“I don’t much fancy being under them when they get here, either.” Captain Lahrheim retreated toward the prisoner barracks.
He wasn’t a particularly clever man, which didn’t mean he was wrong here. Moss didn’t fancy staying out in the open once the storm broke, either. The rain would be bad enough. If you were unlucky, lightning would be worse.
The first raindrops started kicking up puffs of dust from the red dirt just as Moss ducked into his barracks. The inevitable nonstop card game paused for a moment as people made sure he was someone to be trusted. Then the players got back to the serious business at hand: “I’ll see that, and I’ll raise you five clams.”
More rain fell, drumming on the roof. That roof would start leaking any minute. Men who weren’t playing cards set buckets and pots where they’d do the most good. Lightning flashed. God’s artillery followed close on its heels.
“Well, this is fun,” somebody said. The crack got a laugh, but a laugh distinctly nervous around the edges.
Having grown up in Chicago and spent a lot of time in Ontario, Moss had seen his share of several different flavors of bad weather. What Georgia got, though, was different from anything he was used to. It was more… energetic was the first word that came to mind, and it fit pretty well.
Rain came down as if Noah were somewhere just over the next rise. Moss didn’t know about forty days and forty nights, but the next forty minutes marked as ferocious a cloudburst as he’d ever imagined. Lightning crackled again and again, a couple of times close enough to make all his hair stand on end. The thunder that followed sounded like a dress rehearsal for the end of the world.
“Liable to be tornadoes on the edge of a storm like this,” a POW observed.
“We’re safe, then. We’re not on the edge. We’re in the goddamn middle,” another prisoner said.
“Besides, who’d notice anything as small as a tornado in the middle of this?” a would-be wit added. He got a laugh, but all he did was prove he didn’t know the first thing about tornadoes, as several POWs from the Midwest loudly explained to him. Moss agreed, even if he didn’t fuss and fume about it. Wherever tornadoes went, they made themselves noticed.
Colonel Summers looked less and less happy with each minute the downpour went on. Moss had a pretty good notion why, too. He sidled up to the senior officer and murmured, “How well is the tunnel shored up?”
“We’ll find out, won’t we?” was all Monty Summers said. Moss nodded. If something went wrong, there was damn-all he or any other prisoner could do about it right this minute.
Before too long, he stopped worrying about the tunnel. He started worrying about whether they would have to be rescued by rowboat instead. That seemed a much more immediate problem. He also wondered whether the Confederates had any rowboats handy. Had they anticipated storms this big?
Looking out the windows helped very little. Except when lightning tore across the sky, it was almost night-dark. And what the lightning illuminated was mostly a bumper crop of raindrops.
But after something less than an hour, the storm eased. The thunderheads glided off to the east with ponderous dignity. The subtropical sun of Georgia summer came out again. The ground started to steam-not just the puddles and ponds the rain had left behind but the ground itself.
Colonel Summers strode to the north-facing window. The starch came out of his shoulders; he might have aged ten years in ten seconds. “There’s a hole in the ground not far from the deadline inside the fence,” he said, his tone that of a man in the room with a deathbed. And so he might have been, for that hole meant the passing of many men’s hopes.
No one had ever accused the Confederate guards of brilliance. If they’d had any brains at all, they would have been at the front doing something more useful for their country than this. But they didn’t have to be Sir Isaac Newton to figure out that holes in the ground, especially long, straight ones like this, didn’t happen by themselves.
One of the guards who’d squelched through the mud to the subsidence sighted along it as if down the barrel of a rifle. What he saw when he did was the barracks where Moss stood waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He didn’t have to wait long. The Confederates advanced on the building. One of them fell on his can in the slick red mud. Normally, the U.S. captives would have laughed and jeered at his clumsiness. No one made a peep now. The guards were unlikely to find much funny about an escape attempt, especially one they hadn’t noticed till the storm betrayed it.
“Y’all come out right now!” one of them shouted. “Y’all come out or else.”
The prisoners did come out; Moss, for one, didn’t think the guards were kidding about that or else. Crashing sounds from inside the barracks declared that the Confederates were taking the place apart, looking for where the tunnel started. Along with everybody else in green-gray, Moss stood glumly in the mud, waiting for them to find it.
And they did. He’d known they would. They were stupid, but not stupid enough to miss it. Their leader came out with his face even hotter than the weather. “You sons of bitches!” he screamed. “How dare you try and escape from this here prison? How dare you?”
“We have the right.” Moss spoke up, the lawyer in him touched by that peculiar brainless fury. “The Geneva Convention says so.”
That rocked the Confederate guard officer back on his heels. But he rallied, barking, “It also says I got the right to punish the bastards who try an’ break out. ’Fess up, y’all. Who worked on that there tunnel? Rest of you’ll have an easier time if we can punish the real criminals.”
Every single U.S. prisoner raised his hand at the same time. Most of them hadn’t had anything to do with the tunnel. Some, the new fish, hadn’t even known it was there. They raised their hands anyway, without hesitation. Moss was proud of them.
What the guard officer felt was something else again. “All right. All right,” he said heavily, and snorted like a boar hog. “Y’all reckon you’re so goddamn smart. Well, you’ll all catch it together, then, and see how you like that.” He stormed away. Moss hoped he would take a pratfall in the mud, but no such luck. The rain was on the Confederate side every which way today.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull was about to get on a train that would take him back from Virginia to Ohio (or perhaps, given the way things were going, only to western Pennsylvania) when a clerk bounced out of a command car with a canvas sack slung over his shoulder. “Hang on, Doc!” he called. “I got mail for youse guys.”
Youse guys was as far outside the bounds of ordinary English as the Confederate y’all. A lot of languages had separate forms for second-person singular and plural. English didn’t, but kept trying to invent them. The thought flashed through O’Doull’s mind and flew away in a split second, replaced by simple joy. “Give it here,” he told the clerk. “I thought it would be weeks catching up with us.”
Red Crosses adorned the tops of the cars and the sides of the locomotive. Locomotive and cars alike were painted white. With luck, that would keep the Confederates from dropping bombs on the train or machine-gunning it from the air. There had been a few horrible incidents, but only a few. There had also been a few south of the Mason-Dixon line. O’Doull wondered if Jake Featherston’s propaganda machine had manufactured those, but wouldn’t have been surprised if they proved real. War was full of things like that.
He stopped worrying about the war when he saw his wife’s handwriting on a letter with a stamp from the Republic of Quebec. Sorting through the pile, he found several of those, and one from his brother-in-law, Georges Galtier. Seeing that one made him smile in a different way. Among his wife’s relatives, Georges was the zany, the cuckoo, the odd man out-sometimes very odd indeed.