Altogether, there were eleven of them, not counting Newkirk. Eight of the battered, hollow-eyed prisoners were men. Three were women. Nine were German, two were French; all spoke at least some English. Their ages ranged over thirty years or so. Several had blond hair, some dark hair, some graying hair. All of them had been in their current location long enough to feel that death was no longer the more frightening eventuality. They all chose to run for it.
Five of them, including Vogel, were Underground agents. Two were smugglers. One was a black marketer. And three of them genuinely couldn't figure out what they'd done to end up in prison; they had no idea what they were being accused of, or who had denounced them, or why. He hated himself for being so cold-blooded as all that, but the part of Newkirk's mind that instinctively calculated such things reflected that there was a fairly good chance that the cruel illogic of arresting such obvious innocents could, eventually, cause a lot of otherwise loyal Germans to question their leaders, which could only help the Allied cause. Even if the innocents themselves never made it home, and he didn't try to fool himself that their odds were anything but abysmal, they surely had friends. Neighbors. Family. It just might start something of a domino effect. Eventually. It was a hell of a price to pay. But he hadn't started any of this madness, and he sure as hell hadn't forced it on them, and if the innocents were going to pay that price anyway, maybe they could at least get something in exchange.
And as he shepherded his little flock down the corridor, he tried not to think about the fact that, before today, it had never really occurred to him that any German was, or ever could be, considered innocent.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Newkirk could feel the silver SS insignia on his stolen uniform burning him like a brand. This identity was one he suspected he'd be glad to shed as quickly as possible, but it did have a few redeeming features. The loaded sidearm, for instance. That was definitely a nice thing to have. And the identity papers in the pocket just might come in handy, somewhere down the line. And, to put the icing on the cake, the jackboots were a much better fit than Stephens' worn loafers. He'd be able to run if he needed to. God willing, he wouldn't need to, but then again God didn't usually seem to give a toss about arranging matters to suit Peter Newkirk, Esquire.
"Right," he said. "One more thing. You can't go back 'ome. Once we're away, if I… well, if we're separated, you're going to go to these coordinates. There should be a bloke waiting there. If there's more than one, look for the shorter of them, and you say to 'im… " He thought for a moment, trying to come up with a decent password. Not another one of those bleeding nursery rhymes London favored. This needed to be something unusual enough to stand out; something that the others would know could only have come from him... When one occurred to him, he barked a laugh, and told it to Vogel. "It'll be all right. 'E'll know what it's all about."
"If you say so," said Vogel, who was looking less and less reassured by the moment.
"I do say so. I promise you, 'e'll see you right. You can trust 'im."
"If you do, I shall as well. But mein Herr… aren't you coming with us?"
"I bloody well 'ope so. And if I can, I will. But if things go tits up, well… take it from a tailor. Sometimes what you want is a belt and braces." The blank look on Vogel's face prompted him to add for clarification, "Just to be on the safe side, is all. Are we ready? Come on."
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
LeBeau wasn't upset. Not yet. He was somewhere beyond upset, in a cold, stunned place where there was no time or energy for such things. His voice was steady. "So. Are we to bring Monsieur Stephens to the camp, or leave him with the Underground here in town?"
Hogan scrutinized Stephens one more time. He'd really been worked over hard, and as the adrenaline of their escape had ebbed, it seemed to have taken most of Stephens' remaining energy with it; he looked like a marionette with its strings cut. "Normally, I'd say that getting him out of Germany as fast as possible would be a good idea, but I'm not sure he's fit to travel yet. Keeping him in the tunnels for a few days while he gets some strength back might be the safest route."
"Perhaps not. When it is discovered that Pierre is missing, there will be a great deal of trouble in the camp. The Boche will examine every inch of ground searching for tunnels; even a teaspoon's worth of loose dirt will be suspicious. Our tunnel could easily be discovered, and him along with it. And then all this will have been for nothing."
"No. Because Newkirk's not going to be missing. We'll get him back. We might even get him back in time for roll call," said Hogan. It was even money if he was trying to convince LeBeau or himself, and it was useless either way. LeBeau wasn't buying it, and Hogan's faith in his own plan was wavering badly.
LeBeau just looked away.
Scraps of a dozen different conversations spun through Hogan's mind. LeBeau's painfully honest explanation— Betrayal is simply what he expects of people. It is almost certainly what he expects of you. His own promise— I don't work like that. Newkirk's own blunt acceptance of the inevitable knife in the back— You will if you 'ave to. That's war.
Hogan looked away, too. And silently added himself to that list of people who should have protected him… and chosen not to. LeBeau, he suspected, had already done so, too.
