Visser hesitated, eyeing Renaday closely.
“You think it is unreasonable for me to ask? Flying officer, I do not believe you entirely appreciate the jeopardy of your current position.”
Hugh remained silent.
The German’s grin had dissolved now. He wore a singular flat, angry appearance in the set of his jaw, the hardness at the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth. The scars on Visser’s cheeks seemed to grow pale. He shook his head back and forth one time, then slowly, without moving from his seat, Visser reached down to his waist and with a frightening deliberateness, unstrapped the holster flap he wore, and removed a large black steel handgun. He held this up momentarily, then set it down on the desktop in front of Renaday.
“Are you familiar with this weapon, flying officer?”
Hugh shook his head in reply.
“It is a Mauser thirty-eight-caliber revolver. It is a very powerful weapon, Mr. Renaday. Every bit as powerful as the Smith and Wesson revolvers policemen in the States are armed with. It is significantly more powerful than the Webbly-Vickers revolvers that British pilots carry in their bail-out gear. It is not the standard issue for an officer of the Reich, flying officer. Ordinarily men such as myself carry a Luger semiautomatic pistol. A very effective weapon. But it requires two hands to cock and fire, and I, alas, have but the one. So I must use the Mauser, which, admittedly, is far heavier and much more cumbersome, but can be operated with a single hand, and thus it accommodates me far better. You do understand, flying officer, do you not, that a single shot from this weapon will remove a good portion of your face, much of your head, and certainly the majority of your brains?”
Hugh took a long look at the black barrel. The gun remained on the tabletop, but Visser had swung it around so that it pointed at the Canadian. Hugh nodded.
“Good,” Visser said. “Perhaps we make some progress. Now, I ask again, what were you doing out of your quarters?”
“Sightseeing,” Hugh said coldly.
The German burst into a humorless laugh. Visser looked over at Fritz Number One, who hovered in a corner of the room, remaining in the shadow.
“Mr. Renaday seeks to play the fool, corporal. And yet perhaps the joke will be on him. He does not seem to understand that I am well within my rights to shoot him right here. Or if I were to prefer not to make a mess in our office, to have him removed and shot directly outside. He is in violation of a clear camp rule, and the punishment is death! He hangs by the thinnest of threads, corporal, and still he plays games with us.”
Fritz Number One did not reply, other than to nod and stand at attention. Visser turned back to Hugh.
“If I were to send a squad to roust the entire contingent of prisoners in Hut 101, would I find your friend Mr. Hart? Or perhaps Lieutenant Scott? Was your sortie out this night connected to the murder trial?”
Visser held up a hand.
“You do not have to answer that, flying officer, for, of course, I already know that answer. Yes. It must be. But what?”
Hugh shook his head again.
“My name is Hugh Renaday. Flying Officer. My serial number is 472 hyphen 6712. My religion is Protestant. I believe that is all the information I am required to provide at this or any other time, Herr Hauptmann.”
Visser leaned back in his own seat, anger flashing from his eyes. But the words he spoke in reply were slow, icy, and filled with a patient and awful menace.
“I could not help but notice your limp, as you entered, flying officer. You have an injury?”
Hugh shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“But then, why the so-apparent difficulty?”
“An old sports injury. Aggravated this morning.”
Visser smiled again. “Please, flying officer, place your foot up here on the desktop, so that your leg is straight.”
Hugh didn’t move.
“Raise your leg, flying officer. This simple act will delay my shooting you, and give you perhaps a few more seconds to consider precisely how close you are to dying.”
Hugh pushed his chair back slightly, and with a great force of will raised his right leg, slapping the heel down onto the center of the table. The awkwardness of his position sent rays of pain radiating up through his hip, and for a moment, he closed his eyes to the collection of hurt that gathered in his leg.
Visser hesitated, then reached over, seizing Hugh at the knee, pressing his fingers hard into the joint, twisting them savagely.
The Canadian nearly tumbled. A bolt of agony surged through his body.
“This is painful, no?” Visser said, continuing to tear at the leg.
