With a roar, the car's engine accelerated. The tires spun in the dirt.

Raising a dust cloud behind and bouncing slightly on the rough roadway, it headed off in the direction of the line of tall trees and the forest.

Visser, too, watched the car depart. Then, the one-armed German turned slowly, victoriously, his face wearing a laugh that spoke of success.

He stared across toward Tommy and Hugh for several seconds, before he sharply turned on his heel and marched into the office building. The wooden door clacked shut behind him.

Tommy waited. A sudden, abrupt silence enclosed him and inwardly he filled with resignation and rage, unsure which emotion would gain prominence. He half-expected to hear a single cracking pistol report rising from the woods.

"Bloody hell," Hugh said softly after a few moments had passed. Tommy half-pivoted and saw there were tears streaming down the hulking

Canadian's cheeks, and then realized that the same was true of his own.

"We're on our own, now, Yank," Hugh added.

"Bloody fucking war. Bloody fucking goddamn fucking bloody fucking war. Why does everyone who's worth more than half a damn on this sodden earth have to die?" Hugh's voice cracked hard once, filled with an unrelenting sadness.

Tommy, who did not trust his own voice at that moment in the slightest, did not reply. He recognized, too, that he had absolutely no answer to this question.

Tommy trudged through the lengthening afternoon shadows, feeling the first intimations of the evening's chill fight past the remaining sunlight. He tried to force himself to think of home instead of

Phillip Pryce, tried to imagine Vermont in the early spring. He thought it was such a time of promise and expectation, after the harshness of winter. Each crocus that pushed itself through the damp and muddy soil, each bud that struggled to burst on the tip of its tree branch, held out hope.

In the spring, the rivers choked with the runoff from melting winter snows, and he remembered that Lydia especially had liked to bicycle to the edge of the Battenkill, or to a narrow slot on the Mettawee, both places that he would later work hard for rising trout in the summer evenings, and watch as white frothy water burst and bur bled and battled its way over the rocks. There was something invigorating in watching the sinuous muscularity of the water then; it had a life to it that spoke of better days to come.

He shook his head, sighing, the images of his home state distant and elusive. Almost every kriegie had some vision of home that they could rely upon, to conjure up in moments of despair and loneliness, a fantasy of the way things could be, if only they survived. But these familiar daydreams seemed suddenly unreachable to Tommy.

He stopped once, in the center of the assembly yard, and said out loud: "He's dead by now." He could envision Pryce's body lying prone in the woods, the false Swiss Blucher standing above him with his Luger pistol still smoking. Not since the moment he'd seen the Lovely Lydia slide beneath the Mediterranean waves, leaving him bobbing in his life vest alone on the surface of the sea, had he felt so utterly abandoned.

What he wanted to imagine was his home, his girl, and his future, but all that he could see were the dreary barracks of Stalag Luft Thirteen, the ever-present wire encircling him, and the recognition that his nightmares would now include a new ghost.

He smiled, for a moment, at the irony. In his imagination, he introduced his old captain from West Texas to Phillip Pryce. It was the only way, he thought right then, that he could prevent himself from breaking down and crying.

He thought that Phillip would be stiff and formal, at first, while the captain from West Texas would be gregarious, a little overblown, but engaging all the same with his boyishness and enthusiasm. He envisioned the two shaking hands and thought that it would probably take them both a short time to come to understand each other Phillip, of course, would complain that they spoke utterly different languages but that they would find much in each other to like, and it would not be long before they would be telling jokes and slapping one another on the back, instantly the best of friends.

As he rounded the corner, heading toward Hut 101, Tommy imagined the initial conversation between the two ghosts. It would have some hilarity to it, he thought, before the two dead men realized how much they had in common on this earth. He smiled briefly, bittersweet, not a smile that spoke of any lessening of the troubled sensation dogging him, but a smile that had at least a small amount of release within it.

It was right at that moment that he heard the first raised angry voice.

The anger was deep, impatient, and insistent, a cascade of fury and obscenities. And it took him no more than another second or two to recognize whose voice it was that was shouting although he couldn't quite make out all the words that were being bellowed.

He broke into a run, sprinting around the front of the barracks, and as the entranceway to Hut 101 came into view, he saw Lincoln Scott standing on the top step to the hut. In front of him were seventy-five to a hundred milling kriegies, all staring up at the black flier in a jostling, unsteady silence.

Scott's face was contorted with anger. He jabbed a finger into the air above the other airmen.

"You are cowards!" he shouted.

"Every last one of you!

Cowards and cheats!"

Tommy didn't hesitate. He raced forward.

Scott's hand melded into a fist, which he waved in the air.

"I will fight any one of you. Any five of you! Hell, I'll fight you all, you cowards! Come on! Who's gonna be first!"

Scott squared his shoulders, assuming a fighting stance.

Tommy could see his eyes racheting from man to man, ready.

"Cowards!" the black flier cried out again.

"Come on, who wants a piece of me?"

The mass of men seemed to seethe, shifting back and forth, like the water in a pot right before it begins to boil up.

"Fucking nigger!" a voice called out, indistinguishable from the packed mass of men. Scott pivoted to the sound of the words.

"This nigger's ready. Are you? Come on, goddamn it!

Who's gonna be first?"

"Screw you, killer! You're gonna get yours from a Kraut firing squad!"

"Is that so?" Scott replied, his fists still clenched in front of him, his body twisting toward the sound of each catcall.

"What, you aren't man enough to try me on? Gonna let the Krauts do your dirty work for you? Chickens!" He squawked out mockingly, a rooster sound.

"Come on," he challenged the crowd again.

"Why wait? Why not try and take a piece of me now! Or aren't you men enough?"

The crowd surged forward, and Scott once again bent over slightly, like a boxer preparing for the inevitable jab to come flying his way, but readying the right cross counterpunch as a reply. A deadly reply. A boxing axiom: You must take one to give one, and Scott seemed utterly prepared for that tradeoff.

Tommy reached down and summoned the deepest, most authoritative voice he could manage, and from the back of the mob, suddenly shouted out:

"What the hell is going on!"

Scott stiffened slightly when he recognized Tommy's presence.

He didn't answer, but remained in a fighting stance, facing the crowd.

"What's going on?" Tommy demanded again. Like a swimmer working through a heavy surf, he pushed his way through the center of the crowd of white airmen. There were several faces he recognized; men who were scheduled to testify at the trial, men who had been Trader Vic's roommates and friends, the leader of the jazz band and a few of his companions, who had threatened him in the corridor the previous day.

These were the faces of the angriest men, and he suspected that the men who'd threatened him in his bed were there in that crowd. Only he recognized that he didn't have time to scrutinize every face.