Hart’s War

Chapter One

He had just awakened from the dream when the tunnel coming out beneath Hut 109 collapsed. It was just before dawn, and it had been raining hard off and on since midnight.

It was the same dream as always, a dream about what had happened to him two years earlier, as close to being as real in the dream as real was until the very end.

In the dream, he didn't see the convoy.

In the dream, he didn't suggest turning and attacking.

In the dream, they didn't get shot down.

And in the dream, no one died.

Raymund Thomas Hart, a skinny, quiet young man of unprepossessing appearance, the third in his family after both his father and grandfather to carry the saint's name with its Unusual spelling, lay cramped in his bunk in the darkness. He could feel damp sweat gathered around his neck, though the spring night air was still chilled with the leftover cold of winter. In the short moments before the wooden supporting beams eight feet underground snapped under the weight of the rain-soaked earth and the air filled with the whistles and shouts of the guards, he listened to the thick breathing and snores of the men occupying the bunk beds around him.

There were seven other men in the room, and he could recognize each by the distinctive sounds they made at night. One man often spoke, giving orders to his long-dead crew, another whimpered and sometimes cried. A third had asthma, and when the weather turned damp wheezed through the night.

Tommy Hart shivered once and pulled the thin gray blanket up to his neck.

He went over all the familiar details of the dream as if it were being played out like a motion picture in the darkness surrounding him. In the dream, they were flying in utter quiet, no engine sound, no wind noise, just slipping through the air as if it were some clear, sweet liquid, until he heard the deep Texas drawl of the captain over the intercom: "Ahh, hell boys, there ain't nothin' out here worth shootin' at. Tommy, find us the way home, willya?"

In the dream, he would look down at his maps and charts, octant and calipers, read the wind drift indicator and see, just as if it were a great streak of red ink painted across the surface of the blue

Mediterranean waves, the route home. And safety.

Tommy Hart shivered again.

His eyes were open to the nighttime, but he saw instead the sun reflecting off the whitecaps below them. For an instant, he wished there was some way he could make the dream real, then make the real a dream, just nice and easy, reverse the two. It didn't seem like such an unreasonable request. Put it through proper channels, he thought.

Fill out all the standard military forms in triplicate. Navigate through the army bureaucracy.

Snap a salute and get the commanding officer to sign the request.

Transfer, sir: One dream into reality. One reality into dream.

Instead, what had truly happened was that after he had heard the captain's command, he'd crawled forward into the Plexiglas nose cone of the B-25 to take one last look around, just to see if he could read a landmark off the Sicilian coastline, just to be completely certain of their positioning. They were flying down on the deck, less than two hundred feet above the ocean, beneath any probing German radar, and they were blistering along at more than two hundred fifty miles per hour. It should have been wild and exhilarating, six young men in a hot rod on a winding country road, inhibitions left behind like a patch of rubber from tires squealed in acceleration.

But it wasn't that way. Instead, it was risky, like skating gingerly across a frozen pond, unsure of the thickness of the ice creaking beneath each stride.

He had squeezed himself into the cone, next to the bomb sight and up to where the twin fifty-caliber machine guns were mounted.

It was, for a moment, as if he were flying alone, suspended above the vibrant blue of the waves, hurtling along, separated from the rest of the world. He stared out at the horizon, searching for something familiar, something that would serve as a point on the chart that he could use as their anchor for finding the route back to the base. Most of their navigation was done by dead reckoning.

But instead of spotting some telltale mountain ridge, what he'd seen just on the periphery of his field of vision was the unmistakable shape of the line of merchant ships, and the pair of destroyers zigzagging back and forth like alert sheepdogs guarding their flock.

He'd hesitated, just an instant, making swift calculations in his head.

They'd been flying for more than four hours and were at the end of their designated sweep. The crew was tired, eager to return to their base. The two destroyers were formidable defenses, even for the three bombers flying wing to wing in the midday sun. He had told himself at that moment:

Just turn away and say nothing, and the line of ships will be out of sight in seconds and no one will know.

But instead, he did as he'd been taught. He had listened to his own voice as if it were somehow unfamiliar.

"Captain, targets off the starboard wing. Distance maybe five miles."

Again, there'd been a small silence, before he'd heard the reply:

"Well, I'll be a damn horned frog. Tommy, ain't you the peach. You remind me to take you back with me to West Texas and we'll go hunting.

You got some pair of eyes, Tommy. Eyes sharp like yours, boy, ain't no jackrabbit for miles gonna get away from us. We'll have ourselves some fine fresh jackrabbit stew. Ain't nothin' in this world taste any better, boys…"

Whatever else the captain had said. Tommy Hart had lost in the shuffle, as he quickly crawled back through the narrow tunnel toward the midships, making way for the bombardier to assume his position in the nose. He was aware that the Lovely Lydia was making a slow bank to the right, and knew that their movement was being mimicked by The Randy Duck on their left and Green Eyes off their starboard wing. He returned to the small steel chair he occupied just behind the pilot and copilot and looked down at his charts again. He had thought: This is the worst moment. He wished he had the bombardier's duty, but they were the flight leaders, and that had given them an extra crewman for the sortie. By standing up, he could peer out between the two men flying the plane, but he knew he would wait until the last few seconds before doing that. Some fliers liked to see the target come up. He'd always thought of it as staring at death.

"Bombardier? You ready?" The captain's voice had increased in pitch, but still seemed unhurried.

"Ain't gonna take but one little of' bite at these boys, so let's make it worth our whiles to be here." He laughed, which echoed over the intercom.

The captain was a popular man, the sort of person who could find some dry, tumbleweed humor in even the direst of situations; who defeated almost all their obvious fears with the steady Texas drawl that never seemed ruffled, or even mildly irritated, even when flak was exploding around the plane and small pieces of deadly red-hot metal were ringing against the Mitchell's steel frame like the insistent knocking of some boorish and angry neighbor. The less obvious fears, Tommy knew, could never be completely destroyed.

Tommy Hart closed his eyes to the night, trying to squeeze away memory.

This didn't work. It never worked.

He heard the captain's voice again: "All right, boys, here we go. What is it our friends the limeys say?

"Tally ho!" Now, anyone here got any idea what the hell they mean by that?"

The twin fourteen-cylinder Wright Cyclone engines started screaming as the captain pushed them far past their redline. The maximum speed of the Mitchell was supposed to be two hundred and eighty-four miles per hour, but Tommy Hart knew they had pressed past that point. They were coming in out of the sun as best they could, low against the horizon, and he thought showing up nice and dark in the sights of every gun in the convoy.

