York City, talking in a rapid-fire monologue, excited about seeing the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the very first time.
'Hey, Tommy,' he'd called out over the intercom, 'where the hell's that big of' bridge?' And Tommy had replied with a small laugh, 'Captain, they've got lots of bridges here in New York and they're all big. But the George Washington? Just take a look to the north, captain.
About ten miles right up the river.' There had been a momentary pause, while the captain looked, and then he'd abruptly put the Mitchell into a short dive.
'Come on, boys,' he said, 'let's have some fun!'
The formation had followed the Lovely Lydia down to the deck, and the next thing Tommy knew, they were flying right up the Hudson, the easygoing whitecaps of spring water glistening beneath their wings. The captain steered the entire group under the bridge, their engines echoing and roaring as they passed beneath some astonished motorists, who'd stopped in mid-span as the flight passed below them, close enough so that Tommy could see the wide eyes of one small boy who waved frantically and joyously at the bombers. The intercom was filled with the whoops and hollers of excited crewmen. The radio crackled with the shouts from the pilots of the other planes in the formation.
Everyone knew what they'd done was dangerous, illegal, and foolhardy, and they were likely to get their butts chewed out at the next checkpoint, but they were all young men who thought it still a delightfully fine and outrageous idea on a beautiful, breezy afternoon.
The only thing that might have made the dare deviltry better would have been some young women to admire it. Of course. Tommy thought, this was months before any of them knew anything about the lonely and ugly deaths that awaited so many of them.
He looked down the empty corridor of Hut 101 in Stalag Luft Thirteen and remembered that moment and wished he could feel that sort of excitement once again. Risk and joy, instead of risk and fear. He thought that was what the reality of war stole from him. The innocent chanciness of youth.
Tommy sighed deeply, shook the memory from his head, and walked down the corridor. His boots echoed in the empty space. He flung open the door, and stepped down into the dirt of the camp ground, the sunlight blinding him for an instant.
As he raised his hand to shield his eyes from the glare, he saw two men standing just a few feet apart from each other, both watching him. One was Captain Walker Townsend, who had abandoned his baseball glove. The other was Hauptmann Heinrich Visser. The two men had obviously been speaking together.
But their conversation stopped when he hovered near.
Chapter Nine
By midday. Tommy had finished interviewing the remaining witnesses arrayed against Lincoln Scott and all had told him obvious bits and pieces of the same story-tales of anger and enmity between two men that transcended the prisoner-of-war camp, and spoke more about the situation back home in the States.
All the kriegies on Captain Townsend's witness list had seen the hatred displayed by the two men. One man told how he'd watched Trader Vic pick up Scott's Bible and taunt him, picking out random passages and applying racist interpretations to the Good Book's words, insults that seemed to make the black flier seethe with anger. Another declared he'd seen Scott tearing in half the scrap cloth that later became the handles to both the pan and the knife. A third described how the two men had fought when Bedford accused Scott of the theft, and how quick the Tuskegee airman had been with his fierce right cross, catching Vic in the upper lip. If Scott had hit him in the jaw, the kriegie said, Bedford would have dropped in his spot.
As he wandered through the camp, alone with his thoughts despite the presence of five thousand other American airmen, Tommy added each small piece of testimony from each witness together, and recognized that the confidence displayed by Captain Townsend and Major Clark was well founded.
Portraying Scott as a killer was not going to be an overly difficult task. Indeed, by failing to conform, by remaining aloof and independent, the black flier had consistently behaved in a manner that was likely to make most of the kriegies believe him capable of this different type of killing. It was the simplest leap of imagination: from loner to murderer.
Tommy kicked at the dirt and thought: If Scott had made friends, if he'd been outgoing, communicative then the vast majority of the kriegies would have ignored the color of his skin. Tommy was sure of this. But, by setting himself alone and apart from his first minute at
Stalag Luft Thirteen no matter how justified he might have been in taking that route Scott had created the makings of his own tragedy. In a world where everyone was struggling with the same fears, illness and death and loneliness, and the same hungers, food and freedom, he had behaved differently, and that behavior, as much as distrust over the color of his skin, was the cause of the hatred arrayed against him.
Tommy was persuaded that the murder charge was buttressed by that antagonism, which, from the prosecution's viewpoint, was probably ninety percent of their case. The bloodstains, being absent from the bunk room on the night of the murder, the discovery of the knife all these things when taken together painted a compelling portrait. It was only upon examining each separately that the supposition unraveled somewhat.
Somewhat, he thought. Not completely.
A troubling doubt crept into his empty stomach and he bit down on his lower lip, pensive.
Tommy stopped, taking a moment to look up into the sky above, the typical penitent's search for guidance from the heavens. The normal sounds of the camp surrounded him, but they faded away, as he considered the situation. He thought to himself at that moment that for much of his young life, he'd waited for events to happen to him. He blindly believed even if incorrectly that he'd been a passive participant in so much. His home. His school. His service. That he'd managed to stay alive to this point was more by the accidents of good fortune than by anything he'd deliberately seized for himself.
He understood that this waiting for life to happen to him might not work much longer. Certainly, it wasn't going to work for Lincoln Scott.
As he walked, he shook his head, sighing deeply. He felt no closer to understanding why Trader Vic was killed than he had on the morning of the murder. And, absent the ability to get up before the tribunal and offer an alternative, he realized Scott's chances were slight.
There was a spot of sunshine striking against the exterior wall of Hut 105, making it glisten and seem almost new, and Tommy walked over to it. He slumped against the hut and slowly sank to the hard ground, where he stayed, seated, turning his face toward the warmth. For a moment the sun burned his eyes, and he raised a hand to his forehead.
From where he was sitting, he could see through to the wire, and beyond to the woods. There was sound coming from the distance, and he bent toward it, straining to determine what it was. After a moment, he recognized the occasional noisy thud and crash of a tree being felled, and he guessed that just beyond the line of dark trees that marked the start of the forest was where the Russian slave-prisoners were clearing space. It wouldn't be long, he guessed, before the sounds of hammers and saws would be heard as construction began on another camp to hold more Allied airmen. This was what Fritz Number One had told him was under way, and he had no doubt that the ever-present sight of B-17 contrails high in the sky during the day and the deep nighttime rumblings of British raids on nearby installations and rail lines meant that the Germans were acquiring new Allied crews with depressing frequency.
For a long moment he listened to the faded sounds coming from the forest and he supposed that it was backbreaking work being performed by men close to starvation, sick, and near death. He shuddered briefly, imagining what life was like for the Russian prisoners. Unlike the Allied fliers, they had no building compound. Instead, they camped in all weather under makeshift lean-tos and leaky tarpaulins stretched as tents, behind temporary barbed-wire rolls. No toilets. No kitchens.
