throat and he wasn't certain that he could speak.
Scott paused, bending toward Tommy, cupping his hand around his ear and whispering.
'I'm pretty damn sure someone's back there following us. If it's a Kraut, we can't show him the passageway beneath the hut. They figure out that kriegies are using the crawl space and they'll dump concrete in there tomorrow. Can't do that. We're gonna have to try to make it around the front. Dodge the searchlight.'
Tommy nodded, an odd wave of relief coursing through him as he recognized he wouldn't have to traverse the passageway again. And with that relief came the understanding that Scott's observation was correct. Tommy thought that at least Scott was still thinking like a soldier. But at that moment, he didn't know what frightened him more: being forced to crawl beneath Hut 102 or trying to elude the searchlight or waiting for whoever was following them through the darkness to emerge. They all seemed equally evil.
'But maybe it's one of our guys,' Scott whispered.
'And maybe that's worse…' He let his words trail off into the slippery cool air.
With a single glance backward into the void behind them, Scott crept forward to the front edge of Hut 102. Tommy followed on his heels, tossing his own gaze backward once or twice, imagining forms darting through the black night behind them. At the front of the hut, Scott bent down and peered around the edge.
Almost immediately, the black flier pivoted toward Tommy.
'The light's pointing away!' he said, his voice still barely above a whisper but with the demands of a shout.
'We go, now!'
Without hesitating, Scott burst around the corner, dodging the stairs to Hut 102, arms pumping, flat out sprinting for the door to Hut 101, like a halfback who spots a hole in the line.
Tommy had launched himself directly behind Scott, moving rapidly, although not quite able to keep pace with the black flier. He saw the searchlight's beam cutting through the night away from them, blessing them with the same darkness that had seemed a moment earlier to be filled with terrors. Then he saw Scott take the steps up to their barracks in a single leap, grabbing at the door handle and jerking the door open.
As the searchlight abruptly changed direction, and began to race across the dirt ground and wooden huts toward him, Tommy pushed himself forward, flying the last few feet through the air a step ahead of the light, tumbling through the open door. Scott dragged the door closed as he fell to the floor inside the hut, next to Tommy. There was an instant halo of light that passed over the exterior of Hut 101, then proceeded on, oblivious to their presence inside the door.
Both men were quiet, their breath coming in rapid, spasmodic bursts.
After close to a minute, Scott lifted himself up on one elbow. At the same time, Tommy felt around for the candle he'd left behind, then found a match in his shirt pocket. The match flickered as he struck it against the wall and the candle threw weak light on the black airman's grin.
'Any more adventures planned for this evening. Hart?'
Tommy shook his head.
'Enough for tonight.'
Scott nodded, still grinning.
'Well, then, I'll see you in the morning, counselor.'
He laughed. His teeth flashed as they reflected the candlelight.
'I wonder who it was that was out there with us? A Kraut?
Or maybe someone else?' Scott snorted.
'Kinda makes one wonder, don't it?' Then he shrugged, rose to his feet so that he loomed up over Tommy and, slipping out of his flight boots, padded off down the corridor without speaking another word.
Tommy reached down to pull his own boots off, wondering the same thing.
Friend or foe? And which was which? As he tried to unlace the shoes, he discovered his hands were still quivering, and he had to take a minute to get them under control.
It was a fine morning, warm, filled with springtime promises, with only a few billowy white clouds scudding across the distant horizon like sailboats on a faraway sea-the sort of morning that made the war seem distant and illusory. It seemed to affect the Germans, as well; they completed the morning count rapidly, dismissing the men with more than the usual quick efficiency. The kriegies dispersed throughout the camp lazily, some men gathering into knots and just idly standing about smoking in the assembly yard discussing the latest war rumors, gossiping, and telling the same jokes they had already told day in and day out for months and sometimes years. Others picked up and formed the ubiquitous baseball game. A number of men stripped off their shirts and moved chairs out into the sunshine to bathe in the warmth, and others started walking the wire, like strolling through a park, although the sun glistened off the barbed wire to remind them where they were.
As he expected. Tommy Hart saw Lincoln Scott quick-marching from the assembly ground and entering Hut 101 alone, looking neither to right nor left, to return to his room, his Bible, and his solitude. Then Tommy started to retrace their steps from the midnight before.
He tried not to attract any attention to himself, though he realized, ruefully, that by behaving in such an obviously nonchalant manner he was undoubtedly more noticeable rather than less. But there was nothing he could do about this. He moved slowly, almost as if absentmindedly. He ignored the crawl space under the fourth window of Hut 102, fighting off the urge to inspect it during the daytime. He had a lingering question or two about that passageway, but he had not fully formulated the questions in his mind. Only that, like so many things, something struck him as oddly out of place. There was some connection, some linkage that he didn't fully comprehend, he thought.
In addition, he did not want anyone to know that he and Scott had located this route beneath the huts.
So he made his way slowly around the front of Hut 102, scuffling his feet in the dirt, occasionally pausing to lean up against the building and smoke, turning his head toward the sunshine. In the daytime, the distance seemed benign. He swallowed hard against a chill that passed through him as he remembered the race against the searchlight from the previous night.
It took a few lazy minutes before he turned and started to travel quickly down the alleyway formed by the juncture of the two barracks.
In the daytime, the V caused by the tree stump was even more pronounced, and he was surprised that he'd never noticed it before.
Tommy paused before approaching the spot at the end of the two huts. He turned around sharply, trying to see if he was being watched, but it was impossible to tell: There was a kriegie on a stoop, darning socks, the needle reflecting the sunlight as he pulled it through the wool; another was leaning in a spot of sunshine, reading a tattered paperback book with seeming intensity. Two men near the front of Hut 103 were idly tossing a softball back and forth, and three other men a few feet distant were engaged in some debate that seemed to require much gesturing and laughter. Other men wandered past, some moving slowly, others rapidly, as if they had some pressing engagement; it was impossible to tell if any one of them was inspecting him. Leaning back against the wall of the hut, he lit another cigarette, trying to blend in with the camp routine as unobtrusively as possible. He smoked slowly, his eyes darting about, surveying the other men, and when he finished, he flicked the butt away. Then he abruptly turned and headed to the juncture of the two huts.
The small garden that he had just been able to make out in the dark seemed desultory and almost abandoned. There were some potatoes and some greens struggling to take root.
This was unusual: Most prisoner-of-war gardens were tended with extraordinary care and single-minded dedication; the men who tilled them were devoted to their tiny patches of dirt, not merely for the food they created, which helped supplement the meager rations culled from Red Cross parcels, but because of the great morsels of time they occupied.
This garden was different. It had a shadowy, neglected air to it. The earth was turned, but clumps of dirt hadn't been broken up. Some of the plants needed trimming. Tommy bent down, kneeling, and felt the ground. It was damp and moist, which was what he would have expected, given the lack of sunshine that filtered into the spot. There was a slight musty and rotten smell to the ground.
