"Five bleedin' hours." Newkirk muttered, staring through the window in the door to the clock on the wall in the hallway before he shook his head and paced back into the room.

LeBeau watched him from the seat in which he had been dozing and yawned stretching to his full length, which wasn't much. "How far do you think we would get if we casually headed for the Hofbrau?"

"Dressed like this..not far." Newkirk said, glancing down at his sweat and dust stained uniform. It was dark outside the hospital room. The night still coming faster than the day. "But if we stole somethin' from the doctor's lounge..." The Englander left the thought dangling where it was and grew silent.

They'd been all but ignored in the small hospital room, as had the man in the bed. His condition hadn't changed and he had recquired little in the way of care. The nurses had popped in two times, but said nothing to the two POWs. What bothered the Englander most was that they'd seen and heard nothing of the doctor since he'd left them in the room. The only reason Newkirk hadn't already walked out of the hospital was because he had caught a glimpse of Corporal Wilmutt standing just outside the door.

"If it were Schultz gaurdin' us instead of Mutty, he'd be treatin' us to beers at gunpoint." Newkirk muttered, then turned to face the ever darkening room, leaning back against the window sill.

"True. Schultz loves his beer. And his strudel. And his "potato pancakes"." Louie did his own impression of the jovial eater. "I don't think I've ever met a German more enthusiastic about the dullest of foods."

"He'd eat anythin'. Tried to eat a bar o' soap once."

"What!?"

Newkirk smirked, his hands in his pockets, staring at the toe of his boot as he thought back. "Shortly after I started gettin' Red Cross packages...you remember they were delayed at first..." Louie nodded, already smiling and Newkirk continued. "After I'd hid the cigarettes and the candy bars, and traded everythin' else, all I had left was a bar of soap. One particular afternoon, I had nothin' to do. I started carvin' into that bar and by the time I was done it looked just like a bit of amber sweet. I hadn't been up to anything intentional but I had a few debts and so I made a bet with some of the jokers in Barrack 4 that I could get one of the guards to eat that piece of soap."

Newkirk stopped, leaning back, his eyes dancing at the memory. "Oh the money I had ridin' against me. But somehow I knew I was gonna win this bet. One rainy afternoon along came Schultz. I told him all about this fantastic new bit of candy that I'd got in me red cross package and I offered to share a piece with him.

"It tastes funny, though." I told him. "It's like your first taste of wine. It takes a true connoisseur of candy to appreciate this sweet." Schultz was all about it. Convinced that he had the expert taste required to truly appreciate what I was hesitating to give him."

Newkirk started to laugh, choking on the memory, then tried to sober. "I took it out, wrapped nice and neat in a bit of brown paper. I'd written some bullocks on it to make it look fancy. He unwrapped it, sniffed at the paper bouncing his eyebrows the way he does. "Oh this is gut. I can tell already." He said, then popped it into his mouth."

"For shame, Pierre!" LeBeau admonished, but he was grinning. "How long did it take for him to spit it out?"

"Seconds." Newkirk said, grinning broadly. "He'd tasted soap before, the dirty rascal."

"You won your bet?"

"Of course! And.." Newkirk put up a forestalling hand, "To keep things friendly between us, because who wants to be shot for tricking a guard into eating soap, I shared my winnings with the sod. When he realized the profits he could make he offered to eat soap for me anytime I asked."

As the laughter dwindled between them Newkirk stepped closer to the oxygen tent than he'd been all day, crossing his arms protectively in front of his chest, and leaning in to study the unconscious man. "Hard to believe somebody so full of life could be pulled away so quickly."

"He is not dead yet, mon ami." Louie said, quietly.

Peter felt what might have been emotion starting to overwhelm him. It might have been a cold too. He would sooner have blamed it on a cold than admit that he had feelings of friendship towards the enemy. Wiping at his nose, Newkirk quickly stepped away from the bed and said, "Good thing too, he owes me money."

Louie watched Newkirk's face closely, catching the sudden congestion in his voice, and the moisture in his eyes. He smiled gently, knowing his British friend's ways inside and out, and decided to say nothing, giving Pierre his space. "He'll make it." Louie said, firmly hoping that it would be true.

When Hogan woke it was well after dark and his foot felt like it had been stuffed into a gun barrel. He was laying on something soft, covered in a rough blanket and alone in a dark room. A not very big room, he found when he moved his arms out from under the blanket and smacked his knuckles against a thin, wooden wall.

To his right there was a wall, and two feet beyond the edge of the bed to his left was another wall. A closet, a hidden room perhaps? It made sense that his genial host would place an unexpected patient in a safe room, just in case. Hogan couldn't escape the feeling that he had been secreted away in a coffin, however, and worked his way slowly to an up right position. Grateful that the air above his head was clear of obstruction.

