The Daftest Plan Ever Conceived was put into motion that afternoon.
Drew kept a stiff upper lip and remained iron-jawed as Sean did his grumbling and made dire predictions, but privately he was just as worried. This plan was a long shot. In the dark. With a few thousand Nazis surrounding them. They would probably get themselves captured, tortured, and killed. Drew tried to look on the bright side, but as time went on he went from "However miniscule it is, we still have a chance of success" to "Well, at least our deaths will be a good cautionary tale for the brass: never send only three men to kill a well-protected dictator in a city swarming with Nazis, no matter how skilled they are".
When the blazing white sun crawled over the sky's apex and started down to the mountains in the west, Drew had a sudden premonition of how everything would go wrong: they'd be captured, stripped and beaten in front of Karl, tortured until they broke, until there was nothing human or self-respecting or thinking in them, and shot and thrown out in the badlands where the sun melted the flesh off their bones.
He took an overgenerous gulp of water which only unsettled his belly more and did not mention his sudden terror to Sean.
But by the time the day wore thin, Drew's mind settled along with his stomach. A strange, detached calm, as though he was an outsider witnessing all these events unfold. He still realized that he could die and die horribly, but the thought no longer disturbed him. He felt philosophical about it even. He'd had his hard spots, but overall, he didn't mind the life he lived. Dying trying to save a friend wasn't the worst way to go. When he looked at Sean he saw a similar calm quench the fear he hid, but Drew had an unpleasant feeling that it wasn't acceptance so much as surrender.
Drew had hoped that his fear had died completely, but the sight of the guards and the checkpoint at one of the entrances past Tobruk's walls disabused him of that notion. He was sweating so hard his grip on the steering wheel of their stolen truck was slippery. Sean was equally stiff next to him, like a rabbit frozen as a hunting dog bore down on it.
What if I forget my German? What if it's not convincing enough? What if something's wrong with the papers? What if these guards know the men we're impersonating? What if we take too long and the superior officer calls for us? What if we can't get to Karl? What if we can, but we can't find a good exit route?
The guard had dark drooping eyes like a basset hound, which made him look even more tired and slow than he was. "Papers, please." He mumbled in German.
Drew practically shoved the stolen identity papers at him.
The guard barely looked over them at all. Drew realized with a shot of instant relief that they could've forged the papers and this man still wouldn't have noticed. The next question froze his blood, even if it was delivered in a bored and uninterested tone, "Your names?"
I know this one, I know this one, Drew chanted. He swallowed, "Hans Siedel, sir."
"Emile Pfeiffer," Sean said.
The guard grunted and shoved the papers back at him, "You've got a bloody weird accent. Where're you from?"
Fuck, Drew thought. He had no idea where the two men they'd stolen the identities of were from. And his native accent was already bleeding through…
"Saxony," Sean said suddenly.
The guard fished a half-crumpled cigarette out of his pockets. "One more thing," They both turned to face him, praying it was something that they could answer.
The guard smirked, his eyes bright for the first since they'd seen him. "Your trousers are unzipped." They both looked down and out of the corner of his eye, Drew saw Sean turn a shade of red that practically glowed in the dark.
He zipped up his trousers with a scowl and as much dignity as he could muster (which wasn't very much), and Drew collapsed laughing against the steering wheel. Their watchman finally waved them on. Drew found himself inexplicably liking him, probably because his laziness and juvenile sense of humor reminded him of Banes.
Drew was still laughing as they drove in and parked next to a line of other trucks. "Shut up!" Sean snapped as they did, his delay only brought on by his unaccustomedness to speaking German.
Drew stifled his giggles as they climbed out. Sean stopped by him to slap him on the back of the head, making his helmet slide down his forehead. He tried to suck in his air lost to laughter as Sean scanned the area with trained eyes. He took in the high walls, the guard outposts, the way the patrols guards lingered to talk or smoke and the officers eating in the little café in front of them. He gave particular notice to the narrow alleyways and the pathways between the roofs.
"Let's check Karl's planned exit route. If he didn't reach it they might not have found it," Sean whispered, only speaking in German in case whispering in English drew attention.
"If you say so," Drew replied.
Sean carefully observed the houses to their left. He nudged Drew and set off. His stolen uniform didn't fit quite as well as he'd hoped, and despite the silliness of the worry he still feared that its bagginess would give them away when they passed the officers. Drew watched the officers out of the corner of his eye, but they seemed far to engrossed in a tale about the incompetence of one Italian officer to notice them. Sean led them up the stairs and through an empty two-story house that had been repurposed as an office. He stopped at the window next to a desk stacked with two-foot high piles of paper and looked out.
"This is it," with a glance behind him to make sure they weren't being watched, Sean stepped aside so Drew could see the rocky path leading back to their rendezvous just beneath the window. The opposite wall of rock ringing the path was deceptively close to the window, and unless you stuck your head out and looked left you couldn't see the route hidden by shadows and bushes.
Drew sighed in relief. "Alright, we've got our exit. Let's find Karl."
