Five Past Midnight (3 page)

With its guests' propensities for escape in mind, the castle had been modified. A machine-gun tower had been built in the northwest corner of the terrace outside the walls, giving a sight line down the north and west walls. Catwalks had been erected to eliminate guards' blind spots in the courtyard and on approaches to the gate. The castle's eighty-foot- high exterior walls were floodlit, as was the POWs' bailey. Microphones and primitive seismographs had been planted in the walls to detect digging. The lights went off only during air raids. Guards were on duty all night in the courtyard.

But since D-Day, escape had lost much of its allure, and attempts had largely stopped at Colditz and other POW camps. General Eisenhower had recently ordered POWs to stay behind the wire. "We'll get to you soon," Colditz's senior POW officer had heard Ike say over the camp's hidden radio. The prisoners knew Ike would keep his word, and so did the guards. The POWs could now hear Allied guns night and day to the south.

Only the American had tried to escape Colditz since Eisenhower's order. More interested in the American than in the approaching Mitchell, Lieutenant Heydekampf glanced at him again. Until last autumn, food had been adequate for the prisoners. Now the POWs were slowly wasting away. The lost weight had sharpened the angles of the American's face. With the wide cheekbones, cleft chin, and the three-day stubble he always wore, his face resembled a gnawed bone. His eyes were the gray-blue of smoke. He had thin, bloodless lips. His blond hair was sparse, and he kept it shorter than the POW fashion, little more than bristles along the sides of his head. He was taller than the other prisoners, and until recently his shoulders had sloped with muscles and his arms had filled his shirts. But he was thinning quickly, with the rest of them, and now the cords on his neck stood out and his clothes fit sloppily. The American had an aura of restrained violence about him, a brawler's presence. The guards knew he was incessantly calculating, searching for weakness and an avenue to exploit. The commandant had ordered that one of the guards on the catwalk above the potato cellar stairs was always to watch the American when he was in the yard. Hey- dekampf and the other guards often speculated about the American. They had concluded he was both dangerous and mad, an alarming combination.

The POWs' breaths showed in the raw air of morning, the steam almost filling the small bailey. Their eyes were on the gray sky. The bomber's remaining engine blustered, echoing between the walls of the courtyard and rattling the windows. The plane sounded as if it was aimed right at the castle. Then the second Wright engine quit, and the abrupt silence in the POW bailey was startling. Heydekampf followed the gaze of the prisoners to the small patch of leaden clouds visible above the castle walls.

The B-25 suddenly filled the sky over the bailey, eight hundred feet above the castle roofs. The bomber was canted on its starboard wing so that the POWs could see the white star on the fuselage. Fire had engulfed the engine cowling on that side. Smoke and flames soared behind the wing as far as the tail gunner's bubble. The plane's nose had been hit by flak and was a blackened and gaping hole. The canopy behind the cockpit was a twisted mass of metal churned by white flames. The roof gunner's bubble was filled with flame, resembling a beacon. The hydraulics had gone awry; the left landing gear was down and the bomb bay doors were open.

The Mitchell was a medium bomber, with a payload of over two tons. This plane was carrying incendiaries, firebombs the size of milk canisters. The flak had detonated incendiaries that were still in their bomb bay cradles. The plane had become a roaring torch.

Heydekampf swallowed hard, at once pitying the Mitchell crew and relieved the bomber would fly well over the castle. The plane would land in the orchards north of the castle or in the Mulde River.

The lieutenant's relief was short-lived. Canisters were spilling from the open bomb bay. The plane was quickly out of sight again but the bombs remained, sprinkled across the sky in a ragged formation. And they were growing larger.

Heydekampf blew his whistle. "Dismissed," he yelled in English. "Get into the building."

The POWs were motionless, transfixed by the specks in the sky.

"Now," he bellowed. "Get going."

A stampede began. Guards and prisoners dashed for the doors to the scullery, prisoners' kitchen, chapel, parcel room, solitary block, and the stairs down to the potato cellar, anywhere away from the courtyard. They quickly filled the barbershop, the guardhouse, and the shower room.

Heydekampf raced for the delousing shed at the southwest corner of the yard, where fire-fighting equipment was stored. The shed was a temporary structure made of clapboard with a shingle roof. The lieutenant yanked on the latch cord and rushed inside.