Hugh did not reply. Every muscle in his body was taut, fighting against the red-hot lightning of hurt that exploded within him. He was dizzy, almost unconscious, and he fought to maintain some control.
Visser released the leg.
“I can have you hurt, before I have you shot, flying officer. I can have it so that the pain will be so intense that you will welcome the bullet that ends it. Now, I ask one last time: What were you doing out of your quarters?”
Hugh breathed in sharply, trying to calm the waves of agony that ebbed and flowed within him.
“Your answer, please, flying officer. Please keep in mind that your life depends upon it,” Visser demanded sharply.
For the second time that night, Hugh Renaday realized that the string of his own life had reached its end. He took another deep breath, and finally said, “I was looking for you, Herr Hauptmann.”
Visser looked slightly surprised. “Me? But why would you want to see me, flying officer?”
“To spit in your face,” Hugh replied. As he finished, he spat hard at the German. But his parched, dry mouth could not summon any saliva, and he merely sprayed futilely in Visser’s direction.
The Hauptmann recoiled slightly. Then he shook his head, and wiped at the desktop with the sleeve of his one arm. He raised his pistol and pointed it in Hugh’s face. He held it there for several seconds, aiming straight at Hugh’s forehead. The German thumbed back the pistol hammer and then pressed the barrel directly against the Canadian’s flesh. A cold that went far beyond all the pulsating pain in his body filled Hugh. He closed his eyes and tried to think of anything except the moment about to arrive. Seconds passed. Almost a minute. He did not dare open his eyes.
Then Visser smiled again.
He pulled the weapon back.
Hugh felt the pressure of the barrel slide away, and after a pause, opened his eyes. He saw Visser slowly lower the huge Mauser and, with an exaggerated motion, return it to his holster, snapping the leather flap shut tightly.
Hugh’s breath came in raspy bursts. His eyes were fixed on the revolver. He wanted to feel relief, but felt nothing but fear.
“You think yourself fortunate, flying officer, to still be alive?”
Hugh nodded.
“This is sad,” Visser said harshly. He turned to Fritz Number One. “Corporal, please summon a Feldwebel, and have him collect an appropriate squad of men. I want this prisoner taken out immediately and shot.”
“Scott is innocent.”
“Scott is innocent.”
From man to man down the length of the tunnel, the single message echoed. That the three words dragged along with them dozens of other questions was ignored in the close, hot, dirty, and dangerous world of the escape. Each kriegie knew only that the message was as important as the final two or three strokes with the pickax, and each kriegie knew that there was a sort of freedom contained within the three words, a freedom nearly as powerful as that they were crawling toward, so the message was passed along with a ferocity that nearly matched the intensity of the battle that Tommy had fought to acquire them. None of the men knew what had taken place at the front of the tunnel. But they all knew that with the twin extremes of death and escape so close, no one would lie. So by the time the message reached back to the anteroom at the base of the shaft leading down from the privy in Hut 107, the words carried a sort of intox
icating religious fervor.
The fighter pilot from New York leaned forward, over the top of the bellows, craning to hear the message being passed back from the next man in line. He listened carefully, as did the man working beside him, who used the moment to seize a second’s rest from the backbreaking work of lifting the buckets of sandy earth.
“Repeat that,” the fighter pilot whispered.
“Scott is innocent!” he heard. “Got it?”
“I got it.”
The fighter pilot and the kriegie lifting buckets looked at each other momentarily. Then both grinned.
The fighter pilot turned and peered up the shaft of the tunnel. “Hey, up there! Message from the front. . . .”
Major Clark stepped forward, almost elbowing Lincoln Scott aside in his eagerness. He knelt at the side of the entranceway, bending over into the pit. “What is it? Have they reached the surface?”
The weak candlelight flickered off the upturned faces of the two men in the tunnel anteroom. The pilot from New York shrugged. “Well, kinda,” he said.
“What’s the message?” Clark demanded sharply.
“Scott is innocent!” the fighter pilot said. The bucket man nodded hard.
Clark did not reply. He straightened up.
