Kinch looked up from his seat behind the radio table as Carter and Lieutenant Hogan entered the main tunnel hub. Carter gave the lieutenant an uncharacteristic dark look out of the side of his eyes as he came over to Kinch.

Lieutenant Hogan either didn't catch it or didn't care, seeking out the sleeping chamber immediately. Kinch could hear a distant, soft, worried "Hey, Teddy, you okay?" from one of the Lucky Strike crew checking on him as he came in. It sounded like Captain Luck. Then came an answering mumble back that he couldn't quite catch.

"You found the colonel? Gave him the message?" Kinch inquired, worried about Carter's expression.

"Yeah," Carter replied flatly. "He went straight up to the Rec Hall."

"Okay. Addison and Foster were up there and ready to cover for him if needed." Kinch eyed Carter, who had picked up a pencil from the radio table and was turning it in his hands. "You okay?" Kinch asked.

Carter shrugged. He glanced over his shoulder, then spoke very low, just above a whisper. "The colonel and the lieutenant must've had a big fight. The last thing the lieutenant said was he didn't want to talk to the colonel again—ever."

Kinch grimaced at the thought of how Colonel Hogan would react to that. "Well, if the lieutenant's temper matches his father's, I guess it's hardly surprising they clash." He kept his voice low too, hoping to soothe Carter as well as keep their conversation private.

"Yeah, but—geez. Wouldn't you give anything to be able to see and talk to your dad?" Carter rapped the pencil hard on the table, then started slightly at the noise and put it down.

Kinch stared off into the space, visualizing his father. It had been so long since he'd seen him—over two years. "Of course I would," he answered automatically, then shook his head. "Not that I'd ever want him here. I can't even imagine that. I'd want to be home with him." He looked up at Carter. "But we grew up close. You did with your dad too, right?"

Carter nodded.

"But the colonel and the lieutenant didn't," Kinch continued. "That'd make all the difference in the world."

"I suppose." Carter kicked at the hard-packed dirt floor. "I just always thought the colonel would make a great dad for a kid someday. But his real son doesn't seem to think so. I started to try to tell him the colonel's a good guy and he shouldn't talk to him like that, but he just told me to mind my own business."

"Well, they're in a complicated situation, and we don't know all the ins and outs of it. So it's probably best if we steer clear," Kinch said diplomatically, then shifted the subject. "Look, we need to help the colonel as best we can right now. Do you have your shopping list for London? I'm supposed to get it off in our next contact in ninety minutes."

"Okay, I'll have it for you soon." Carter gave a final dissatisfied kick to the floor, and then disappeared down the tunnel that led to his lab.

Kinch settled back down to his own task of figuring out what should be on his part of the shopping list. He was methodically inspecting the radio for wearing parts beyond the broken headset—the dampness and dust of the tunnel were always hard on it despite the drop sheet he used to protect it when it wasn't in use—when he heard a soft step. He glanced up, expecting to see Carter back, but instead saw Lieutenant Hogan drifting over towards him. The dim lighting of the tunnel made the lieutenant look very young. Just a kid—but doing a man's job, Kinch thought with a small pang of sympathy that almost overrode his earlier aggravation from their confrontation up in the barracks. Like so many other young guys in this war.

"You ought to be sleeping, sir," he advised quietly, trying to keep his voice kind despite his annoyance and worry over the young officer's insubordination to the colonel. He figured that whatever kind of conversations the two had had with each other, the kid had to have been through an emotional wringer today, so it wasn't surprising if he couldn't sleep. But he was going to be up all night, so it'd be good if he could do so now.

The lieutenant shrugged. "Too keyed up to sleep, and I'll keep the others up." He kept his voice down too. "I, uh, I wanted to apologize for earlier. I shouldn't have pulled rank on you that way. I know you were trying to follow your orders."

"Your orders too, Lieutenant," Kinch couldn't help answering.

