'Got to go up there and get the truth.'
'Well, I'll be damned,' the pilot said, shaking his head back and forth. His face glistened with the effort from pumping the bellows.
'I'll say this for you, buddy. You may not find that whoever it is you're looking for is all that eager to talk. Especially with freedom only a coupla feet away.'
'Got to go,' Tommy repeated, 'got no choice anymore.'
Each word he spoke seemed to sear his chest like a burst of superheated air exploding from a fireball.
The New Yorker continued his hard work without hesitation.
He shrugged.
'All right,' he said, 'here's the deal. There are twenty-six guys spaced out down the length of the tunnel. A kriegie every ten feet or so. Each bucket gets passed forward to the front, filled up, then passed back. Each guy scoots forward like a crab, then backs up, sorta like some crazy turtle in reverse.
We're on a pretty tight schedule here, so you better keep moving and get whatever it is you're gonna do, done.
And you're gonna hafta squeeze by every guy in the tunnel.
There's a rope to help you pull yourself along. But for Christ's sake don't hit the goddamn ceiling! Try not to lift your head at all. We used wood from the Red Cross parcels to shore up the roof, but it's unstable as hell, and if you bang into it, it's likely to come down on your head. Maybe on everybody's heads. Try not to scrape the walls, either. They ain't much better.'
Tommy took in everything the man said. He turned his eyes toward the tunnel shaft. It was narrow, terrifying. No more than two feet by three feet. Each kriegie waiting in the tunnel had a single fat candle creating little islands of light around them; those were the only sources of illumination along the entire length.
The New Yorker smiled.
'Hey, Tommy,' he said, grinning through the exertion, 'when I get home and make my first million and I need some damn sharp polished-shoes Ivy
League lawyer to watch out for my money and my butt, you're gonna be the guy I'm gonna call. You can count on it. Anyway, hope you find what you're looking for,' he said.
Then he bent forward, peering up into the tunnel, and he half-whispered, half-shouted a sort of warning: 'Man coming up.
Make way!'
'Hope you make it home okay,' Tommy managed to say, his throat already parched with dust and fear.
'Gotta try,' the New Yorker said.
'Better than spending another minute wasting away in this damn place.'
Then he bent down and renewed his pumping with increased vigor, forcing blast after blast of air up the length of the tunnel.
Tommy ducked down, on his hands and knees. He hesitated for just an instant, finding the rope with his fingers and grasping hold of it, then he thrust himself forward, on his belly, crawling forward like some eager newborn, but with none of a child's sense of adventure.
Instead, all he could discern was a deep, cavernous terror echoing within him, and all he knew was that the answers he needed that night lay some seventy-five yards ahead, at the very end of what any reasonable person would take one single glance at and recognize was little more than a long, dark, and dangerously narrow grave.
Hugh Renaday was also crawling.
Moving slowly, with painstaking deliberateness, he'd managed to cover almost a hundred yards, so that he was now well into the center of the open exercise and assembly area, and he deemed it reasonable now to turn and try to maneuver back close enough to the front of Hut 101 where he could burst up and sprint for the doorway when the final shadows of the night aligned themselves conveniently. Of course, he realized, sprinting was going to be an experience. The pain in his knee was excruciating, a flower of agony dropping throbbing petals of hurt throughout his entire leg.
For a moment, the Canadian lowered his face into the dirt, tasting the dry, bitter grime on his tongue. The exertion of crawling had forced him into a sweat, and now, taking a second to rest, he felt a hard chill move through the core of his body. He remembered a time when he was younger and he'd had the wind knocked out of him during a game, and he'd lain on the ice, gasping, feeling the deep cold seep through his jersey and socks, as if to remind him who was really the stronger. He kept his face buried down, thinking that this night was trying to teach him much the same lesson.
A part of him had already accepted that he would be shot and killed that night. Maybe in the next few minutes. Maybe he had an hour or two left. This gloomy sense of despair fought hard against a wild and almost uncontrollable urge to live. The fight between these two conflicting desires was clouded by all that had happened, and the more pure need that Hugh inwardly seized on that regardless of what happened to him, he would do nothing to compromise his friends' lives.
And he supposed not compromising them meant not compromising the escape that was being mounted that night.
A great quiet surrounded him, and he listened to his raspy breathing.
For a moment, silently, he spoke to his own knee, berating it: How could you do this to me? It wasn't that hard a cut. I've asked you to do much more difficult things, turns and spins, and drives on the ice, and you've never complained before, and certainly never betrayed me.
Why this bloody night? The knee did not answer back directly, but continued to throb, as if settling into a comfortable pain that it could deliver steadily. He wondered what he had done. Torn ligaments?
Dislocation? Then, still face down in the dirt, he shrugged, as if to say that it made no difference.
Slowly he lifted his eyes, carefully surveying the area around him. The guards in the towers, the Hundfuhrers leading their dogs around the perimeter, were nowhere to be seen, but, he told himself, that didn't mean they were not there. All it meant was that he could not see them.
Still, he was encouraged.
If he could not see them, then perhaps they could not see him.
Carefully, still hugging the earth, Hugh Renaday turned slightly, snaking himself forward again, but now angling back on a diagonal path toward Hut 101. He made a plan, which also reinvigorated him: crawl another fifty yards, then wait.
Wait at least an hour, maybe two. Wait for the last and deepest part of the night to arrive, and then make an attempt for the hut. That would give Tommy and Scott enough time to do whatever it was that they had figured out they had to do. And, he hoped, it would give the escapees enough time as well.
Hugh sighed sharply, as he pushed forward with slow, yet steady determination. It seemed to him that there were many needs being filled that night, and he was damned if he knew which was the most important. He knew only that he was crawling along a razor-thin edge himself. He had an odd, almost funny memory strike him right then. He recalled a science class in high school, where the teacher had boastfully told a disbelieving bunch of students that a slug could actually crawl across the straight edge of a razor without slicing itself in two. And the teacher had backed this up, producing a brown, slimy slug and the obligatory shiny razor, and the students had lined up and watched in astonishment as the snail did precisely as advertised. He thought that this night he had to be no different from that snail. At least, that was what he believed.
Thirty yards to his right, the barbed-wire barricade loomed up. He kept himself pressed down, told himself to measure progress in inches, maybe even centimeters. He told himself:
Let the night work for you.
At that moment, though, he heard a single, sharp bark, from just beyond the wire fence, followed by a clear, harsh, low growl. He froze, pushing himself down as far as he could into the embrace of cold dirt.
There was a metal jangle as a Hundfuhrer pulled back hard on his dog's chain. He heard the goon talk to his animal, calling it by name.
