The Great Escape (14 page)

Measuring below by string and above by trigonometry, Floody estimated that the halfway house was just about under the wire. About thirty yards on was the edge of the wood, and Roger agreed with him that about seven yards inside the wood was a safe enough spot to break out.

“We ought to be there safely in a fortnight,” Floody announced to the committee, “then we’re going to have a very tricky job to dig straight up about twenty-five feet.”

“Why can’t we slope gradually up from where we are now?” asked Marshall. “We’d only have a few feet to go vertically then, and it’d save a hell of a lot of time.”

“I’ve been thinking of that,” Floody said, “but I don’t think it’d work. Too risky. If a trolley full of sand gets away on a downhill slope, it’ll smash everything.”

“I don’t see why a trolley should get away,” said Marshall. “We’re out to save time, aren’t we?” Marshall was the obstinate one. When he got an idea he hung on to it like a leech.

“If a rope breaks,” said Floody, “you can kiss your tunnel good-by. The trolley’ll tear half a dozen frames down, and you’ll get twenty feet of sand collapsing. Over that distance it’ll probably fall for a hell of a height, and you’ll have twenty tons blocking the works. The trolley might run on and bring down a bloody sight more than that.”

“Put double ropes on,” said Marshall. “The time’s the important thing. If we don’t get it finished, the Yanks are going to miss out and be pretty sore, and I don’t blame ‘em.”

Pulling on his mustache, George Harsh said seriously in his Georgia accent: “What about the guys down below if a trolley gets away and brings everything down?”

“I tell you there’s no need for a trolley to get away,” Marshall said.

“A man’s only got to lose his grip on the rope,” said Floody. “You can take all precautions, but it can happen. There’ll be a couple of blokes trapped, and they won’t have a chance.”

“I’ll take a chance on that,” Marshall said.

“So will everyone,” said Roger gently, “but that isn’t the point. If we have to take a chance, we can. The thing is, do we have to?” He turned to Floody.

“No,” said Floody. “I’m bloody sure we can make it in time my way.”

“Then that’s it,” Roger said. It wasn’t often he came into the technical arguments, and when he did it was always at the end with a decisiveness that settled it. Marshall fought tooth and nail for his ideas, but when the decision went against him he accepted it, muttering for a few minutes sometimes, but then resigning himself to it. He was an old regular, had been in the Air Force for donkey’s years, and was always bubbling over with high-strung enthusiasm. Outside tunnel work his only relaxation in the camp was playing the oboe, and his roommates wouldn’t let him do much of that.

In Block 106 Jerry Sage and Davy Jones had been sitting up all night for two nights running. Their vigil was by the light of a fat lamp around the kitchen stove where a great covered pot was bubbling. Out of the lid of the pot stuck a long thin tube made out of bits of jam tin rolled around a pencil. There were yards of the tube; it angled down from the pot into a tin of water where it curled around and around and then stuck out through a fat-sealed hole in the bottom. Every few seconds a globule of colorless liquid dripped and fell with a glistening splash into a jar on the floor. The Fourth of July was approaching, and through one of Al Hake’s stills the Americans were preparing for it.

The camp was drier than Prohibition ever made the U.S. Once a year the Germans produced a few barrels of a liquid which mocked the traditions of German beer and was compared detrimentally with the natural product of the horses that pulled the honey wagon.

For state occasions the substitute was raisin wine and its byproducts. About a dozen men saved all the raisins and sugar from their Red Cross parcels for several weeks and then tipped them into half a barrel of water with fermented raisin as a starter. For three weeks it bubbled like a witch’s cauldron, and when all the raisins had fully fermented the pulp residue was strained through a towel. The sludge that came out was courteously called raisin wine. It had phenomenal alcoholic ferocity and would lubricate one good party, leaving a feeling of impending doom in the morning.

The fastidious ones double-distilled it into raw spirit, and one of the Poles, who had been a chemistry lecturer at Kraków University, used to make from it an imitation rye whisky in return for a share in the party. He poured in some viscous stuff that looked like honey and added a little white powder. He would never say what they were, which was probably just as well. The spirit turned a pale amber, and if you couldn’t remember very clearly what rye whisky tasted like, it wasn’t a bad substitute. When July fourth dawned, a dozen American syndicates had gallons of the stuff prepared.

They started toasting the day as the sun edged up behind the pine trees, and half an hour later hell broke out in the British blocks as Paul Revere came riding through, followed by forty whooping Indians. Paul Revere was Jerry Sage, in a paper tricorne hat and long woolen underpants for knee breeches. He threw Bushell out of bed, and Roger, grinding his teeth slightly, took it quietly, largely because Sage and Harsh were sitting on him. He was rostered for the tunnel that day and went below after appell with a wistful glance at a bottle of hellbrew that Sage was brandishing.

The party went on all day until about three o’clock a senior officer suggested they should ease off in case some exuberant soul wandered over the warning wire. Half a dozen senior British and American officers threw him into the firepool, clothes and all. Goodrich, with bland apologies, leaned down and offered to help him out and the man in the pool dragged Goodrich in too. Goodrich climbed out and threw Wings Day in, and within five minutes everyone had been thrown in the pool.

After they had climbed out, someone noticed a body drifting sluggishly on the bottom of the pool. They hauled it out, laid it flat, and started squeezing the water out with artificial respiration until you could almost hear the ribs cracking. The body stirred after a while and eventually sat up with a wan smile. “The water wouldn’t hold me up,” he said foolishly.