Lincoln Scott heard the words, but for a moment, the impact of them did not occur to him. He was watching the major, who was shaking his head back and forth, as if fighting off the explosion of the words spoken in such a small space.
Fenelli, however, caught the importance immediately. Not merely in the message, but how it was passed along. He, too, leaned over into the shaft and whispered down to the men below: “That come all the way from the front? From Hart and Numbers One and Two?”
“Yes. All the way. Pass it back!” the fighter pilot urged.
Fenelli sat up, smiling.
Major Clark’s face was rigid. “You’ll do nothing of the sort, lieutenant! That message stops right here.”
Fenelli’s mouth opened slightly in astonishment.
“What?” he said.
Major Clark looked at the doctor-in-training and spoke, almost as if Lincoln Scott abruptly had disappeared from the room, ignoring the black flier. “We don’t know for sure how or why or where that message came from and we don’t know, I mean, Hart could have forced it out or something. We don’t have any answers, and I won’t allow it to be spread.”
Fenelli shook his head. He looked over at Scott.
Scott stepped forward, thrusting his chest in front of Major Clark. For a moment his outrage seemed to take him over, and the black flier quivered with the desire to simply lay a right uppercut into the chin of the major. But he fought off this urge, and replaced it with the hardest, coldest stare he could manage.
“What is it about the truth that bothers you so much, major?”
Clark recoiled. He did not reply.
Scott moved to the edge of the tunnel entrance. “Either the truth comes out, or no one goes in,” he said quietly.
Major Clark coughed, eyeing the black flier, trying to measure the determination in his face. “There’s no time left,” Clark said.
“That’s right,” Fenelli said briskly. “No damn time left.”
Then the medic from Cleveland looked past the major, and made a small wave toward one of the dirt bucket men, hovering in the doorway to the privy. “Hey!” Fenelli said loudly. “You got the word from the front?”
The man shook his head.
“Well,” Fenelli said, breaking into a grin. “Scott is innocent. It’s the real dope and it came from the head of the tunnel. Now, you pass that on. Everybody in this hut is to know. Scott is innocent! And you tell everybody the line is gonna move any second now, so to get ready.”
The man hesitated, looked once over at Scott, and then smiled. He turned and whispered to the next man in the corridor, and that man nodded, once he heard the message. It went down the center of the hut, to all the men waiting to escape, and all the men standing by in the support roles, and all the fliers gathered in the doorway of each barracks room, creating a buzz of excitement that seemed to reverberate in the enclosed tight spaces.
Scott stepped away from the tunnel entrance, pushing to the side of the small privy. He understood what the weight of the single phrase was, spread through the men in Hut 107. He knew it would sweep rapidly far beyond the confines of the hut, as soon as the sun rose. It would certainly be all over the camp within hours, and might possibly, if the men escaping were lucky, be the words they carried with them to freedom. It was a weight that Major Clark and Colonel MacNamara and Captain Walker Townsend and all the men trying to put his back against a wall and make him face a firing squad would not be able to lift. The weight of innocence.
He took a deep breath and looked toward the hole in the floor. Now, Lincoln Scott thought quietly, that the truth has come out from underground, it is time for Tommy Hart to emerge.
But instead of the lanky form of the law student from Vermont, another message came ricocheting down the tunnel. Nicholas Fenelli, eyes brightening, voice husky with sudden excitement, looked over toward Scott and whispered: “They’re through! We’re moving out!”
Tommy Hart stood, balancing precariously near the top rung of the ladder, his face lifted toward a six-inch hole in the roof of dirt, drinking in the heady wine of the fresh night air that poured into the tunnel. In his right hand, he held the pickax. Below him, Murphy and the bandleader were feverishly wiping dirt from their faces with a thin piece of cloth, and scrambling into their escape clothing.
The bandleader—musician, murderer, tunnel king—could not resist a single hushed question: “Hart? How does it smell?”
Tommy hesitated, then whispered his reply: “Sweet.”
