Hogan had been right about one thing; Newkirk, given a good set of picks and a few uninterrupted minutes, probably could have gotten himself in and out of the Tower of London. That part of the escape had been sheer skill. The part that was pure, dumb luck was the fact that, between a three-day training maneuver three miles outside of town that had claimed half the men, and a batch of very dubious schnitzel served the night before that had put paid to most of the remainder, the guards were embarrassingly shorthanded on that particular day. Call it chance, call it fate, call it divine intervention; either way, it was the difference between life and death.
Newkirk counted to one thousand after he was sure Hogan and Stephens were gone; that seemed like a sufficient margin for safety. There had been no shouting or gunfire, or anything else to suggest that all was not right with the world; therefore, his presence in the cell no longer seemed at all necessary— or even slightly desirable. If Hogan had gotten away clean, it was more than time for him, Newkirk, to be elsewhere before they came to collect Stephens for their regularly scheduled programme of musical selections and assorted tortures and noticed the difference. (Or worse... didn't notice the difference.) If Hogan had been caught, which was not, alas, beyond the realm of possibility— as clever as he might be, he was still just a Yank and an officer, the poor sod— well, he could hardly help the man from in here, now could he?
He slipped out of the cell. There was only one guard in sight, bent over a large ledger, presumably documenting the current roster of soon-to-be corpses in the cells. Scarcely more than a boy, in a spanking new uniform that, providentially enough, looked to be about the right size. His face a mask, Newkirk crept up behind the German, clapped a hand over the man's mouth, and with one quick, vicious twist, snapped his neck.
He was dead before Newkirk could even finish lowering him to the ground.
"Fortunes of war, Fritz," he muttered, as he dragged the German back into Stephens' cell. "Sorry, chum. Better luck picking the right side next time around."
Quickly, neatly, he stripped the body and donned the uniform. The tunic, horribly, was still warm as he pulled it on. He'd told Hogan that he wasn't a murderer, and he told himself that he still wasn't. That the rules were different for soldiers than they were on Civvy Street.
That had sounded a great deal more convincing when he wasn't lacing up a dead man's boot.
He arranged the body, face down, on the cot, and threw the blanket over it to hide the fact that it was neither Stephens nor breathing. It wouldn't fool anyone for long, but if luck was on his side it wouldn't have to. He straightened his new uniform; this was his third new identity in as many hours. How many other people might he need to be before morning?
Well, he'd burn that bridge when he came to it. He took one last look around the cell, and was reasonably satisfied that there was nothing there to connect a pair of foolhardy POWs with the murder-slash-escape, at least so long as they didn't dust for prints or any such Sherlock Holmes caper. No, it was about as neat a murder as one could ask for on short notice.
And it really was a murder, wasn't it. He'd told Hogan that murder had never, ever been one of the tunes in his not-inconsiderable repertoire back home. Nor had it been. But he'd never said that he hadn't seen the sheet music, or that he didn't know how it was played… and he did.
He took a deep breath, and stepped out into the corridor, forcing himself into that stick-up-the-Khyber attitude all Krauts seemed to favor. All he had to do now was get the hell out of the building. Yes. That was all he needed to do. Piece of cake. He marched resolutely towards the exit, past the rows of closed cell doors, his inherited jackboots thumping the cement floor like a drum.
He made it almost halfway down the corridor.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*
The rendezvous point was an old barn about half a mile outside of town. LeBeau and Olsen were waiting there, both increasingly anxious about Hogan and Newkirk and pretending that they weren't. They'd long since run out of conversation.
Olsen glanced at his watch. "We're… um… we're going to have to go back pretty soon. If we miss evening roll call, they'll—"
"If we miss roll call, they will come out searching for us," said LeBeau, with a forced calm. "Oui. And if they find us out of uniform, we will be shot. We can spare another hour yet."
"But, LeBeau—"
"Another hour, I said. At least, I will wait another hour. You may go if you choose."
Olsen gave him a level look. "Nah," he said. "I'm game if you are. Newkirk's probably getting his face slapped by some girl, and I don't want to miss hearing him try to deny it."
