As soon as his feet hit dirt Carter whipped around and pointed his light down the tunnel. The first fifteen feet looked clear, the rest obscured by a haze of floating dust and a slight bend in the wall. The sound of secondary and tertiary explosions, guards shouting, dogs barking, sirens wailing, was all dampened by the thousands of tons of dirt above and around him but Carter still couldn't hear what he was hoping for.
"LeBeau! Kinch!?" He listened, his echo cutting off a little short, followed by the sound of some dirt falling and then nothing.
Carter skittered forward, flashing the light in a "Z" pattern that illuminated the ceiling beams, then the walls, then the floor over and over again. He spot checked every beam before stepping under it just in case this turned out to be the only way out of the tunnel.
"Louie! Kinchloe!" He shouted again, unable to avoid breathing in the dust that filled the tunnel, and desperately waving it away from his face.
The tunnel came to a bend and Carter headed to the left, toward the tunnel that led to the radio room and Barrack 2, certain that was the direction Louie and Kinch would have taken. Another explosion from above and the tunnel vibrated recklessly, dusting Carter's hat and uniform with small pebbles and fine granules of dirt. Carter focused the beam of his light on the ceiling and studied it closely as the shaking subsided and earth settled.
This time when he looked to the tunnel ahead he saw a flash of red wool.
"LeBeau!" He shouted, running towards the jumble of beams, dirt and Frenchman blocking the path. At first it looked as if the little Corporal was suspended in midair. Several feet off the floor, LeBeau was lying face down on what remained of some wooden packing crates that had been stored against one side of the tunnel. One of his gloved hands was visible, dangling over the edge of the crate, the other hidden under his torso. His head too was hanging down, but from the mid-chest back he was hidden behind beams, dirt and debris.
Carter checked the support beams that led up to the cave-in, gauging which were still solid, and which were likely to collapse if he started moving things around. Before he could've hoped to reach a decision about how to get his friend out, the Frenchman started to wake.
His head rolled around, then LeBeau groaned and tried to lift himself off the wooden box. That move brought a cry of pain and LeBeau freed his other hand in one jerk, bracing himself on the crate next to him, frantic to escape.
"Louie, calm down. Breathe."
"Carter…" The word came out desperate, rough and grating with pain as LeBeau struggled against the pressure on his torso and legs.
"Louie, stop movin'." Carter warned, putting his hands against the beam that lay overtop the cavity LeBeau was wedged into, feeling it shake every time the Frenchman pushed or pulled. "Cut it out, Louie!" Carter tried again feeling dirt shift, cascading faster and faster into the un-collapsed part of the tunnel. The dirt was likely the only thing keeping the beam from crushing his friend entirely.
Carter gave up on the heavy ceiling support and grabbed his friend's face in his hands, going to his knees and looking the man in the face, once more desperately pleading for him to hold still.
He was in pain. Panicking. He was claustrophobic, Carter remembered distantly. "You gotta calm down, Buddy. Or this whole thing is gonna come down on ya… I'm gonna get ya out but you gotta hold still, and you gotta breathe."
Lebeau took a few deeper breaths, feeling some of the panic wane, trying to push the rest back into the box it had escaped from. The pain wouldn't go away. Breathing deep made it worse. "'Hurts, Carter."
"I know, buddy, I know. I'm gonna get ya out, and we're gonna get you fixed up good as new." Carter could see the doubt in Louie's eyes, so he nodded his head firmly to finish the sentence, then stood and pointed the flashlight at the giant pick-up sticks. He didn't have a lot of time. That was the thing clearest to him as he studied the engineering problem of the century that one crashed plane had created.
"That's him. I found him! Hey guys, I found him!"
"Is he alive?"
A pause, then. "He's breathin'. Smacked his head pretty good, but he's breathin'."
"Don't move him." Sgt. Wilson called then darted down the tunnel, waving the three men with him to come forward.
"Good work, Johnson. Get the other guys and send them this way with the braces."
Johnson nodded, rising from his knees and letting Wilson, the closest thing to a doctor that they had, get into the spot he'd just pushed himself into. "What about Carter and LeBeau?"
Wilson didn't look up from the dark skinned, down-turned face, searching the staff sergeant's skull for the origin of the pool of blood collecting beneath him. "Nothin' we can do about either of 'em right now. Get the engineers in here on the double and brace this tunnel. If Kinch is here, the others may be, too."
"Right." Johnson confirmed then took off, calling for the half-dozen other prisoners in the tunnel system.
