Death In Captivity (17 page)

‘I can’t understand it,’ said Commander Oxey. ‘He must know that his German pals are taking a beating in Sicily and he must guess that the British Army will be in Italy soon. He can’t hope to shut all our mouths.’

‘I put the point to him,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘But it didn’t ring a bell at all.’

‘That’s not healthy,’ said Baird.

‘So I thought. To my mind it can only mean that the Fascists are going to make a fight for it. Italy’s a damned long prickly country, full of defensive positions, and we’re about four hundred miles up it as the crow flies. If the Italians stick by the Germans and keep their heads it’s going to take the Army months to reach us. By the time they get here, we’ll all be in Germany, Benucci included. Or that’s what he’s reckoning on, anyway.’

‘Might be a sea-borne landing,’ suggested Commander Oxey. He didn’t say it very hopefully. All four men were thinking the same thing.

‘There could be,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘Hardly as far north as this, I should have thought.’

There was another silence.

‘If we told them everything,’ said Baird, ‘where we found Coutoules and how and everything. Made a clean breast of it. Do you think it would be any use?’

‘I think they’d laugh in our faces,’ said Colonel Lavery. ‘They’d appropriate the tunnel, say thank you very much, and carry on with Byfold’s execution, as planned.’

‘Then what do we do?’ said Baird. ‘Sit and wait for it, and hope for a miracle?’

‘If I might make a suggestion,’ said Colonel Shore. ‘Stop me if I say anything you don’t agree with, but isn’t there one possible solution we’ve been overlooking. It’s a golden rule, when you’ve got two dangers, to see if you can’t set them to cancelling each other out. The Italians have taken Byfold, and they’re forcing our hands by threatening to shoot him – with just enough colour of legality to make them feel good about it. The only possible way we can save him, and it isn’t a very certain way at that, is by giving up our last trump card – the Hut C tunnel. All right. Now we know where Byfold is. Colonel Lavery saw him this morning. He’s in the carabinieri block, next to the cooler. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Colonel Lavery.

‘And the cooler’s empty at the moment, waiting for an expected influx of prisoners. And the cooler is next door to the carabinieri block. Do you see?’

‘Not at the moment,’ said Colonel Lavery, ‘but please go on.’

‘Why don’t we stage a nice little riot this evening, and get half a dozen of the right types put in the cooler? There are officers in this camp who can pick a lock with their eyes shut. They break out some time tonight, quietly remove the sentry in the doorway of the cooler, move across to the carabinieri block, let out Byfold, and then – ’

‘Yes. Then what?’ said Baird.

‘And then,’ said Colonel Shore, ‘they simply
come back into the camp.
That part shouldn’t be difficult. There’s only one gate sentry at night – and he’s in his box on the outer gate. Provided the guards on the platform don’t spot what’s happening – and remember, they are concentrating on the camp, not on the Italian quarters – then the whole gang should be back in the huts before the alarm is raised.’

‘They might,’ said Baird. ‘I agree. It’s so mad, and so unexpected, that it might work. But how are we any better off? We can’t keep Byfold if they want him. That would simply lead to a pitched battle that we should be bound to lose.’

‘Surely,’ said Colonel Shore. ‘That wasn’t my idea at all. I suggest that once Byfold is safely in the camp,
we put him down the Hut C tunnel.’

It was Colonel Lavery who eventually broke the respectful silence which greeted this suggestion.

‘Pure genius,’ he said. ‘No other word for it. It puts them in a cleft stick, of course. Once they’ve searched the camp and failed to find Byfold, they must guess that he’s in the tunnel, because that’s the only considerable hiding place they have so far failed to discover. If they
do
know about it, they’ll have to show their hand. If they don’t they’ve got to give up Byfold.’

‘What about the other six?’ said Baird. ‘They’ll know who they are and they’ll be certain to take it out of them – or do you suggest we put them down the tunnel too?’

‘I should hardly say that was necessary,’ said Shore. ‘I don’t think even Benucci could shoot them out of hand – they’d need some form of hearing if only to protect themselves – and that’s all going to take time—’

‘Provided they don’t kill the sentry, I don’t see that there could be any question of shooting them. The most they would get would be a term of imprisonment—’

‘All right,’ said Baird. ‘The first thing is, who’s going to do it? We haven’t got much time. Goyles and Long are obvious choices. If they’re willing, we’d better let them pick the rest of the team. I’ll have a word with Goyles now. What do you say, sir?’