They had, against all the odds, rescued Stephens. A valuable cog in the wheel of the Allied war machine, or so it seemed, and, impossibly, they had saved him with nothing more than a dash of audacity and a phony uniform. A job well done. It was cold comfort.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
They made it up the first flight of stairs before they noticed the smoke in the air. Vogel coughed once. Almost accusingly, he said, "You have set the fires already? Before we are out of the building?"
Even Newkirk's lungs, which had long ago resigned themselves to a life that was going to contain ridiculous amounts of smoke, smog, and other non-salubrious substances, were starting to complain as the haze got thicker. "Not my fire," he said, clapping a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. "I wasn't scheduled to commit any arson for at least another five minutes."
"What do we do, then?" asked one of them. A rather pretty French girl, and it was a measure of the stress that they were all under that he barely noticed that she was a girl, let alone a pretty one.
"Plan's not changed any. We get out of 'ere. Steal a truck if we can, scarper on foot if we can't, commend our souls to God, and 'ope that Krauts can't aim. Not necessarily in that order."
"This is not much of a plan," she said, coughing harder.
"Yeah. I noticed that too," he said, handing her the handkerchief as they got to the top of the second flight of stairs. The smoke was thicker, now. Much thicker.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*
By the time they made it to the street, half-suffocated but not quite singed, the street was a more or less solid mass of bodies, all shouting orders that no one was really listening to, and all getting in one another's way.
One man, off to the side a bit, was just getting out of a truck. Newkirk's eyes lit up, and he chivvied his little band towards it.
"Step aside," he snapped to the driver. "I am commandeering this truck."
"You can't have it," he said. "I am helping transport important records. They cannot be left to burn."
"I need it to transport prisoners," growled Newkirk. "Papers do not run away. They can wait."
He looked at the ragtag band of prisoners, and sneered. "Let the scum burn," he said dismissively. "It will save us the trouble of shooting them."
"Listen, dummkopf. These prisoners still have valuable information to share with us; can you not get it through your thick skull that letting them burn before we have extracted that intelligence would be extremely wasteful?" Newkirk, with a manic, vicious glitter in his eyes that he had stolen, without attribution and without apology, from Lange, got right in the man's face. It worked; he was pleased to see that he was going green around the gills. "Or perhaps that's what you want, eh? Do you have some reason for wanting them silenced before we've heard all they have to say?"
The Luftwaffe rank-and-filer who'd had the misfortune of being the one with a set of truck keys was a sergeant; he technically outranked the man who'd worn Newkirk's stolen Gestapo uniform. The skull and crossbones insignia, however, made such technicalities negligible, and the sadistic glee in Newkirk's face made them entirely irrelevant. The sergeant went a bit paler.
"No, of course not, sir," he stammered. "What will you—I mean, sir… what should be done to protect them?"
"Protect them? Now you want to protect them?" Newkirk let a corner of his mouth twist into a cruel sneer, and got in closer still. Instinctively, the German backpedaled a step or two, retreating behind the body of the truck. Nerves of steel, this one. "Perhaps you should come along! I am taking them to a more secure facility. A charming place, where we can have our…discussions… in peace. Perhaps you'd like to join us? You're so adept at asking questions that I can only imagine you're equally as good at answering them."
"No sir," he got out, still retreating. He held out the keys in a hand that only shook a little. "I'm very sorry, sir."
"You certainly are," said Newkirk, and snatched them from the man's hand. "Well? What are you waiting for? Go help them put out the fire, dummkopf!"
"Thank you sir!" he said, and all but ran towards the building. Flames were beginning to show at the windows.
"Don't mention it," Newkirk muttered under his breath. "Really. Don't." He opened the driver's side door. Their luck was holding; the sergeant had left his topcoat on the passenger seat. And, oh bliss, his rifle; the poor chap was going to have to do some fancy footwork when his superiors learned that he'd lost it. "Oi! Take this," he said, shoving the coat at Vogel. He slung the rifle over his own shoulder. "Congratulations on your promotion, feldwebel. You're driving."
The coat didn't really fit Vogel all that well. But it covered his dirty, and decidedly non-military, shirt, and it went along with the keys to the truck, which, so far as any of them cared at that point, made it the garment he had been waiting for all his life. He jumped into the driver's seat while Newkirk, snarling and spitting potty-mouthed epithets with an ease and fluency that would have brought a proud tear to the eye of any Nazi training officer, herded the rest of the prisoners into the back of the truck.
"This won't stand up to anyone watching with more than 'alf an eye," Newkirk said under his breath to the nearest prisoner—the French girl, as it happened. "Vogel, this'll be good for getting some initial distance between them and us, but we'd best ditch the truck once we're well away. And the uniform with it. It's an army truck; it'll stand out like a sore thumb, and we don't know any of the right passwords for the checkpoints."
