The Great Escape (20 page)

The compound dust was frozen hard under a foot of snow, and most of us tried to keep warm by going to bed during the day. It was no time for escaping and Rubberneck knew it. The rest of the ferrets were very glad to be invited into rooms for a brew, out of the cold.

That, reasoned Roger, was the time to open up “Harry” again. It was about January 7, when he called the committee together.

“The idea is a blitz campaign,” he said. “If we can finish ‘Harry’ in a couple of months while the Goons aren’t expecting it, we can seal it again and break as soon as the weather’s right.”

“What about dispersal, for Pete’s sake?” Floody asked. “We can’t get rid of the stuff while the snow’s about.”

“That’s what the Goons’ll be thinking,” Roger said. “We’ve got to find some way of doing it now. Anyone got any ideas?”

They talked about it for an hour and got nowhere. There didn’t seem to be any way of doing it. If they packed it under the huts, it would be found. If they stored it up in the roofs, it would probably be found there too. Likewise if they hid it, as before, in the rooms, once the ferrets found sand, the hunt would be on again till they located a tunnel. And “Harry” was the last hope. They wouldn’t risk it.

Canton suggested digging a small tunnel as a blind and letting the ferrets find it but that only meant more sand dispersal. Also, as Roger pointed out, they might find “Harry” instead. Now that the new compound was up outside the west fence, the north side was the only practicable tunnel route. That would mean tougher searches of the northern blocks, including 104. He closed the meeting and told them to go away and think of something.

Crump and Fanshawe stood talking for a while outside 110, and Fanshawe suddenly said, “What about the theater?”

“Under it!” said Crump. “God, I was just thinking of that.”

“Is there any room?”

“Bound to be. It’s a sloping floor.”

They ran back inside and told Bushell, who was peeling potatoes. He put them down with a dawning glint in his eye and said slowly, “I really think you’ve hit it. That floor’s a couple of feet high.”

“It ought to be safe,” Crump said. “I don’t think the sods have ever bothered to search it properly.”

“They can’t.” Roger was grinning. “Not underneath anyway. We didn’t put any trap doors in the walls.”

The theater people weren’t happy about the idea. They thought if the Germans found sand under their floor they might shut the theater down and put a stop to camp entertainments.

“Escape is more important,” Wings Day said, and issued a tactful but uncompromising order that the theater was to be used for dispersal.

Travis fixed a seat in the back row of the auditorium so that it tipped back on hinges, and under it he cut a trap door in the floor. Fanshawe slipped below with a fat lamp and found there was enough space to disperse more sand than “Harry” would ever yield.

Immediately after appell on January 10, Floody, Pat Langford (“Harry’s” trapfuehrer), and Crump started chipping the cement away around “Harry’s” trap. They thought they could get it done in about twenty minutes, but Crump had made such a good job of it that it took them two hours. They lifted the stove off the tiled square, the trap swung up easily, and they clambered below carrying a fat lamp each, wondering nervously what they would find. “Harry” had been shut for three months, and tunnels need constant maintenance to stay in good order.

Crump had made a good job of “Harry.” The air was still fresh down there because he had left the by-pass valve open on the pump. He crawled up the tunnel, finding a little sand had seeped through here and there, but only four shoring frames had twisted out of plumb and he chalked them to be replaced later. Floody found the kit bag bellows on the pump had rotted, and that afternoon Travis went down with a couple of carpenters and fitted new bags. The pump seemed to be working stiffly, and Crump reported from the face that not much air was coming through.

“I guess there’s a blockage in the air line somewhere,” Floody said gloomily. There was nothing to do but unearth the line till they found the damage — the stickiest job possible because it meant reefing up floor boards with the risk of the frames above sinking and starting dangerous falls. Luckily they found the worst trouble in the first few feet, near the tunnel mouth. Some of the tins of the airline had buckled and sand had leaked in. They replaced them and the pump worked normally again, but Crump found jets of air hissing up through several floor boards and they had to take out more boards, dig down, and seal the leaking tins with fresh tarred paper. It was a long and exasperating job and took several days.

On January 14, Floody was able to take the first full shift down for digging. He trolleyed up to the face and ran his finger gently down the sand. It was fine and felt fairly firm so he knew he could space his frames about a foot apart and board them on top. He dug ten feet that day, and the sand flooded back to the shaft where Crump packed it in kit bags.

After appell, the evening shift laid fresh rails, and about 8 P.M. Langford opened the trap for the first dispersing. It had never been so easy to get rid of the sand, because as it was the off season for escape, Massey had persuaded Von Lindeiner to let the prisoners walk about between the blocks till ten o’clock. Covered by darkness, there was no need to use the trouser bags.

