No ownership of the Hogan's Heroes characters is implied or inferred. Copyright belongs to others and no infringement is intended.
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"Can you hear me? What is your name?"
Pain. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think. But the voices wouldn't leave him alone. Hearing them as though from a distance, Hogan found himself unable to respond. And his arms and legs were so heavy he couldn't move them. He tried, then tried again. But he was so tired he could have cried from exhaustion. It wasn't supposed to be like this, he remembered thinking. But that was the only clear thought in his spinning head.
"What is your name?"
Something or someone probed his abdomen, and a white-hot pain made him cry out and try to pull away from the source of the hurt. His mind registered suddenly that he was actually restrained, secured to whatever it was he was lying on. Then the pinpricks of light in front of his eyes faded away.
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He wandered aimlessly in a dreamless, twisted netherworld. He could see and hear nothing, feel nothing but the ceaseless pain that filled him and taunted him, probed him and reached out for him, pulling at his most tender of wounds and ripping at them until they screamed for mercy. His terrified mind pleaded with him, begged him to find an escape, telling him that he was on the brink and could take no more. But he could do nothing but suffer in mind and body, knowing deep down somewhere that he had been captured. Captured by the enemy. No one could help him. No one would help him.
What will happen to me now?
Voices were calling him. But he couldn't hear what they were saying, and he was so tired. He stopped listening and let himself drift fully back into blackness.
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"Colonel. Colonel Hogan. Can you hear me?"
Hogan became aware of the pain a few seconds after he was beckoned back into consciousness. A sharp, searing pain in his gut; a duller, pounding pain in his head; an unrelenting, full ache attacking his entire body. He couldn't focus, could barely open his eyes. But he knew somehow that he was lying on his side, in what seemed to be an entirely too-bright room, and everything was white, so white before him, and his throat was so dry, too dry to form words.
"Colonel Hogan, can you hear me?"
The voice came again. Hogan still couldn't answer. But he managed a guttural, broken sound, and closed his eyes, until the brightness and the pain went away.
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Hogan moaned softly as his awareness of his body increased enough to pull him into reality. Slowly, he realized he was lying on his back. And a strange sensation on his right arm told him he was attached to some sort of intravenous equipment. He didn't want to open his eyes; he felt dizzy, and everything still seemed so bright. But the touch of a cool, damp cloth running across his very hot forehead tempted him enough to part his eyelids just a bit, an action he regretted when the light pierced his head like a knife. He closed them again with a groan.
"Shh, Herr Colonel," said a gentle voice. "Go back to sleep."
Hogan obeyed. It never even occurred to him to wonder where he was.
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Hogan's tongue felt swollen inside his mouth, and his lips were so dry and cracked that they hurt merely to part. But he had to try, as the question "Where am I?" bounced around inside his confused and aching head, and so he did. But he didn't recognize the sounds as words, and no one answered him, so he concluded that they came out as jumbled as they seemed to his muddled mind.
For the briefest part of a second he maintained his interest in getting an answer. But then that disappeared with any other random, conscious thoughts, and Hogan didn't know, or care, where they were going.
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Fade in…
Hogan suddenly, inexplicably, found himself shuffling like an old man across a cold room, with someone at his arm, apparently propping him up in case he fell over. There was still pain, so much pain, especially in his abdomen, but it was bearable, and he was able to move without doing much more than biting his lip and concentrating on his breathing.
He raised his eyes, still unused to the brightness of the light, to look around him. White walls, signs in a language that he did not recognize as his own, men and women in white coats. A hospital.
Hogan's eyes dropped to his own body—he was in uniform. His now ragged bomber jacket was draped over shoulders that were wearing a clean Air Corps shirt. Was it his? He didn't think so. He vaguely registered new trousers, and his shoes, and he could feel the familiar weight of his crush cap on his sore head. So he was dressed for travel, and he couldn't even remember getting here, wherever "here" was. Where was he going?
A voice spoke suddenly, loudly, in heavily-accented English beside him. "You have done well, Colonel Hogan. Now it is time for the real adventure to begin."
Hogan considering trying to figure out what that meant. But the darkness was closing in again, and he felt his knees weakening as the fire in his body flared up again and burned with an evil intensity.
Fade out…
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Barely conscious and still in great pain, Hogan was pulled out of the black car by the handcuffs and led up the stairs into a building that he vaguely noticed had two large Nazi flags hanging down on either side of the entry doors. He was led down corridors that he took no notice of, deposited carelessly in a chair in a large, ornate office, and left alone. He sagged, hurting and dizzy, and would likely have tumbled forward had someone not entered the room at that time and pushed him back into the seat.
Hogan tried to focus, tried to study the officer in black before him, who was sitting at the desk in a huge, high-backed chair. But he could only take in so much, and after a brief glance up, Hogan dropped his heavy head back down to his chest and concentrated only on his breathing, and on the wild pain coursing through his body.
"Colonel Biedenbender says you are the scourge of the skies," the heavily accented voice said in English. "Is this true?"