Lovely Lydia shuddered slightly as the bomb bay doors opened, and then again, buffeted in the sky by the sudden wind of fire, as the guns awaiting them opened up. Black puffs filled the air, and the motors screamed in defiance. The copilot was shouting something incomprehensible as the plane ripped through the air toward the line of ships. Tommy had risen from his seat, finally staring through the cockpit window, his hands gripping a steel support bar. For the smallest of moments, he caught sight of the first of the German destroyers, its wake streaming out in a white tail behind it, as it spun about in the water, almost like a ballet dancer's pirouette, smoke from all its weapons rising into the air.

Lovely Lydia was slammed once, then again, skewing through the sky.

Tommy Hart had felt his throat dry up, and some sound was welling up from deep within himself, half a shout, half a groan, as he stared out ahead at the line of ships desperately trying to maneuver out of the path of the bombing run.

"Let 'em go!" he'd shouted, but his voice had been lost in the scream of the engines and the thudding of the flak bursting all around them.

The plane carried six five-hundred-pound bombs, and the technique used in skip-bombing a convoy was not unlike shooting a twenty-two at a line of metal ducks in a state fair sideshow, except the ducks couldn't fire back. The bombardier would ignore the Norden bombsight, which didn't really work all that well anyway, and line up each target by eye, release a bomb, then twitch the plane and line up the next. It was fast and frightening, speed and terror all mixed together.

When done properly, the bombs would rebound off the surface of the water and careen into the target like a bowling ball bounced down an alleyway toward the pins. The bombardier was only twenty-two, fresh-faced, and from a farm in Pennsylvania, but he had grown up shooting deer in the thick woods of the countryside of his home state, and he was very good at what he did, very cool, very composed, unaware that every microsecond took them closer to their own deaths, just as it took them closer to the deaths they were trying to achieve.

"One away!" the voice from the nose of the plane crackled over the intercom, distant, as if shouted from some field far away.

"Two gone! Three!" Lovely Lydia was shuddering bow to stern, torn by the force of the bullets flying toward her, the release of the bombs and the speed of its own wind ripping at her wings.

"All away! Get us out of here, captain!"

The engines surged again, as the captain pulled back on the stick, lining the bomber into the air.

"Rear turret! What y'all see?"

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, captain! One hit! No three! No, damn it, five hits! Jesus Christ! Omigod, Omigod! They got the Duck! Oh, no.

Green Eyes, too!"

"Hang on, boys," the captain had said.

"We'll be home for dinner. Tommy, check it out! Tell me what y'all see back there!"

Lovely Lydia had a small Plexiglas bubble in the roof, designed for the navigator to use for observation, although Tommy preferred to climb into the nose. There was a small metal step that he used to push himself up into the bubble, and he took a quick glance behind them and saw huge black spirals of smoke rising from a half-dozen ships in the convoy and a massive red explosion from an oil tanker. But his attention to the success of their work was short-lived, for what he'd immediately seen had frightened him far more in that moment than anything in the bombing run-not the speed, not the scream of the engines, not the wall of bullets they'd passed through. What he saw was the unmistakable red-orange of flames shooting from the port engine, licking across the surface of the wing.

He had screamed into the intercom: "Port side! Port side!

Fire!"

Only to hear the captain reply nonchalantly, "I know, they're on fire, helluva job, bombardier…"

"No, damn it, captain, it's us!"

The flames were shooting out of the cowling, streaking the blue air, and black smoke was smudging the wind. We're dead. Tommy had thought right then. In a second or two, or maybe five or ten, the flames will hit the fuel line and race back into the wing tank and we'll explode.

He had stopped being afraid at that moment. It was the rarest of sensations, to look out at something taking place just beyond his reach and recognize it for what it was-his own death. He felt a slight twinge of irritation, as if frustrated that there was nothing he could do, but resigned. And, in the same second, felt an odd, distant sort of loneliness and worried about his mother, and his brother, who was somewhere in the Pacific, and his sister and his sister's best friend, who lived down the block from them back in Manchester and whom he loved with a painful, dogged intensity, and how they would all be hurt far worse and for far longer than he was about to be, because he knew the explosion that was about to overtake them would be quick and decisive.

And into this reverie he'd heard the captain drawl one last time, "Hang on tight, boys, we're gonna try for the water!" and Lovely Lydia started to dive down, reaching for the waves that were their only real chance, to dump themselves into the water and extinguish the fire before the plane exploded.

It seemed to him that the world around him was screaming not words from memory, not sounds that belonged to the earth, but the crackling noise of some hellish circle of tormenting flame. He had always told himself that if they went into the drink, he would jam himself up behind the reinforced steel sled of the copilot's seat, but he didn't have time to get there. Instead, he hung desperately onto a ceiling pipe, riding into the blue of the Mediterranean ocean at nearly three hundred miles per hour, and looking for all the world in that terrifying moment like some nonchalant Manhattan commuter hanging from a subway train strap patiently waiting for his stop.

In his bunk, he shivered again.

He remembered: The sergeant in the turret screaming.

Tommy had staggered a step toward the gunner because he'd known that the man was locked into his seat, and the safety catch wouldn't release because the impact must have jammed it shut, and he was crying for help. But in that second, he had heard the captain yell to him,

"Tommy, get out! Just get out!

I'll help the gunner!" There were no sounds from the others.

The captain's order was the last sound he'd heard from any of the crew of the Lovely Lydia. He'd been surprised that the side hatch had opened, and surprised again when his Mae West had actually worked, helping him to bob on the surface like a child's cork toy. He'd paddled away from the plane, then turned back, waiting for the others to exit, but none had.

He'd called out once: "Get out! Get out! Please get out!"

And then he'd floated, waiting.

After a few seconds. Lovely Lydia had abruptly pitched forward, nose down, and silently slid beneath the water's surface, leaving him alone in the ocean.

This had always disturbed him. The captain, the copilot, the bombardier, and both gunners, they had always seemed to him to be so much quicker and sharper than he was. They were all young and athletic, coordinated, and skilled. They were quick and efficient, good shots with a machine gun or a basketball, fast around the bases legging out an extra base rap, and he had always known they were the real warriors on the Lovely Lydia, while he'd always thought of himself as this silly bookworm student, a little thin, a little clumsy, but good with calculations and a slide rule, who had grown up staring at the stars in the sky above his Vermont home, and thus, more by accident than patriotic design, had become a navigator and was more or less along for the ride. He had thought of himself as merely a piece of equipment, an appendage on the flight, while they were the fliers and the killers and the real men of the battle.

He did not understand why he had lived and all the men who'd seemed so much stronger than he had died.

And so he'd floated alone on the sea for nearly twenty-four hours, salt water mingling with his tears, on the edge of delirium, swimming in despair, until an Italian fishing boat had plucked him from the waves.

They were rough men who'd handled him with surprising gentleness. The fishermen had wrapped him in a blanket and given him a glass of red wine. He could still remember how it burned his throat as he drank.

And when they came to shore, they had dutifully handed him over to the Germans.

