Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  Tommy crawled back to prison, alone, exhausted, blind, and deeply hurt, chased by the faraway sound of Fritz Number One’s whistle shattering the orderly world above him.

  Chapter Twenty

  A FIELD DRESSING

  It was near chaos in Hut 107.

  The would-be escapees gathered in the central corridor were frantically changing out of their retailored suits, back into their frayed and worn uniforms. Many men had collected extra rations for the escape, food to eat while on the lam, and they were now stuffing their mouths with chocolate or processed meat, fearful that any second the Germans were going to arrive and confiscate everything they’d hoarded so diligently over the past weeks. The support personnel were seizing the clothing, forged documents, tickets, passports, work orders, anything the kriegies had constructed to give false legitimacy to their anticipated existence beyond the wire, and stuffing these into hollowed-out books, or behind walls in concealed hiding spots. The men who’d been part of the bucket brigade of dirt dropped down from the hole in the ceiling, furiously wiping sweat and grime from their faces while one flier carefully fixed the access panel back in place on the off chance that the Germans would not discover it. An officer stood by the front door of the hut, peering through a crack in the wood, shuffling men out of the hut singly and in pairs, as long as the coast stayed clear.

  There had been twenty-nine men stretched out in the tunnel when Tommy had given the word of warning to Number Nineteen. The alarm moved more rapidly than the men, passed back in a series of shouts, just as the message about Scott’s innocence had been. But as the warning streamed back, the men in the tunnel had fought to start their own retreat, which was far more difficult in the cramped and dark quarters. The men had moved desperately, almost frantically, some crawling backward, some struggling to get turned around. Even with the urgency passed back, it still took some time for each man to retrace his steps, filled with disappointment, some fear, plenty of anxiety, and a furiousness at the harshness of life that had stolen this chance from them. Curses resounded in the tight spaces, obscenities rebounding off the walls.

  When the men first started to emerge from the tunnel, Lincoln Scott had been poised near the edge of the entrance, adjacent to the privy. Major Clark was giving sharp orders a few feet away, trying to keep discipline among the frenzied men. Scott had turned and absorbed the disintegration of the scene around him. He reached down and helped to lift Number Forty-seven from the entrance.

  “Where’s Hart?” Scott demanded. “Did you see Tommy Hart?”

  The flier shook his head. “He must still be up at the front,” the man replied.

  Scott helped push the kriegie back toward the corridor, where the man began to tear at his escape clothes. Scott looked down into the pit of the tunnel. The candlelight seemed to throw scars across the faces of the disappointed men as they struggled to crawl from the tunnel entrance. He reached down and grasped Number Forty-six’s hand, and with an immense jerk, lifted the next in line to the surface, asking the same question: “Did you see Hart? Did you hear him? Is he okay?”

  But Number Forty-six shook his head.

  “It’s a damn mess in there, Scott. You can’t see a damn thing. I don’t know where Hart is.”

  Scott nodded. He guided the flier out of the privy toward the corridor, then reached down and seized the black cable leading into the hole.

  “What are you doing, Scott?” Major Clark demanded.

  “Helping,” Scott replied. He twisted about, almost like a mountaineer preparing to rappel down a cliff, and without saying another word to the major, lowered himself down to the anteroom. He could sense a fierce tautness in the cheap air of the tunnel, almost like entering a medical ward where disease lingers in the corners and no one has ever opened a window to bring in fresh air. In the rush to retreat, the bellows had been abandoned, kicked to the side of the space by one of the first kriegies to emerge from the tunnel. Scott saw that Number Forty-five was struggling with a suitcase, and he reached into the gray semidarkness and tore it from the grateful man’s hands. “Jesus,” the kriegie whispered. “That damn thing almost brought the roof down on my head. Thanks.” The man leaned up against the wall of the anteroom. “There’s no air,” he whispered. “No damn air up there at all. I hope nobody passes out.”

