The Circle soldier shoved him once again, and Yaz had no choice but to resume digging.
His line of about two hundred slave laborers, chained at the feet, stretched out of the tunnel and up to the huge wooden door. The soldier routinely walked along poking every third or fourth man in the ribs. It was only about nine in the morning, yet Yaz and the others had been at it for three hours already. There had been no breakfast, no water.
Just then Yaz heard a commotion down the line a way. The guard had grabbed one of the laborers by the scruff of his neck and was questioning him intensely.
“Where the hell did you get this?” the soldier shouted at the man, poking him in his stomach with the butt of his AK-47.
“I found it, over there,” the prisoner answered, terrified. “I was just going to use it … to sleep on.”
The object in contention was a simple, uninflated inner tube.
Three more guards showed up. “Show me where you found it,” the soldier ordered the man.
As the rest of the work gang watched, the prisoner was unhooked from his chains and led the guards to a spot off to the side of the huge cavern.
“In there,” the man said, pointing to a hole in the dirt floor. “There’s a bunch of them.”
One of the guards jumped into the cavity and soon was passing up dozens of neatly-folded inner tubes.
The first guard inspected several of the tubes. “Where the hell could these have come from?” he asked.
“Left over from before the war I guess,” one of his companions answered. “But the captain will go apeshit if he knew these scumheads were using them to sleep on.”
The last of the tubes were recovered. “Take them all up to the end of the tunnel and burn them,” the first guard said.
His companions did as told and Yaz went back to his shoveling. Compared to the dirty blanket he now slept on, he thought sleeping on an inflated inner tube would be like heaven …
Several hours passed, when Yaz felt another poke in his ribs.
“You … Go up to the entrance way,” the guard told him. “Help the others carry down the chow.”
“Yah, sir, massah …” Yaz said under his breath as the man unhooked his leg irons. Actually, he was thankful for the opportunity to get away from the monotonous shoveling, even for a short while.
He slowly made his way past the work gang and up to the front end of The Hole. Ten other laborers were waiting there.
“Ah, fresh oxygen …” he whispered as he breathed in his first taste of outside air in two weeks. The sun was out but it wasn’t too hot. A quarter mile away was the Mississippi and even its muddy water looked inviting.
An old Ryder Rent-A-Truck pulled up to the mouth of the tunnel and two men, both of them wearing sunglasses and white coveralls, got out. They were POW trusties, prisoners allowed to perform more than menial tasks.
“You guys here for the food?” one asked.
Yaz and the others nodded. They went around to the side of the vehicle, opened its folding door to reveal ten pots filled with steaming soup. The drivers climbed up into the truck.
But the pots were hot and they needed help.
“Climb up here and give us a hand,” one of the drivers told Yaz.
He climbed up into the truck and the three of them grabbed the first steaming pot and painfully lowered it to the ground.
“This is ridiculous,” one trusty said. “We need a winch.”
The second and third pots were worse.
Just then Yaz spotted a crowbar at the back of the truck sitting on top of a pile of cardboard boxes.
“Here, use this,” he said, walking to retrieve the tool. But as he did so, he noticed that the top of one of the cardboard boxes was open. He glanced inside.
It was filled with neatly-folded inner tubes …
Suddenly, one of the drivers came up from behind and had his hands around Yaz’s throat.
“That was a big mistake, mister,” the man said. “You just looked somewhere you shouldn’t have …”
Yaz was just about gagging from the man’s stranglehold. The driver spun him around, and for the first time, Yaz got a good look at the other trusty without his sunglasses.
Oddly, the man looked familiar …
“I … know … you,” Yaz was able to say, his words a gurgle.
The man stared at him, as if he’d seen Yaz before, too.
“Let him go,” he told his partner.
Released from the chokehold, Yaz and the man stared at each other for a moment, trying to figure out where they had seen each other before.
“You’re a pilot,” Yaz said suddenly, as if the thought had magically appeared in his brain. “Back at Suez … you helped pull me from the water …”
The man looked at him closely and started shaking his head.
“Your name …” Yaz continued. “It’s … Elvis.”
The man shook his head and put his sunglasses back on.
“You’re nuts, mac,” he said briskly. “Now get your ass in gear and get that goddamn soup out of here.”
With that the man climbed out of the truck, fiddled around at the back of the truck, then disappeared.
Using the crowbar, the other driver and Yaz lowered the rest of the pots to the ground.
The job done, the truck quickly pulled away, the man who Yaz had recognized behind the wheel.
Yaz shook his head. Maybe he was mistaken, but the driver looked exactly like one of the pilots who had come to the rescue of the survivors of the aircraft carrier that had sunk during the battle of the Suez Canal. Yaz had only seen the man briefly at the time, yet his wavy, jelly-roll haircut and rock star looks were unmistakable.
He shrugged it off and went to pick up his gang’s soup pot. That’s when he saw that something had been scribbled in the loose dirt next to where the truck had been parked.
It was a single letter and Yaz had to stare at it for a few moments before its meaning started to sink in. When it did, he immediately knew that he was right in identifying the driver.
Using the heel of his boot, the man had scratched out a large “W” in the dirt …
About the Author
Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, Chopper Ops, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show, Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Mack Maloney
Cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-0668-1
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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