That was what had really happened. But in his dream the truth always evaporated, replaced instead by a much happier reality, where they were all alive, and gathered beneath the wing of the Lovely Lydia, trading jokes about the Arab merchants outside their dusty North African base, and boasting about what they would do with their lives and their girlfriends and wives when they got back to the States. He had sometimes thought, when they were still alive, that the men on the Lovely Lydia were the best friends he would ever have, and then sometimes thought that they would never see each other again, once the war was over. It had never really occurred to him that he would never see them again because they were all dead, and he was still alive, because this had never really seemed a possibility.

In his bunk, he thought: They will be with me always.

One of the prisoners in another bed shifted, the wooden slats creaking and obscuring the man's words as he talked in his sleep, the noise dissolving into an almost girlish moaning sound.

I lived and they died.

He cursed often at his eyes, and how they'd betrayed them all by spotting that convoy. He thought incongruously that if only he'd been born stone blind, instead of blessed with especially acute eyesight, then they'd all still be alive. It did no good, he knew, to think like that. Instead, he vowed that if he survived the war, one day he would travel all the way across the country to West Texas, and after he arrived there, he would drive deep into the scrubland and arroyos of that harsh land and take up a rifle and begin to kill jackrabbits.

Every jackrabbit he could spot. Every jackrabbit for miles around.

He envisioned himself shooting dozens, hundreds, thousands, a great slaughter of rabbits. Killing jackrabbits until he fell to the earth exhausted, ammunition expended, the barrel of the rifle seared red hot.

Surrounded by enough dead jackrabbits to last his captain an eternity.

He knew he would not be able to fall back to sleep.

So, he lay back, listening to the rain striking the metal roof and resounding like gunshots. And mixed in that sound came a low and distant thud. And moments later, shrill whistles and frantic shouts, all in the unmistakable angry German of the prison camp guards. He swung his feet out of the bunk and was pulling on his boots when he heard a pounding on the barracks door and "Raus! Raus! Schnell!" It would be cold on the parade ground, and Tommy Hart reached for his old leather flight jacket. The men around him were hurrying to dress, pulling on their woolen underwear and cracked and worn flight boots as the first insinuations of dawn light came filtering through the grimy barracks windows. In his hurry to get dressed, he lost sight of the Lovely Lydia and its crew, letting them fade into the near part of his memory as he quickly joined the flow of men heading out into the damp early morning chill of Stalag Luft Thirteen.

Second Lieutenant Tommy Hart shuffled his feet in the light brown mud of the parade compound. The grumbling had started within a few minutes of the assembly-an Appell in German-and now, whenever a guard walked by, the men would begin to catcall, and complain.

The Germans, for the most part, ignored them. Occasionally a Hundfuhrer, with his snarling shepherd at his side, would turn at the groups of men, and make motions as if he were ready to let the dog loose, which had the intended effect of quieting the airmen, if only for a few minutes. Luftwaffe Oberst Edward Von Reiter, the camp commandant, had quick-marched past the formations hours earlier, pausing only when accosted by the Senior American Officer, Colonel Lewis MacNamara, who immediately launched into a series of rapid-fire complaints. Von Reiter listened to MacNamara for perhaps thirty seconds, then casually saluted, raising a riding crop to the brim of his cap, and gestured for the SAO to return to his position at the head of the blocks of men. Without another glance at the row of airmen, Von Reiter had disappeared in the direction of Hut 109.

The kriegies mumbled and stamped their feet, as the day grew around them. Kriegies was what they called themselves, a shortening of the German Kriegsgefangene, which loosely translated into "war captured."

Standing, waiting, was both boring and exhausting. It was something they were familiar with, but hated.

There were nearly ten thousand Allied prisoners of war held in the camp, split almost equally between two compounds, North and South. The U.S. fliers-all officers-were in the southern compound, while British and other Allies were situated to the North, a quarter mile away.

Passage between the camps, while not unusual, was mildly difficult. An escort and an armed guard and a compelling reason were necessary.

Of course, a compelling reason could be manufactured by the quick exchange of a couple of cigarettes passed to one of the ferrets, which was what the kriegies called the guards who roamed the camps, armed only with the sword-like steel probes they used to poke into the ground. The guards with the dogs were called by their official names, because the dogs scared everyone. There were no walls at the camp, but each of the compounds was surrounded by a twenty-foot-high fence. Two rows of barbed concertina wire on either side of a metal chain link.

Every fifty yards along the fence was a stolid, squat wooden tower.

These were manned around the clock by humorless and unbribable machine-gun crews, goons, with Schmeisser machine pistols hung around their necks.

Ten feet inside the main fence the Germans had strung a thin strand of wire from wooden stakes. This was the deadline.

Anyone crossing that line was assumed to be trying to escape, and would be shot. At least, that was what the Luftwaffe commandant told each prisoner upon arrival at Stalag Luft Thirteen. The reality was that the guards would let a prisoner, who donned a white smock with a red cross prominently centered on it, pursue a baseball or football if it rolled to the exterior fence, although sometimes, for amusement, they would wave a prisoner after the item, then fire a short burst into the air above his head or into the dirt at his feet. Walking the deadline was a favorite kriegie activity; the airmen would pace endless laps at the limit of their confinement.

The May sun rose rapidly, warming the faces of the men gathered on the parade ground. Tommy Hart guessed they had been standing in formation for nearly four hours, while steady processions of German officers and enlisted men had passed by, heading toward the collapsed tunnel. The enlisted men carried shovels and pickaxes. The officers wore frowns.

"It's the damn wood," a voice from the formation spoke.

"It gets wet, it gets rotten, won't hold up a damn thing."

Tommy Hart turned and saw that the man speaking was a wiry West Virginian, copilot on a B-l 7, and a man whose father had grown up working in the coal mines. He'd presumed the West Virginian, whose flat voice twanged with disgust, was prominent in escape planning. Men with knowledge of the earth-farmers, miners, excavators, even a funeral home director shot down over France who lived in the next hut over were enlisted in the efforts within hours of their arrival at Stalag Luft Thirteen.

He had made no efforts to escape the camp. Nor did he have any great desire to try, unlike many of the other men. It was not that he didn't want to be free, which he did, but that he silently knew that in order to escape he would have to descend into a tunnel.

And this he could not do.

He supposed his fear of enclosed spaces came from the time he accidentally locked himself inside a basement closet when he was no more than four or five. A dozen terrifying hours spent enclosed in darkness, in heat and tears, hearing his mother's distant voice calling to him yet unable to raise his own, he was so panicked. He probably would not have characterized the fear that remained with him from that day as claustrophobia, but that, in effect, was what it was. He'd joined the air corps at least in part because even in the tight confines of the bomber, he was still out in the open. The idea of being inside a tank or a submarine had been far more frightening to him than the fear of enemy bullets.