Colonel Lavery took his time over answering. Before he did so he looked at the calendar on his wall. July 19th.

‘I wish it was a week later,’ he said. ‘Yes, I agree. It’s almost the only thing to do. It may come off. It’s better than sitting back and waiting.’

‘I wonder if I could have a word with you,’ said ‘Tag’ Burchnall.

‘Of course,’ said Goyles. ‘Come in. If it’s about those rugger posts he added, ‘I can only say how sorry—’

‘No, nothing like that. It’s just that we heard – it may be quite wrong, but you know how things get about in this camp – we heard there was some scheme on foot for getting Byfold out of clink—’

That’s right.’

‘From what I heard, it sounded rather a sporting thing altogether. I wondered if you wanted any help – Jerry Parsons is quite useful if it comes to a rough-house, and Rollo isn’t such a fool as he looks—’

Goyles made very little effort to conceal his surprise or his pleasure.

‘You’d be very welcome,’ he said. ‘We’d got four already. Anderson and Duncan are helping, but we needed two more. Come for a stroll round the camp and I’ll give you the details—’

Goyles was on the final tunnelling shift, and after tea he changed slowly into his digging kit, and made his way to the kitchen. He had done it all so many times before that most of his actions were mechanical, and only a quarter of his mind was on the job.

He had a lot to think about at that moment. It was as if two enormous kaleidoscopes were being shaken before his eyes, forming and reforming their incomprehensible patterns; or two wheels rotating and two films unrolling simultaneously. Sometimes the pictures coincided, but more often they were different. On the one side was Captain Benucci and the Fascist machinery of their captors, and beyond him the ranked Fascist hegemony of Italy itself, with the Duce at the summit, all revolving, in some quite inexplicable way, around the person of Roger Byfold, who was sitting in his cell, waiting for what the day after tomorrow might bring. On the other side was the microcosm, the little world of the camp itself, the cell-like organisation through which its four hundred inhabitants crawled and swarmed. Those who knew you and those who didn’t. Your friends and your enemies – and it was becoming difficult after his surprising conversation with Burchnall that morning to be quite sure which was which. And just as the one pattern seemed to centre itself round the figure of Roger Byfold, so was the other concentrated on the awkward, unlikeable, unforgettable figure of Cyriakos Coutoules who, in that very tunnel, only eighteen days before—

‘Wake up, Cuckoo,’ said Long, ‘You’re number one tonight.’

‘All right,’ said Goyles. ‘Let’s go. Who’s doing number two?’

‘Andy’s two, I’m three. I’ll start the pump going when you reach the bend.’

Goyles lowered himself on to the truck and started, with the expertness of long practice, to propel himself forward up the tunnel. Anderson crawled more slowly behind him, holding in his hand a rope attached to the truck. It was Goyles’ job, as number one, to do the actual excavating. The sand which he dug was placed in cardboard boxes, six of which fitted on to the trolley. Anderson, from an excavation at the half-way mark, would pull the trolley back, and load the boxes into two sacks. Long, at number three, would then make two journeys to fetch the sacks back to the shaft. It was also his job to keep the pump going. Now that the tunnel was more than a hundred and fifty feet long this system saved time and meant that the man at the face could dig almost uninterruptedly.

The tunnel was no longer quite the comfortable, all-enclosed affair that it had been. The effect of the half-timbering which the Escape Committee had ordered in the interests of speed was already apparent. To move at all in the last thirty feet was an agonising performance. It was all right as long as you were on the truck itself, but moving on hands and knees was like making your way across a series of diabolical railway sleepers, and the sides of the tunnel, which were naked in every alternate revetment, dribbled a small but increasing shower of sand on to you as you moved.

Goyles hardly noticed any of this. He scooped and dug mechanically, filling all six boxes at once, and then again. The end of his forty minutes’ turn at the face was nearly up. Whilst he waited for the jerk on the cord attached to his foot which would indicate that the truck was ready for hauling back from the half-way house, his mind reverted once again to its pressing problems.