As each penguin reported to the trap, Langford hauled up a kit bag of sand on a sling, and the penguin swung it over his shoulder. George Harsh signaled the all clear from the corridor, and the penguin nipped swiftly out of the hut and across the path into the door of 109 opposite. He reported to a controller’s room there, and if ferrets were about he slung the bag under a bunk and waited. If it was all clear he moved out of the far door of 109 with his sand and walked around 120 through the snow straight into the theater. Fanshawe, by the trap, passed the kit bag below.

A faint glow was coming out of the trap where, down below, a dozen dirt-stained men in long underpants were crawling on their bellies by the light of a couple of fat lamps. In turn each one took a bag and wriggled to the side of the floor and emptied it, packing it down as hard as he could. The penguin took an empty kit bag back with him, folded under his coat.

Over in an end room of 112, the duty pilot kept a team of runners, and if any German — ferret or otherwise — came into the camp, he sent one man to tell George Harsh who it was and where he was heading, and two more to tail the German. One of them kept him in sight all the time and periodically sent the other to tell George his latest movements. George sat most of the time in the room across the corridor from “Harry’s” trap, knowing at any time where every German in the compound was. If a ferret headed for 104, George slipped across and warned Langford.

Langford had a drill for closing the trap and could do the whole operation in just over twenty seconds. Closing the trap itself was easy enough, but there was more to it than that. First, a quick warning to the people below to keep quiet, then he slipped the grill in position and used blankets to muffle the hollow sound. The trap came down, and he slipped the extension flue off the stive, moved the stove back on the trap, and slipped on the usual short flue. Langford always had the stove burning red-hot so any ferret prowling about the room would be discouraged from moving it to investigate the tiled base.

“Harry” was electrically lit all through the night, the stolen cable being taken right up to the face, tacked to a corner of the tunnel roof. It made work much easier, though the day shift still had to use the fat lamps because the power wasn’t on. They were getting rid of so much and that Floody sent down a couple extra workers on the night shift to keep on digging. Fanshawe dispersed it all, and in a week “Harry” had gone forward fifty feet, and Crump and Floody built a halfway house. It was on the same lines as in “Tom,” about seven feet long and two feet six inches square. They called it Piccadilly, and it was just about under the cooler.

Sound travels through loose sand, and Shag Rees swore he could hear the jackboots rasping on the concrete floor of the cooler.

“I ought to know,” he said. “I know the bloody sound well enough.”

Roger insisted on going down and working a couple of shifts. He was in grim good spirits again, obsessed with the prospects of escape.

“There’ll have to be at least one more halfway house,” Floody told him. “I think we can probably leave it at that. We’ve done just over 100 feet now, and I’d say there’s another 250 to go.” That was across the rest of the vorlager to the far fence, under the road and the grass verge to the shelter of the woods.

George Harsh was geting grayer every day. There was a little giner-haired ferret called Rudy, and his contact lived in 104. It had never mattered a great deal before but now Rudy went on the late ferret shift and came in after appell every evening. He made a beeline for his contact’s room and sat down to talk, smoke his contact’s cigarettes, and get his brew. He sat there for hours behind the closed door, while the trap was open down the corridor and penguins went traipsing by, lugging their sand. For a time George considered making the contact move to another block, but dropped that idea because he knew Rudy might still haunt 104 to scrounge cigarettes from his other friends in the contact’s room.

“We’ll have to let Rudy stay,” he gloomed to Floody, pulling agitatedly on his mustache. “I guess we can take enough precautions.”

Rudy was always given the chair farthest from the door, and his contact and at least two others always sat between Rudy and the door. Outside, George had a stooge standing hour after hour with a cooking pot, and if Rudy ever got up in a hurry to go, there would have been a loud scraping of feet in the room, and as Rudy opened the door, he’d have been bowled over by the stooge bringing in the pot. George also always had one of Valenta’s German speakers loafing in the door of the kitchen, and if Rudy or any other ferret wandered in at short notice, he would hold him up with a half a minute’s conversation while Langford went through his trap drill.

“Harry” was nearly two hundred feet long when the full moon came. The sky stayed clear, and for a week the moonglow off the snow filled the compound with a soft radiance.

“It’s too risky,” Fanshawe told Roger. “It looks like day outside. The penguins’ll be spotted in no time. They could see them from the goon-boxes.”

Roger, impatient and irritable, gave the pack-up order, and there was no tunnel work for a week. Every day he went along to Chaz Hall and asked what the weather would be that night, and every day Hall gave him the same answer, “Bloody moon. No cloud.”

Crump used the time to make new ropes for the trolleys, as the old ones were rotting. Williams had been saving up string from the parcel store, and Crump took on the exasperating job of making three hundred feet of four-ply plait, the long ends constantly tangling so that he had two men standing behind him clearing it.