LeBeau flickered a smile. "Merci, mon ami,"he said. Before he could continue, two figures approached the barn. One wore an Abwehr uniform, and he was nearly carrying the other, a stumbling figure in a gray work shirt and dungarees. Both Olsen and LeBeau, without even thinking about it, dove for cover. The door cracked open.
"Old Mother Hubbard went to her cupboard to bring out a turkey to carve," said the Abwehr officer, in Hogan's voice.
LeBeau felt his heart sputter back into motion, and gave the countersign. "But when she got there, the cupboard was bare, for the Boche had just left her to starve."
Olsen rubbed a hand over his eyes until he thought he could keep his voice from trembling. "Wow. You really scared us, sir. We weren't expecting Abwehr. I'm sure glad you're all right."
"Things got a bit more complicated than they were supposed to," said Hogan, helping Stephens sit down on a bale of elderly hay. "We ran into a bit of trouble; I had to improvise."
"So I see, sir," said LeBeau, moving towards them. "What can I do to help—" Hogan seemed fine. But Newkirk was obviously…
Newkirk was obviously not the man on the hay bale, and LeBeau felt his heart skip another beat.
Olsen stood up, too. "Is Newkirk hurt? What happened to—" He got close enough to get a look at the man in Newkirk's clothing, and his eyes widened. All vestiges of proper NCO-to-Colonel etiquette were momentarily forgotten. "Who the hell is that?"
*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*
It was a very long corridor, and each cell he passed made it that much harder to keep walking, until he noticed that he'd stopped moving altogether. Couldn't move, and it didn't have anything to do with the terror that was twisting his guts into a knot. With a sort of numb wonder, Newkirk realized that, for the first time, the absolute first time since he'd been dragged into a Dulag cell with another man's blood slowly drying on his coverall and his own blood coating the back of his throat, he wanted—desperately, desperately wanted—to live.
It did cross his mind that he'd picked one hell of a bad time to start wanting it.
Still. Here he was, in the middle of a Gestapo prison with a key ring in his hand. There were so very many cells, and anyone who was on the wrong side of those locked doors was almost certainly on the right side of the war. Probably they wanted to live, too. Probably they deserved to live. London had been quite adamant about rescuing Stephens, but if they'd known who else was down here, mightn't they have wanted them sprung, too?
His orders had been clear. Get Stephens, and get out. But there were so many cells. Cells full of people who were certainly going to be tortured or killed. And he had the keys right in his hand. He could, perhaps, free at least a few of them. If he chose to try.
Every minute he spent here was a danger. It was against his orders. It was suicidally stupid.
But there were so many cells. So many people who didn't deserve what the Krauts would do to them. So many lives trembling in the balance. Some of them might even be young girls whose big brothers had abandoned them to go off and play soldier.
This was all wrong. They needed a hero. Someone who could stride in the door, effortlessly save the day, and ride off into the sunset, debonair and witty and indefatigable. A Lancelot, or a Robin Hood, or at least a white-hatted movie-serial do-gooder. Hell, they needed a Colonel Hogan. Not a sticky-fingered gutter rat, and certainly not a half-cracked jailbird. No, they needed— deserved— a hero. And what they'd gotten, the poor luckless bastards… was him.
A memory struck him; himself, at sixteen or so. He'd been with the circus for two years, and for pretty much the first time in his life, he'd begun to feel safe. Almost dared to begin hoping that he'd found a real place for himself. Somewhere he could truly belong, with people who actually wanted him there, and, just maybe, a future to go along with it.
So, of course, that was the moment when fate chose to kick him in the teeth.
In the careful, painstaking hand of a person for whom the written word was, at best, a formal and distant acquaintance, the letter he'd just been handed said that his nan was dying, and that he needed to come home. For Mavis' sake. That he had to stand between her and their father, the man who'd thrown him out three years ago… because there was no one else left who would or could.
If there was anything in the world he wanted less than to go back to London and face his father, he'd have been hard-pressed to think of it. And raising a child? Him? Were they all mad?
He'd crumpled the note in a hand that he refused to let shake, and begun informing the universe at large, as though it hadn't noticed, exactly how unfair it was being, both to him, and to her.