Easier said than done as it turned out. They both agreed that avoiding conversation was best in case their German slipped, so they couldn't ask 'out of curiosity' where the prisoner was, and had no idea where he might be held. In the end they decided to follow a steady stream of men who looked like they were taking a break in hopes they'd eavesdrop on a conversation about him. The krauts led them through a series of shadowy alleys to a large courtyard, dark but lit just enough to see by from lamps and the little spark-like lights of lit cigarettes that gave the faces of the men smoking them a ghoulish glow. The topics of conversations were remarkably similar to the ones back at the camp: How's that girl you've got back home? Got any booze? Are you as bored as I am? Hey, don't you owe me money from that last card game? I'd kill for a hot bath. Fuck, it's cold tonight. Fuck that Lieutenant; I just know that he hates me.
It was like a carnival mirror, except with voices and words.
That just left him and Sean, standing awkwardly with nothing to do. Drew cursed himself for not bringing cigarettes. Hard to suspect a sitting and smoking private of being up to no good. They walked self-consciously across the stones of the courtyard, feeling that they were being watched despite everyone ignoring them, staying several feet away from everyone else. It was bizarre, and Drew couldn't get over it; being so close to their enemies. He felt like he was walking among lions.
Drew stopped dead at a sight that greeted them against a sunburnt stone wall. A solid wooden post had been fitted into the stones, and sitting at its base was a carelessly discarded length of rope. Blood, barely visible in the light cast by the lanterns, stained the stones around the post a red-brown. It was a whipping post, and if Karl truly was captured and not dead, then that blood was probably his. Sean stopped beside him, and Drew saw a twitch cross the muscles of his face.
There was a dark alley between the wall and the next building that Sean led him to. Drew followed, casting a look over his shoulder to make sure they weren't being watched. Hopefully Sean had an idea. A constructive idea, not a snide remark, since Sean seemed to consider those ideas. The alley was quiet, muffling the chatter from the courtyard with thick walls. The buildings there weren't used, and it was easy to see why; there were deep cracks in the mud-brick walls and in some of the foundations, and very little but the supports and rubble was left of the houses at the end of the street.
When they were hallway down the alley the buildings leaned precariously and cast even more shadows than normal, leaving it so dark they could barely make out each other's faces. Sean whirled around. Even unable to see his face, Drew could tell he see the way his shoulders bristled. "What now?" Sean snapped, the anger in his tone not hiding the anxiety.
"Now we find him!" Drew hissed back. He was embarrassed and frustrated and frightened of the hang-ups in his own plan, and he didn't need Sean picking it apart even more.
"How? Sooner or later, an officer will see us—"
"Looking for something gentlemen?" A cool, amused third voice said.
Standing in what little light there was in the alley was a man. They could make out a smirk on his face but no other features. He was average height, of average build, with blond hair that reflected the moonlight. He wasn't dressed like an officer.
Drew reached for the suppressed pistol at his belt, a spare Karl left them—
"Were you looking for the prisoner? Or should I say, Karl Fairburne? You nearly found him, I'll give you that. If you're so curious…I don't have any guards to escort him yet," The man smiled in amusement like they were children caught with their hands in the biscuit tin.
For a half-second Drew's head was spinning so fast with new information — who was this man? How did he know Karl's name? How was he related to Karl's imprisonment? — that he couldn't respond. But the instant his senses returned he dropped his hand from his pistol and said heartily, "Ja!"
It was really fucking cold tonight. It was always cold, especially in this dank cell and blanket-less bed, but tonight the elements seemed determined to kill him. Maybe that'd be for the best.
Karl had checked every inch of his cell, but there was no way escape route from there. He'd tried the holes near the ceiling to discover that they were the result of a dangerously unstable foundation, and the slope of the ceiling warned him that dislodging anything was likely to lead to the entire building collapsing on him. The door was too heavy for him to break open and no way to pick it from the inside. If he had any opportunity to escape at all, it was when Johan was dragging him out for another torture session. But he had no weapons bar a nail he'd pulled out of his bunk, and even if he was fully armed he couldn't take on Johan and his two guards of the day without one of them raising the alarm. Even if by some miracle he evaded all of that, he was in the middle of a Nazi-controlled city with wounds that made walking a challenge. He had no hope of getting back to the rendezvous. He was dead meat. The best he could hope for was freezing to death.
One mixed blessing from the cold at least was that it numbed the pain.
The door slammed.
Rage burst in his chest like a volcano. Hadn't he done enough? Did he still believe that he could beat something out of him? That he'd broken? Oh, he wasn't broken yet. Far from it. He wasn't going to break—that was his one remaining purpose.
There was only one set of footsteps in the hallway. Odd. Johan never visited him without guards. He knew better than not to. And the guards always brought his food when Johan visited. Other than that the other side of the door was totally silent. The key scraped into the keyhole, and there was a brittle click as it unlocked.
Karl tensed every muscle, reveling in the sting of his injuries and the way his skin pulled at them. If it was just Johan on the other side of the door he'd be ready.
The door creaked open, and Karl saw it in slow motion.
A familiar blue eye shown through the cracked doorway, a sincere and open sky-blue, not the heartless ice blue he knew Johan's to be. For a second he thought it was just new meat, but then…
"Karl," Drew grinned and all the tension in his face eased off, "let's get out of here."