"Yeah. I know." He picked up the same pencil that Carter had been worrying earlier and toyed with it. "I just couldn't see it—was too mad to see it right then. But I shouldn't have pushed you that way, and I'm sorry about it."

"You're in a tough situation," Kinch observed neutrally. "And it can be hard to separate the personal and professional sometimes."

Lieutenant Hogan scowled. "You sound like my old man. Except of course he says that he can do it with me, no sweat."

Kinch raised his eyebrows slightly. "I didn't know he'd said that, but . . . well, I've spent a lot of time with him over the past couple of years, so I guess he's rubbed off on me. It's not surprising if I occasionally sound like him." He fixed the younger man in his gaze seriously. "But don't think it doesn't cost him, in this situation. I know him well enough to tell that last night and today have taken one of the biggest tolls on him that I've seen."

Lieutenant Hogan stopped fiddling with the pencil and narrowed his eyes, looking at Kinch searchingly. Kinch kept his own gaze steady, but wondered if he should have taken his own advice to Carter and steered clear of the subject.

"You seem close to him," the lieutenant remarked at last, dropping his eyes and setting the pencil down carefully.

"I'm his chief of operations and SEA.* And we all live in each other's pockets here. So yes, I guess you could say we're pretty close. As close as he lets anyone in. He's a pretty private man, despite that outgoing exterior."

The younger man slouched against the brace that supported the tunnel ceiling for a moment, then abruptly asked, "Can I ask you something, military ranks aside?"

A little warily, Kinch answered, "Okay. Shoot."

"So what do you think of my father—or I guess I should say, of Colonel Hogan? Your honest opinion, not just what you think you ought to say about him as your CO. I won't tell him, or anyone else. I just—I want—no, I need an outside perspective at the moment." He bit his lip. "Please."

Kinch smiled slightly. "Well, mine's hardly unbiased." He thought for a moment about how to start, what he could say honestly that might help the lieutenant the most—and the colonel too. "At times he can be the most exasperating man I've ever known. He wants the impossible done—and part of what's exasperating is that he constantly finds ways for us to do it. He works us hard, long hours above and below ground, but it's important work, and we all know it needs doing. He can be moody, and he gets snappish when things aren't going well or when he's tired. But he's carrying a lot on his shoulders, so I'm willing to cut him slack for that. And, I have to admit he'll often apologize for it when he barks unfairly, which is more than I can say for most other officers."

He glanced upward, thinking of the apology he'd just gotten from the younger Hogan in front of him. The lieutenant managed a small, self-conscious upturn of his own lips, but it quickly faded.

Kinch leaned back against the wall and folded his arms before continuing, highly aware of how the lieutenant was watching him with dark, guarded eyes. "But the colonel's also the most brilliant leader I've ever seen. This is an all-volunteer outfit. And he got hundreds of men to volunteer for it—not just those of us who are the core crew and run the day-to-day missions, but everyone else in the camp, all the support teams and cover staff. He didn't order us to do all this. He persuaded us, even though the whole idea was completely crazy." Kinch chuckled affectionately. "He does have a silver tongue, that's for sure. It's amazing what he can talk you into."

"Yeah," the lieutenant agreed glumly. "It's one of the things my parents dislike most about him."

Kinch noted the reference to the young Hogan's grandparents, but let it pass without comment. "I think it's related to his sense of fun, too. He gets a kick out of bamboozling the Kommandant and guards who run the camp, so that we can make our missions work. But he'll play with us, too, even when we're the instigators of the joke on him, and that's also unusual for an officer in my experience. I remember one time we'd dug a false tunnel on his orders, as a decoy for the Kommandant to find so we could get our guys out the regular tunnel. When the colonel came in the barracks we wouldn't tell him where the fake tunnel was, made him guess and hunt for it. And he was willing to play along, even enjoyed it." Kinch smiled at the memory, and the lieutenant's mouth tugged to the left in a slight half grin.