So, in the oddly uncertain prison world of Stalag Luft Thirteen, Tommy Hart knew one thing: If he ever did get out, it would have to be through the front gate. Because he would never voluntarily descend into a tunnel.

This made him think of himself as content although that was probably not the right word, more willing or resigned to wait for the end of the war despite the rigors of Stalag Luft Thirteen. He was occasionally enlisted as a stooge to take up a position where he could keep an eye on one of the ferrets, an -early warning system designed by the camp security officers. Any German walking within the camp was constantly followed and observed by a system of overlapping watchers, with redundant signaling methods. Of course, the ferrets knew they were being watched, and consequently tried their best to evade the security, constantly altering their routes, and their paths.

"Hey! Fritz Number One! How long you gonna keep us standing here?"

This voice bellowed with unmistakable authority. The man behind it was a fighter pilot from New York, a captain. The outburst was directed at a solitary German, dressed in the gray coveralls, with a soft campaign hat pulled down on his forehead, that was the standard ferret uniform.

There were three ferrets with the first name of Fritz and they were always addressed by their name and number, which irritated them immensely.

The ferret turned, eyeing the captain. Then he stepped up to the man, who stood at parade rest in the front row. The Germans had each block of the formation gather in rows of five, easier for counting.

"If you did not dig, captain, then there would be no need for standing here," he said in excellent English.

"Hell, Fritz Number One," the captain replied.

"We didn't do no digging. This was probably some more of your lousy sewage system that went and fell in. You guys ought to get some of us to show you how it's done."

The German shook his head.

"No, Kapitan, this was a tunnel. To escape is foolhardy.

Now it has cost two men their lives."

This news silenced the airmen.

"Two men?" the captain asked.

"But how?"

The ferret shrugged.

"They were digging. The earth falls in. They are trapped. Buried. A loss. Most foolish."

He raised his voice slightly, staring at the formation of his enemies.

"It is stupid. Dummkopf." He bent down, and scraped up a handful of muddy ground, which he squeezed between long, almost feminine fingers.

"This earth. Good for planting.

Growing food. This is good. Good for your games. These are good, too…" he gestured toward the compound athletic field.

"But not strong enough for tunnels."

The ferret turned back to the captain.

"You will not fly again, Kapitan, until after the war. If you live."

The captain from New York simply stared at the ferret hard, finally replying, "Well, we'll see about that, won't we?"

The ferret made a lazy salute, and started to move off, pausing only as he reached the end of the formation. There he had a quick exchange with another officer. Tommy Hart leaned forward and saw that Fritz Number One had reached out his. hand, and that a quick pair of cigarettes had been slipped to him. The man who had passed the smokes was a wiry, short, smiling bomber captain from Greenville, Mississippi, named Vincent Bedford, but he was the formation's expert negotiator and trader, and because of his skills had been nicknamed Trader Vic after the famous restaurateur.

Bedford had a thick, southern drawl, with an excitable quality to it.

He was an excellent poker player, a more than passable shortstop who'd done some time in the minor leagues. Before the war, he'd been a car salesman, which seemed appropriate. But what he truly excelled at was the commerce of Stalag Luft Thirteen, turning cigarettes and chocolates and tins of real coffee that arrived either in Red Cross parcels or packages from the States into clothing and other goods. Or he would take extra clothing and turn that into foodstuffs. No trade was beyond Vincent Bedford, and rarely did he come out on the wrong end of an exchange. And, in the unusual event that he had, then his gambler's instincts repaired his losses. A poker game could replenish his stock as effectively as a parcel from home. He seemed to trade in other items as well; always knowing the latest rumor, always getting the latest war news just slightly ahead of everyone else. Tommy Hart assumed that in his trades he'd somehow acquired a radio, but didn't know this for certain. What he did know was that Vincent Bedford was the man in Hut 101 to see. In a world where men had little, Vincent Bedford had amassed a prisoner-of-war-camp fortune, stockpiling coffee and foodstuffs and woolen socks and long underwear and anything else that might make life in the bag slightly more livable.

The few times that Trader Vic wasn't making some trade, Bedford would launch into grandiose and idyllic descriptions of the little town he hailed from, always delivered in the soft drawl of the Deep South, slowly, lovingly. More often than not, the other airmen would tell him they were all moving to Greenville after the war, simply to get him to shut up, because talk of home, no matter how elegiac, prompted a homesickness that was dangerous. All the men in the camp lived on the edge of one despair or another, and thinking of the States did no one any good, though it was almost the only thing they did think about.

Bedford watched the ferret move away, then turned and whispered something to the next airman in formation. It only took a few seconds for the news to pass through the group, and on to the next formation.

The trapped men were named Wilson and O'Hara. They were both prominent tunnel rats. Tommy Hart knew O'Hara slightly; the dead man had occupied a bunk in their hut, but in another room, so he was merely one of the two hundred faces crammed into the barracks. According to the information being whispered down the rows of kriegies, the two men had descended into the tunnel late that past night, and were busily trying to shore up the support beams when the soft ground had given way around them. They'd been buried alive.

And, according to the information Bedford had acquired, the Germans had decided to leave the bodies of the two men where the ground had collapsed in on them.

The whispered talk quickly gave way to voices starting to be raised in anger. The formations of men seemed to take on a sinuous sort of life, as lines straightened, shoulders were thrust back. Without command, men snapped to attention.

Tommy Hart did the same, but not without a last glance down the lines of men to where Trader Vic was standing. He was struck by what he'd seen, and unsettled slightly, by something elusive, that he could not put a word to.

Then, before he had time to assess what it was that had disturbed him, the captain from New York shouted out: "Killers!

Goddamn murderers! Savages!" Other voices from other formations picked up the same message, and the air of the compound filled rapidly with bellows of outrage.

The SAO stepped to the front of the formations, and turned and stared at the men with a glare that seemed to demand discipline, although his own anger was evident in the cold gray look in his eyes and the rigid jut to his jaw. Lewis MacNamara was old-time army, a full bird colonel with over twenty years in uniform, who rarely needed to raise his voice and was accustomed to being obeyed. A stiff man, who seemingly saw his imprisonment as just another in a long line of military assignments. As MacNamara assumed a parade rest facing the kriegies, his legs slightly apart, his arms held tightly behind his waist, a pair of goons snapped back the bolts on their weapons, an act of mostly menace, but with just enough determination that the men in formation hesitated, and slowly quieted.

No one truly thought the goons would open fire on the massed airmen.

But no one was ever completely certain of this.

The camp commandant, trailed by a pair of aides who walked gingerly through the mud in their polished riding boots, have into view, which prompted some whistles and catcalls, studiously ignored by Von Reiter.

Without a word to the SAO, the commandant addressed the formations loudly.

"We will count now. Then you are dismissed."

He paused, then added.

"The count, it will be two men short! Idiocy!"