On one wall of the shed were shelves containing insecticide powders and solutions, an assortment of barber sheers, and a dozen flit-guns.

A shower had been rigged but most of the delousing was done with the sprayers. A footbath was in the center of the hut. Tin tubs used to chemically wash clothes were in another corner. Nits, ringworm, fleas, chig- gers; the shed had seen them all. Along another wall were stirrup pumps and buckets of sand.

The lieutenant grabbed a pump and was turning toward the door when an incendiary bomb shot through the shed's roof, showering the room with shingles. The canister slammed into the cement floor and burst open, spewing phosphorous to all corners of the shed and immediately igniting. A second canister blew through the roof, splintering the storage shelves before it split open on the floor and splashed more chemically fed fire across the room.

Furious flames blocked the door, crawled up the wood walls, and surged into the shower and tubs. Acrid black smoke blinded Hey- dekampf. Fire climbed his legs. The German was surrounded by shimmering sheets of orange flame. He tried for the entry, but the inferno beat him back. He doubled over, his lungs unable to draw in the baked air. He dropped the pump. His cap fell to the pool of flames on the floor. Fire splattered onto his uniform. His hair ignited. He sank to his knees, keenly aware that he was about to die.

And he journeyed straight to hell, surely for out of the wall of fire stepped the devil, his skin leaping with flame, his eyes sinister red embers. Fire roiled around Satan's head in a profane imitation of an angel's halo. The devil's arms—limbs of flames—reached for the German.

Satan had the same features as the crazy American. It figured, was Heydekampf's last thought. He toppled toward the footbath.

The American scooped up the lieutenant and charged back out the delousing-shed door trailing flames. POWs immediately smothered the two men with their coats. They wrestled them to the cobblestones and rolled them over and over, choking the flames.

Two other incendiaries had landed in the yard. Guards and prisoners used shovels and sand from the fire station in the British orderlies' quarters to douse them. Other POWs returned to the yard and ran over to the lieutenant and the American.

The blankets were lifted. Lieutenant Heydekampf s clothes had become charred shreds. The hair on the left side of his head was scorched. His neck and wrist and calves were raw. The soles of his boots had been burned off.

The crowd around them grew larger. The American rolled to his knees. Smoke wafted from his blackened jacket and pants. His right ear was singed and his right arm would require salve. His eyebrows had been burned almost to the skin.

Lieutenant Heydekampf opened his eyes. Through heat-blistered lips he gasped, "You!" He coughed roughly and panted for breath. "I thought you were the devil."

The American grinned and spoke to a German guard for the first time since his capture. "I've been called that before."

3

THE AMERICAN scraped a rusty nail with a fingernail file. The filings dropped to a tiny red pile on a copy of the
Overseas Kid,
the German propaganda newspaper for POWs, used mainly for toilet paper. The American worked rhythmically until the nail shone like new.

Next he began filing a piece of charcoal. A cone of shavings grew on the paper. Also on the table was a tin marked NUR FÜR KRIEGSGEFAN-
GENE (FOR
POWs
ONLY),
a grainyjam distilled from sugar beets. Leaning against the wall was a baseball bat he had carved from a pole stolen from the castle shop.

He was on the first floor of the British ward. At his elbow was dinner: one-seventh of a loaf of black bread and three small potatoes. At the stove near the door Lieutenant Reginald Burke of the Royal Tank Regiment was stirring tomcat stew, a catchall for anything available that day.

"Are yours in, Yank?" Burke called from the stove.

The American threw him the three potatoes. Burke sliced them, letting the wedges drop into the kettle. The stew also contained a handful of barley and kohlrabi, a plant resembling a turnip. He tossed in a pinch of salt. Pepper was not issued because a POW who was attempting escape had once thrown it into a guard's eyes. Tomcat stew was inedible to anyone but the starving.

The POWs knew the American as John, and they knew it was a pseudonym adopted to protect his life, for reasons they could only guess. The American had told only the senior allied officer his true name.

Burke was a Londoner, with hooded eyes and ears that stuck out at ninety degrees from his head. The turret of his Churchill tank had been on fire when he fled through the hatch, and the burn scar on his neck resembled purple crepe. He lifted a pot from the stove, then moved to the table to fill the American's cup. The ersatz coffee smelled like a wet dog.

