Then the Senior American Officer turned and followed the Germans down the corridor. For a moment. Tommy and Lincoln Scott remained in the hallway.
'Would you have fought them?' Tommy asked.
'Yes,' Scott replied brusquely.
'Of course.'
'And don't you think that's precisely what they wanted?'
Tommy continued.
'Yes, you're probably right about that, too,' Scott conceded.
'But what choice did I have?'
Tommy didn't answer this, because he didn't see any alternative.
What he said instead was: 'I think it would be a good idea if we stopped doing precisely what everyone who hates you expects you to do.'
Scott opened his mouth to answer, then hesitated, pausing over his words. Then he nodded.
'You make a salient point, Hart. I agree.'
Scott stood beside the door to the bunk room, and ushered Tommy inside.
'I appreciate your offer,' he said.
'But I can-' Tommy cut him off.
'I can put a bunk over against the wall, and Hugh should stay closest to the door. In case there are any others who might want to try something in the night. There aren't too many who would be willing to fight their way through him to get to you.'
Scott again started to speak, stopped, and then nodded.
'Thank you,' he said. Tommy smiled. He guessed that this was the first time he'd heard the black airman use those words with any significant degree of sincerity. He pointed at the wall where he intended to move his bunk.
'I'll just get my stuff,' he said, and then he paused.
A sudden, nasty fear slid through him.
Tommy's eyes raced around the room, searching the spare and sparse area.
'What is it?' Scott asked, suddenly alarmed by the look on Tommy's face.
'The board. The board with Vic's blood on it. That proves he was killed outside the Abort, then moved there. That I left here with you earlier…'
Tommy spun about, searching.
'Where the hell is it?'
Scott turned to the farthest corner.
'I set it right there,' he said slowly.
'It was there when I left to go to the Abort.'
But both men could see that the board had disappeared.
Chapter Ten
Immediately after the regular evening Appell, Tommy Hart and Lincoln Scott headed directly for Colonel MacNamara's quarters. The two men walked swiftly yet silently across the assembly yard and directly into Hut 114, not speaking to anyone else, not speaking between themselves, passing small groups of kriegies getting ready to prepare their dinners.
For the most part, the men were carefully assembling various items gleaned from Red Cross parcels, combining foodstuffs-tinned beef or sausage, dried vegetables and fruits, and the ever-present processed milk called Klim that was the basis for virtually every sauce they could concoct. That afternoon, the Germans had provided some kriegsbrot and a meager issue of hard turnips and musty potatoes.
An enterprising kriegie cook could create an incredible range of meals from the materials in a Red Cross parcel, taking chances with ingredients (processed pork roll fried with strawberry jam garnished with tinned fruits). The more successful chefs often posted new recipes on the Stalag Luft Thirteen bulletin boards, and these recipes were attempted and revamped in dozens of different ways throughout the camp. The airmen replaced bulk with invention, and every new kriegie learned to both cook and eat slowly, trying to make each small, inadequate bite both evoke some memory of some fine meal eaten under far better circumstances, and at the same time last far longer than it deserved. No one wolfed down their food in Stalag Luft Thirteen.
As they passed down the central corridor of the hut, Tommy snuck a sideways glance over at Scott. As always, Scott was marching erect, with a tautness to his face that spoke of both anger and aggressiveness. Tommy thought there was some sort of enigmatic toughness to Scott that he did not even begin to understand, which sprang from some well within the man that Tommy doubted he would ever see.
In the same instant, he wondered what the black flier thought when he looked over at him. Scott had the rare capacity to make whoever was walking at his side appear smaller.
Tommy thought this quality came from what one had seen of life, and how it had been absorbed deep within, and Lincoln Scott had seen much. As for himself, he did not think Vermont and Harvard equaled the journey that Lincoln Scott had traveled, even though both men had arrived in the same place at the same time. There was one thing Tommy knew for sure: Scott still did not look like a prisoner of war. Perhaps he had lost weight this was inevitable given the stark and bare diet but there was no look of sullen resignation, nor one of cowed patience, which is its own type of defeat, in his quick dark eyes.
Tommy wondered about himself. Did Stalag Luft Thirteen melt the fighter out of him as surely as it did pounds? Had he lost desire?
Assertiveness? Pugnacity? The qualities that made a young man look forward to life. He sometimes dogged himself with questions, wondering whether he would be able to invoke these traits when he needed them most.
Especially now, he thought, when Phillip Pryce is gone, and there is only his memory to remind me when to call on them. Tommy bit down on his lip, wrestling with emotions. It was as hard to imagine Phillip dead as it was to believe him still alive. It was as if the Englishman had been plucked from Tommy's existence with the finality of death but none of the reality. He'd waved, and then he'd vanished. No explosion.
No fire. No shrieks for help. No blood. The portrait in his mind's eye of the wry, unafraid smile that Phillip wore in that last moment was like a hard blow to his stomach.
Tommy walked quickly and steadily at Lincoln Scott's side, but inwardly he felt alone.
'You gonna do the talking. Hart? Or should I?'
Scott's barely constrained ferocity ripped Tommy from his thoughts. He answered instantly.
'I'll start off, but make sure MacNamara knows your feelings. You understand what I'm saying?'
Scott nodded.
'Yeah,' he said, lowering his voice.
'Be a gentleman, a very pissed-off gentleman, but don't say anything that insults the bastard, because he's the judge and he might choose tomorrow's proceedings as get-even time.'
'That's close enough,' Tommy said. He reached out and rapped sharply three times on the Senior American Officer's door. In the second they paused, waiting, Scott muttered, 'I'll be a gentleman. Hart. But you know, I'm getting tired of being reasonable all the time. I sometimes think I'm gonna be reasonable right up to the moment I hear them give the command to fire.'
'I'm not sure you have been,' Tommy replied weakly, and Scott snorted, amused.
They heard a voice call for them to enter, and Scott swung open the door. Lewis MacNamara was seated in a distant corner of the room, his stockinged feet up on his bunk, a pair of scratched and bent