The airmen remained silent, standing at attention.

"This is the third tunnel in the past year!" Von Reiter continued.

"But it is the first tunnel to cost men their lives!" The commandant was shouting, his voice infected with frustration.

"Further escape attempts will not be tolerated!"

He paused, then stared across at the men. He lifted a bony finger and pointed like a wizened schoolteacher at an unruly class.

"There has never been a successful escape from my camp!

Never! And there will be none!"

He paused, his eyes sweeping over the assembled kriegies.

"You have been warned," he concluded.

In the momentary silence that swept across the formations of men,

Colonel MacNamara stepped forward. His own voice carried the same weight of command as Von Reiter's. His spine was rigid, his posture a portrait of military perfection.

That his uniform was frayed and ragged seemed oddly to underscore his taut bearing.

"I would like to take this opportunity to remind the Oberst that it is the sworn duty of every officer to attempt to escape from the enemy."

Von Reiter held up his hand, cutting off the colonel.

"Do not speak to me of duty," he said.

"Escape is verboten "This duty, this requirement, is no different for the Luftwaffe airmen being held by our side," MacNamara loudly added.

"And if a Luftwaffe flier died in his attempt, he would be buried by his own comrades, with full military honors!"

Von Reiter frowned, started to reply, then stopped. He nodded his head, just slightly. The two men stared hard at each other, as if struggling over something between them. A tug-of-war of wills.

Then the commandant gestured for the SAO to accompany him, and he turned his back on the gathered men. The two senior officers disappeared from the kriegies' sight, marching stride for stride in the direction of the main gate, which led to the camp offices. Instantly, ferrets appeared at the head of each block formation, and the airmen began the familiar and laborious process of being counted. Midway through the roll call the kriegies heard the first deep, thudding explosion, as German sappers placed charges along the length of the collapsed tunnel, filling it with more of the sandy yellow dirt that had choked the life from the two tunnel men. Tommy Hart thought there was something wrong, or perhaps unfair, in enlisting to fly in the clean, clear air, no matter how deadly it could be, only to die alone and suffocating, trapped eight feet beneath the earth. He did not say this out loud.

The tunnel coming out from 109 had been concealed underneath a washroom sink, and after going straight down, had taken a sharp right turn, heading for the wire. Of the forty huts in the compound, 109 was second closest to the perimeter. To reach the safety of the dark line of tall fir trees that signaled the edge of a deep Bavarian forest, the tunnel diggers were required to burrow more than a hundred yards through the dirt.

The tunnel had made it less than a third of the way. Of the three tunnels dug during the past year, it had traveled the farthest, and had the highest of hopes attached to it.

Like virtually every other kriegie in the camp, by midday Tommy Hart had walked over to the deadline and stared out at the remains of the tunnel, trying to imagine what it must have been like for the two men trapped beneath the surface. The sapper's charges had left the earth churned up, grass streaked with muddy brown dirt, cratered with depressions where the explosions had caused the tunnel ceiling to collapse. A guard crew had poured wet concrete into the tunnel's entranceway in Hut 109.

He sighed loudly. There were two other pilots, B-17 men wearing heavy sheepskin coats despite the mild temperatures, standing nearby, taking in the same elusive vista.

"It doesn't seem all that far," one man said, with a sigh.

"Close," his companion agreed, muttering.

"Real close," the first pilot said.

"Into the forest, through the trees, find the road to town and you're in business. Just gotta make it to the station and a rail line heading south. Jump some old freight train destination Switzerland and you're on your way. Damn. Real close."

"Not close at all," Tommy Hart disagreed.

"And too damn obvious from the North tower."

Both men hesitated, then nodded, as if they, too, knew their eyes were betraying them. War has a way of shrinking and expanding distances, depending on the threat involved in traveling through the contested space. It's always hard to see clearly. Tommy thought, especially when one's life might be at stake.

"I'd still like just one little old chance," one of the men said. He was perhaps a little older than Tommy, and much stockier. He hadn't shaved, and he wore his campaign hat pulled down hard to his eyebrows.

"Just one chance. I think if I could just get to the other side where there ain't no wire, well, hell, ain't nothing on this earth gonna stop me then " "Except maybe a couple of million Krauts," his friend interrupted.

"And you don't speak any German and where you gonna go to, anyways?"

"Switzerland. Beautiful country. All cows and mountains and those fancy little houses…"

"Chalets," the other man said.

"They call 'em chalets."

"Right. I figure maybe a couple of weeks getting nice and fat eating chocolate. Nice big, fat milk chocolate bars served up by some pretty blond farm girl in pigtails whose mommy and daddy ain't nowhere around.

Then maybe right back home to the States, where I got a girl maybe give me some damn special hero's-type welcome, you better believe."

The other pilot slapped him on the arm. The leather jacket muffled the sound.

"Dreamer," he said. He turned toward Tommy Hart, "Been in the bag long?" he asked.

"Since November, forty-two," Tommy replied.

Both men whistled.

"Whoa! Old-timer. Ever made it out?"

"Not once," Tommy replied.

"Not for a minute. Not even for a second."

"Man," the B-17 pilot continued, "I only been here five weeks and I'm already so crazy, don't know what the hell I'm gonna do. Kinda like having an itch, you know, right in the middle of your back. Right where you can't reach it."

"Better get used to it," Tommy replied.

"Guys try to blitz out. Get dead fast."

"Never get used to it," the man said.

Tommy nodded in agreement. Never get used to it, he thought. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lip, breathing in hard.

"Sometimes," Tommy said softly, "you've got to find your freedom up here…" He tapped his forehead.

One of the pilots nodded, but the other airman had turned back toward the main camp.

"Hey," he said, "look what's coming."

Tommy pivoted quickly and saw a dozen men marching in tight formation across the wide expanse of the compound's exercise ground. The men had obviously decked themselves out in Stalag Luft Thirteen finery; they wore ties, their shirts and jackets were pressed, there were sharp creases in their pants. Prisoner-of-war-camp dress uniforms.

Each man in the group was carrying a musical instrument.

The May sun suddenly reflected off the brass of a trombone, glinting sharply. A drummer had slung a single snare around his waist so that it hung in front of him, and as the men approached, he began to snap out a rolling, fast metallic beat.

The squad leader was set slightly ahead. His eyes were locked forward, staring through the wire to the forest beyond.

He had two instruments in his hands, a clarinet, held in his right, and a trumpet, which glistened, polished to a rich golden brown sheen. All the men maintained formation, quick-marching in unison, the leader calling out an occasional cadence above the steady rat-a-tat of the snare drum.

It took no more than seconds for the odd constellation to attract the attention of the other kriegies. Men began to stream from the huts, jostling shoulder to shoulder to see what was going on. In front of some of the side barracks there were officers tending to small gardens, and they dropped their makeshift tools to the dirt and fell in behind the marching squad. A baseball game, just getting under way in the exercise yard, stopped. Gloves, bats, and balls were left behind as the players joined the throng that had collected behind the marching men.