Kinch grew serious, and leaned forward again, resting his right arm on the radio table, toying with the clipboard lying there as he spoke. "Most importantly, I guess I'd say he's fair. He treats us all equally, listens to our ideas, uses them if he thinks they're good, credits us for them too. That's rare, in my experience, in men in general and officers in particular. He doesn't ask of us anything he's not willing to do himself, up in camp and down here. He'll even take a turn with the dishes sometimes. He gets a hundred percent from all of us, because he gives a hundred and ten percent of himself. We do a lot of the heavy lifting, but he takes his turn at that too, plus he's the front man with the Germans. That means he's often in the greatest danger. But he's also a genius at keeping them off balance, at manipulating the Kommandant and guards into doing what he wants, to play their roles to our advantage. He's sharp, always on the lookout for how he can turn whatever weak spots he sees to our benefit."

As he spoke, Kinch could see Lieutenant Hogan listening carefully, holding himself still as he leaned against the ceiling brace, hands in his trouser pockets, trying to absorb what he was hearing.

"Why's he doing all this? Was he ordered to? Couldn't he have just escaped? . . . Come home?" the younger man eventually asked, then interrupted himself bitterly. "Or back to England, I mean. Of course he'd never have come home."

Kinch shook his head, troubled by the younger man's words and their tone, unsure where they were coming from and if what he was about to say would help or not. "No, he wasn't ordered to do it. The whole thing was the colonel's idea. He assessed the camp—the Kommandant and the guards, the whole area—and decided it could work. He found a couple of underground contacts when we were outside on work trips, got a bunch of us working to dig the tunnels, build the radio, everything. And once he got in touch with contacts he had in London and got permission for the operation, they helped build the escape network, got us supplies, and then started using us for other things too." He paused for a moment, then added, "Everything you're seeing, and a lot that you aren't—all this is his vision. You, and a lot of other downed airmen, would be prisoners or dead right now if he hadn't built this. Let me tell you, building it was the hardest thing I'd ever done—till we started operating it. But we've saved a lot of lives, kept a lot of people out of the hands of the Nazis. With help, of course."

"You didn't say why he's doing it," the lieutenant responded after a moment.

Kinch placed his clipboard back on the radio table, and folded his hands, considering that. "I think for him it goes way beyond just duty," he answered slowly and seriously. "It's because he really loathes the Nazis, what they stand for, what they've done, what they're doing to people here who aren't part of the Nazi Party, the destruction they've wreaked on the rest of Europe. I guess for most airmen that stays fairly abstract; you focus on targets to bomb, on avoiding flak, handling attacking fighters, getting your mission done and back to base safely. You know it's important to win the war, and you want to stay alive, and that's fair enough. But you don't see what's really going on. Down here on the ground—well, it's a different story."

The lieutenant stared down towards the radio, but his gaze was unseeing. "He was always anti-Nazi. Even before the war started over here, he kept insisting that Hitler was more than just a nut, that he was really dangerous. Then once it did start . . . well, he was saying that same thing the last time I saw him, trying to explain to me why he had to go to England. I heard him and my Pops arguing about it." He stopped, swallowed, then continued haltingly. "I sided with Pops. Didn't think he should go. I wouldn't . . . I didn't even say goodbye to him. Didn't hear from him afterwards, so I thought he was mad at me . . . though he says now that he wrote me." His voice sounded dubious and he paused for just a second before adding, "Then in '42 my grandparents—his parents, I mean—wrote me to say he'd been shot down."

"I've seen the letters," Kinch replied quietly. "The envelopes, anyway, with your name on them, when I was collecting them for mail call. I didn't know which relative you were. But he's been writing you."

The lieutenant looked down the tunnel and compressed his lips for a moment. "He never told you about me, huh."

Kinch didn't like the bitter tone the colored that remark. "Lots of us find it hard to talk much about home while we're here," he answered. "Plus, rank does make a difference. He doesn't share much about his private life with any of us. But it goes both ways—or doesn't, to be more accurate, I guess. I don't think I've ever told him about my sister. But that doesn't mean I'm not thinking about her a lot."

