This was officially The Daftest Plan Ever Conceived, Sean decided.
It was all Drew's idea, and clearly the 30 hours without sleep had gotten to him when he told his finished draft of it to Sean before rolling over to rest up. Sean let it be and tried not to think about it, because surely by the time his squadmate woke up he'd realize that they needed a real plan.
But no, when Drew woke up, he was even more confident in his plan than before. Apparently Drew was a fucking idiot and had always neglected to inform Sean of this.
They were going to die in that damn city.
"These fit," Drew said again, holding up the uniforms they'd stolen off two Afrika Korpsmen (corpse-men now) who'd made the mistake of patrolling through Drew and Sean's stakeout place in the valley.
"So?!"
"So, they won't look odd on us," There was such a fierce determination in Drew's eyes that he could only be sincere.
"That's the least of our problems!" Sean yelled, "What about papers, their identities?"
"They had them on them, and if we work fast we can memorize them by tomorrow when these men were supposed to show up for duty," Drew gave Sean a hard stare not unlike Sean's mother used to give him when he refused to practice his sums.
"What about their friends? Their squad mates? They'll shoot us on sight!" Sean snarled.
"No they won't. There are a thousand enlisted men in that city. They'll assume we're two of the hundreds of men they don't know by face," Drew quirked an eyebrow at him, "Sean, we've trained to do things like this."
"In those scenarios we always had meticulously crafted identities that we had weeks to memorize and men on the inside to cover for us!" Sean retorted, "This is a suicide run!"
"It's the only way to get Karl back," Drew's eyes hardened.
"There must be a better way. Let's go back to base, tell the captain. We'll plan a proper rescue mission," Sean reasoned.
"They'll never do it. Not for a city this well-fortified. If we go, they won't let us come back and that Johan will torture our squadmate to death," Drew took a deep breath, "Sean you know that."
Sean did. The brass would never agree, not with everything else going on. One soldier was a number to them. It was a face and a spirit to a squad. "There's…" He had nothing. They had one plan that was suicidally reckless, and everything else was condemning that squadmate to the death he'd rescued Brauer from. "We won't get any second chances. You know that right?"
Drew nodded solemnly, "I do. But I won't leave a friend to die if I can try and do something about it."
Karl slouched forward, finding it a more comfortable position to sit in. The wounds on his back itched and ached like the whip was still hitting them sometimes. This was how it would be. Karl was starting to think that the torture sessions themselves were only half the torture. The other half was in moments where he could think. Here the fear built up for the next session; here he had ample time to think over every decision he'd every regretted; here the boredom and isolation could drive him insane; here his injuries accumulated, until every inch of him ached or burned or throbbed.
He'd given in and eaten earlier, and the bread sat in his stomach like a rock, and he could swear it wasn't digesting. His eyes ached with need to sleep and the dull pains told him he needed it, but he couldn't find a comfortable position. Sleeping on his back or even his side was impossible the day after the lashing, and sleeping on his stomach bent his spine at a painful curve because of the cot's rigidity and lack of pillows. He was willing to give sleeping sitting up a try though; so far so good.
His dreams were filled with dark Berlin alleyways and shadows holding long knives that were always just out of sight. He almost thought he could see the faces of people from his neighborhood in them, maybe even Noah from school.
The first face he saw clearly was Theo's, also from school, the one classmate that his cousin Lange had said had joined the Wehrmacht and been invited into the officer's academy before all communication between him and the small bit of his family still in Germany went eerily silent. Theo looked exactly as Karl remembered him, sharp-faced and mean, with a sort of perceptive intelligence that was geared exclusively for acts of pettiness and ego-boosting. He smiled with teeth when he saw Karl, and held up his knife so the dim moonlight caught it. A thick red substance ran down the edge of the blade and onto the handle.
"I helped kill him you know," Theo said, sounding exactly like he did when Karl knew him.
Karl woke up still seated with a cold sweat sitting on his skin. He folded back anger and the bitter taste of regret with his tongue, and swallowed it down.
There was a clang nearby that made his head swim. He groaned.
Back already?