He, too, was covered with the sweaty grime of digging. For the past ten minutes he had taken over from the two other men, who had fallen back, exhausted with the effort that digging the last few feet required. Tommy, though, felt a surge of energy. He had flailed away at the dirt with a furious vigor, tearing at the clods of earth with the pickax until one clod came free covered with grass.
He continued to breathe in deeply. The air was so rich he thought it might make him dizzy.
“Hart! Come on down,” the bandleader hissed.
Tommy took one long swig of night, and reluctantly lowered himself back into the pit. He faced the two men. Even in the light of a single candle, Tommy could see both their faces flushed with excitement. It was as if, in that moment, the lure of freedom were so powerful that it managed to overcome all the doubts and fears about what the next hours would hold.
“Okay, Hart, here’s the drill. I’m going to fix a rope from the top rung and lead it out to a nearby tree. You’re gonna be the watchdog by the tree, Hart. Each kriegie’s gonna come to the top of that ladder and wait there for a signal—two quick tugs—that will let him know the coast is clear. Try to move a man along every two to three minutes. No faster, but no slower, either. That’ll avoid attention and maybe get us back on our timetable. Once they get out, they know what to do. When everybody’s out, you can head back down the tunnel and get back inside the compound.”
“Why can’t I wait here?”
“No time, Hart. Those men deserve their chance and you can’t get in the way. Literally.”
Tommy nodded. He could see the sense in what the bandleader was saying. The musician stuck out his hand. “Look me up in the French Quarter sometime, Hart.”
Tommy looked down at the man’s hand. He imagined it reaching up around Trader Vic’s throat. He understood, too, that only a few minutes earlier, that same hand was trying to kill him. Amid the heat, the dirt, and the fear that closed in on all of them waiting inside the tunnel, everything had abruptly changed. He reached out and took the man’s hand. The bandleader smiled, his wide grin flashing white in the darkness. “You were right about another thing, too, Hart. I am indeed left-handed.”
“You’re a killer,” Tommy said quietly.
�
�We’re all killers,” the man replied.
Tommy shook his head slowly, but the musician laughed.
“Yes, we are, no matter what you say. We may not be again, when all this is said and done and we’re home sitting around the fireplace growing old and telling war stories. But right now, right here, we all are. You. Me. Murphy, there, and Scott, too. MacNamara, Clark, hell, everybody. Including Trader Vic. He just might have been the worst of all of us, ’cause he ended up killing even if by mistake for no reason other than to make his own sorry life a little easier.”
The musician shook his head. “Not much of a reason for dying, is it?” Then he looked over at Tommy, still holding onto his hand. “You think, Tommy boy, that the truth about all this is ever gonna see the light of day?” Before Tommy could reply, the musician shook his head. “I’m not thinking so, Tommy Hart. I’m not thinking that the army is all too fine on the idea of telling the world that some of its finest heroes are also some of its very best killers. No sir. I don’t think this is a story they’ll be particularly eager to tell.”
Tommy swallowed hard. “Good luck,” he said. “New Orleans. I’ll make a point of it, someday.”
“Buy you a drink,” the bandleader said. “Hell, Tommy, we make it home in one piece, I’ll buy you a dozen drinks. We can drink to the truth and how it don’t never do nobody no good.”
“I don’t know that’s right,” Tommy replied.
The musician laughed, shrugged, and climbed the ladder. In his hand, the bandleader carried a long coil of thin rope. Tommy could see him fix the rope to the top rung, and then tear a few more clods of dirt free. They tumbled down onto Tommy, and he blinked, and ducked his head away. The musician paused, and suddenly blew out the last candle. In the split-second that followed, the bandleader wiggled through the hole in the earth, suddenly bathed in a wan half-light from the moon, and disappeared.
Murphy grunted. He had no similar pleasantries for Tommy. He rose up, following. Behind him, Tommy could hear Number Three moving down the tunnel like some excited crab scrambling through the sand. Tommy saw Murphy’s legs kick for a moment, trying to gain some purchase in the crumbling dirt of the tunnel exit. Then Tommy lifted himself up the ladder.
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