He nodded, once, as Newkirk switched back to German, and resumed barking commands and describing the probable ancestry of his little flock, emphasizing each new perversion with a mock-blow of his rifle butt that looked quite convincing from any distance. As the last man was loaded aboard, Newkirk swung himself in and looked into the courtyard, which was still a hive of activity. No one, however, seemed to be paying them too much attention.
"That's the last of you. Floor it!"
And Vogel did, peeling out into the road with just a little too much speed for inconspicuousness. All four tires did stay on the road, but not by much.
They made it almost twenty yards before someone seemed to notice that something was amiss. "Halt!" that someone shouted, and followed up that friendly suggestion with a short volley of rifle shots.
"Keep driving!" Newkirk contradicted, and scrambled back to the rear of the truck to return fire. "Don't you bloody well stop for anything! You see God Almighty blocking the road, you run the bastard over!"
The French girl turned towards him. Fiercely, she demanded, "Give me a gun!"
He didn't have time for niceties like asking whether she was familiar with weaponry. He just shoved the rifle into her hands and drew the sidearm. "There. Shoot anyone what isn't me, all right?" Suiting the action to the word, he fired, almost randomly, into the crowd. Any Nazi he hit was one less to shoot at them, and good riddance, he thought, just as a bullet missed his head so closely that he could hear it whistle.
Reflexively, he ducked, just as Vogel made a hard right turn. Newkirk lost his balance, and fell.
He hit the ground rolling.
Vogel, true to orders, didn't stop.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Newkirk had a thick skull, and a good thing, too. He only lay there, dazed, for a moment; then he pushed himself carefully off the ground. Nothing seemed broken. Right. Change of plans, number eleventy-million and three; he would duck into that alley, and get the hell out of this uniform, and run like sixty for the rendezvous. He might not beat them there, but he might still arrive quickly enough that the Colonel wouldn't have time to get too angry—
"Halt!"
The word might be ignorable; the click of a gun being cocked was not. Slowly, Newkirk put his hands in the air, and even more slowly turned around to face them. It was over. Better to have the holes in front.
The two men were not in uniform, but they were wearing dark suits. That meant Gestapo. That meant trouble. That meant discovery. That meant he had to keep his mouth shut for as long as humanly possible, no matter what.
It meant death, and it meant unimaginable pain before he was finally allowed to die.
Damn it. Why couldn't this have happened yesterday, when he wouldn't have cared?
"Where were you taking those prisoners?" asked the younger of the two men.
Newkirk said nothing.
The man backhanded him across the face. "Answer me, swine! Where were you taking them?"
Newkirk said nothing.
The second man shook his head sadly. "This is madness. Tell us where you were going. You will eventually, you know; you could spare yourself a great deal of unpleasantness if you simply cooperate now. Help us to help you. Tell us where they are."
The old good cop/bad cop routine? Really? Who did they think they were fooling? Newkirk glared at them both, and answered in German. This was probably the last thing he'd say of his own volition, and he didn't want there to be even the slightest chance they'd mistake his meaning. "Where are they? They are in Hell. Go look for them there." He bared his teeth in a parody of a smile. "You will eventually, you know."
The two men traded glances. "We'll bring him with us," decided the second man. "No sense in doing this out in the open."
They manhandled him to their car, shoved him into the boot, and took off. "What now, Piper?" asked the first one, with a thread of desperation becoming increasingly apparent in his voice. "We have to find them!"
"I know that! And we will," said the second man, code name 'Pied Piper,' his composure similarly fraying. "We'll… we'll take him to Horner. I'm sure he'll know what to do."
"What to do? What to do? There's nothing left to do! Besides, Horner had no idea what to do yesterday; what could he possibly do now? Our diversion failed, and now we don't even know where the Gestapo are taking them!" The first man was not in the mood for soothing inanities. He was called 'de Carabas,' and just now he felt as much of a fraud as his namesake.
"We will soon," said the Piper, ice in his voice and steel in his eyes. "Our guest will tell us everything we need to know." He made an abrupt right turn—much harder than was strictly necessary—and headed down a side street. One with a great many potholes. The boot was not padded.
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Author's note: Sometimes the left hand really, really should have been told what the right hand was doing. Piper and de Carabas are a pair of hot-headed idiots who meant well, but going rogue was really not their cleverest move, no matter who they thought they were rescuing.
And as for the pretty French girl... I don't say that she is someone we'd recognize from the show. Nor do I say that she isn't. To quote Newkirk... your call, either way.