Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  “Almost like a small sword,” Townsend said. He mock-shuddered. “Nasty item to kill someone with, I say.”

  Tommy nodded, replacing the knife on the table and picking up the flight boots. He turned them over in his hands, inspecting the flat leather soles that had been stitched onto the softer fur-lined tops. He noted that the bloodstains were predominantly on the toes of the boots.

  “Good thing it’s nearly summer,” Townsend said. “It would be a shame to not be wearing those things in the winter, now, wouldn’t it? ’Course, this damn German weather is as unpredictable as I’ve ever seen. One day we’re all out of doors, sunning ourselves like on some trip down to Roanoke or Virginia Beach. Next, well, standing around the morning Appell freezing our tails off. It’s like it can’t make up its mind to get on with the summer. Ain’t like that back home. No sir. Virginia we get that nice easy winter and early spring. Long about now there’s honeysuckle in bloom. Honeysuckle and lilacs. Like to fill the air with sweetness . . .”

  Tommy set the boots back on the bed, and gingerly lifted the leather flight jacket. He saw why Lincoln Scott had not noticed the bloodstains when he reached for the coat after awakening in the near-dark to the sound of German whistles and cries. There was blood on the left knit wrist cuff, and another small streak near the collar on the same side. A larger stain was located on the back. He turned the jacket around once or twice more, then shook his head slowly, sighing.

  “Well,” Tommy said. “Back home I’d probably claim these items were all seized illegally, without due process.”

  “Now, I’m not thinking that’s an argument likely to work here and now, Tommy,” Townsend said. “Maybe back home, but—”

  Tommy interrupted him. “But not here. You’re right about that. Now about that list?”

  Townsend reached into his shirt breast pocket and removed a piece of paper containing ten names and their hut locations. He handed it over to Tommy, who accepted it, without looking at the names, sliding it into his own shirt pocket.

  “I suppose it is premature to start talking about sentencing,” he said slowly. “I mean, I think I managed today to prevent a lynching from taking place. But we should discuss the possibilities given the likely outcome, don’t you think, captain?” With a defeated look in his eyes, Tommy swung his hand over the array of evidence.

  “Why, Tommy, please call me Walker. And yes, I do believe that is premature, as you say. But I am most willing to have these discussions at a later point. Maybe on Monday afternoon, what do you think?”

  “Thanks, Walker. I’ll get back to you on that. And thanks for being so reasonable about all this. I think Major Clark is—”

  Townsend interrupted. “A mite difficult? Temperamental, perhaps?”

  He laughed and Tommy, smiling falsely, joined him. “That’s for sure,” he said.

  “The major has been in the bag too damn long. As have we all, I suppose, because maybe one minute’s a minute too long. But he and the colonel mostly. Far, far too long, I’d say. And too long for you, too, Tommy, from what I’ve been told.”

  Tommy patted his chest where the list was now located. “Well,” he said, stepping back. “Thanks again. I’m back to work.”

  Walker Townsend gave a small nod and reached for his crossword puzzle. “Well, then, you need anything from the prosecution, Tommy, you just feel welcome to come see me anytime, day or night, at your convenience.”

  “I appreciate that,” Tommy said. Liar, he thought to himself. He made a small, false-friendly wave, and turned quickly. He took in a razored, long breath of cool air, thinking that for the first time since the moment he’d viewed Trader Vic’s body stuffed into the filthy Abort, he’d just seen hard evidence instead of mere words, no matter how forcefully spoken, that persuaded him that Lincoln Scott was absolutely innocent of the airman’s murder.

  The luminous dial on the watch Lydia had given him read ten minutes past midnight when Tommy gingerly slipped from the relative warmth of his bunk and felt the cold floor penetrate through his thin, oft-darned wool socks. He perched on the edge of the bed for an instant, like a diver waiting for the right moment to launch himself toward the water. The night sounds of the bunk room surrounded him with a steady familiarity, the same snores, coughs, whimperings, and wheezes coming from men he’d known for months and yet thought he hardly knew at all. The darkness seemed to envelop him, and he fought off a momentary, unsettled panicky sense, some of the leftover residue of his claustrophobia. The nights always seemed to be as close as the closet he’d shut himself into as a child. It took a conscious force of will to remind himself that the bunk-room darkness wasn’t the same.

