Hugh's breath came in raspy bursts. His eyes were fixed on the revolver. He wanted to feel relief, but felt nothing but fear.
"You think yourself fortunate, flying officer, to still be alive?"
Hugh nodded.
"This is sad," Visser said harshly. He turned to Fritz Number One.
"Corporal, please summon a Feldwebel, and have him collect an appropriate squad of men. I want this prisoner taken out immediately and shot."
"Scott is innocent."
"Scott is innocent."
From man to man down the length of the tunnel, the single message echoed. That the three words dragged along with them dozens of other questions was ignored in the close, hot, dirty, and dangerous world of the escape. Each kriegie knew only that the message was as important as the final two or three strokes with the pickax, and each kriegie knew that there was a sort of freedom contained within the three words, a freedom nearly as powerful as that they were crawling toward, so the message was passed along with a ferocity that nearly matched the intensity of the battle that Tommy had fought to acquire them. None of the men knew what had taken place at the front of the tunnel. But they all knew that with the twin extremes of death and escape so close, no one would lie. So by the time the message reached back to the anteroom at the base of the shaft leading down from the privy in Hut 107, the words carried a sort of intoxicating religious fervor.
The fighter pilot from New York leaned forward, over the top of the bellows, craning to hear the message being passed back from the next man in line. He listened carefully, as did the man working beside him, who used the moment to seize a second's rest from the backbreaking work of lifting the buckets of sandy earth.
"Repeat that," the fighter pilot whispered.
"Scott is innocent!" he heard.
"Got it?"
"I got it."
The fighter pilot and the kriegie lifting buckets looked at each other momentarily. Then both grinned.
The fighter pilot turned and peered up the shaft of the tunnel.
"Hey, up there! Message from the front…"
Major Clark stepped forward, almost elbowing Lincoln Scott aside in his eagerness. He knelt at the side of the entranceway, bending over into the pit.
"What is it? Have they reached the surface?"
The weak candlelight flickered off the upturned faces of the two men in the tunnel anteroom. The pilot from New York shrugged.
"Well, kinda," he said.
"What's the message?" Clark demanded sharply.
"Scott is innocent!" the fighter pilot said. The bucket man nodded hard.
Clark did not reply. He straightened up.
Lincoln Scott heard the words, but for a moment, the impact of them did not occur to him. He was watching the major, who was shaking his head back and forth, as if fighting off the explosion of the words spoken in such a small space.
Fenelli, however, caught the importance immediately. Not merely in the message, but how it was passed along. He, too, leaned over into the shaft and whispered down to the men below: "That come all the way from the front? From Hart and Numbers One and Two?"
"Yes. All the way. Pass it back!" the fighter pilot urged.
Fenelli sat up, smiling.
Major Clark's face was rigid.
"You'll do nothing of the sort, lieutenant! That message stops right here."
Fenelli's mouth opened slightly in astonishment.
"What?" he said.
Major Clark looked at the doctor-in-training and spoke, almost as if Lincoln Scott abruptly had disappeared from the room, ignoring the black flier.
"We don't know for sure how or why or where that message came from and we don't know, I mean. Hart could have forced it out or something. We don't have any answers, and I won't allow it to be spread."
Fenelli shook his head. He looked over at Scott.
Scott stepped forward, thrusting his chest in front of Major Clark. For a moment his outrage seemed to take him over, and the black flier quivered with the desire to simply lay a right uppercut into the chin of the major. But he fought off this urge, and replaced it with the hardest, coldest stare he could manage.
"What is it about the truth that bothers you so much, major?"
Clark recoiled. He did not reply.
Scott moved to the edge of the tunnel entrance.
"Either the truth comes out, or no one goes in," he said quietly.
Major Clark coughed, eyeing the black flier, trying to measure the determination in his face.
"There's no time left," Clark said.
"That's right," Fenelli said briskly.
"No damn time left."
Then the medic from Cleveland looked past the major, and made a small wave toward one of the dirt bucket men, hovering in the doorway to the privy.
"Hey!" Fenelli said loudly.
"You got the word from the front?"
The man shook his head.
"Well," Fenelli said, breaking into a grin.
"Scott is innocent.
It's the real dope and it came from the head of the tunnel. Now, you pass that on. Everybody in this hut is to know. Scott is innocent!
And you tell everybody the line is gonna move any second now, so to get ready."
The man hesitated, looked once over at Scott, and then smiled. He turned and whispered to the next man in the corridor, and that man nodded, once he heard the message. It went down the center of the hut, to all the men waiting to escape, and all the men standing by in the support roles, and all the fliers gathered in the doorway of each barracks room, creating a buzz of excitement that seemed to reverberate in the enclosed tight spaces.
Scott stepped away from the tunnel entrance, pushing to the side of the small privy. He understood what the weight of the single phrase was, spread through the men in Hut 107. He knew it would sweep rapidly far beyond the confines of the hut, as soon as the sun rose. It would certainly be all over the camp within hours, and might possibly, if the men escaping were lucky, be the words they carried with them to freedom. It was a weight that Major Clark and Colonel MacNamara and Captain Walker Townsend and all the men trying to put his back against a wall and make him face a firing squad would not be able to lift. The weight of innocence.
He took a deep breath and looked toward the hole in the floor. Now, Lincoln Scott thought quietly, that the truth has come out from underground, it is time for Tommy Hart to emerge.
But instead of the lanky form of the law student from Vermont, another message came ricocheting down the tunnel.
Nicholas Fenelli, eyes brightening, voice husky with sudden excitement, looked over toward Scott and whispered:
"They're through! We're moving out!"
Tommy Hart stood, balancing precariously near the top rung of the ladder, his face lifted toward a six-inch hole in the roof of dirt, drinking in the heady wine of the fresh night air that poured into the tunnel. In his right hand, he held the pickax.