The men in Barracks 1 were made up almost entirely of corps engineers, and many of them had been in the camp longer than even Colonel Hogan, after they were captured while trying to make inroads into Italy. About the time the tunnel system was first being excavated, the engineers had started planning for the eventual collapse of those tunnels. What goes up, must come down, they all said like a regular credo. In preparation they had eventually rebuilt every bunk, table or chair in their barrack so that it could be quickly disassembled and reused as emergency bracing for the tunnels.
The minute they saw the plane come down half the men had gone to work in the tunnels, the other half pouring into the prison compound to put out the fires. It wasn't until after they'd gone underground that they were informed by the men in Barracks 2 that LeBeau, Kinch and Carter were supposed to have been in the emergency tunnel when the bomb hit.
Kinch had managed to get mostly clear of the cave in, but by mere feet. Wilson didn't want to think about the chances the other two might have had. Without moving Kinch's neck or back, Wilson checked his limbs for breaks or blood, getting the men with him to dig out the Sergeant's lower legs and feet.
Surrounded by piles of loose dirt, Wilson couldn't figure out at first what had hit the American sergeant hard enough to draw blood. The beams overhead had been jostled and the dirt around them shaken free, but nothing substantial had fallen. Then he noticed the smear of blood on the pillar behind where Kinchloe must have been standing and the loose lighting fixture still swinging slightly on its chord.
A group of engineers, loaded down with braces turned the corner as Wilson pieced together what must have happened and pulled a pen light from his pocket. "Must've seen that fixture coming down, and reacted. Probably got thrown into that beam." He said getting onto his belly, before he flashed the penlight into the one eye he had access to, pleased when the pupil reacted. Sluggish, but it was better than nothing.
The sudden burst of light in his retina got a secondary reaction out of the imposing staff sergeant and Wilson kept his hand on Kinch's neck, gently keeping the man's head as still as possible while he talked him back to the land of the living.
"Take it easy, Kinch. Slow and easy. There was a cave in, and you were knocked out. You need to keep still as possible for a bit."
Kinch moaned softly, his arms moving to brace himself on the floor and push up. A good sign. Wilson watched for his legs to move next, keeping up the quiet encouragement.
One booted foot jerked, then another and Kinch grunted, paling a little in the flashlight beam, and looking suddenly like he was going to be sick.
Wilson and his two makeshift medics were crowded around the wounded man. Four of the six engineers in the tunnel were squeezed into the same tight space as well, excavating and bracing as quickly as possible. There wasn't going to be much room for vomit, and Wilson was already cringing at what the next few hours were going be like if Kinch lost it, and he had to wear the man's puke.
"Take it easy, Sergeant. One of you men grab a bucket on the double!?"
"A bucket?" A voice echoed down the line, but Wilson ignored it, talking the sergeant through again.
"Are you dizzy?"
He got a grunt for a response, his hands still preventing their temporary leader from moving his head too much.
"Keep your eyes closed, deep breaths and wiggle your fingers for me, one at a time."
This time the grunt was a perturbed sound, almost as if the staff sergeant were berating him for expecting the impossible. "Come on. One at a time." Wilson urged again.
After a few seconds the wounded man did as he was told, turning all his concentration to the task of moving each finger individually, distracting his mind from the nausea.
The bucket came a few seconds before Wilson allowed Kinch to try to push to his knees, and couldn't have come sooner.
The engineers did what they could to ignore the unsettling sounds, digging, shoring up the tunnel and making headway as fast as they could toward where they hoped to find their other missing men.
It was like putting up a tent by yourself, Carter thought, digging like a terrier in the dirt on the opposite side of the tunnel. Peeling away layer by layer of rubble, he glanced up at the beam of light that wavered, but stayed trained on the ceiling.
Once you had one side of the canvas tacked down so that it wouldn't move, all you had to do was lift the ridgepole until it was leaning in the opposite direction of the planted tent pegs, tack down the other side, and wedge the ridge into place.
It was easier with two people, but he'd done it on his own a hundred times in the Boyscouts. A knowledge of leverage and a little creativity was all he needed.
"Doin' alright, Louie?" Carter asked, glancing briefly to the Frenchman he had managed to turn partially onto his side. The turn had created more room between Louie's chest and the beam and the trapped man now concentrated fully on breathing and holding the flashlight. Andrew got a breathy, pained, "Oui." From the man and considered the answer good enough for the time being.
One side of the fallen ceiling beam was still firmly anchored between the upright brace and the roof of the tunnel, and not likely to move. The other side was resting on dirt and debris and lowering in a steady, slow, 45 degree angle as Carter dug carefully around it.
If he went too fast the beam might tip, roll, or slip and fall… Carter had to make sure that the debris behind the beam was stable enough not to come crashing down on his own head, or Louie's. Then he had to get it solidly planted on the tunnel floor before he could even think about any of the rest of the rubble that he feared was cutting off the feeling in the Frenchman's legs.