  One of the guard tower searchlights swept across the outside window, boarded to the night, the strong light penetrating the cracks in the wooden shutters for a few seconds, traveling across the far wall. He welcomed the light; it helped to orient him to where he was and push away the childhood nightmare memories that dogged him in all tight, dark spaces.

  Reaching down beneath the bunk, he found his boots. Then, with his left hand, he located his leather flight jacket and the stub of a candle fixed into an empty processed-meat tin can. He did not light the candle, preferring to wait for the next searchlight sweep, which would provide him with just enough light to slip from the bunk through the door and out into the hut’s central corridor.

  Tommy did not have to wait long for the light to sweep past. As it threw its filmy yellow brightness across the room, he rose, boots, jacket, and candle in hand, took three quick strides to the door, and slipped through. He stopped in the corridor for an instant, listening behind him, making certain that he had arisen without waking any of the other men in his room. Silence, save for the routine noises of sleep, surrounded him. He reached into his pants pocket and removed a single match, which he scraped on the wall and which burst into flame. He lit the candle, and moving like some ghostly apparition, he tiptoed down the corridor, heading steadily toward Lincoln Scott’s room.

  The black flier was asleep in a heap in the solitary bunk, but the pressure of Tommy’s hand on his shoulder made him lurch upright, and for a moment Tommy thought Lincoln Scott was going to throw one of his lethal-looking right crosses in his direction, as Scott twisted in the bed, groaning obscenities.

  “Quiet!” Tommy whispered. “It’s me, Hart.”

  He held the candle up to his face.

  “Jesus, Hart,” Lincoln Scott muttered. “I thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Trouble.”

  “Maybe I am,” Tommy continued, speaking softly.

  Scott swung his feet out of the bunk. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”

  “An experiment,” Tommy replied. He grinned. “A little reenactment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Simple,” Tommy said, still speaking softly. “Let’s pretend this is the night Vic died. First you show me exactly how you got up and moved around on that night. Then we’re going to try to figure out where Vic went before he landed nice and dead in the Abort.”

  Scott’s dark head nodded. “Makes sense,” he said briskly, shaking sleep from his eyes. “What time is it?”

  “A little after midnight.”

  Scott rubbed a hand across his face, moving his head up and down. “That would be about right,” he said. “I don’t have a clock, so there was no way for me to tell for certain what the time was. But it was pitch black and the place was quiet and it seems to me that would be about right. Maybe a little earlier or an hour or so later, but not much more. Certainly not close to dawn.”

  “Just before dawn was when his body was discovered.”

  “Well, I was up earlier. I’m sure of it.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “So, you got up . . .”

  “This is more or less where my bunk was,” Scott continued. “Four double-decker bunks, two on each side. I was closest to the door, so the only person I was worried about disturbing was the guy on top of me. . . .”
>
  “Bedford?”

  “Directly across the room. Bottom bunk.”

  “Did you see him?”

  Scott shook his head. “I didn’t look,” he replied.

  Tommy was about to stop the black flier, because this answer didn’t make any sense to him, but he hesitated, then asked, instead, “Did you light the candle at your bed?”

  “Yes. I lit it, then shielded it with my hand. Like I said, I didn’t want to wake the others. I left my boots and jacket . . .”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Boots at the end of the bunk. Jacket on the wall.”

  “Did you see either of them?”

  “No. I didn’t look. And I had no reason to suspect someone might take them. I was meaning to do my business and get back into the rack as quickly as possible. The toilet’s not far and I wanted to be real quiet. I went barefoot. Even though it was goddamn cold. . . .”