The squad leader was a short man, balding slightly, thin and muscular like a bantamweight wrestler. He seemed oblivious to the hundreds of airmen who had materialized behind him, continuing to march, eyes straight ahead. He repeatedly blared the cadence "Right, your right, right…" as the squad did a sharp left wheel that would have done justice to a West Point drill team, and approached the deadline. On the leader's barked command "Squad… Halt!" they came to a rest a few feet from the wire, their feet stamping in unison against the muffled dust.

The German machine gunners in the nearest tower swung their weapon in the direction of the men. They seemed both curious and intent. Their eyes were just visible beneath the dull gray steel helmets they wore, peering above the barrel of the gun.

Tommy Hart watched, but then overheard one of the B-17 pilots still standing by his side whisper in a deep voice of quiet despair: "O'Hara.

The little Irish mick who died in the tunnel last night. He was a New Orleans boy, just like the band leader They enlisted together. Flew together. Played music together. I think he was the clarinet…"

The band leader turned to the men, and called out: "Stalag Luft Thirteen Prisoner's Jazz Band… attention!"

The squad clicked their heels together.

"Take positions!" he ordered.

The squad stepped smartly into a semicircle, facing the barbed wire and the scar on the earth that marked the tunnel's final progress and where the two diggers lay buried. The men lifted their instruments to their lips, waiting for the signal from the band leader Saxophones, trombones, French horns, and comets stood at attention. The drummer's sticks paused over the skin of the snare. A guitarist fingered the fret board a pick in his right hand.

The band leader eyes swept over each of the men, assessing their readiness. Then he did an abrupt about-face, turning his back to the band. He strode three steps forward, right to the edge of the deadline, and in a swift motion, set the clarinet down against the wire. He raised up, snapped off a sharp salute to the instrument, and again performed an about-face. The band leader seemed to quiver, for an instant, as he returned to his position in front of the assembled musicians.

Tommy Hart saw a small tremble in the band leader lips as the man slowly lifted his trumpet to his mouth. He could see that tears were streaking down the cheeks of both the tenor sax man and one of the trombone players. The men all seemed to hesitate, and silence filled the air. The band leader nodded, licked his lips as if to steady them, raised his left hand, and began to mark time.

"On the downbeat," he said. "

"Chattanooga Choochoo."

Make it hot! Make it real hot! One, two, three, and four…"

The music burst forth, exploding like a star shell in the air around them. It soared into the sky, lifted above the barbed wire and the guard tower, flying birdlike into the clear blue, and disappearing, fading in the distance beyond the tree line and its promise of elusive freedom.

The musicians played with ferocity, unbridled intensity.

Within seconds beads of sweat emerged on their foreheads.

Their instruments bent and swayed with the rhythms of the music. Every few moments one of the band members would step forward into the center of the semicircle, soloing, dominating the syncopation, cutting loose with a saxophone's plaintive wail or a guitar's edgy energy. The men did this without a sign or a signal from the band leader reacting more to the surge of music that they had created, an old-time revivalists' intensity, responding as if some heavenly hand reached down and nudged them gently on the shoulder.

"Chattanooga Choo-choo" flowed like a river directly into "That Old Black Magic" and then into "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B"-where the band leader stepped to the forefront, blasting out trumpet calls in time with the other instruments. The music continued, unrestrained, unfettered, uninterrupted, dipping, swaying, inexorable in its force, each tune smoothly blending with neighborly friendliness into the next.

The huge crowd of kriegies stood stock-still, quiet, listening.

The band played nonstop for close to thirty minutes, until the members seemed red-faced, like sprinters exhausted by the effort, gasping for air. The leader, sweat dripping from his forehead, lifted his left hand from the trumpet as they swept into the final searing bars of

"Take the A Train," raising it high above his head, and then abruptly sliced it down through the air, and the band, on cue, stopped.

There was no applause. Not a sound emerged from the massive crowd of men.

The band leader looked across at the members of the group and nodded his head slowly. Sweat and tears mingled freely on his face, glistening on his cheeks, but his lips had creased into a half-smile of sorts, one that appreciated what they'd done, but still twisted with the sadness of the reason. Tommy Hart did not see or hear the command, but the band abruptly stepped into parade rest positions, instruments held like weapons at their chests. The band leader walked over to a trombonist, handed the man his own trumpet, then did a sharp about-face, quick-marching to the wire and picking up the lone clarinet. Still facing out to the woods and the great world beyond the wire, the band leader lifted the instrument to his lips and trilled out a single, long slow scale. Tommy did not know if the man was improvising or not, but he listened carefully as the clear, smooth notes of the clarinet danced through the air. Tommy thought the music not unlike the birds he was used to seeing in the rolling fields of his Vermont home in the fall, just before the great migrations south. When alarmed, they would rise up into the air in unison, milling about for a moment or two, then suddenly taking wing and, gathering together, flying en masse off into the sun. That was what the clarinet's tunes were doing. Rising up, searching to find shape and organization, then soaring off into the distance.

The last note seemed especially high, especially lonesome.

The band leader stopped, slowly lowering the instrument from his lips.

For an instant he held the clarinet against his chest. Then he pivoted sharply and called out a command:

"Stalag Luft Thirteen Prisoner Jazz Band… attention!"

The band snapped together, like the carefully fitted pieces of a machine.

"By column of twos… about-face! Drummer please… forward march!"

The jazz band began to move away from the wire. But where before they had been quick-marching, now they moved slowly, deliberately. A funeral cadence, each right foot hesitating slightly before falling to the earth. The drummer's beat was slow and doleful.

The mass of kriegies parted, letting the band march through, moving at just more than a crawl, then closed ranks behind them, as the prisoners slowly returned to whatever activity they could find to get them through the next minute, the next hour, the next day of confinement.

Tommy Hart glanced up. The two German guards in the tower continued to train their machine gun on the gathering of men. They were grinning.

They don't know, he thought to himself, but for just a few minutes there right in front of their eyes and their weapons we all became free men once again.

He had some time before the afternoon count, so Tommy returned to his bunk room to get a book. Each hut at Stalag Luft Thirteen was constructed from a combination of prefabricated wood and beaverboard, drafty and cold in the winter, stifling hot in the summer. When it rained, and the men were forced indoors, the rooms gained a musty, green odor, a smell of sweat and confinement. There were fourteen rooms in each hut, each holding eight men in bunks. The kriegies had learned that by moving one of the beaverboard walls just a few inches, they could create hollow spaces between the walls, which were used for concealing escape items ranging from uniforms recut to resemble ordinary suits to picks and axes used by tunnelers.