He didn't look up when he heard footsteps approaching and then stop in front of the door; didn't twitch when the door unlocked with a loud click and swung open with a feeble creak. He pointedly didn't look at Johan anywhere, not even his boots.
Johan grabbed his jaw and wrenched his head up sharply. When he saw Karl's glare he smiled slow and with a certain wryness and gleam to his eye that Karl didn't want to contemplate. "Karl," He drawled, drawing out the syllables, "Will you have a chat with us?"
The guards —different from last time, had different noses — pulled Karl to his feet, the calluses on their hands burning like poison on his barely closed cuts. They were rougher than usual with him, more callous. He was dragged across the streets to Johan's "sitting room". It was the same room where his fingers had been ripped off, and it looked exactly the same as last time with the addition of a few more spots on the wood where his blood had dripped onto the armrests. He was pushed back into it. The woodgrain was agony on his back. He leaned forward once his aching wrists were locked in to minimize contact.
Johan was going through his regular routine of unpacking his kit. Karl distracted himself from the dread building up in him by taking advantage of the light to get a good look at his exposed nail beds. They looked at well as could be expected, vivid red and clotting nicely with nothing that indicated infection to him.
Johan pulled out a long serrated knife. The torturer held it up to the light and ran his finger along the edge of the blade, just light enough that it didn't cut him. There was something eerily reverent in the way he did it. "Last time I used her," Johan remarked, "I was stationed in a POW camp near the sea. They had a British agent who'd infiltrated a general's staff, and I was tasked to make an example of him."
Karl held his breath. Couldn't be.
"What was his name…? I can't seem to remember. Strange, because he was different from my other visitors. The only one that escaped me."
Johan leaned down so they were eye to eye and grinned. "You'd know his name, wouldn't you Karl? After all, you rescued him."
Karl wanted to surge forward and tear his head off. He saw Brauer, grinning jauntily with a tin cup of moonshine in his hand, but still saw Johan with his eyes, and it only fed the fury growing in his lungs.
Johan saw the recognition in his eyes and gestured a little in excitement. "You do remember! What was his name?"
Karl wasn't giving it to him; he wouldn't give Johan Ben's name any more than he'd tell him the date and time of the next offensive. That bastard had no right to it.
Johan fiddled with his knife, just barely in view. "You know, I had more ideas. More…" he gestured in the air, fishing for a word, "hmm, no, can't think of any other words. But I had more ideas of what I was going to do with this knife, all my knives, everything else in my kit. I'm always looking for more ways to do things. It all gets dull otherwise."
He smiled, thoughtfully, "Ah well. You'll do. I always have ideas I haven't tried." He brought the knife back into view and turned it and looked at it with a deep affection.
When he looked at Karl and brought the knife forward Karl briefly feared it would be his face, and it was nearly a relief when it sank into the skin above his sternum. Johan dragged it down, and it burned all the way down, to his navel. He brought the tip of the knife up almost to his lips and looked at the cut from different angles, like a painter making notes on his model. He placed the tip of the knife on the underside of Karl's left clavicle and followed it until it met where the first cut began at the manubrium of Karl's sternum. With an approving, focused little nod, he moved onto the other side to make it symmetrical.
Karl gritted his teeth together and hissed through the pain. The Miststück was making art of him.
Johan grinned at him, briefly, viciously, then without warning cut into the lash wounds on his back.
Karl screamed, and it tore painfully out of his throat and he choked on the aftershock of the breath that fueled it.
The pain was burning, sharp, aching and throbbing all at once and made black spots splashed in his sight. His muscles involuntarily went slack as unconsciousness started pulling him under…
Johan stood suddenly and slapped him twice.
Karl shook his head violently, and the movement made the black dots remaining sway.
"Can't have that," Johan said, "like I said, I have plans."
"Verpiss dich!"
"Oh don't give me that. This is nothing," Johan said as he wiped the blood off his knife with a small towel stained the color of rust.
"Nothing?" Karl echoed, watching the blood pool in his navel before running down to stain his pants a wet, dark red. The wound was deep enough to scar, and it burned like hell. The reopened wound on his back was worse.