  Scott helped to steady the gasping man against the side of the pit, and put the access cable in his hands. The kriegie nodded thanks and started to pull himself up, hand over hand. As soon as he’d managed to lift himself over Scott’s head, the black flier turned and grabbed the bellows.

  He set it upright, and then plunked himself down, straddling it as had the captain from New York earlier that long night. With a strength born of urgency, he started to pump away furiously, sending blasts of air down the tunnel.

  Nearly a full minute passed before the next kriegie slid through the tunnel entrance. This flier seemed exhausted by the tension of the failed escape. He coughed and tore at the air in the anteroom gratefully with wheezing breath and pointed at the bellows. “Good,” he whispered dryly. “You can’t breathe up there. Not at all.”

  “Where’s Hart?” Scott demanded, between grunts. His face glistened with the sweat of exertion.

  The man shook his head. “I don’t know. Coming, maybe? I don’t know. You can’t see. Can barely breathe. There’s goddamn sand and dirt everywhere and all you can hear are the other guys yelling to back up, get out, get out, get out. That and you can hear the damn boards in the roof creaking and snapping. I hope the whole thing doesn’t come caving in. Are the Krauts here yet?”

  Scott gritted his teeth. He shook his head.

  “Not yet. You’ve got a chance to get out, quick.”

  Number Forty-five nodded. He sighed, gathering strength. Then he, too, struggled up the cable, reaching toward the hands at the privy entrance that were extended to him.

  Below, Scott continued to pump air with deadly speed. The bellows creaked and whooshed, and the black flier grunted hard at the effort.

  Slowly, one after another, the men crawled out of the tunnel. All were filthy, all were scared, all were relieved to be able to see the surface. One man said, “That’s what dying must be like.” Another said, “It’s like a damn grave in there.” Every kriegie filled his lungs with air, and more than one took one look at Scott behind the bellows and whispered grateful thanks.

  Time seemed to stretch around them dangerously, tugging at each man like the undertow on the beach, threatening to pull them into the shifting currents of deep waters. The tunnel itself, Scott thought, must be a little like drowning. Then he shoved this thought away, and demanded of the next man the only question that seemed to matter to him any longer, “Have you seen Hart? Where’s Hart?”

  No one could answer.

  Fenelli, who was Number Twenty-eight, pulled himself forward, landing in a heap by Scott’s legs. He gestured at the bellows. “Damn good thing you started to do that,” he hissed. “Otherwise we’da had unconscious men stuck all over the damn tunnel. It’s almost toxic in there.”

  “Where’s Hart?” Scott demanded for the hundredth time.

  Fenelli shook his head. “He was at the very front. Outside the wire. Giving the men the go ahead. I don’t know where he is, now.”

  Scott was filled with the anger of impotence. He didn’t know what the hell else he could do, except continue to shoot the lifesaving air down the tunnel.

  “You better get out of here,” he grunted. “They’ll help you up topside.”

  Fenelli started to rise, then slumped back down. He smiled.

  “You know, I have a cousin in the navy. Goddamn submarines. He wanted me to join up with him, but I told him only a fool would try to swim around under the damn ocean, holding their breath and looking for Japs. You’d never catch me doing anything so stupid, I told him. Hah! Now, look at me. Twenty feet under the ground, still stuck in a damn prison. It sure is a long way from flying.”

  Scott nodded, still working hard. He m
anaged a small smile.

  “I think,” Fenelli said, “I’ll stick here with you for a couple of minutes.”

  The medic from Cleveland bent over, peering back into the pitch black tunnel. Perhaps sixty seconds passed, and then he reached forward, helping Number Twenty-seven through the last few feet. This was the captain from New York. He, too, dropped immediately to the floor, gasping like a fish out of water. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What a fucking mess. I had to dig through a pile of sand more than once. Things are getting pretty shaky in there.”

  “Where’s Tommy?”