  Tommy nodded, still troubled, then he shook this off and said, “All right, let’s go. Show me exactly what you did that night—except this time, bring your boots and jacket. Move the same way, at the same speed.” He checked the dial of his watch, timing the black flier.

  Without a word, Scott rose. Like Tommy, he seized his boots in his hand. Slightly bent at the waist, he stepped away from the bunk. He gestured toward where the other men would have been sleeping, pointed at the wall where his jacket now hung from a single nail. Still moving quietly, but being trailed by Tommy, Scott walked across the room in perhaps two long strides, and swung the door open. Tommy took note that unlike many of the doors in the hut, this one seemed to have had its hinges oiled. It made a single creaking sound that he did not think in and of itself was enough to awaken even the lightest sleeper. And it only clicked once, as it closed behind them and they were in the corridor.

  Scott gestured toward the single toilet. It was placed in a makeshift stall, hardly bigger than a wardrobe, only twenty feet from Scott’s bunk room. Tommy held his candle up above his head to light their route. Their feet padded silently against the wooden floor.

  Outside the toilet, Scott finally spoke. “Inside. Used the toilet, then returned to the room. That’s it.”

  Tommy looked down at the green light of his watch face. No more than three minutes had passed since Scott had stepped from his bunk. He turned and looked all the way back down the corridor. For a single instant, his stomach contracted and he swallowed hard. The darkness of his fear of enclosure scratched at his heart. But he fought off the clammy sensation and concentrated on the problem at hand. The only exit to the hut was at the far end, past all the remaining bunk rooms. He thought that to travel from the toilet to the outside, anyone would have to walk past close to one hundred sleeping men, behind a dozen closed doors. But there was no telling who might hear footsteps. Who might be awake. Who might be alert.

  “And you saw no one?” he asked again.

  Scott turned away, staring back into the darkness.

  “No. I told you. No one.”

  Tommy ignored the hesitation in the Tuskegee airman’s voice and pointed forward. “All right,” he said quietly. “So much for what you did. Now for what Trader Vic might have done.”

  Still with their boots in their hands, the two men quietly maneuvered down the hut’s central corridor, using the weak candle light to illuminate their path. At the entrance door to Hut 101, Tommy paused, thinking. A searchlight swept past, throwing its light onto the steps for an instant as it traveled forward. Tommy looked back down the corridor, toward the bunk rooms. The searchlight was outside and to the left, which meant that it covered every room on that side of the building, which was the side that he and Lincoln Scott and Trader Vic had all lived on. He realized that it was conceivable that someone could exit from one of the windows on the right side of the hut; they would only catch a portion of the searchlight’s path as it swept across the walls and roof. But it would have been impossible for anyone to move through the sleeping kriegies in the tight spaces of the bunk rooms on that side unless something had been prearranged. He was certain that the men who left in the night to tunnel, especially the ones who had died beneath the ground so recently, had been from that side of the hut. Anyone else—escape committee types, forgers, spies, for whatever reason—would need to alert the entire membership of the room of whatever window they intended to use. This, he thought, violated every principle of military secrecy. Even though the men could be trusted, it was a foolish chance to take. Also, it identified the men who were working late into the night, which was another security violation.

  So, Tommy thought, measuring, assessing, adding factors together as swiftly as possible, feeling slightly like he did in the moment before some white-haired law school professor chalked an essay question on a blackboard, anyone needing to exit Hut 101 in the middle of the night, and needing to do it without attracting attention either from his fellow prisoners or the Germans, would probably risk going out the front door.

  The searchlight swept past again, light quickly filtering through the cracks in the door and then, just as swiftly, fading back into darkness.

  The Germans did not like to use the searchlights, especially on nights when there were British bombing raids on nearby installations. Even the most uneducated German soldier could guess that from the air the sight of probing searchlights would make the camp appear to be an ammunition dump or a manufacturing plant, and some hard-pressed Lancaster pilot, having fought off frightening raids by Luftwaffe night fighters, might make an error and drop his stick of bombs right on top of them.