"How's the pain?"
LeBeau's face was bathed in sweat, his skin more pale than usual, with high peaks of red on his cheeks that Carter didn't like. But he was breathing and still conscious. "Less." Louie responded, after what seemed like an eternity, then the light that was focused on the ceiling shuddered and the Frenchman added, "Cold."
The comment stopped Carter dead in his tracks and he stared at his friend, then scrambled to get out of the pack on his shoulders, ripped the rolled blanket from the top and shoved himself to his feet. As carefully as he possibly could Carter wrapped the blanket around LeBeau's shoulders, wishing once again that he had some way of supporting the Frenchman's head and neck.
A glance to the pack that he had forgotten about up until that moment made him silently berate himself and he hefted the sturdy canvas bag, pushing it against the crates. The top of the pack exceeded the height of the crates by about three inches. Carter nestled LeBeau's blanket-wrapped head against the new pillow and smirked a little when the Frenchman sighed in relief.
The sergeant went back to digging, hyper focused on the dirt and keeping it level, and almost missed LeBeau's voice in the near darkness.
"Sur le Pont…" Three French words, barely sung in a shadow of LeBeau's normally powerful baritone.
A couple more inches of dirt gone, the surface Carter was digging at started to feel more like packed floor.
"D'Avignon…" A three syllable word, again sung on all the same note, but a step higher.
Floor! Yes! Carter sparked a fierce grin as one corner of the four by four beam touched down, and he began to dig behind it, his arms burning, turning his eyes up to the illuminated spot on the ceiling. Dust had been raining down here and there, but no dirt, and no big chunks. It was going to hold.
"L'on y danse, l'on y danse." That phrase took a lot more breath, and left LeBeau gasping, but the tone of his voice had been stronger, and the melody rose and fell lyrically.
Carter stood, panting, reaching behind the sturdy beam and gently pushing against the other bits of debris, trying to see what would move and what wouldn't. A few things came loose. Dirt, scraps of wood, some dead wiring.
As he worked his way back to the trapped Frenchman he heard him repeat the first line in pieces.
"Sur le Pont."
Carter leaned carefully over LeBeau, probing gently around his trapped torso and legs, starting to get a good idea of what he would have to do to get the Frenchman free.
"D'avignon."
"The crates." Carter whispered, pulling free of the pile up and backing out, going to his knees to look at the boxes supporting his friend's frame.
He couldn't work up, and he couldn't work to the sides. Pulling debris out over top of LeBeau could be deadly, and excruciatingly painful for the injured man, but if he took out the crates. Broke them up somehow in one move.
"Louie."
"L'on y danse…"
"Louie…"
"Tous en rond."
What he wouldn't have given to have had the help of just one more person. Someone to hold LeBeau and pull him free once Carter had bashed the crate to pieces. Not for the first time Andrew felt the fierce concern, worry and determination flood through him, pushing out through his tear ducts. Knowing he had to make this work. Knowing he had to hurry. Knowing most of all that he didn't know anywhere near enough to get Louie free without screwing something up.
"Sur le Pont."
Louie wasn't giving up, Carter thought.
"D'avignon."
He couldn't give up either.
"L'on y danse…"
Carter thrust to his feet again and once more let his hands gently explore the debris directly pressing down against LeBeau. Wood, dirt, something metal that might have been a broken joint brace. He didn't feel any blood, but the minute his hands touched the wool of LeBeau's trousers the weak song broke off and was replaced by a quick yelp of pain. Alarmed, Carter pulled his hands away quickly.
LeBeau fought valiantly past the temptation to pass out, gradually finding his voice and finishing the second stanza through gritted teeth. "L'on y danse…"
"You felt that, Louie?" Carter asked, and the Frenchman didn't respond verbally, but met his eyes confirming what should have been obvious.
Feeling meant blood flow and working nerve endings. That meant some of Carter's digging had already released the pressure on Louie's legs, and that his back was probably still in one piece. He could do this. Maybe.
Andrew looked at the beam that now probably acted more as a dam holding back rubble, than an obstruction. He looked at the crate under the Frenchman, knocking scraped knuckles against its side, testing the strength of its construction. It'd held against the cave in, Carter thought, it wasn't going to be easy to bust.
But just like the tunnel itself every structure had a weak point. Carter catalogued what he had at his disposal and thought back to the few seconds that he'd had to explore the broken joint brace. Had it moved when he'd jerked his hand back? Would he be able to get it free?
Carter scraped a dirt crusted hand nervously across his mouth, then stepped forward resting the same hand lightly on the trapped man's shoulder. He squeezed gently, apologetically, and said, "Buddy, this next part is gonna hurt."