The lieutenant fell silent, digesting that. Kinch let it ride for a bit, ostensibly returning his attention to the radio and his list.

"What happened to him when he was shot down? Did they . . . hurt him when they caught him?" The question seemed dragged out reluctantly from the lieutenant, and he'd folded his arms tightly against his chest.

How to answer that? Honesty seemed the best route with this kid—as it always was with his father. But definitely not the whole truth. "He was captured by an SS troop. Usually the Germans treat officers reasonably well, the Luftwaffe takes them and they abide by the Geneva Convention. Our officers get interrogated, of course, but no real rough stuff."

"But my dad was treated . . . roughly?"

The kid had seen through the dodge. As sharp as his father, apparently. Kinch paused, deliberating before answering, certain he shouldn't give too much detail. This wasn't his story, and he had no idea what the colonel would want. The less said, the better.

"Yes," he finally answered. "They turned him over to the Gestapo, who had him for a while. But they didn't break him, and he came out of it fighting mad. He'd no sooner got here than he started to organize the prisoners. The guys here were already working on a tunnel, but he decided it was too close to the surface. So they dug deeper and by luck found this old mine that a bunch of our tunnels are based on. They figured it was most of a century old, half collapsed and completely forgotten. Don't know what kind of ore the miners were hoping to find around here—I'm guessing from what we've seen that they didn't find anything—but it gave our guys a good head start. Then the Colonel decided that it could be used for more and better things than just a mass escape. So, here we are. And able to help you."

The lieutenant looked at him carefully. "'They'? You mean you weren't here when he got here?"

Kinch shook his head. "LeBeau and Newkirk were. I got here a couple of months later, and Carter a bit after me. There was still plenty of digging and set-up work to do. But I wouldn't be here if Colonel Hogan hadn't insisted on it with the Krauts. They could've sent me some place a lot worse. So I owe him a lot. He gave me a chance."

The kid's face crumpled, and Kinch realized he'd made some kind of misstep. Lieutenant Hogan swung away from the table, clearly agitated.

"He won't give me a chance, though. He says I can't fly again, too dangerous for his operation here with all of you."

Kinch sighed. So that was it. No wonder the kid was so upset.

"I'm sorry; I know that's got to be hard," he said, trying to sound sympathetic.

Lieutenant Hogan turned back, looking at Kinch searchingly. His face changed, cooled—just as Kinch had seen the colonel's do on a hundred occasions. "But you agree with him." The lieutenant's voice made it a statement, not a question.

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, but I do."

"Why?" the lieutenant asked stiffly.

"Because it's too much risk to give the Nazis a chance at that kind of leverage over the colonel," Kinch answered levelly. "If they got their hands on you, you'd be an awful weapon they could use against him. We got incredibly lucky picking you up last night. The chances of you getting shot down again are too good, unfortunately, if you keep flying missions over Germany, but it's unlikely that it'd happen right here a second time. The Germans would most likely get you anywhere else. We just can't chance that."

"I don't get it! Why am I so much worse for him than any of you? You said you two were close. But he and I aren't! He lives with you guys. He never has with me! I've hardly ever even seen him! I may have known him more years, but you've actually spent far more time with him and known him far better than I ever have!" The lieutenant's voice had risen.

"Because no matter what you're his son, not a man under his command. And that makes the difference." Captain Luck's voice was unexpected, and both men turned in surprise. "I've been thinking about this all day," the captain continued, addressing the lieutenant. "And much as I hate to admit it in this case, the colonel is right."

Lieutenant Hogan said nothing; he didn't have to. The betrayed look on his face said plenty.

