The voice was soft, slithery. It seemed to sidle past the abrupt thudding of blood in his ears, the immediate racket of his heartbeat.
He lay back on the bed. The hand still covered his mouth.
"Listen to me, Yankee," the voice continued in a tone barely above a whisper.
"Don't look up. Don't turn around, just listen to me. And y'all won't get hurt. Can you do that?
Just nod your head."
Tommy nodded.
"Good," the voice said. Tommy realized that the man was kneeling by the side of the bunk, just behind his head, enveloped in darkness. Not even the occasional sliver of light from a passing searchlight sweep striking the exterior of the hut and penetrating past the window's wooden shutters helped him to see who was gripping him so tightly. He realized it was the man's left hand over his mouth. He did not know where the man's right hand was. And he did not know whether it held some sort of weapon.
Abruptly, he heard a second voice, whispering from the other side of the bunk. He was startled, and his body must have shaken slightly, because the grip across his mouth tightened even more.
"Ask him," the second voice demanded.
"Just ask him the question."
The man at his side grunted quietly.
"Tell me. Hart. Are you a good soldier? Can you follow orders?"
Tommy nodded again.
"Good," the voice whispered, hissing still.
"I knew it. Because, you see, that's all that we want you to do. All that's required of you. Just follow your orders. Now, do you remember what your orders are?"
He continued to nod.
"Your orders, Hart, are to help justice be done. No more.
No less. You'll do that, won't you, Hart? See that justice is done?"
He tried to speak, but the hand clamped across his mouth prevented him.
"Just nod your head again, lieutenant."
He nodded, as before.
"We're just making sure of that. Hart. Because no one wants to see justice avoided. You'll be absolutely certain that justice is done, won't you?"
Tommy did not move.
"I know you will," the voice hissed a final time.
"We all know you will. Everyone in this place…" Tommy could sense the man on his left moving away from the bunk over toward the bunk-room door.
"Don't turn. Don't speak. Don't light a candle. Just lie there,
Hart. And remember you only have one job ahead of you: just follow orders…" the man said. He squeezed painfully hard one time, then released his grip, before slinking away into the darkness. Tommy could hear the door creak open and then close. Gasping for breath like a fish suddenly plucked from the ocean, Tommy remained rigidly on his bed as he'd been told, the normal night sounds of the other men in the room slowly returning to his ears. But it was some time before his heart rate slowed from the deep drumming that pounded in his chest.
Chapter Five
Tommy kept his mouth shut as the kriegies flooded from the huts for the morning Appell. The early sky had lightened slightly, turning from dull, metallic gray to a horizon of tarnished silver that held out the hope of clearing. It was not as cold as it had been the day before, but there was still an unpleasant dampness in the air. Around him, as always, men complained, men grumbled, men muttered obscenities, as they formed the usual five-deep rows and began the laborious process of being counted. Ferrets moved up and down the rows, calling out numbers in German, starting over and repeating themselves when they lost track or were distracted by some kriegie asking a question. Tommy listened carefully to every voice, straining hard to recognize in the snatches of words that flowed at him from the collected airmen the sounds of the two men who'd visited him in the night.
He stood at parade rest, pretending to be outwardly relaxed, trying to appear bored as he had for hundreds of similar mornings, but inwardly stretched taut with an unruly turmoil and an unfamiliar anxiety that, had he been slightly older and more worldly, he might have recognized as fear.
But it was a far different fear from the fear he and all the other kriegies were accustomed to, which was the universal fear of flying straight into a squall of tracer rounds and flak. He wanted to pivot around, to search the eyes of the men surrounding him in the formation, thinking suddenly that the two voices who'd arrived at his bunk side in the midnight of the camp would be watching him carefully now. He surreptiously shifted his eyes about, darting glances to the right and left, trying to pick out and identify the men who had told him that his job was simply to follow orders. He was surrounded, as always, by the men who flew in all the ships of war. In Mitchells and Liberators, Forts and Thunderbolts, Mustangs, Warhawks, and Lightnings.
Someone was watching him, but he did not know who.
The catcalls and complaints of that morning were the same as every morning. The ragged lines of U.S. airmen were no different from what they were any day-except for the two men absent. One dead. One in the cooler and accused of murder.
Tommy exhaled slowly and had to control himself to keep from twitching.
He could feel his heart accelerate, almost as fast as it did during the night when he'd been awakened by the hand closing over his mouth. He felt almost light-headed and his skin burned, especially his back, as if the eyes of the men he sought were scorching him.
The morning air he gasped at was cool, suddenly tasting to him like a smooth pebble plucked from the bottom of one of the trout streams of his home state, placed under his tongue on a hot day. He closed his eyes for a moment, envisioning fast, dark waters bubbling with white froth as they coursed through some narrow rapids on the Battenkill or the White River, waters that had fallen out of the crags of the Green Mountains, made by late-melting snow and racing toward the larger watersheds of the Connecticut or Hudson. The image calmed him.
He heard a ferret close by, grunting out numbers.
He opened his eyes and saw that they had nearly completed the count. He looked across the yard and, almost as if on cue, saw Oberst Von Reiter, accompanied by Hauptmann Heinrich Visser, emerging from the office building and making their way past the cordon of saluting camp guards through the front gate toward the assembled fliers. As always, Von Reiter was dressed with rigid precision, each crease of his immaculately tailored uniform slicing the air, and Tommy imagined that as he strode forward they made the same whistling sound as a sabre slashing the wind did. Visser, on the other hand, appeared slightly less neat, a little crumpled, almost as if he'd slept in his uniform the night before. The empty sleeve of his greatcoat was pinned together but still napped as he kept pace with the taller camp commandant.
Tommy watched the Hauptmann's eyes, and saw that as he approached, they were sweeping across the rows of kriegies, taking in and measuring the men as they came to attention.