Each hut contained a small washroom with a sink, but showers were located in a building between the North and South camps, and men needed an escort to use them. They were not used regularly. Each hut also included a single working toilet, but it was operated only at night, after lights out. During the day, the kriegies utilized outside privies.

These were known as Aborts, and accommodated a half-dozen men at a time. They afforded a slight degree of privacy-wooden partitions separated the polished wooden seats. The Germans provided adequate supplies of lime, and Abort details liberally scrubbed the area with strong disinfecting GI soap. Each pair of huts shared an Abort, which was located between the buildings.

The men cooked for themselves, each hut maintaining a rudimentary kitchen with wooden stove. The Germans provided some minimal rations, mostly potatoes, terrible-tasting blood sausage, turnips, and kriegsbrot-the hard, dark war bread upon which the entire nation seemed to exist. Kriegies were inventive cooks, coaxing varied and different tastes from the same foodstuffs by mixing and matching. The food parcels either shipped by relatives or issued by the Red Cross were the foundations for their meals. The men were always hungry, but rarely starving, although to many the distinction seemed narrow.

Stalag Luft Thirteen was a world within a world.

There were daily classes in art and philosophy, musical performances almost nightly in Hut 112, which had been dubbed The Luftclub, and a theater with its own regular troupe. It was currently performing The

Man Who Came to Dinner to rave reviews in the camp newspaper. There were spirited athletic competitions, including a storied softball rivalry between the top team in the South compound and a squad from the

British North camp. The British did not totally understand many of the subtleties of baseball, but two of the pilots in their camp had been bowlers for the national cricket team before the war, and they had adapted quickly to the concept of throwing strikes. There was a lending library, which kept an eclectic combination of mysteries and classics.

Tommy Hart, though, had his own collection of books.

He had been midway through his third year at Harvard Law School when Pearl Harbor had been bombed. While some of his classmates had deferred enlisting until the end of the academic year and graduation, he had quietly joined a line outside the recruiting station near Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston. He had put down the air corps on his recruitment papers on a whim, and several weeks later had carried his suitcase across Harvard Yard in the midst of a January snowstorm, heading toward the T, a ride to South Station, and a train to Dothan, Alabama, and flight training.

Shortly after his capture, he'd filled out a form for the International Red Cross that was supposed to notify his family that he still lived.

He'd left much of the form blank, not fully trusting the Germans who would process the document.

But near the bottom had been a space that requested special items needed. On this line he'd written, mostly as a lark: Edmund's Principles of Common Law, Third Edition, 1938, University of Chicago Press. To his surprise, the book was waiting for him when he arrived at Stalag Luft Thirteen, although it had been mailed by the YMCA organization.

Tommy had clutched the thick volume of legal precedents to his chest throughout his first night at the camp, like a child would hold a favorite and reassuring teddy bear, and for the first moment since he'd seen the flames streaking across the Lovely Lydia's right wing, actually dared to think he might survive.

Edmund's Principles had been followed in quick order by Burke's Elements of Criminal Procedure and by texts on torts, wills, and civil actions. Tommy had acquired works on legal history and a secondhand but valuable copy of the life and opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had also requested a biography and selected writings of Clarence Darrow. He was particularly interested in the man's famous jury summations.

So while others sketched or learned lines and hammed it up on stage.

Tommy Hart had studied. He'd envisioned every course in his final year, and had replicated each. He wrote mock papers, submitted mock arguments and legal documents, debated both sides of every point and issue that he could find, creating persuasive claims to buttress either side's position on every fake dispute he could imagine.

And while others planned escape and dreamed of freedom, Tommy learned the law.

Once a week, on Friday mornings, he would bribe one of the Fritzes with a couple of cigarettes to take him to the British compound, where he would be greeted by Wing Commander Phillip Pryce and Flying Officer Hugh Renaday.

Pryce was beyond middle age, one of the oldest men in both camps, white-haired, sallow-chested, and thin, with a reedy voice and flaccid skin that seemed to hang from his arms. He always seemed to be struggling, red-nosed and sniffling, with a cold or a virus that threatened to turn into pneumonia, regardless of what the weather was.

Before the war Pryce had been a prominent London barrister, a member of an ancient and venerated set of chambers.

His Stalag Luft Thirteen roommate, Hugh Renaday, was half his age, only a year or so older than Tommy, and sported a large, bushy mustache. The two men had been captured together when their Blenheim bomber had been shot down over Holland. Pryce often would point out, in his aristocratic, high-pitched tones, that it was all a terrible mistake that he was at Stalag Luft Thirteen at all. It was, he would say, a place for the younger men. He'd only been on that bomber on that particular flight because he'd grown increasingly frustrated with nightly sending men out on dangerous missions that cost them their lives, and so, one night, against express orders, he'd taken the place of a sick turret gunner on the Blenheim.

"Bad choice, that," Pryce would mutter.

Renaday, a thickset tree-stump of a man even though the camp diet melted pounds from his rugger's frame, would counter, "Ah, but who wants to die in bed at home?"

And Pryce would reply: "But, my dear lad we all do. You young men simply need the perspective of age."

Renaday was a rough-edged Canadian. Before the war he had been a criminal investigator for the provincial police in Manitoba. A week after he enlisted in the RCAF, he'd received word of his acceptance into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Faced with the choice of following the career he'd always dreamed of or sticking with the air corps, he'd reluctantly put off his appointment to the Mounties. He would always conclude the conversation with Pryce by saying, "Spoken like an old man."

On Fridays, the three men would regularly meet and discuss the law.

Renaday had a policeman's attitudes, all straightforward, fact-driven, and direct, constantly seeking the narrowest line through any case and argument. Pryce was the precise opposite, a master of subtlety. The older man liked to soliloquize on the aristocracy of conflict, the princeliness of distinctions between the facts and the law. More often than not. Tommy Hart served as the bridge between the two men, charting his course between the older man's nights of intellectualism and the younger man's dogged pragmatism. It was, he thought, a part of his schooling.

He hoped the tunnel collapse would not prevent him from attending their regular weekly session. Sometimes, after discovering a concealed radio or other contraband, the Germans would lock down the camps as punishment, and the men would be forced to spend days indoors. Travel between the two compounds would be curtailed. Once a soccer game between North and South squads was canceled, to the fury of the

British, and relief of the Americans, who'd known they were destined to be slaughtered, and much preferred to play their British counterparts in basketball or baseball.

This week, the three men were scheduled to discuss the Lindbergh kidnapping. Tommy was to argue the carpenter's defense, Renaday taking the part of the state, with Pryce acting as arbiter. He felt unprepared, constricted not merely by the facts but by his position. He had felt much more comfortable the previous month, when they'd argued the details of the Wright-Mills murder case. And he'd been much more confident in the dead of winter, when they'd dissected the legal aspects of Jack the Ripper's Victorian killing spree. To his immense delight, his British friends had been constantly on the defensive during that debate.