"What could the likes of me do for a little girl? Teach 'er to lift wallets? She's barely more than a baby! She needs a real 'ome, a family to look after 'er, send 'er to school and cook 'er dinners. She's only six, for God's sake! She deserves better than this! She needs a father… and all she's got is me!"
Ronald J. Whittaker, also known as the Amazing Rondini, was not a man given to deep thought. He was a knife thrower—a rather good one—and a drunk; he was kind enough, in his way, and perhaps if he'd been able to keep off the bottle there would have been more to say about him than that. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and even a washed-up carnie rumpot can have one or two pearls of wisdom in him.
"Well, if that's all the poor girl's got, I guess you'd best see to it that it's enough," said Ron. "That's your job, now. It's all on you. I daresay you can do it if you try, especially if it's that or the workhouse for the lass."
Newkirk, not even close to finished with his rant, had just stared at the man for a long moment, stunned, then nodded slowly and gone to pack his meager belongings. Everything changed for him, right there on the road to Damascus… or, at any rate, the road to Manchester. His own needs didn't get to come first anymore.
Ron's words had never left him. They'd made him into the person he was. It wasn't the mere fact of the responsibility he was taking on his scrawny shoulders that forced the change; it had been Ron's quiet certainty that he could manage it if he cared enough to try. These poor unlucky sods needed a hero. What they had was him.
He'd have to make that be enough.
He spun on his heel, went back to that ledger full of names and cell numbers. There were enough of them to be unnerving, but not so many as to be utterly impossible, he decided. He started with the one cell he knew had a living occupant; that older man he'd seen.
There is a distinct possibility that the sight of a man in Gestapo black-and-silver opening a person's cell door, with a drawn Luger in his hand and a death-or-glory glitter in his eyes, is never, and can never, be a reassuring one. The man in the cell, who called himself Vogel, swallowed hard.
"Sprechen Sie Englisch?" the guard asked abruptly.
"Yes," said Vogel.
"Right, then," said the guard, as his voice shifted into something that was decidedly not Aryan. "You've got a choice. I'm breaking out of 'ere; you can come if you like. It probably won't work and we'll be shot in the attempt, but that's likely quicker and cleaner than whatever these Gestapo bastards will do to us otherwise. Or you can stay behind. Take your chances with the Gestapo, or take them with me. Your call, either way."
Vogel didn't even have to think about it. "I will trust you," he said, with a certain amount of dignity. "I think we all will."
Newkirk cocked his head. "All, eh? You know the other members of this little country club?"
"Some of them," Vogel admitted. "Associates of mine. We were… captured together. I can only hope they are still alive."
"Fair enough. I'm going to nip across the way for a bit, see who else might be in the mood for a bit of a 'oliday. You stay put while I do the inviting. I'm leaving the door unlocked; if I don't… well, if things go pear-shaped, you can try to make a run for it. Best I 'ave to offer."
"It's more than I'd any right to ask," Vogel said. "But please. Let me come with you. My friends will be more likely to trust you if I'm there."
"That's your call, too. Come on if you're coming."
"Ja. Do you have a plan for how we can escape?"
"Would that I did. All I can think of is this. We go up the stairs into the main corridor, and shout 'Fire.' With any luck, they'll get so busy that they won't notice me leading you fellows out. If we make it to the streets, we scatter and run like the devil's on our 'eels, because trust me, 'e will be. No matter what 'appens, you run. Better for some of us to get away than none. All right?"
"But they will see that there is no fire," said Vogel.
He reached in a pocket, retrieved the Kraut's lighter. "There will be in about two minutes. Unless you've got any better ideas?"
Vogel grimaced. "I will try to come up with something in the next five minutes."
"Good. You do that. I'm not too proud to take suggestions."
No, not too proud by a long shot. His current plan was essentially a suicide run, and Newkirk rather thought that they all knew it. A better plan would be nice.
Well, maybe at least a couple of them would make it out.
*.*.*.*.*.*
Author's note: The Amazing Rondini is an original character who I mentioned in 'Sew Far, So Good.' Newkirk once says that he traveled with a circus for a while—sharing quarters with the chimpanzee, so he couldn't have been too far up the totem pole. Given that he can and does throw knives, I theorized that it was a skill he picked up during that period of his life.