The cord jerked.

Goyles half-turned on his elbow, his leg caught the woodwork of the last revetment, and the next moment he was lying, flat on his face, in pitch darkness. He was pinned to the ground, like a slug under a lawn roller, by the weight of the sand which had fallen on him.

It was a few seconds before he actually realised that he was unable to breathe.

But even in that agonising moment, as he arched his back and strained his muscles in a futile effort to raise himself, as the red lights started to flare and wheel behind his eyes, and his heart came bursting outwards from his lungs, even at that moment, in his mind, curiously detached from the agony of his body, a tiny but decisive piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Goyles owed his life to the fact that Long and Anderson were both old hands at tunnelling; to the fluke that they happened to be together, at the half-way post, unloading the last lot of sand, when the fall occurred; and to the fortunate chance that the lights did not fail.

If any of these things had fallen out differently he would certainly have died.

‘Start the pump,’ said Long. ‘I’ll dig him out. You’d better use the trolley to get you back to the shaft.’ Almost before he had finished speaking he was himself moving at reckless speed, towards the face of the tunnel.

As he moved he calculated the chances.

The airline of the pump was a series of jointed tins, and it ran in a shallow trench, on one side of the tunnel. It was the first rule of tunnelling that you extended this line scrupulously, tin by tin, as you went, and he prayed that Goyles had not forgotten to do so. Even in a heavy fall the digger’s body might come down across the end of the air line and protect the outlet from the sand, and in such cases experience had shown that enough air could be pumped into the fall to keep the victim alive during the period of his unearthing. The chief danger was that, so long as he was conscious, his struggles to assist might block the airline altogether.

It was a big fall, and it was obvious to Long as soon as he saw it why it had occurred. The tunnel had run into the footing of the outer camp wall. The soil having already been disturbed from above would be the more likely to collapse when excavated from below.

Long lay on one side, his head almost on Goyles’ stockinged feet and started to shovel the sand past his own body like a fox-terrier at a rabbit hole. He could hear the wheeze of air under pressure coming out somewhere in the mass ahead of him. He hoped that all the sand which was going to come down had done so already.

Goyles was showing no signs of life.

‘Probably better if he stays that way for the moment,’ thought Long.

He himself was sweating all over and the tips of his fingers were already raw. There was no time for finesse. He simply worked his way in until he could get his hands hooked into Goyles’ belt. Then he braced his knees against the last intact frame of the tunnel, humped his back and heaved with all the unexpected strength that was in his slight body.

The frame shifted ominously.

The sweat on Long’s body seemed to turn cold all at once. He stopped pulling and resettled himself. Then he took a deep breath, and pulled again, less violently, but as strongly. Under this pressure Goyles’ body started to move. Tony pulled him back steadily, shifted his own positon again, and pulled again. Now he had him clear. He disengaged one hand, felt down to the side of the tunnel, and tore open one of the joints in the air pipe.

The fresh air poured out over both of them, cool and sweet. He was lying there, trying to think coherently, and aware that he had gone dangerously near the limit, both mentally and physically, when he felt a hand on his heel.

Help had arrived in the form of ‘Brandy’ Duncan.

‘I’ve brought the trolley up with me,’ said Duncan. ‘Better get him on it. We can’t try any first aid here. There isn’t room. Are you all right?’

Long was almost as white as the unconscious Goyles.

‘I shall be OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s get him moving.’

Back in the Hut C kitchen they found Doctor Simmonds who, like the stormy petrel, could smell trouble from afar. Under his direction they laid Goyles on the floor and started to work. His glasses had been broken in the fall and in the rescue operations a splinter of lens had dug a long furrow down the side of his nose. This was now bleeding.

‘Very healthy sign,’ said Doctor Simmonds. ‘He’ll be round in a minute.’

‘We’d better clear up,’ said Duncan. ‘Give us a hand and we’ll get the trap down. And we’d better get some of that sand swept up.’

At this moment Goyles opened his eyes. He lay for a moment looking at the ceiling and then said, in a conversational tone of voice, ‘You can’t move your hands, you know.’