Scott picked his own way, directly behind Tommy. The weak candlelight threw odd, elongated shadows against the walls. As they passed, the kriegies remained silent, saying nothing, but watching the two men as they stepped forward. It was as if Tommy and Lincoln were penetrating the secret midnight ritual of some unusual order of monks.
Ahead of them they could see a small cone of light coming from the single-toilet privy at the far end of the hut. A kriegie emerged, holding a makeshift bucket filled with dirt, which he passed to one of the uniformed men standing nearby. The bucket was handed on, and finally disappeared into one of the bunk rooms, like an old-fashioned fire brigade passing water to the base of some flames. Tommy peered into the room as he stepped past, and saw that the bucket was being lifted up into a hole in the ceiling, where another pair of hands grabbed for it. He knew that above, in the crawl space below the ceiling, the dirt was spread about, and then the empty bucket passed down, making its way through pairs of eager hands, back toward the privy.
Tommy stepped up to the door. The men’s faces seemed streaked with anxiety, marked by the tension of the night and the flickering light from the candles, as another bucket filled with dirt was lifted from a hole in the floor of the hut’s sole bathroom.
The tunnel went down beneath the toilet. Kriegie engineers had managed to lift the entire commode and move it several feet to the side, making an opening perhaps four feet square. The waste pipe descended in the midst of the opening, but had been blocked off at the top. The men in Hut 107 had clearly disabled the toilet in order to dig the tunnel. Tommy was struck with a momentary admiration for the scheme. Then he heard a sharp, angry voice coming from his side.
“Hart! You son of a bitch! What the hell are you doing here?”
Tommy turned and faced Major Clark.
“Well, major,” he replied coldly, “I’m looking for some explanations.”
“I’m going to see you brought up on charges, lieutenant!” Clark blustered, still keeping his voice low, but unable to conceal his anger. “Now, get the hell back into that corridor and wait there until we’re finished here! That’s an order!”
Tommy shook his head. “Not tonight it isn’t, major. Not yet.”
Clark stepped across the small space, thrusting his face into Tommy’s. “I’ll have you . . .” he started, only to be interrupted by Lincoln Scott, who pushed his broad shoulders forward, and jabbed a finger in the diminutive major’s chest, stopping him in his tracks.
“You’ll have us what, major? Shot?”
“Yes! You’re interfering with a military operation! Disobeying an order in combat! That’s a capital offense.”
“Well,” Scott said, with an angry smile on his lips, “I seem to be accumulating those sorts of charges with some frequency.”
To the side, they heard a muffled laugh from several of the other men, a burst probably caused as much by the tension of the night as by what Scott had said.
“We’re not going anywhere until we have the truth!” Tommy said, pushing his own face down at the major’s.
Clark’s face twisted, contorted with rage. He turned to several kriegies standing nearby, just beyond the tunnel entrance. “Seize these men!” Clark hissed.
The kriegies seemed to hesitate, and in that taut second, a different voice rose, filled with a surprising humor, and accompanied by a truculent laugh.
“Hell, major, you can’t do that! And we all know it. Because those two guys are just as important as anyone else here tonight. Only difference is, they didn’t know it. So I guess they ain’t as stupid as you thought, huh, major?”
Tomm
y looked down and saw that the man who had spoken was hunched over by the side of the tunnel. He was wearing a dark blue suit, and looking like a somewhat bedraggled businessman. But his grin was unmistakable Cleveland.
“Hey, Hart,” Lieutenant Nicholas Fenelli said lightly. “I really didn’t think I’d see you again until we made it home to the States. So, what do you think of the new threads? Pretty sharp, huh? Think the girls back home will be lining up for me?”
Fenelli, still smiling, gestured to his suit jacket.
Major Clark turned angrily to the camp medic. “Lieutenant Fenelli, you’re not a part of this!”
Fenelli shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, major. And every flier here knows it. We’re all a part of the same thing.”
Just then another bucket of dirt rose from the tunnel entrance, seemingly pinning Major Clark between the need to distribute the dirt and to deal with Tommy Hart and Lincoln Scott. Clark glared at the two lieutenants, and down at Fenelli, who just grinned insouciantly back at him. He pointed at the bucket brigade to move the dirt along, which it did, swinging past Tommy and Lincoln. Then Clark bent down and whispered to the men in the tunnel: “How much farther?”
It took almost a minute of silence for the question to be relayed up the tunnel and another minute for the answer to come boomeranging back.
“Six feet,” a disembodied voice said, rising from the hole in the floor. “Just like digging a grave.”
“Keep at it,” the major said, frowning. “Stick to the schedule!” Then he turned back to Tommy and Lincoln. “You two are not welcome here,” he said coldly and calmly, apparently having regained his composure in the time it took for the message to be sent up the tunnel and returned.
“Where’s Colonel MacNamara?” Tommy asked.
“Where do you think?” Clark asked. Then he answered his own question sourly. “In his bunk room, deliberating with the other two members of the tribunal.”
Hart's War Page 50
