Kinch took off his headphones, stuck his well-chewed pencil over his ear, and hurried up the ladder and into the barracks, a sheet of paper in his hand.
"Colonel Hogan," he said. "Word just came in from London."
Hogan tossed his book aside, eyes lighting with interest. "Good news or bad?"
"Depends on how things go, I guess," Kinch said. "And whose side you're on."
Hogan pretended to think about it. "Weeeelll… just for argument's sake, let's assume I'm rooting for the Allied side."
"Then it depends on how much you wanted a quiet night in. We've got a mission. There's an ammo dump they'd like us to make disappear."
"Carter will be in his glory," Hogan said, grinning.
"I'll say!" said Carter, his eyes glowing. "Boy! Nothing makes a better explosion than an ammo dump. And I've got a batch of just the best TNT you ever saw to start it off with. Kaboom!"
"After a buildup like that, we've got to take the job," said Newkirk. "He won't be fit to live with till we do. Where is this place?"
"About fifteen miles due east of Dusselhaven," Kinch said, glancing at his notes to be certain. "They want us to do it tonight."
"We'll have to borrow something from the motor pool," Hogan said, and began pacing.
"Wait— you said tonight?" Carter looked worried. "They want us to do it tonight?"
"Why?" asked LeBeau. "Did you have plans for this evening?"
"No…not exactly," said Carter. "It's just that today is Friday the thirteenth, you know?"
"Blimey," said Newkirk, taken aback. "He's right. Not the best time to be pressing our luck, wouldn't you say?"
"Probably not," Kinch agreed, with some reluctance. "I hadn't even thought about that."
LeBeau frowned. "Maybe this can wait until tomorrow?"
Hogan looked from one to the next, incredulity clear on his face. "I can't believe what I'm hearing," he said. "Bad luck? You guys don't really believe in all that baloney, do you?"
"No, sir," Newkirk said immediately. "We're just a bunch of prisoners running an espionage ring from the heart of Nazi Germany. Why on earth would we be worried about bad luck?"
Hogan rolled his eyes. "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Do you worry about stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, too? Friday the thirteenth is just another day in the calendar."
There was an awkward silence. Even he had to admit that he wasn't making a very good case for himself. "Guys… come on. You're looking at this backwards. The only ones who are going to be having bad luck this Friday the thirteenth are the goons who suddenly don't have any way of reloading their guns. Okay?"
"I guess it really would be a shame not to use all that swell TNT," said Carter, with some doubt in his voice. He had never sounded less enthusiastic about an explosion.
"I'm in, too, Colonel," said Kinch, who figured he had at least a fifty percent chance of being assigned to stay home and man the radio anyway.
LeBeau sighed. "Oui, mon Colonel," he said. "I am with you."
"…Thy will be done," said Newkirk, with a midnight-in-the-Garden-of-Gethsemane air of wry resignation. "I'm in, sir."
Hogan spent half a second wondering if he was being cast in the part of Pilate before firmly dismissing the thought. "Great. All right, Carter, get cracking with that TNT. Kinch, check the motor pool; see what we can get. Newkirk, travel passes for everyone, and if you sign them as 'General von Newkirkbaum' again, you'll be on KP until next Christmas. LeBeau, wardrobe. I think Heer this time would be nice; we've been Luftwaffe a lot lately—"
The door to the barracks slammed open. Schultz came barging in, his clipboard in hand, shouting "Achtung!"
"What's the big idea, Schultz?" Hogan quickly crumpled the sheet of paper with the assignment details on it, stuffed it into his pocket. "The Geneva Convention says that we've got the right to some privacy."
Schultz rolled his eyes. "Colonel Hogan, it says no such thing, and you know it."
"Well, it should. And even if it doesn't, it's only common courtesy to knock first," he said, not giving an inch. "Didn't your mother teach you any manners?"
"Next time, maybe we should hang a necktie on the doorknob or something," said Newkirk.
"Ah, ciel, I miss having a reason to do that," LeBeau said wistfully.
"What?" asked Carter.
"I'll explain when you're older," said Hogan. "All right, Schultz; you're here. What do you want?"
"I am so very sorry to disturb your important business," Schultz said, sarcasm dripping from every word. "But the Kommandant wishes me to invite you gentlemen to a surprise barracks inspection, so achtung! Everyone stand by your bunks!"
With the obligatory sullen grumbling, they did, and stood, stone-faced, as a pair of guards came into the barracks and rooted around a bit. These inspections were not an uncommon occurrence, but they never got any less nerve-wracking, especially the bit where they poked at the bunk that hid the tunnel entrance.