  The man shook his head. “There’s still men coming down the tunnel behind me,” he said. He seized a breath of air and struggled to his feet. “Jesus. Feels good to stand up. Now, I’m out of here. Kee-rist!” He grabbed at the cable and with Fenelli steadying him, began to lift himself toward the safety of the surface.

  It was right when Number Nineteen finally pushed through the tunnel entrance, that Major Clark leaned over the edge of the pit and shouted down, “That’s it! They just sounded the damn alarm!”

  The howl of a distant air-raid siren managed to penetrate even to the depth where they were gathered.

  “Where’s Hart?” Scott cried.

  Number Nineteen shook his head. “He shoulda been right behind me,” he said. “But I don’t know where he went.”

  “What happened?” Fenelli demanded, kneeling down and staring into the tunnel darkness. He craned his head into the hole, trying to hear sounds of crawling.

  “Come on, you men, hurry up!” Major Clark cried out from above. “Let’s move!”

  Number Nineteen continued to shake his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was at the top of the ladder, waiting for the signal to run, you know, just like we’d been briefed, ’cept it was Hart on the other end of the rope, giving the signals, not the guy in front of you, like we expected. Anyways, I’m waiting and waiting and wondering what the hell, ’cause it’s been more than a coupla minutes and we’re supposed to be going every two, three minutes, and all of a sudden, all I can hear is the sound of two men fighting. And some kinda fight, too. No voices, not at first. Just grunts and hard breathing and punches being thrown and landing, too. Then there’s silence and then like from nowheres, I can just hear some voices finally. Can’t hear what the hell anyone’s saying, but that don’t matter, ’cause next thing I know, there’s Hart, right in the entrance, saying there’s Krauts everywhere and to get my tail back up the tunnel fast, get everybody out, ’cause the alarm’s gonna go off any second. So I drop back down and start back, but it takes damn near forever, ’cause guys are panicking, and fighting to get turned around and you can’t barely breathe and there’s dirt everywhere and you can’t see a damn thing ’cause every candle is out. And then, here I am.”

  “Where’s Hart?” Scott shouted.

  Number Nineteen shrugged, still catching his breath.

  “I can’t tell you. I thought he’d be right behind me. But he ain’t.”

  From above, Major Clark’s voice bellowed down.

  “Hurry up! Germans will be here any second! We have to close up!”

  Scott turned his face up. “Hart’s not back!” he answered sharply.

  Major Clark seemed to hesitate.

  “He should be behind the last man!”

  “He’s not back!”

  “We have to close up before they get here!”

  “He’s not back!” Lincoln Scott roared. Insistent.

  “Well, where the hell is he?” the major demanded.

  Tommy Hart could no longer separate the different pains that swept through his body. His mangled hand seemed to have distributed agony throughout every inch of his being. Every surge of blinding hurt was fueled by an exhaustion so total and utterly complete that he no longer really believed that he had the strength to pull himself down the entire length of the tunnel. He had traversed past the point where fear and terror held sway, deep into death’s arena. That he was able to crawl forward almost surprised him; he had no real understanding where the energy came from. His muscles screamed threats of fatigue. His imagination was a fevered blank fire of pain. Still he dragged himself ahead.

  It was darker than any night he’d known and he was terribly alone.

  Sand rivulets leaked onto his head. Dust clogged his nostrils. It seemed that there was no air left inside the narrow tunnel confines. The only sound he could make out was the creak of support boards seemingly ready to give way. He pulled himself along, using a swimming motion, thrusting aside dirt that clogged his route, fighting every centimeter of the way.

  He held out no real hope of being able to crawl the entire seventy-five yards. And he certainly no longer held any belief that he could cover the distance before the Germans descended upon Hut 107. In an odd way, though, the exhaustion, coupled with pain, and the immense effort it took to work his way ahead, all conspired to prevent him from being crippled by fear. It was almost as if all the other competing agonies that screamed inside his body didn’t leave enough room for the most obvious and the most dangerous. And so defeat in this final fight didn’t really dare enter his thinking.