George Harsh wagged a solemn finger at him. “It’s the faith you lack,” he boomed, and vanished in the direction of his hut.

He was back in a minute with a blanket draped around him in biblical style. Standing on the edge of the pool, he raised an arm for silence and intoned: “Thou shalt have faith and walk upon the waters.” He took a firm pace forward, and the water closed ruthlessly over him.

They pulled him out, and he stood in dripping dignity, wrapping his cloak around him.

“I got two steps,” he lied shamelessly, “but my faith gave out.”

“Tom” had gone fifty feet past the halfway house when one of the penguins slipped up. He was a little careless, pulling the pin out of his trouser bags on the fringe of a crowd around a volley-ball game instead of in among them. It only needed a little slip. Glemnitz was prowling about and saw the yellow sand before it was covered up. He didn’t say anything at the time. Glemnitz never signaled his punches.

Every ferret was in the compound the next morning, and they turned over all the gardens. In several of them they found more yellow sand than should have been there. Roger and Valenta watched them and saw Glemnitz and Rubberneck walk out, grim and thoughtful.

Roger sent for the committee.

“Glemnitz knows there’s a tunnel,” he announced. “Now there won’t be any peace till he finds it. It’s going to be a race, and we’re on the dirty end of it. They’ll be searching every hut, and that means they’ll be concentrating on all the concrete floors. There’s nothing more we can do about ‘Tom’s’ trap. Maybe it’ll hold, maybe it won’t. Dispersing is going to be the toughest part. Glemnitz’ll be watching the compound like a hawk.”

“If he knows there’s a tunnel, why worry so much trying to hide the sand?” someone asked. “We’re not giving anything away they don’t already know.”

“You bloody stupid clot,” Roger turned on him. “They’ll identify the penguin traffic and trace it back to 123. Use your brains, for God’s sake.”

“Have you seen the guys in the goon-boxes?” said Harsh. “Every son of a bitch has got his field glasses up watching all the time.”

“Probably marking the numbers that go in and out of every block,” Roger said. “I want an immediate restriction on traffic in and out of 123.”

“You can’t stop it,” someone said.

“I don’t want to stop it,” Roger said cuttingly. “That’d be just as fishy. I just want the camp to know they’re not to go to 123 during dispersal hours. There ought to be about enough penguin traffic to make it look natural. There’s one thing we’ve got to keep in mind. Glemnitz doesn’t know how many tunnels there are or how advanced they are, and he won’t have the faintest idea everything is so organized. He mustn’t get to thinking it’s anything more than a little effort of a few blokes. If he does, he’ll turn the whole bloody camp inside out. He mustn’t find anything more.”

“Well, what about the dispersal areas?” Floody asked. “It’s going to be a bloody risk putting it in the compound.”

“We can put some in the gardens they found the first lot in,” Roger said. “I know the Goons. They won’t think of looking there again. For the rest, we’ll just have to have bigger and better diversions.”

Sage said he’d get the whole goddamn camp out.

Glemnitz, Rubberneck, and a dozen ferrets searched block 106 the next morning and nearly took it to pieces in the process. It was one of the three blocks along the western wire. The others were 107 and 123.

About 11 A.M. three heavy wagons drove in and careered around the compound, mostly along the sides of the huts, trying to collapse any tunnels by weight. They wrecked half the camp gardens, but tunnels thirty feet deep were safe from that sort of thing.

Next morning they searched 107 for five hours. The Keen Type had had an attack of cold feet and wouldn’t tell Axel Zillessen what huts were next on the list, but Blind Peter could have made a pretty good guess. There were no shifts down “Tom” that day. With the ferrets busy on 107, Minskewitz spent the morning carefully cementing the edges around “Tom’s” trap. Very thin cement, so it would dry quickly.

We came off appell next morning and found the screen of tommygunners around 123, the ferrets inside. Roger, Floody, and Crump couldn’t bear to watch and walked silently around the circuit all morning. At two o’clock the ferrets came out carrying a few nails and some wire — all they’d found in the way of illicit property.

They searched another block the next day, and that morning the stooges on the routine searches found ferrets hiding in the roofs of two blocks. They’d climbed up there while we were on appell and had their ears glued to the ceilings. There was no point staying up there after being spotted, and the embarrassed ferrets dropped out of the manholes and walked off.

Outside the south wire the first huts of the new compound were nearly finished. They were prefabricated and went up quickly. With all the ferret activity there had been no tunneling for three days. Time was getting short.

Roger went and talked it over with Massey, Goodrich, and Wings Day. The senior men, less experienced in tunneling, never tried to throw their rank about and interfere, but they shouldered responsibility where they could help on policy matters. They advised Bussell to take the calculated risk.

Roger spent a special security warning around the camp that night. In the morning Minskewitz chipped the new cement away from the edges of “Tom’s” trap and Floody took a shift down. They dug ten feet during the day, but the penguins, working very cautiously, could get rid of only three-quarters of it.

Birkland was walking round the circuit that evening and saw a ferret moving in the wood outside the compound. As he watched, curious, he saw the ferret slip down behind a pile of branches on the edge of the wood. Birkland stood there for a quarter of an hour but the ferret didn’t come out again. He went to Roger’s room.