'Prinz! Was ist das? Bei Fuss! Heel!
'The dog's growl had changed into a constant teeth-bared guttural sound, as it struggled to pull ahead.
Hugh shuddered, barely with enough time to be afraid.
Each Hundfuhrer carried a small, battery-driven flashlight.
The Canadian heard a click, and then saw a weak cone of light sweep back and forth a few feet away. He dug himself even deeper, still frozen in position. The dog barked again, and Hugh saw the edge of the torch's beam trickle across the back of his outstretched hands. He did not dare move them.
Then he heard a voice cry out in the darkness: 'Halt!
Halt!'
The dog began to bark over and over, frantically, its voice shattering the night as it strained to get forward. He heard the Hundfuhrer chamber a round in his rifle, and, in the same second, a searchlight from the closest tower switched on with an electric thud. It creased the darkness, blistering him with sudden brightness.
He struggled quickly to his feet, his leg pulsating in objection, immediately lifting his hands far above his head. Hugh cried out desperately, 'Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!' as he stood alone in the glare of exposure. He took a deep breath, and whispered to himself, 'Don't shoot…' Then he closed his eyes, and thought of home and how, in the early days of summer, dawn always seemed to sweep across the Canadian plains with a purple-red clear intensity, as if overwhelmed, excited, and undeniably joyous at the idea of another day.
For a single microsecond he felt a complete and ineffable sadness that he would never be awake to see those moments again. Then, crowded into this final thought, he managed to wish Tommy and Lincoln good luck.
Hugh squeezed his eyes tight against the last second about to arrive for him and heard his own voice, strangely distant and oddly unafraid, try one more time: 'Nicht schiessen! ' he shouted. He wished, in that moment, that he could have found a braver, more glorious, and less lonely place to die. Then he quieted, hands raised high in the air, and simply waited with surprising patience to be murdered.
In the undiluted terror that had overtaken him, twenty feet beneath the surface. Tommy could no longer tell whether it was stifling hot or bone-chilling cold. He shivered with every inch forward, and salty sweat clogged his eyes. Every foot he traveled seemed to take the last of his ebbing strength, rob the final breath he could pry, wheezing, from the air of the tunnel that threatened to entomb him. More than once he'd heard an ominous creak of flimsy wood shoring up the walls and ceiling, and more than once dusty rivulets of dirt had streamed down onto his head and neck.
The darkness that surrounded him was marred only by the candles held by each man he worked his way past. The kriegies in the tunnel were astonished at his presence, but still they moved aside as best they could, pushing themselves dangerously against the wall of the tunnel, giving him precious inches of empty space to squeeze past. Every man he met held their breath as he scraped by, knowing that even taking a single extra breath might bring the roof down on all of them.
There were a few curses, but no objections. The entire tunnel was filled with fear, apprehension, and danger, and to the men waiting in the darkness. Tommy's steady trip to the front was merely another awful anxiety on what they dreamed would be the road to freedom.
He recognized several of the men-two from his own hut, who grunted an acknowledgment as he crept past, and a third who'd once borrowed one of his law texts, desperate for anything to read to break the monotony of a snowy winter week.
There was a man with whom he'd once had a funny conversation in the yard. sharing cigarettes and ersatz coffee, a wiry, grinning fellow from Princeton who had insulted Harvard most wildly and hilariously, but who had readily agreed that any Yale man was probably not only a shirker and a coward but likely to be fighting for the Germans or the Japanese, anyway. The Princeton man had pushed back against the wall, and gasped when some dirt from the roof streamed onto both their heads.
Then he'd urged Tommy on with a whispered, 'Get what you need. Tommy.'
This alone had encouraged Tommy to travel another half-dozen feet forward, stopping only to seize the dirt-filled bucket from the man ahead, and pass it back to Princeton, behind him.
The muscles in his arms and legs screamed pain and fatigue at him. His neck and back felt as if they were being hammered by the red-hot tongs of a blacksmith. For an instant, he lowered his head, listening to the yawing sound of the wooden supports, and thought that nothing in the world was more exhausting than fear. No race. No fight. No battle.
Fear always ran faster, hit harder, and fought longer.
He dragged himself forward, struggling past each of the designated escapees. He was no longer able to tell whether he 'd been crawling for minutes or hours. He thought he would never get out of the tunnel, and then imagined that it was like some particularly terrifying dream from which he was destined never to awaken.
He pushed on, gasping for air.
Tommy had counted the men in the tunnel, and knew that he was squeezing past Number Three, a bankerly type wearing wire-rim glasses streaked with moisture, whom Tommy presumed was the chief camp document forger.
The man twisted aside, grunting, wordless, as Tommy maneuvered past him.
For the first time. Tommy could hear the sounds of digging coming from up ahead. He guessed there were two men, working in a small space not unlike the anteroom where he'd found the pilot from New York. The difference would be that they would have no abundance of crate boards to shore things up. Instead, they would be scraping the dirt from above their heads, packing it in the empty buckets and passing it back.
There would be no need for an elaborate, concealed exit, the way the entrance was so cleverly hidden back in the privy in Hut 107. The exit would be the smallest possible hole a kriegie could worm through.
Tommy thrust himself toward the sound of the digging.
There must have been two candles in that space, because he could just make out a nickering, indistinct shape. He crept forward, still without a concrete plan beyond confrontation, thinking hard to himself that what he needed to know was just at the edge of his reach.
He knew only that he wanted to reach the end. The end of the tunnel.
The end of the case. The end of everything that had happened. He could feel panic surging through him, mingling freely with confusion and desire. Driven by the difficult twins of fear and fury, he pushed himself the final few feet, almost popping into the anteroom to the escape's exit.
Above him, the tunnel rose sharply toward the surface.
A makeshift ladder built from scraps of wood was thrust against the side of the shaft. Near the top of the ladder, one man hacked at the remaining clods of dirt. Midway down, a second man caught the earth as it fell from beneath the pickax, collecting it in the ubiquitous bucket. Both men were nearly naked, their bodies glistening in the candlelight with sweat and streaks of dirt that made them seem prehistoric, terrifying. Thrust to the side of the anteroom were two small valises and a pile of clothes they would change into as soon as they burst through to the air. Their escape kit.
From above him, the two men hesitated, looking down in surprise.
Tommy could not make out the face of Number One, the man with the pickax. But his eyes met Number Two.
'Hart!' the man whispered sharply.
Tommy struggled halfway to his feet in the tight, narrow space, ending on his knees like some supplicant in a church looking up at the figure on the Cross. He peered through the nickering light, and after a single, long silent moment, recognized Number Two.
'You killed him, didn't you. Murphy?'
Tommy said harshly.
'He was your friend and your roommate and you killed him, didn't you?'
At first, the lieutenant from Springfield didn't reply. His face wore an eerie look of
