Chapter Eighteen
By the time he reached the bottom of the shaft, Tommy thought he could no longer breathe. Every foot he dropped himself into the earth seemed to rob him of air, so that when finally his toes touched the hard, packed dirt twenty feet down, his breath was already coming in short, spasmodic bursts, wheezy and harsh, his chest feeling as if a giant rock were pressing down upon it.
There were two men working in a small space, almost an anteroom at the head of the actual tunnel, perhaps six feet in width and barely four feet high. Their faces were illuminated by a pair of candles mounted in emptied meat tins; the faint light seemed to struggle against the shadows that threatened to overcome the entire space. Both men wore rings of sweat around their foreheads; their cheeks were streaked with dirt and exhaustion. One man was dressed in a suit not that different from the one Fenelli wore, and he was seated behind a makeshift bellows, operating the pump furiously. The bellows made a small whooshing sound, as it pumped air up the tunnel; Tommy guessed this kriegie must be number twenty-seven. The other man wore only skivvies.
He was small, compact, and heavily muscled. It was his job to take each bucket of dirt that was passed back and climb it up the shaft for distribution.
The man in the suit spoke first. He didn't stop his pumping at the bellows, but astonishment marked each of his words.
"Hart! Jesus, buddy, what the hell are you doing here?"
Tommy peered through the flickering light and saw that the man doing the pumping was the fighter pilot from New York, the man who had helped him in the assembly yard.
"Answers," Tommy wheezed. He pointed up the tunnel.
"In there."
"You're going up the tunnel?" the New Yorker asked.
Tommy nodded.
"Need the truth." He choked out each word harshly.
"The truth is up there? About Trader Vic?"
Tommy nodded again.
The man continued to work, but looked surprised.
"You sure? I don't get it. The tunnel and Vic's death? Major Clark never said anything to anybody working this dig that Vic had something to do with this."
"All hidden," Tommy coughed out.
"All connected." It took an incredible effort for him to drag enough air past all his fear to find enough wind to speak.
"Got to go up there and get the truth."
"Well, I'll be damned," the pilot said, shaking his head back and forth. His face glistened with the effort from pumping the bellows.
"I'll say this for you, buddy. You may not find that whoever it is you're looking for is all that eager to talk. Especially with freedom only a coupla feet away."
"Got to go," Tommy repeated, "got no choice anymore."
Each word he spoke seemed to sear his chest like a burst of superheated air exploding from a fireball.
The New Yorker continued his hard work without hesitation.
He shrugged.
"All right," he said, "here's the deal. There are twenty-six guys spaced out down the length of the tunnel. A kriegie every ten feet or so. Each bucket gets passed forward to the front, filled up, then passed back. Each guy scoots forward like a crab, then backs up, sorta like some crazy turtle in reverse.
We're on a pretty tight schedule here, so you better keep moving and get whatever it is you're gonna do, done.
And you're gonna hafta squeeze by every guy in the tunnel.
There's a rope to help you pull yourself along. But for Christ's sake don't hit the goddamn ceiling! Try not to lift your head at all. We used wood from the Red Cross parcels to shore up the roof, but it's unstable as hell, and if you bang into it, it's likely to come down on your head. Maybe on everybody's heads. Try not to scrape the walls, either. They ain't much better."
Tommy took in everything the man said. He turned his eyes toward the tunnel shaft. It was narrow, terrifying. No more than two feet by three feet. Each kriegie waiting in the tunnel had a single fat candle creating little islands of light around them; those were the only sources of illumination along the entire length.
The New Yorker smiled.
"Hey, Tommy," he said, grinning through the exertion, "when I get home and make my first million and I need some damn sharp polished-shoes Ivy
League lawyer to watch out for my money and my butt, you're gonna be the guy I'm gonna call. You can count on it. Anyway, hope you find what you're looking for," he said.
Then he bent forward, peering up into the tunnel, and he half-whispered, half-shouted a sort of warning: "Man coming up.
Make way!"
"Hope you make it home okay," Tommy managed to say, his throat already parched with dust and fear.
"Gotta try," the New Yorker said.
"Better than spending another minute wasting away in this damn place."
Then he bent down and renewed his pumping with increased vigor, forcing blast after blast of air up the length of the tunnel.
Tommy ducked down, on his hands and knees. He hesitated for just an instant, finding the rope with his fingers and grasping hold of it, then he thrust himself forward, on his belly, crawling forward like some eager newborn, but with none of a child's sense of adventure.
Instead, all he could discern was a deep, cavernous terror echoing within him, and all he knew was that the answers he needed that night lay some seventy-five yards ahead, at the very end of what any reasonable person would take one single glance at and recognize was little more than a long, dark, and dangerously narrow grave.
Hugh Renaday was also crawling.
Moving slowly, with painstaking deliberateness, he'd managed to cover almost a hundred yards, so that he was now well into the center of the open exercise and assembly area, and he deemed it reasonable now to turn and try to maneuver back close enough to the front of Hut 101 where he could burst up and sprint for the doorway when the final shadows of the night aligned themselves conveniently. Of course, he realized, sprinting was going to be an experience. The pain in his knee was excruciating, a flower of agony dropping throbbing petals of hurt throughout his entire leg.
For a moment, the Canadian lowered his face into the dirt, tasting the dry, bitter grime on his tongue. The exertion of crawling had forced him into a sweat, and now, taking a second to rest, he felt a hard chill move through the core of his body. He remembered a time when he was younger and he'd had the wind knocked out of him during a game, and he'd lain on the ice, gasping, feeling the deep cold seep through his jersey and socks, as if to remind him who was really the stronger. He kept his face buried down, thinking that this night was trying to teach him much the same lesson.