  Tommy grabbed at each inch of darkness and hauled himself forward.

  He did not stop. Nor did he even hesitate, despite his exhaustion. Even when he found his way partially blocked, and the narrow space made even smaller, he still snaked ahead, his lanky form slithering through the tightest of gaps. His head spun dizzily with exertion. Each breath of air he squeezed from the blackness around him seemed thinner, more fetid, filled with evil.

  How long he had traveled, or how far, was unknown to him. In a way, it seemed to him as if he’d always been in the tunnel. That there never was an outside, never was a clear sky filled with fresh air and a great expanse of stars above. For a moment, he almost laughed, thinking that everything else must have been a dream; his home, his school, his love, the war, his friends, the camp, the wire—all of it. None of it really ever took place. He had died, right there in the Mediterranean Sea, right alongside the captain from Texas, and everything else was merely some odd fantasy of the future that he was carrying with him into oblivion. He gritted his teeth and dragged himself another yard forward, thinking perhaps nothing was real, and this tunnel was hell, and that he had always been there and would always remain inside. There was no exit. There was no air. There was no light. Not ever.

  And into this delirium that overcame him, he heard a voice.

  It seemed familiar. He thought at first it was Phillip Pryce’s, and then no, it was his old captain calling for him. He struggled forward a little more, and broke into a smile, because he realized it had to be Lydia summoning him. It was home in Vermont, and it was summer, and she wanted him to sneak from his house into the warm midnight and give her just a single, deep kiss goodnight. He whispered a reply, just like any delighted lover reaching across a bed late at night in response to the merest of suggestive touches, a beckoning.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  The voice called out again, and he stretched forward.

  “I’m here,” he said, louder. He did not have the energy to speak any harder, and what he managed was really barely approaching a normal tone. Again, he pulled himself ahead, half-expecting to see Lydia’s hand reaching for his, her voice coaxing him toward her.

  But what he heard instead was a terrible crack.

  He did not even have time to panic when the roof above him shattered, and he was abruptly enveloped in a cascade of sandy dirt.

  “I heard him!” Lincoln Scott shouted. “He’s there!”

  “Jesus!” Fenelli cried out, recoiling from the tunnel entrance as a blast of dirt like an explosion billowed through. “Goddamn it!”

  From above in the privy, Major Clark yelled down: “What is it? Where’s Hart?”

  “He’s there!” Scott answered. “I heard him!”

  “It’s a goddamn cave-in!” Fenelli screamed.

  “Where’s Hart?” the
major yelled again. “We have to close up! The Krauts are rousting everyone out of the huts. If we don’t close this up now, they’ll find it!”

  “I heard him,” Scott screamed. “He’s trapped!”

  Both Scott and Fenelli looked up at Major Clark in that second. The major seemed to sway, like heat vapors above a black macadam highway on a hot August afternoon, before he made a decision.

  “Get the buckets moving,” he shouted, turning toward the other men in the corridor. “No one leaves until we dig Hart out!” He bent toward the tunnel anteroom. “Coming down,” he yelled out. And then he grabbed a makeshift pickax and spade and launched them down into the hole in the earth.

  They thudded to the ground. But Lincoln Scott had already thrust himself into the tunnel, burrowing forward, where he was tearing at the loose sand and dirt frantically, digging like some crazed subterranean beast. Scott ripped at the cave-in, kicking the dirt back behind him, where Fenelli shoveled it to the back of the anteroom.

  Nothing Lincoln Scott had ever done in his life seemed as urgent. No moment of confrontation, no anger, no rage, nothing equaled his assault on the intractable loose sand. It was like trying to do battle with a ghost, with a vapor. He had no idea whether he had to dig through one foot or a hundred. But distance made utterly no difference to him. He snatched at the dirt, throwing handfuls behind him, and he began to whisper a mantra, “You’re not dying! You’re not dying . . .” as he dug toward the spot where he believed he’d heard the last faint sound of Tommy Hart’s voice.