Hogan said nothing. He was barely registering the words.
"Tell me about the 504th, Colonel." Again no answer from the prisoner. "Tell me!"
The voice got more insistent, and Hogan found his head suddenly jerked back, stretching his torso. He cried out weakly, eyes squeezed shut, but said nothing. He couldn't understand what was wanted of him. His head was released with a violent shove, and Hogan slumped forward in the chair. Unable to stop the momentum as his hands were still in restraints, he was propelled to the floor, where he landed with a moan.
No one helped him up. Suddenly Hogan felt the hard toe of a boot pushing at his sore back, and he tried unsuccessfully to pull away from it. "Make it easy on yourself, Colonel Hogan. Talk with us, eh? You have nothing to fear from us if you do the right thing."
Hogan could not answer.
"Put him in a cell. We will have him fill out the Arrival Report Form later… and then we will talk again." The voice swimming over his head came close to Hogan's ear. "You understand, Colonel? We will meet again soon… and you will talk."
Hogan's rattling breath was his only reply.
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With the restraints finally removed from his wrists, Hogan let the pen hover over the form before him. It was several hours later now, God knew whether it was day or night, and though he felt just as weak as he had before, at least the dizziness had subsided, and he could see past the headache assaulting him to the words on the page. Hogan immediately rejected most of the questions on the paper: those queries about his religion, his family, his pay, his trade. Details about his crew and their fate would be left blank, not only because he knew he would never answer them, but because he truly didn't know the answers anyway. If he could have found any humor in the situation he was in, he would have laughed out loud at the question requesting his home address. Why did the Krauts want that? So they could brag to his family about his capture? Or so they could tell his family terrible lies—like that he was dead?
A jarring thought suddenly made him go cold. Maybe they wouldn't be lies.
Hogan immediately brushed that doubt away. They wouldn't be getting his strength of will, or anything else not required under the Geneva Convention.
Hogan wrote down what was going to become a familiar mantra: Hogan, Robert E., Colonel, US Army Air Corps. Serial number 0876707.
He signed the bottom with a hurting hand, and a breaking heart.
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"I see we didn't get very much information from you, Colonel Hogan." The German officer whom Hogan had first met when brought here faced him once again across the desk, holding the mostly blank Arrival Report Form. "You didn't even fill in the date!"
Hogan lowered his eyes. "I don't know what day it is."
"Today is the twenty-second of July."
Hogan shuddered involuntarily. He had started Goldilocks's twentieth mission on the ninth. What had happened to the last two weeks?
The German noticed Hogan's hesitancy and smiled benignly. "I am Major Boehringer. It is my job to interrogate you and indoctrinate you in the ways of prisoners of war. How do you like the Durschgangslager der Luftwaffe so far?"
So I'm near Frankfurt. This must be the interrogation center at Oberursel. "Your towels aren't as nice as the ones back in London." The flippancy of Hogan's answer surprised himself as much as Boehringer.
The German laughed. "I see! Well, perhaps they aren't up to your usual standard in the 504th. That was your Bomb Group, was it not?"
Hogan remained silent.
Boehringer nodded. "Very well. Colonel Hogan, there are two ways to do this: easy, and hard. How would you like to proceed?"
"I wouldn't."
Boehringer nodded. "Granted. But we will."
"You're going to do most of the talking," Hogan answered. "I've told you everything already."
"Oh, but you haven't!" Boehringer replied. "You see, Colonel Biedenbender has told me all about you. He says you have perfected some marvelous tactics that have had the Luftwaffe in an absolute tizzy trying to fight you." Boehringer's voice dropped menacingly. "Trying to shoot you down, Hogan. You." Hogan said nothing as his heart splashed into his stinging gut. Four fighters. There were four fighters gunning for us. So it was personal."Your Bomb Group has been a thorn in our side for quite some time." Boehringer relaxed again and smiled gently. "How many missions had you flown when you were finally downed, Colonel?"
"At least one, right?" Hogan answered.
Boehringer smiled again. "I find you very amusing, Colonel Hogan. I am going to enjoy talking with you."
"I'm so pleased." A clearly false smile spread across Hogan's face.
"Tell me, Colonel, I am told you were shot down in a daylight encounter. I find it intriguing that the Allies would again send out bombers during the day, considering how miserably that failed in the past. Is this something they are going to be doing regularly from now on?"
"I won't know, will I?" Hogan asked. "I have a feeling I'll be a little tied up."
"Surely they made plans that you were aware of." Hogan clammed up. Boehringer spoke again, this time sounding cross. "Colonel Hogan, you are aware that we can make your life very uncomfortable here."
Hogan raised an eyebrow. "Can?" he retorted.
Boehringer spoke sharply. "You have not yet seen what we can do here, Colonel. I suggest that you consider your future when answering my questions."
"With all due respect, Major, I suggest that you stick to worrying about your own. I'm quite capable of looking after myself."
Boehringer stared Hogan straight in the eye. Hogan wanted to look away, but willed himself not to. "We shall see, Colonel Hogan. We shall see."