  So the searchlight use was erratic, which only made them more terrifying to anyone who wanted to maneuver from one hut to another at night. It was difficult to time their sweeps because they were so haphazard.

  Tommy took a deep breath. Getting caught in a searchlight’s beam probably meant death.

  At a minimum, it would prompt whistles and alerts, and if one got his hands up fast enough, before a Hundführer or one of the tower goons pulled his Schmeisser machine pistol into a firing position, probably only a fortnight in the cooler. And getting caught outside would also compromise the tunnel or the meeting or whatever purpose the kriegie had for being out. So, Tommy considered, there never was a routine motivation for exiting the hut after lights out.

  He slowly released his pent-up wind, making a whistling sound between his teeth.

  Nothing routine about this excursion, either, he thought.

  Tommy zipped up his flight jacket, and bent down to tie on his shoes, gesturing for Scott to do the same.

  Scott started to smile. The easygoing, devil-may-care grin of a warrior accustomed to danger. “This is dicey, huh, Hart?” he whispered. “Don’t want to get caught.”

  Tommy nodded. “Getting caught isn’t quite the problem. Getting dead is. Don’t really want to get shot,” he said. His throat had parched suddenly, the dryness reaching his tongue. “Not now . . .”

  “Not ever,” Scott said, still grinning. Tommy thought Scott probably felt closer to being a fighter pilot then than he had in any second since he’d first leapt free of his burning plane over occupied territory. As he knotted his boots, the black flier asked, “So, where we heading first?”

  “The Abort. And then we’ll backtrack a bit.”

  “What’re we looking for, exactly?” Scott asked.

  “Exactly? I don’t know. But possibly? We’re looking for a spot where someone might feel comfortable committing a murder.”

  With that, Tommy turned to the door. He blew out the candle. He was breathing in a shallow, steady fashion, poised like a sprinter getting ready to start a race. As soon as the searchlight swept over the front of the hut, he grabbed at the door handle, jerked it open, and with Scott inches behind him, dove out into the inky darkness creeping right behind the searchlight’s beam.

  Chapter Eight

  A PLACE THAT ACCOMMODATED MURDER

  Tommy took two dozen fast strides forward, sprinting furiously, then threw himself up against the
wall of Hut 102, breathing hard, pushing his back stiffly to the wooden frame of the building, trying to meld together with the hard boards. He watched as the searchlight’s beam danced away from him, erratically poking and probing the corners and edges of the huts, like a dog sniffing for some prey at the fringe of some tangled briars. The searchlight seemed to him to be alive, tinged with evil. He inhaled sharply as the beam hesitated at the roofline of an adjacent hut, then, instead of proceeding toward more distant barracks, inexplicably began to sweep back toward him, abruptly retracing its steps. He shrank back in sudden fear, frozen in position, unable to move, as the light crept steadily toward him, closing in on him inexorably. The beam was perhaps three feet away, malevolent, searching as if it somehow knew he was there, but unsure of precisely where, in some deadly version of the children’s game of hide-and-seek, when he felt Scott’s hand suddenly seize his shoulder and savagely drag him down.

  Tommy dropped to the cold earth, and felt himself being pulled back into a small depression next to the hut. He scrambled backward, crablike.

  “Head down,” Scott whispered urgently.

  As he buried his face in the dirt, the searchlight passed across the building above them. Tommy squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the whistles and shouts from the goons in the tower manning the light. For an instant, he thought he could hear the unmistakable sound of a round being chambered in a rifle—then there was silence.

  Gingerly he raised his face from the dust, the dry, musty taste lingering on his lips. He saw the beam of light had swept away, across a nearby roof, probing the distance, as if hunting for some new quarry. He let his wind out slowly, making a sighing sound. Then he heard Scott beside him, speaking softly in a voice that clearly made its way past a grin: “Well, that was goddamn close.”