One of them, apparently heading for Hogan's desk— and the coffeepot sitting on it— pushed past Hogan. Not roughly, not even impolitely, but enough that the crumpled paper fell out of his pocket.
Every prisoner in the barracks tensed. Hogan could actually feel a few more strands of his hair going gray.
Something else clattered to the floor a split second later; Newkirk bent over and quickly snatched it up.
"Was ist los?" Both guards wheeled around to look for the source of the noise. Hogan took advantage of the distraction to scoop up the paper and shove it back in his pocket, silently blessing Newkirk's wits.
"What's that, then?" Newkirk said.
"What did you pick up?"
"Pick up? Me? Nothing at all, sir," Newkirk said, in a meek tone too unnatural to be even remotely real. "Don't know what you're talking about."
The guard glared at him. "Show me your hand," he ordered.
Newkirk opened his left hand. Empty.
"Your other hand," the guard snapped.
Reluctantly, he did, revealing his cigarette lighter. "Oh, is this what you meant? Sorry, but I was just heading out for a smoke when you gents arrived."
The guard roughly patted him down, emerging empty-handed. "If you were going to smoke, where are your cigarettes?"
"Funny you should ask. That's where I ran into a bit of a snag," he said, with a winning smile. "But hope springs eternal, what? There's got to be someone left in camp I haven't borrowed from in a while."
"Dummkopf," the guard muttered with a scowl, but he left it at that, and a few minutes later they all left, presumably to brighten up the dull lives of the denizens of Barracks Three.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"Good work, Newkirk," Hogan said. "Thanks."
"That's what you pay me for," he brushed it off. "Just lucky they were that easy to put off the scent; I thought for a minute that I might have to let them find my pencil sharpener."
"Good thing you didn't. That would have meant at least a week in the cooler," Carter said.
"Which, come to think of it, would've meant sitting out tonight's mission," Newkirk said. "Cor. Think we can get the goons to come back for a second round?"
"Nice try," said Hogan, and glanced at his watch. "Right. Chow call should be in about ten minutes. We'll get back to work after lunch."
Accordingly, seven and a half minutes later, they were summoned to the mess hall for lunch. Three and a quarter minutes after that, they were standing in line waiting to be served.
That was when some luckless KP worker cleared his throat and explained that there had been some technical difficulties with the meal. Namely, that there wasn't going to be one, because the supplies that had been trucked in that morning were in a state of decay so far advanced that even the Germans had admitted that serving it would probably be considered a war crime.
As the grumbling reached a fever pitch, the erstwhile cook assured them that with any luck, replacements would arrive by the next day at the latest, and until then they were, regrettably, on their own.
And two minutes after that, they were all trudging back across the compound in no sweet mood.
"LeBeau, what do our food supplies look like?" Hogan asked. "I'm not asking you to cook for the whole camp, but is there anything we can distribute to the other barracks?"
"Very little, I am afraid," LeBeau said. "Our usual sources have been less than helpful lately; they cannot sell what they do not have, no matter how much we offer. So we have not been receiving supplies. And there have been several large groups of hungry escapees this month."
"Damn. Well, going hungry for one day won't kill us," Hogan said. "The job tonight is our first priority; everything else, including dinner, will have to wait."
The others traded complicated looks. "Gosh, Colonel Hogan. We've been having a real streak of bad luck already," Carter said, flinging himself into the breach. "That surprise inspection, dropping the plans, no food… are you sure we should go ahead with the mission?"
"Sure I'm sure," Hogan shot back, an edge in his voice. "Knock it off with that kind of talk! I'm telling you—there's no such thing as bad luck."
The crash of thunder overhead at that precise moment did not, he thought, add any weight to his argument. The torrential downpour that came with it was almost enough to make him doubt it, himself. And the new leak in the ceiling, the one directly over his desk, was almost as eloquent a rebuttal as the ones he saw in the faces of his entire core team.
"Right," he ground out between his teeth. "You have your orders; get moving. We've got to be ready to move by lights-out."
As they climbed down the ladder to the tunnels, Hogan could clearly hear Carter saying, "Well, if all else fails, I've got a lucky rabbit's foot in my locker. Maybe that will help."
"Why would it? Didn't work too bleeding well for the rabbit, now did it?"
*.*.*.*.*.*.*
Author's note: This was supposed to be a short vignette for Friday the 13th, but as usual, it outgrew its original borders.
Title is from 'The Coming of Good Luck' by Robert Herrick
So good luck came, and on my roof did light/ Like noiseless snow, or as the dew of night/ Not all at once, but gently, as the trees/ Are by the sunbeams tickled by degrees