Tommy took his copy of Burke's Criminal Procedure from a shelf next to his bunk and exited Hut 101. Early in his stay at Stalag Luft Thirteen he had designed and built himself a chair using the leftover wooden crates in which Red Cross parcels were shipped to the camp. The chair resembled an Adirondack-style chair, and for POW camp furniture was widely admired and immediately and frequently copied. The chair had several important details: it only required a half-dozen nails to hold it together and it was actually fairly comfortable.

He sometimes thought it had been his only real contribution to camp life.

He moved the chair into the midday sun and opened the text. He was, however, hardly a paragraph into his reading before a figure hovered into view, and he looked up at the same moment he heard the familiar Mississippi drawl.

"Hey, Hart, how y'all doin' this fine day?"

"I don't think I'd call it a fine day. Vic. Another day. That's all."

"Well, another day for you and me, maybe. But the last day for a couple of good old boys."

"That's true enough…"

Tommy had to hold his hand up, blocking the sun, in order to clearly see Vincent Bedford.

"Some men, they got the need, you know. Hart? They got the big desire. It pains 'em so much, they got to try anything to get out.

What it amounts to, why, now I got an empty bunk in my room and somebody's writing that big hurt letter to some poor folks back home.

Other men, well, they look at that barbed wire and they figure the best way to get past it is to wait. Be patient. Other men, well, they see something else."

"What is it you see. Vic? When you look at the wire?"

Tommy asked.

The southerner grinned.

"Same thing I always see, wherever I be."

"Which is?"

"Why, lawyer man, I see an opportunity."

Tommy hesitated, then replied, "And what opportunity brings you to me?"

Vincent Bedford knelt down, so that he was on eye level with Tommy. He was carrying two cartons of brand-new American cigarettes. He poked them at Tommy.

"Why, Hart, you know what I'm looking for. I want to make a trade.

Same as always. You got something I want. I got lots that you need.

We're simply trying to reach an accommodation.

A mutual opportunity, I'd say. An arrangement promising satisfaction to all parties."

Tommy shook his head.

"I've told you before, I won't trade it."

Bedford smiled with mock astonishment.

"Everyone and everything has a price. Hart. You know that. I know that. Hell, when you think about it, that's pretty much what those law books of your'n say on each and every page, don't they? And anyways, what y'all think is so important about knowing what time it is? There ain't no special time, here in this place. Wake up the same every day.

Bed at night, jus' the same. Eat. Sleep. Roll call. Every day. Jus’ the same. So, tell me, Hart, why y'all need that watch so damn much?"

Tommy glanced down at the Longines watch on his left wrist. For an instant the steel casing reflected a burst of sunlight.

It was an excellent watch, with a sweep hand and jeweled mechanism. It kept precise time and seemed oblivious to the shocks and batterings of war. But, more important, etched into the back were the words I'll be waiting and the initial L. Tommy merely had to listen to the muffled ticking to be reminded of the young woman who'd given it to him on his last leave home before shipping out. Bedford, of course, knew none of this.

"It's not the time it keeps," Tommy said in reply.

"It's the time it promises."

Bedford laughed out loud.

"Man, what you mean by that?"

The southerner smiled again.

"Suppose I fix it so you gets to see those limey friends of yours whenever you want? I can do that. Suppose you start getting an extra parcel each week?

I can make that happen, too. What you need. Hart? Food?

Some warm clothes? Maybe books? Even a radio. I can get you one. A good one, too. Then you be able to listen to the truth and not have to rely on all the scuttlebutt and rumor that floats around this place.

You jus' got to name your price."

"Not for sale."

"Damn." Bedford stood up, finally irritated.

"Y'all ain't got no idea what I can get with a watch like that."

"Sorry," Tommy replied briskly.

Bedford seemed to snarl for a moment, then replaced the look of angry frustration with another grin.

"Time will come, lawyer man. And you'll end up needing to take less than you're offered here today. Ought to know when a trade is ripe.

Don't want to be making no trades when you truly need something'.

Always get the short end, then."

"No deals. Not today. Not tomorrow. Be seeing you. Vic."

Bedford shrugged, with an exaggerated motion. He seemed about to say something else, when both men heard the shrill whistle of the afternoon

Appell. Ferrets materialized by each block of huts, shouting "Raus!

Raus!" and men began to emerge from the buildings, slowly making their way to the parade ground.

Tommy Hart ducked back inside Hut 101 and replaced the legal text on the shelf. Then he joined the flow of men shuffling through the afternoon sun toward the assembly.

As always, they gathered in rows five deep.

The ferrets counted, walking up and down the rows, trying to make certain no one was missing. It was a tedious process, one the Germans seemed to accept with dedication. Tommy could never understand how it was that they weren't bored senseless by the twice-daily exercise in simple mathematics.

Of course, he conceded inwardly that on a day that two men died in a tunnel, the ferret who missed a count would very likely find himself on a troop train bound for the eastern front. So the guards were being cautious and precise, even more so than their usual cautious and precise natures ordinarily allowed for.

When the count was satisfactorily accomplished, the ferrets returned to the front of the formations, reporting to the Unteroffizier assigned to that day's task. He would, in turn, report to the commandant. Von Reiter did not attend every Appell.

But in order for the men to be dismissed, he had to give the order. The kriegies found this extra wait wildly irritating, as the Unteroffizier disappeared through the front gate, heading toward Von Reiter's office.

The delay this afternoon seemed lengthy.

Tommy stole a glance down the formation. He noticed that Vincent Bedford was at attention two spaces away. He looked back to the front, and saw that the Unteroffizier had returned and was speaking with SAO MacNamara. Tommy could just make out a look of concern on the face of the colonel, then MacNamara did an abrupt turn and marched out the gate with the German, disappearing into the commandant's office.

It was ten minutes before MacNamara reappeared. He strode swiftly back to the head of the formations of airmen.

But then he seemed to hesitate for an instant before speaking out, in a large, parade ground voice: "New prisoner coming in!"

MacNamara paused again, as if he wished to add something.

But the kriegies' attention swung quickly in that momentary delay, to where a single U.S. flier, flanked on either side by goons with rifles, was emerging from the commandant's office. The flier was tall, a half foot taller than either of the guards accompanying him, trim, wearing the sheepskin jacket and soft helmet of a fighter pilot. He marched forward rapidly, his leather flight boots kicking up small puffs of dust from the earth, coming to attention in front of Colonel MacNamara, where the flier snapped off a salute that seemed creased, it was so sharp.

The kriegies were silent, staring ahead.

The only sound Tommy Hart heard, in those seconds, was the unmistakable drawl of the Mississippian, whose every word was filled with undeniable astonishment:

"I'll be goddamned…" Vincent Bedford said loudly.

"It's a damn nigger!"