'Four double-decker bunks, two on each side. I was closest to the door, so the only person I was worried about disturbing was the guy on top of me…'
'Bedford?'
'Directly across the room. Bottom bunk.'
'Did you see him?'
Scott shook his head.
'I didn't look,' he replied.
Tommy was about to stop the black flier, because this answer didn't make any sense to him, but he hesitated, then asked, instead, 'Did you light the candle at your bed?'
'Yes. I lit it, then shielded it with my hand. Like I said, I didn't want to wake the others. I left my boots and jacket…'
'Where exactly?'
'Boots at the end of the bunk. Jacket on the wall.'
'Did you see either of them?'
'No. I didn't look. And I had no reason to suspect someone might take them. I was meaning to do my business and get back into the rack as quickly as possible. The toilet's not far and I wanted to be real quiet. I went barefoot. Even though it was goddamn cold…'
Tommy nodded, still troubled, then he shook this off and said, 'All right, let's go. Show me exactly what you did that night-except this time, bring your boots and jacket. Move the same way, at the same speed.' He checked the dial of his watch, timing the black flier.
Without a word, Scott rose. Like Tommy, he seized his boots in his hand. Slightly bent at the waist, he stepped away from the bunk. He gestured toward where the other men would have been sleeping, pointed at the wall where his jacket now hung from a single nail. Still moving quietly, but being trailed by Tommy, Scott walked across the room in perhaps two long strides, and swung the door open. Tommy took note that unlike many of the doors in the hut, this one seemed to have had its hinges oiled. It made a single creaking sound that he did not think in and of itself was enough to awaken even the lightest sleeper.
And it only clicked once, as it closed behind them and they were in the corridor.
Scott gestured toward the single toilet. It was placed in a makeshift stall, hardly bigger than a wardrobe, only twenty feet from Scott's bunk room. Tommy held his candle up above his head to light their route. Their feet padded silently against the wooden floor.
Outside the toilet, Scott finally spoke.
'Inside. Used the toilet, then returned to the room. That's it.'
Tommy looked down at the green light of his watch face.
No more than three minutes had passed since Scott had stepped from his bunk. He turned and looked all the way back down the corridor. For a single instant, his stomach contracted and he swallowed hard. The darkness of his fear of enclosure scratched at his heart. But he fought off the clammy sensation and concentrated on the problem at hand. The only exit to the hut was at the far end, past all the remaining bunk rooms. He thought that to travel from the toilet to the outside, anyone would have to walk past close to one hundred sleeping men, behind a dozen closed doors. But there was no telling who might hear footsteps. Who might be awake. Who might be alert.
'And you saw no one?' he asked again.
Scott turned away, staring back into the darkness.
'No. I told you. No one.'
Tommy ignored the hesitation in the Tuskegee airman's voice and pointed forward.
'All right,' he said quietly.
'So much for what you did. Now for what Trader Vic might have done.'
Still with their boots in their hands, the two men quietly maneuvered down the hut's central corridor, using the weak candle light to illuminate their path. At the entrance door to Hut 101, Tommy paused, thinking. A searchlight swept past, throwing its light onto the steps for an instant as it traveled forward. Tommy looked back down the corridor, toward the bunk rooms. The searchlight was outside and to the left, which meant that it covered every room on that side of the building, which was the side that he and Lincoln Scott and Trader Vic had all lived on. He realized that it was conceivable that someone could exit from one of the windows on the right side of the hut; they would only catch a portion of the searchlight's path as it swept across the walls and roof. But it would have been impossible for anyone to move through the sleeping kriegies in the tight spaces of the bunk rooms on that side unless something had been prearranged. He was certain that the men who left in the night to tunnel, especially the ones who had died beneath the ground so recently, had been from that side of the hut. Anyone else escape committee types, forgers, spies, for whatever reason would need to alert the entire membership of the room of whatever window they intended to use. This, he thought, violated every principle of military secrecy. Even though the men could be trusted, it was a foolish chance to take. Also, it identified the men who were working late into the night, which was another security violation.
So, Tommy thought, measuring, assessing, adding factors together as swiftly as possible, feeling slightly like he did in the moment before some white-haired law school professor chalked an essay question on a blackboard, anyone needing to exit Hut 101 in the middle of the night, and needing to do it without attracting attention either from his fellow prisoners or the Germans, would probably risk going out the front door.
The searchlight swept past again, light quickly filtering through the cracks in the door and then, just as swiftly, fading back into darkness.
The Germans did not like to use the searchlights, especially on nights when there were British bombing raids on nearby installations. Even the most uneducated German soldier could guess that from the air the sight of probing searchlights would make the camp appear to be an ammunition dump or a manufacturing plant, and some hard-pressed Lancaster pilot, having fought off frightening raids by Luftwaffe night fighters, might make an error and drop his stick of bombs right on top of them.
So the searchlight use was erratic, which only made them more terrifying to anyone who wanted to maneuver from one hut to another at night. It was difficult to time their sweeps because they were so haphazard.
Tommy took a deep breath. Getting caught in a searchlight's beam probably meant death.
At a minimum, it would prompt whistles and alerts, and if one got his hands up fast enough, before a Hundfuhrer or one of the tower goons pulled his Schmeisser machine pistol into a firing position, probably only a fortnight in the cooler. And getting caught outside would also compromise the tunnel or the meeting or whatever purpose the kriegie had for being out. So, Tommy considered, there never was a routine motivation for exiting the hut after lights out.
He slowly released his pent-up wind, making a whistling sound between his teeth.
Nothing routine about this excursion, either, he thought.
Tommy zipped up his flight jacket, and bent down to tie on his shoes, gesturing for Scott to do the same.
Scott started to smile. The easygoing, devil-may-care grin of a warrior accustomed to danger.
'This is dicey, huh, Hart?' he whispered.
'Don't want to get caught.'
Tommy nodded.
'Getting caught isn't quite the problem.
Getting dead is. Don't really want to get shot,' he said. His throat had parched suddenly, the dryness reaching his tongue.
'Not now…'
'Not ever,' Scott said, still grinning. Tommy thought Scott probably felt closer to being a fighter pilot then than he had in any second since he'd first leapt free of his burning plane over occupied territory. As he knotted his boots, the black flier asked, 'So, where we heading first?'
'The Abort. And then we'll backtrack a bit.'
'What're we looking for, exactly?' Scott asked.