Two other kriegies were lying on their bunk beds, weak from pneumonia and dysentery. The Colditz infirmary was full. The American opened a D-bar from a Red Cross parcel. He cut the chocolate into fourths. Then with his spoon he gathered the crumbs that had fallen from the bar while he quartered it. He placed these atop the chocolate pieces, careful to apportion the crumbs evenly.

Burke ladled stew into a bowl. "This is as ready as it'll ever be."

The American rose from the table to take a bowl and cup from Burke. He carried them to a bunk where Captain Lewis Grimball of the Wiltshire Regiment was shivering under his blanket. The spring thaw had not reached the castle's interior. The American helped him to a sitting position. Grimball coughed raggedly. The American wiped spit from the corner of Grimball's mouth then held the cup to his lips.

Grimball sipped, then wheezed, "This tastes like bloody dirt, John."

"Here's your chocolate." The American placed the candy in his hand, then stirred the nail rust and charcoal powder into the ersatz coffee, and handed it to the Brit. Rust prevented anemia and the charcoal helped control dysentery.

Grimball coughed again. He nibbled on a piece of bread.

The American also served a meal to Lieutenant Richard Cornwall of the Essex Scottish (Canada) Regiment, who was lying on his bunk near the stove. The walls of the ward were gray stone, and the slate floor was set in a rococo pattern, perhaps designed by a Saxon duke. The bunks, table, a few chairs, and a stove filled the small room. Nails had been hammered into the ends of the bunks to hang clothes. One shirt was hanging on a nail near a wash bucket filled with water and with prunes, raisins, and sugar from Red Cross parcels. Fermented a month, the concoction would have a horse's kick. When guards approached the ward, a POW would yell, "Goons up," and the hanging shirt would be tossed into the wash bucket. The guards assumed a POW was doing his laundry. When the Jerries left, every drop of the brew would be twisted from the shirt. Two barred windows overlooked the prisoners' yard.

When the American returned to the table, Burke placed a soup bowl in front of him. As they reached for their spoons, the door opened and the senior allied officer entered the ward, followed by the ranking American officer.

The American and Burke dropped their utensils and quickly rose to attention.

"At ease," the SAO said. "May we have a few words with you, John?"

Group Captain Ian Hornsby had lost his Handley Page Halifax and three fingers of his left hand over occupied France, and had been caught attempting to walk out of Stalag Luft I at Barth dressed as a chimney sweep. Hornsby had seemingly taken all of Colditz's privations onto himself. He had lost sixty pounds, and his body had become spindly. He had a mulish mouth and a wisp of a mustache. Hornsby shook his head at Reginald Burke's offer of coffee.

"We thought perhaps you could tell us what's going on," said Harry Bell, the senior American POW. Bell liked to complain that his position as senior American officer didn't amount to anything because there were only five Americans at Colditx. Major Bell's bomber and fifty-one other B-17s—one-fifth of the attacking force—had been shot down during the Regensburg raid, August 17-18,1943. Bell's face had been pinched by his months in captivity, and deep lines were around his mouth. His eyes were surrounded by a network of wrinkles.

The SAO said, "We've gone along with your determination to remain anonymous, believing that you faced a firing squad or service in a slave labor gang if the Jerries found out who you were. You told only me and Bell here, and we've told no one. Except London, when you first arrived here."

The American might have nodded. His face lost its usual trace of merriment. He was wearing a wool sweater under a duffel coat and a black watch cap. His angled face, harsh in good times, had become bony. The skin had sunk around his cheekbones and jaw. He had not lost teeth like many of the POWs, and they were even and white. He asked, "A message on your radio?"

The POWs knew a radio was in the camp somewhere because BBC war news was known almost immediately after a broadcast, spread by Hornsby's runners, who would memorize ten sentences of newt>, then repeat it verbatim to gatherings of POWs For security reasons, only Hornsby and two others knew that the radio was hidden in a table leg, or that half a year ago Hornsby had devised a wireless code, a multiple substitution with frequent changes When a Geneva Red Cross official visited Colditz, Hornsby had asked him to take a message for his wife, and cable it to her from Geneva. It had contained the code, which England accepted. Hornsby had been receiving coded instruction since then.