Luck stepped forward and put his hand on the young man's shoulder. "There's no man I'd choose as my copilot over you," he said firmly, looking right at him. "You have the skill and the guts needed; you have a cool head under fire. Your age doesn't matter. I know you've worried about that, but you've proven yourself to me and every man on the Strike, ten times over." He squeezed tightly. "But sometimes we get caught up in situations that are bigger than we are. This whole war, just for starters. But right now, right here," he looked around the tunnel, "we're in a unique place. Pilots are precious, and there aren't enough of us, but still, there are other men who can fly bombing missions. But I'm guessing," he looked over at Kinch, dropping his arm, "that there's no other group like this."

Kinch nodded.

"In fact, I'm willing to bet that your activities aren't limited to picking up stranded crews," Luck added.

Kinch looked down at his clipboard, face neutral. "I can't comment on that, sir."

"No, you shouldn't, Sergeant. But anyone with eyes and a brain can see the possibilities here. And how dangerous it is for all of you. And therefore how you need to minimize all possible risks."

"But no one's answering my question!" Frustration ruled Lieutenant Hogan's voice. "I don't see why I'm a greater risk on later flight missions. On this one, okay, sure: my—uh, the colonel told me how I in particular could be traced back to you guys here. But how am I more of a threat to him than anyone else, even if I do get captured on some later mission? There'd be no more evidence of a link to this operation than with anyone else. And I'm no more likely to tell them about it under questioning than you are, sir." He glared at his commanding officer. "Even less, quite frankly, since I've got more stake in protecting him."

"And he has a stake in protecting you, far greater than he has for anyone under his command here," Luck answered back. "That's the problem."

Kinch stepped back in. "Lieutenant, suppose the Gestapo got him. We're as careful as we can be, but that could happen any day to any of us; we all know it. And now suppose the Luftwaffe had you, and the Gestapo knew that. They'd put the two of you in a cell, and start working on you. It's a common enough tactic for the Gestapo, to use family against each other. Either the colonel would break, to try to help you, or he wouldn't, to try to save everyone else. But that would break him just as surely and permanently, in a different way."

Luck nodded in agreement. "He'd have two irreconcilable duties, as commander and father. God knows it's hard enough for any officer to lose men under his command. But sometimes it happens, or it's even necessary in the course of missions. That's the job. But you could never be just a man under his command, Ted."

The young man shook his head. "I don't matter that way to him," he said, his voice near a whisper.

"Yes," Kinch responded, also softly but with a penetrating look. "You do."

Lieutenant Hogan met his eyes for a moment, then glanced away, blinking hard several times and then swallowing before giving the smallest nod in return.

Kinch glanced at Captain Luck, who was looking at the lieutenant with concern in his eyes but shifted his gaze to catch Kinch's. Kinch flicked his eyes toward the sleeping alcove.

The captain took the hint, nodding slightly then touching the young man's shoulder. "C'mon, Ted. Let's go talk some more. Or lie down and rest, whichever you'd prefer."

The lieutenant nodded again, and quietly followed his CO from the chamber, while Kinch stared absently at his shopping list, his mind elsewhere entirely.

ooOoo

*Author's Note:

1) Hogan introduces Kinch to Crittendon in "The Ride of the Valkyrie" as "in charge of operations"; what exactly that means isn't clear, but it sounds much more authoritative than the roles he assigns to the rest of his team members in that episode. A lot of fan fiction refers to Kinch as Hogan's second in command (I've used the term myself in one of my stories). But as best I can tell from what I've read recently, Kinch would not be Hogan's "second in command" because non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in the United States Army cannot "hold command," because they have not been granted such authority by the head of state. But NCOs can "have charge" of units they are responsible for. A good term that the United States military seems to actually use and that fits the role Kinch generally seems to play in the series, and even more so in much fan fiction, is SEA: Senior Enlisted Advisor. The SEA, as the name implies, acts as an advisor to the commanding officer. So that's why I chose that term for this story. Thanks to Sgt. Moffitt for answering some questions and letting me bounce ideas on this topic off her.

2) Kinch's memory of the joke his men play on Hogan comes from the episode "Reservations Are Required." Hogan offers to do the dishes near the end of the episode "The Missing Klink," saying that the humility will do him good.