So the searchlight use was erratic, which only made them more terrifying to anyone who wanted to maneuver from one hut to another at night. It was difficult to time their sweeps because they were so haphazard.
Tommy took a deep breath. Getting caught in a searchlight's beam probably meant death.
At a minimum, it would prompt whistles and alerts, and if one got his hands up fast enough, before a Hundfuhrer or one of the tower goons pulled his Schmeisser machine pistol into a firing position, probably only a fortnight in the cooler. And getting caught outside would also compromise the tunnel or the meeting or whatever purpose the kriegie had for being out. So, Tommy considered, there never was a routine motivation for exiting the hut after lights out.
He slowly released his pent-up wind, making a whistling sound between his teeth.
Nothing routine about this excursion, either, he thought.
Tommy zipped up his flight jacket, and bent down to tie on his shoes, gesturing for Scott to do the same.
Scott started to smile. The easygoing, devil-may-care grin of a warrior accustomed to danger.
"This is dicey, huh, Hart?" he whispered.
"Don't want to get caught."
Tommy nodded.
"Getting caught isn't quite the problem.
Getting dead is. Don't really want to get shot," he said. His throat had parched suddenly, the dryness reaching his tongue.
"Not now…"
"Not ever," Scott said, still grinning. Tommy thought Scott probably felt closer to being a fighter pilot then than he had in any second since he'd first leapt free of his burning plane over occupied territory. As he knotted his boots, the black flier asked, "So, where we heading first?"
"The Abort. And then we'll backtrack a bit."
"What're we looking for, exactly?" Scott asked.
"Exactly? I don't know. But possibly? We're looking for a spot where someone might feel comfortable committing a murder."
With that. Tommy turned to the door. He blew out the candle.
He was breathing in a shallow, steady fashion, poised like a sprinter getting ready to start a race. As soon as the searchlight swept over the front of the hut, he grabbed at the door handle, jerked it open, and with Scott inches behind him, dove out into the inky darkness creeping right behind the searchlight's beam.
Chapter Eight
Tommy took two dozen fast strides forward, sprinting furiously, then threw himself up against the wall of Hut 102, breathing hard, pushing his back stiffly to the wooden frame of the building, trying to meld together with the hard boards.
He watched as the searchlight's beam danced away from him, erratically poking and probing the corners and edges of the huts, like a dog sniffing for some prey at the fringe of some tangled briars. The searchlight seemed to him to be alive, tinged with evil. He inhaled sharply as the beam hesitated at the roofline of an adjacent hut, then, instead of proceeding toward more distant barracks, inexplicably began to sweep back toward him, abruptly retracing its steps. He shrank back in sudden fear, frozen in position, unable to move, as the light crept steadily toward him, closing in on him inexorably. The beam was perhaps three feet away, malevolent, searching as if it somehow knew he was there, but unsure of precisely where, in some deadly version of the children's game of hide-and-seek, when he felt Scott's hand suddenly seize his shoulder and savagely drag him down.
Tommy dropped to the cold earth, and felt himself being pulled back into a small depression next to the hut. He scrambled backward, crablike.
"Head down," Scott whispered urgently.
As he buried his face in the dirt, the searchlight passed across the building above them. Tommy squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the whistles and shouts from the goons in the tower manning the light. For an instant, he thought he could hear the unmistakable sound of a round being chambered in a rifle then there was silence.
Gingerly he raised his face from the dust, the dry, musty taste lingering on his lips. He saw the beam of light had swept away, across a nearby roof, probing the distance, as if hunting for some new quarry.
He let his wind out slowly, making a sighing sound. Then he heard
Scott beside him, speaking softly in a voice that clearly made its way past a grin: "Well, that was goddamn close."
He pivoted, just able to make out the black airman's shape prone in the dirt beside him.
"Gotta move a little faster when trouble starts coming in your direction," Scott whispered.
"Good thing you weren't in a fighter. Hart. Stick to bombers, nice and steady and solid bombers. Don't need to react quite so quickly in bombers.
And maybe when you get back to the States you better stick to non contact sports, too. No football, no boxing for you. Golf would be good. Or fishing. Or maybe just read a lot of books."
Tommy frowned. He felt a sudden surge of competitiveness within him.
In prep school and then as an undergraduate, he'd been an excellent tennis player. And growing up in Vermont, he'd learned to be an expert skier. He wanted to say something about the capacity to stand on the lip of some snow-covered ridge, cold wind cutting through woolen clothing, staring down the side of some steep trail, and the abandon that he would call up from deep within to launch himself over the edge and down. He thought it took a different sort of recklessness and bravery. But he knew it wasn't the same as climbing into the ring to face down another man bent on harm and hurt, the way Lincoln Scott had.
That was something more primal, and he wasn't sure he could do that.
He thought suddenly that there were many questions about himself that needed answering, and that he had postponed asking almost every one of them of himself.
"You gonna be okay. Hart?" Scott asked sharply.
"I'm fine," Tommy replied, shaking the questions from his imagination.
"A little spooked. That's all."
Scott hesitated, still slightly amused, then added: "All right, counselor. Lead the way. Tight formation. Wing to wing."
Tommy scrambled to his feet, regaining his bearings. He took a long, slow breath of the nighttime air, like inhaling black vapors, and realized that it had been almost two years since he'd been outside of the hut in the dead of midnight.
Prisoner-of-war camp demanded the most simplistic of routines: Lights out shortly after dark. Go to bed. Go to sleep. Fight off nightmares and sleep terrors. Wake up at dawn. Rise. Be counted. Do it all again.
In his months inside Stalag Luft Thirteen there had been perhaps a dozen nighttime air raids close enough for the camp sirens to be sounded, but the Germans hadn't provided any bomb shelters inside the wire, nor had they allowed the men to construct any, so prisoners weren't scrambled out into the dark to seek protection from their own high in the air above them. Instead, at the first alarm, the Germans merely sent ferrets through the camp rapidly padlocking the doors to each hut. Their fear was that kriegies would try to use a raid as a diversion to escape, and in this they were probably correct.