A part of him had already accepted that he would be shot and killed that night. Maybe in the next few minutes. Maybe he had an hour or two left. This gloomy sense of despair fought hard against a wild and almost uncontrollable urge to live. The fight between these two conflicting desires was clouded by all that had happened, and the more pure need that Hugh inwardly seized on that regardless of what happened to him, he would do nothing to compromise his friends' lives.
And he supposed not compromising them meant not compromising the escape that was being mounted that night.
A great quiet surrounded him, and he listened to his raspy breathing.
For a moment, silently, he spoke to his own knee, berating it: How could you do this to me? It wasn't that hard a cut. I've asked you to do much more difficult things, turns and spins, and drives on the ice, and you've never complained before, and certainly never betrayed me.
Why this bloody night? The knee did not answer back directly, but continued to throb, as if settling into a comfortable pain that it could deliver steadily. He wondered what he had done. Torn ligaments?
Dislocation? Then, still face down in the dirt, he shrugged, as if to say that it made no difference.
Slowly he lifted his eyes, carefully surveying the area around him. The guards in the towers, the Hundfuhrers leading their dogs around the perimeter, were nowhere to be seen, but, he told himself, that didn't mean they were not there. All it meant was that he could not see them.
Still, he was encouraged.
If he could not see them, then perhaps they could not see him.
Carefully, still hugging the earth, Hugh Renaday turned slightly, snaking himself forward again, but now angling back on a diagonal path toward Hut 101. He made a plan, which also reinvigorated him: crawl another fifty yards, then wait.
Wait at least an hour, maybe two. Wait for the last and deepest part of the night to arrive, and then make an attempt for the hut. That would give Tommy and Scott enough time to do whatever it was that they had figured out they had to do. And, he hoped, it would give the escapees enough time as well.
Hugh sighed sharply, as he pushed forward with slow, yet steady determination. It seemed to him that there were many needs being filled that night, and he was damned if he knew which was the most important. He knew only that he was crawling along a razor-thin edge himself. He had an odd, almost funny memory strike him right then. He recalled a science class in high school, where the teacher had boastfully told a disbelieving bunch of students that a slug could actually crawl across the straight edge of a razor without slicing itself in two. And the teacher had backed this up, producing a brown, slimy slug and the obligatory shiny razor, and the students had lined up and watched in astonishment as the snail did precisely as advertised. He thought that this night he had to be no different from that snail. At least, that was what he believed.
Thirty yards to his right, the barbed-wire barricade loomed up. He kept himself pressed down, told himself to measure progress in inches, maybe even centimeters. He told himself:
Let the night work for you.
At that moment, though, he heard a single, sharp bark, from just beyond the wire fence, followed by a clear, harsh, low growl. He froze, pushing himself down as far as he could into the embrace of cold dirt.
There was a metal jangle as a Hundfuhrer pulled back hard on his dog's chain. He heard the goon talk to his animal, calling it by name.
"Prinz! Was ist das? Bei Fuss! Heel!
"The dog's growl had changed into a constant teeth-bared guttural sound, as it struggled to pull ahead.
Hugh shuddered, barely with enough time to be afraid.
Each Hundfuhrer carried a small, battery-driven flashlight.
The Canadian heard a click, and then saw a weak cone of light sweep back and forth a few feet away. He dug himself even deeper, still frozen in position. The dog barked again, and Hugh saw the edge of the torch's beam trickle across the back of his outstretched hands. He did not dare move them.
Then he heard a voice cry out in the darkness: "Halt!
Halt!"
The dog began to bark over and over, frantically, its voice shattering the night as it strained to get forward. He heard the Hundfuhrer chamber a round in his rifle, and, in the same second, a searchlight from the closest tower switched on with an electric thud. It creased the darkness, blistering him with sudden brightness.
He struggled quickly to his feet, his leg pulsating in objection, immediately lifting his hands far above his head. Hugh cried out desperately, "Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!" as he stood alone in the glare of exposure. He took a deep breath, and whispered to himself, "Don't shoot…" Then he closed his eyes, and thought of home and how, in the early days of summer, dawn always seemed to sweep across the Canadian plains with a purple-red clear intensity, as if overwhelmed, excited, and undeniably joyous at the idea of another day.
For a single microsecond he felt a complete and ineffable sadness that he would never be awake to see those moments again. Then, crowded into this final thought, he managed to wish Tommy and Lincoln good luck.
Hugh squeezed his eyes tight against the last second about to arrive for him and heard his own voice, strangely distant and oddly unafraid, try one more time: "Nicht schiessen! " he shouted. He wished, in that moment, that he could have found a braver, more glorious, and less lonely place to die. Then he quieted, hands raised high in the air, and simply waited with surprising patience to be murdered.
In the undiluted terror that had overtaken him, twenty feet beneath the surface. Tommy could no longer tell whether it was stifling hot or bone-chilling cold. He shivered with every inch forward, and salty sweat clogged his eyes. Every foot he traveled seemed to take the last of his ebbing strength, rob the final breath he could pry, wheezing, from the air of the tunnel that threatened to entomb him. More than once he'd heard an ominous creak of flimsy wood shoring up the walls and ceiling, and more than once dusty rivulets of dirt had streamed down onto his head and neck.
The darkness that surrounded him was marred only by the candles held by each man he worked his way past. The kriegies in the tunnel were astonished at his presence, but still they moved aside as best they could, pushing themselves dangerously against the wall of the tunnel, giving him precious inches of empty space to squeeze past. Every man he met held their breath as he scraped by, knowing that even taking a single extra breath might bring the roof down on all of them.
There were a few curses, but no objections. The entire tunnel was filled with fear, apprehension, and danger, and to the men waiting in the darkness. Tommy's steady trip to the front was merely another awful anxiety on what they dreamed would be the road to freedom.
He recognized several of the men-two from his own hut, who grunted an acknowledgment as he crept past, and a third who'd once borrowed one of his law texts, desperate for anything to read to break the monotony of a snowy winter week.