"Goddamn it. Hart!" the man at the door hissed.
"You're not on the list! What are you doing here?"
"You could call this a truth-seeking mission," Tommy replied briskly.
He said no more, but stepped over the feet of the last man waiting, and started down the corridor. Lincoln Scott picked his own way, directly behind Tommy. The weak candlelight threw odd, elongated shadows against the walls. As they passed, the kriegies remained silent, saying nothing, but watching the two men as they stepped forward. It was as if Tommy and Lincoln were penetrating the secret midnight ritual of some unusual order of monks.
Ahead of them they could see a small cone of light coming from the single-toilet privy at the far end of the hut. A kriegie emerged, holding a makeshift bucket filled with dirt, which he passed to one of the uniformed men standing nearby. The bucket was handed on, and finally disappeared into one of the bunk rooms, like an old-fashioned fire brigade passing water to the base of some flames. Tommy peered into the room as he stepped past, and saw that the bucket was being lifted up into a hole in the ceiling, where another pair of hands grabbed for it. He knew that above, in the crawl space below the ceiling, the dirt was spread about, and then the empty bucket passed down, making its way through pairs of eager hands, back toward the privy.
Tommy stepped up to the door. The men's faces seemed streaked with anxiety, marked by the tension of the night and the flickering light from the candles, as another bucket filled with dirt was lifted from a hole in the floor of the hut's sole bathroom.
The tunnel went down beneath the toilet. Kriegie engineers had managed to lift the entire commode and move it several feet to the side, making an opening perhaps four feet square.
The waste pipe descended in the midst of the opening, but had been blocked off at the top. The men in Hut 107 had clearly disabled the toilet in order to dig the tunnel. Tommy was struck with a momentary admiration for the scheme.
Then he heard a sharp, angry voice coming from his side.
"Hart! You son of a bitch! What the hell are you doing here?"
Tommy turned and faced Major Clark.
"Well, major," he replied coldly, "I'm looking for some explanations."
"I'm going to see you brought up on charges, lieutenant!"
Clark blustered, still keeping his voice low, but unable to conceal his anger.
"Now, get the hell back into that corridor and wait there until we're finished here! That's an order!"
Tommy shook his head.
"Not tonight it isn't, major. Not yet."
Clark stepped across the small space, thrusting his face into Tommy's.
"I'll have you…" he started, only to be interrupted by Lincoln
Scott, who pushed his broad shoulders forward, and jabbed a finger in the diminutive major's chest, stopping him in his tracks.
"You'll have us what, major? Shot?"
"Yes! You're interfering with a military operation! Disobeying an order in combat! That's a capital offense."
"Well," Scott said, with an angry smile on his lips, "I seem to be accumulating those sorts of charges with some frequency."
To the side, they heard a muffled laugh from several of the other men, a burst probably caused as much by the tension of the night as by what
Scott had said.
"We're not going anywhere until we have the truth!"
Tommy said, pushing his own face down at the major's.
Clark's face twisted, contorted with rage. He turned to several kriegies standing nearby, just beyond the tunnel entrance.
"Seize these men!" Clark hissed.
The kriegies seemed to hesitate, and in that taut second, a different voice rose, filled with a surprising humor, and accompanied by a truculent laugh.
"Hell, major, you can't do that! And we all know it. Because those two guys are just as important as anyone else here tonight. Only difference is, they didn't know it. So I guess they ain't as stupid as you thought, huh, major?"
Tommy looked down and saw that the man who had spoken was hunched over by the side of the tunnel. He was wearing a dark blue suit, and looking like a somewhat bedraggled businessman. But his grin was unmistakable Cleveland.
"Hey, Hart," Lieutenant Nicholas Fenelli said lightly.
"I really didn't think I'd see you again until we made it home to the
States. So, what do you think of the new threads? Pretty sharp, huh?
Think the girls back home will be lining up for me?"
Fenelli, still smiling, gestured to his suit jacket.
Major Clark turned angrily to the camp medic.
"Lieutenant Fenelli, you're not a part of this!"
Fenelli shook his head.
"That's where you're wrong, major. And every flier here knows it.
We're all a part of the same thing."
Just then another bucket of dirt rose from the tunnel entrance, seemingly pinning Major Clark between the need to distribute the dirt and to deal with Tommy Hart and Lincoln Scott, Clark glared at the two lieutenants, and down at Fenelli, who just grinned insouciantly back at him. He pointed at the bucket brigade to move the dirt along, which it did, swinging past Tommy and Lincoln. Then Clark bent down and whispered to the men in the tunneclass="underline" "How much farther?"
It took almost a minute of silence for the question to be relayed up the tunnel and another minute for the answer to come boomeranging back.
"Six feet," a disembodied voice said, rising from the hole in the floor.
"Just like digging a grave."
"Keep at it," the major said, frowning.
"Stick to the schedule!
"Then he turned back to Tommy and Lincoln.
"You two are not welcome here," he said coldly and calmly, apparently having regained his composure in the time it took for the message to be sent up the tunnel and returned.
"Where's Colonel MacNamara?" Tommy asked.
"Where do you think?" Clark asked. Then he answered his own question sourly.
"In his bunk room, deliberating with the other two members of the tribunal."
Tommy paused, then asked, "And he's writing a speech, too, isn't he?
Something that will keep that morning Appell delayed even further, right?"
Clark grimaced and didn't reply. But Fenelli did.
"I knew you were smart enough to figure that out, Hart," he said with his small laugh.
"I told the major that, when he first approached me about making some small alterations in my testimony. But he didn't think you could."
"Shut up, Fenelli," Clark said.