Johan packed up his kit again, and a poor, neglected optimistic part of his brain hoped that that was the end of it, but Karl quashed it even before Johan said, "courtyard" to the guards.
They pulled him away from the chair, down the short steps down into the courtyard before what used to be the old marketplace, and again the men gathered in the courtyard gradually stopped their conversations to stare at him. It was a stomach-turning sort of déjà vu, like flashing back to a bad memory, and the aching in Karl's wounds seemed to intensify.
Karl was stood upright near the pole he'd been tied to the day before, and he resolutely chose not to look at it, not see if there were any bloodstains on it, not to think of how this would affect the healing of his present wounds.
Johan came down with a smile and a nod as a prearranged signal between him and the guards. The guard on his left brought his hand down and began undoing Karl's belt.
Karl stiffened; Johan's words, 'this is nothing' started to become clearer in meaning to him. His pants were shrugged off and tossed aside, along with his scarf and undershorts.
Karl closed his eyes and took deep breaths, counting them in fives. It was a little like the old nightmare in secondary school, back before he had nightmares that featured empty eyes and bloodstained uniforms, of standing in front of the chalkboard with no clothes on.
Except he wasn't in front of his classmates, but a few dozen enemy soldiers, and unlike his classmates they could do worse than laughing at him.
No-one was laughing now; Karl mostly heard awkward coughs. He opened his eyes just enough to see. Most of the guards were either pointedly looking away from him or unashamedly staring at his groin. Was it honestly such a goddamn mystery whether or not an enemy sniper had a set?
The guards moved suddenly, drawing Karl back with them into the post. This time he was tied upright, his back pressed flat against the splinter-filled wood. The last thing he wanted to do was scream in his naked state, surrounded by watching Afrika Korpsmen, but he couldn't stop it.
As he tried to suck air back into his lungs Johan walked down the steps with the knife. He stopped right next to Karl and leaned in so his teeth nearly caught his ear.
"I know who you are."
Karl's gut swooped instinctively, but his head told him that it meant nothing if Johan knew his name.
"Your father was the Weimar Republic's ambassador to America."
The swoop returned. It meant nothing; Karl's father and mother and sister were safe in Virginia, and all the better that everyone should know that not every German bowed to the party line
"So what?" Karl hissed.
Johan's reply was immediate, "You're a traitor to the people."
"Not me. You are," Karl growled, "I'm here to save it." The words weren't his most eloquent but they burned in his chest and it felt so good to finally let them out, after days and weeks and months and years of holding them in him. Of waiting to find somebody to say that to.
"Save it by killing its people? Supporting its enemies?" Johan's voice was curious but light, idle almost.
"I'm killing the men who are poisoning it," Karl replied.
Johan stepped back, to fix Karl in a surprisingly piercing stare, "Are you? Or are you killing us because the SA killed your brother?"
Karl's next breath froze in his throat. How does he know…?
"Your old classmate Theo told me," Johan said in the same quiet, disinterested voice, "During a conversation we had a while back he mentioned having two classmates, both the sons of the ambassador. One of them got involved in the Communist Party, and Theo helped the SA cover up his death after they killed him. The younger brother, who escaped him, was named Karl Fairburne."
Karl's glare directed up at Johan was nearly enough to kill. So, Karl thought, a deadly calm like a lid on a boiling stewpot settling over his mind, Theo was involved.
"Where is he…?" Karl whispered, nearly able to imagine the bastard's throat under his fingers.
"Surrounded by guards," Johan deadpanned.
"I don't care if the gates of hell guard him," Karl replied.
Johan gave him a haughty look, and turned to the crowd. "My comrades," He said, loud enough to be heard in the entire courtyard, "When we captured the Desert Ghost, we merely thought we'd caught a dangerous American assassin. We had no idea what a betrayal lurked in our midst."
Johan certainly had everyone's attention now: all conversations had stopped, and all eyes were now on him. He paced dramatically in front of the post. "The man trussed up in front of you is one of our own! A man born in the heart of Berlin, to a worker for the Weimar Republic!"