He listened for a few minutes, disoriented in the darkness. There were no voices, no way of knowing how long he'd slept, or who might be waiting outside the door, assuming he could find one. He moved his foot from the surface of the bed, the tightness and additional weight telling him that the doctor might have succeeded in casting his ankle.

Hogan wasn't too happy about it, but he didn't have a choice. The proximity of the walls made it easier to stand, and the dull pounding in his ankle, distant as it was, told him that he'd been dosed with some kind of painkiller. He stood three feet from the end of the bed, feeling around the wall in front of him until he found a crack that ran ceiling to floor. He pushed, pulled, then slid the panel to the left and finally got it open.

The room beyond was dark as well, but light filtered under the edge of a door. The room he'd slept in had to have been hidden behind the pantry. Hogan moved as quietly as he could, wincing when his wounded ankle encountered canning jars and tins. He could only hope that unwanted visitors would assume he was a rat. A very large, graceless rat.

Standing at the thin pantry door Hogan listened for voices, sensing the greater heat of the room beyond and shivering. Before he could open the door himself he heard a metallic rattle near his right shoulder and flinched away from the bright light as Helen jerked the door open.

"You're awake!" She said, breathing heavily. The look she gave him was a guilty one, and she seemed perturbed at being distracted from whatever she had been doing before. As his eyes adjusted Hogan scanned the room beyond the girl's shoulder, then stepped past her. She didn't put too much effort into getting out of his way, and stayed clinging to the door once he was free of the pantry.

Her behavior spiked adrenaline through his system, warning him that something was off. "Who's here?" he asked, limping down the length of the counter until he could see into the room beyond the kitchen. There was a low fire burning in the fireplace, a rumpled blanket and pile of pillows on the floor beside the fire and a pair of cups sitting on the hearth.

"Nobody is here." Helen said, belatedly. "Father and Charlotte took the girls into town. Back to her home."

"You said that your sister-in-law lived with you." Hogan corrected her, then turned back to the kitchen, hopping to the outer door and glancing through the small window it afforded. The moonlight reflected off the bare skin of a half-unclothed male streaking across the open yard and disappearing into the woods. With a frown, Hogan relaxed a little, turning a disapproving glance toward the teen girl.

"Boyfriend?"

Helen jutted her jaw out and pursed her lips, saying nothing in response.

"Listen, kid. I don't care what you do on your own time. Just don't lie to me when there are lives hanging in the balance. Especially mine."

Helen looked away, shrugging one shoulder, still clinging to the door. Only now she had developed a peculiar blush to her cheeks, and a moment later Hogan realized that she was crying.

This time he was positive it couldn't have been anything he had said, but he took a careful step toward her. The girl turned from him, wiping at her cheeks before stomping into the dark main room where she busily cleaned up the evidence of her clandestine evening.

Hogan sighed and leaned against the counter, finally getting a good look at the cloth wrapped splint, and not a cast after all, that the doctor had crafted around his still swollen ankle. Thankfully the doctor had been kind enough to leave his pants intact, merely shoving the cuff up.

"Where is your father, Helen?"

"I told you. He went with Charlotte to their home. She needed some things." Helen said petulantly, carrying the two cups into the kitchen and setting them down forcefully in the basin that they used for a sink.

The thing that had been nagging at the back of his mind suddenly came to the forefront and Hogan scanned the room rapidly before he asked, "That package of information. What happened to it?"

"Father took it with him. To meet the contact." Helen said, blinking at the unexpected fervor in the American's tone.

"With your sister and the little girls!?" Hogan demanded, spotting his jacket on the back of one of the kitchen chairs and jerking it on.

"He was going to meet the contact alone, after he dropped them off." Helen explained. "There is no danger...Paul met with them all the time. They are gut people."

"If they are such gut people how did the Gestapo happen across your brother, just in time to capture him and then shoot him dead?" Hogan demanded, searching under the tables and chairs for his boot. He wasn't going to be able to get it on over the splint, but he wasn't going to leave an American made military boot in their home either.

Helen didn't have a response for that, her face tightening in a rush of emotion.

"For that matter, how do you know you can you trust that boy you were with tonight?" Hogan demanded, the outraged commanding officer tone overtaking the rush of compassion at the sight of the girl now weeping in front of him. "Suppose he found out that an American was hiding out in your house, and went to tell his parents. Your family would be arrested within hours and this whole operation would go down the tubes."

Angrilly Helen spat, "He has no parents. They were killed while traveling. A bombing raid. American bombers."