"Hey! Fritz Number One! How long you gonna keep us standing here?"
This voice bellowed with unmistakable authority. The man behind it was a fighter pilot from New York, a captain. The outburst was directed at a solitary German, dressed in the gray coveralls, with a soft campaign hat pulled down on his forehead, that was the standard ferret uniform.
There were three ferrets with the first name of Fritz and they were always addressed by their name and number, which irritated them immensely.
The ferret turned, eyeing the captain. Then he stepped up to the man, who stood at parade rest in the front row. The Germans had each block of the formation gather in rows of five, easier for counting.
"If you did not dig, captain, then there would be no need for standing here," he said in excellent English.
"Hell, Fritz Number One," the captain replied.
"We didn't do no digging. This was probably some more of your lousy sewage system that went and fell in. You guys ought to get some of us to show you how it's done."
The German shook his head.
"No, Kapitan, this was a tunnel. To escape is foolhardy.
Now it has cost two men their lives."
This news silenced the airmen.
"Two men?" the captain asked.
"But how?"
The ferret shrugged.
"They were digging. The earth falls in. They are trapped. Buried. A loss. Most foolish."
He raised his voice slightly, staring at the formation of his enemies.
"It is stupid. Dummkopf." He bent down, and scraped up a handful of muddy ground, which he squeezed between long, almost feminine fingers.
"This earth. Good for planting.
Growing food. This is good. Good for your games. These are good, too…" he gestured toward the compound athletic field.
"But not strong enough for tunnels."
The ferret turned back to the captain.
"You will not fly again, Kapitan, until after the war. If you live."
The captain from New York simply stared at the ferret hard, finally replying, "Well, we'll see about that, won't we?"
The ferret made a lazy salute, and started to move off, pausing only as he reached the end of the formation. There he had a quick exchange with another officer. Tommy Hart leaned forward and saw that Fritz Number One had reached out his. hand, and that a quick pair of cigarettes had been slipped to him. The man who had passed the smokes was a wiry, short, smiling bomber captain from Greenville, Mississippi, named Vincent Bedford, but he was the formation's expert negotiator and trader, and because of his skills had been nicknamed Trader Vic after the famous restaurateur.
Bedford had a thick, southern drawl, with an excitable quality to it.
He was an excellent poker player, a more than passable shortstop who'd done some time in the minor leagues. Before the war, he'd been a car salesman, which seemed appropriate. But what he truly excelled at was the commerce of Stalag Luft Thirteen, turning cigarettes and chocolates and tins of real coffee that arrived either in Red Cross parcels or packages from the States into clothing and other goods. Or he would take extra clothing and turn that into foodstuffs. No trade was beyond Vincent Bedford, and rarely did he come out on the wrong end of an exchange. And, in the unusual event that he had, then his gambler's instincts repaired his losses. A poker game could replenish his stock as effectively as a parcel from home. He seemed to trade in other items as well; always knowing the latest rumor, always getting the latest war news just slightly ahead of everyone else. Tommy Hart assumed that in his trades he'd somehow acquired a radio, but didn't know this for certain. What he did know was that Vincent Bedford was the man in Hut 101 to see. In a world where men had little, Vincent Bedford had amassed a prisoner-of-war-camp fortune, stockpiling coffee and foodstuffs and woolen socks and long underwear and anything else that might make life in the bag slightly more livable.
The few times that Trader Vic wasn't making some trade, Bedford would launch into grandiose and idyllic descriptions of the little town he hailed from, always delivered in the soft drawl of the Deep South, slowly, lovingly. More often than not, the other airmen would tell him they were all moving to Greenville after the war, simply to get him to shut up, because talk of home, no matter how elegiac, prompted a homesickness that was dangerous. All the men in the camp lived on the edge of one despair or another, and thinking of the States did no one any good, though it was almost the only thing they did think about.
Bedford watched the ferret move away, then turned and whispered something to the next airman in formation. It only took a few seconds for the news to pass through the group, and on to the next formation.
The trapped men were named Wilson and O'Hara. They were both prominent tunnel rats. Tommy Hart knew O'Hara slightly; the dead man had occupied a bunk in their hut, but in another room, so he was merely one of the two hundred faces crammed into the barracks. According to the information being whispered down the rows of kriegies, the two men had descended into the tunnel late that past night, and were busily trying to shore up the support beams when the soft ground had given way around them. They'd been buried alive.
And, according to the information Bedford had acquired, the Germans had decided to leave the bodies of the two men where the ground had collapsed in on them.
The whispered talk quickly gave way to voices starting to be raised in anger. The formations of men seemed to take on a sinuous sort of life, as lines straightened, shoulders were thrust back. Without command, men snapped to attention.
Tommy Hart did the same, but not without a last glance down the lines of men to where Trader Vic was standing. He was struck by what he'd seen, and unsettled slightly, by something elusive, that he could not put a word to.
Then, before he had time to assess what it was that had disturbed him, the captain from New York shouted out: "Killers!
Goddamn murderers! Savages!" Other voices from other formations picked up the same message, and the air of the compound filled rapidly with bellows of outrage.
The SAO stepped to the front of the formations, and turned and stared at the men with a glare that seemed to demand discipline, although his own anger was evident in the cold gray look in his eyes and the rigid jut to his jaw. Lewis MacNamara was old-time army, a full bird colonel with over twenty years in uniform, who rarely needed to raise his voice and was accustomed to being obeyed. A stiff man, who seemingly saw his imprisonment as just another in a long line of military assignments. As MacNamara assumed a parade rest facing the kriegies, his legs slightly apart, his arms held tightly behind his waist, a pair of goons snapped back the bolts on their weapons, an act of mostly menace, but with just enough determination that the men in formation hesitated, and slowly quieted.