A shocked murmur went through the crowd. The men looked at each other and at Karl, reevaluating the man now that they knew his heritage, as everyone in their party did. There was a shout at the back of the crowd, and it ratcheted up the volume of all other conversations.
"This most monstrous betrayal, a German with German blood in his veins, trying to murder the Fuhrer as he met with his troops!" Johan shouted to the crowd.
The crowd shouted back, angry now, bristling and shifting restlessly like a disturbed beast. The men in the front were red-faced with anger, two behind them writhing trying to get through, to Karl, shouting the whole while. The soldiers who weren't outraged were drowned out by those who were, who screamed for his blood and hurled abuse.
The whole courtyard seemed to be moving, ready to surge forward and rip him apart. The officers were the worst, screaming the most vulgar insults they could think of and promising him a grisly death, and encouraging their subordinates to do the same.
Johan walked halfway in front of him and held up his knife so it caught the light. The noise got louder, supportive and the language bloodier.
"Cut his throat!"
"Rip his goddamn head off!"
"Kill him! Kill him!"
Johan turned towards Karl, a smile once again gracing his features, and the sun nearly directly above left his features in shadow.
This is it, Karl thought. He watched the knife in Johan's right hand. He was going to die in Tobruk, amid the cheers of the men who ought to have been his countrymen.
But the knife just barely sank into the skin, below the scabbing cut Johan made on his collarbone. It cut diagonally a short way then changed directions and cut diagonally another way. Johan pulled it up a bit before making three sideways cuts and a vertical one to connect them.
He was cutting a word into Karl's skin, above his heart.
By the time he started on the next letter, an 'r', Karl was sure what word it would be.
Looking at the crowd that was only really held back by the knowledge that Johan was hurting him was out of the question, but he was loath to look at Johan or even his guards, and the setting sun blinded him if he looked up. He closed his eyes again.
It hurt, everything hurt from the scabbed over cut on the back of his head to his exposed nail beds, to his lash wounds, but none of them burned as much as the knife currently etching his skin did.
Karl nearly locked his knees to prevent leaning back into the wooden post, but the pressure of the pain and Johan's grip had him going backwards. When Johan jabbed in the tip of the knife twice to make a dieresis, Karl hissed and leaned back into the wood. Splinters caught in his back. The barely healed scabs we scraped off. Karl clamped his jaw shut and tightened his throat to muffle the pained noise he made as much as possible.
Johan smirked like a schoolyard bully, like Noah and Theo did when they beat up third-years and then presumably later when in the HJ they graduated to murdering classmates suspected of ties to Communism. To the crowd, what Johan was doing was probably justice, or for a select few a bridge too far. To Johan it was no different than when Theo used to corner the school's smallest boys, steal their bags and bash in their noses. It was humiliation and pain as an end.
When he was finally finished, Johan kicked Karl in the groin. He yelped and bowled forward in pain, only for Johan to grab him by the throat and slam him back into the post, so his reopened injuries were in full contact with the woodgrain and his wobbly legs bowed out, leaving him spread-eagled against the post. A laugh went up in the courtyard.
Through it all, Johan grinned. Hot red rage flared and curled in his lungs, throat, and temples and between his eyes. A personal, spiteful hatred that he hadn't felt since the day before his family left Germany, and Theo met him shadowed by several of his fellow HJ thugs next to his house. Theo had flashed a knife and a grin at him and said, "Don't hurry back traitor."
Johan stepped back just enough so the word he'd cut into Karl's skin was visible to the crowd. It brayed in agreement. Some voices quieted, but they didn't last long as the most fanatical within the crowd started screaming for his death again, and the rest of the mob got louder with them.
The wound was burning with pain to the point where it was practically numb, and he didn't feel the blood running down his chest for a few inches. He didn't need to look down to know what it said.
Johan looked at him with a raised eyebrow, inviting critiques and comments.
"I'll kill you," Karl promised, wishing he felt more intimidating.
"Maybe," Johan replied in an equally quiet voice. He drew his hand across the wound, making Karl hiss before bringing up his hand so he could see the blood on it, "but you'll always have reminders of me."