There was a single light shining in the dirty window of the medical services hut, which he spotted as he came around the corner of Hut 119.

For a second, he looked past the buildings, out through the wire to the modest cemetery. He thought that it was a particular cruelty of the Germans that they had allowed the men who died to be buried outside the wire. It made a mockery of every kriegie's yearning for freedom and home. The only men no longer in prison were six feet beneath the ground.

Tommy scowled, took an angry deep breath of the cooling air surrounding him, and jogged up the wooden steps to the small clinic-hut, grabbing at the door, and surging inside.

There was a solitary kriegie sitting behind the desk, in the same position where Tommy had first met Nicholas Fenelli.

The man looked up sharply.

"What's the problem, buddy?" he asked.

"Gonna be dark soon, need to be in your hut."

Tommy stepped forward, out of the shadows by the door, into the light.

He saw the captain's bars on the man's jacket, and so he threw a lazy salute in the officer's direction. He did not recognize the man. But the reverse wasn't true.

"You're Hart, ain't you?"

"Right. I'm looking for-" "I know who you're looking for. But I was there today, and I heard Colonel MacNamara's orders-" "You got a name, captain?" Tommy interrupted.

The officer hesitated, shrugged, then replied, "Sure.

Carson. Like the scout." He held out a hand, and Tommy shook it.

"Okay, Captain Carson, let me try again. Where's Fenelli?"

"Not here. And he has orders not to speak with you or anyone else. And you have orders not to try to talk to him."

"You been in the bag long, captain? I don't recognize you."

"Couple of months. Came in right before Scott, actually."

"Okay then, captain, let me clue you on something. We may still be in the army, and we may still have uniforms and salute and call everybody by their rank and all, but you know what? It ain't the same thing. Now, where's Fenelli?"

Carson shook his head.

"He was moved out. They told me if you came looking not to tell you."

"I can go from hut to hut…"

"And maybe get shot by some goon in the towers for your troubles."

Tommy nodded. The captain was right. There was no way, without being told where to go, for Tommy to go from room to room, searching for Fenelli. Not in the short amount of evening left before the lights went out.

"You know where he is?"

The captain shook his head.

"This they who told you what to say if I came looking, this would be

Major Clark and Captain Townsend, right?"

The man hesitated, which of course told Tommy the answer.

Then Captain Carson shrugged.

"Yeah," he said.

"It was them. And they're the ones that helped Fenelli take his stuff.

And they told me I was gonna have to help Fenelli in here, after the trial's over and things get back to normal. That's what they said.

Back to normal."

"So you're going to be helping Fenelli? You got any experience?

I mean, with medical problems."

"My old man was a country doctor. He ran a little clinic where I used to work, summers. And I was premed at the University of Wisconsin, so I guess I'm as qualified as anybody else. You know, I wonder why there aren't any real doctors here. I mean, you can find just about any other type of profession…"

"Maybe the doctors are smart enough not to go up in a B-17…"

"Or a Thunderbolt. Like I wasn't." Carson smiled.

"You know. Hart, I don't want to come across like such a hard case.

If I knew, I'd tell you. Hell, I don't even think they told Fenelli where they were moving him. And he knew you'd be coming around tonight, and so he told me to tell you he was goddamn sorry about today…" Carson looked around for a moment, just double-checking to make sure the two men were alone.

"And he left a note. You got to understand. Hart, those two guys were keeping a pretty close eye on Fenelli. Sitting on him pretty good. I didn't get the impression he was all that happy to be hustled off to some new hut. And he sure wasn't all that happy with the testimony today in court, but he wasn't talking about it one way or the other, especially with me. But he managed to scribble down something and slip it aside…" Carson was reaching into his pocket, as he spoke.

He removed a torn scrap of paper, folded twice. He handed it to

Tommy.

"I didn't read it," Carson said.

Tommy nodded, unfolded the scrap, and read: Sorry, Hart. Trader Vic was right about one thing: Everything in this damn place is a deal. Good deal for some, maybe a bad deal for others.

Hope you make it home in one piece. After all this is finished, you ever get to Cleveland, look me up so I can apologize properly.

He did not sign the note. It was written in a hasty, scribbled script, in thick dark pencil. Tommy read it through three times, memorizing it word for word.

"Fenelli said to tell you to burn that, after you got it," Carson said.

Tommy nodded.

"What has Fenelli told you? About this place. The clinic, I mean."

The captain shrugged his shoulders in exaggerated fashion.

"Since I got here, all he does is complain. He's damn fed up with never being able to really help no one, because the Krauts steal the medical supplies. He said the day he gets to retire from this job and get back to his reading and real studying would be the best day of his life. That's what he said you've been up to, right. Hart? Reading those law books. He told me to be smart and do the same. Get some medical texts and start studying. We got plenty of free time, right?"

"That's the only thing we do seem to have enough of," Tommy said.

Night's cold and dark had seized the camp as Tommy hurried beneath the encroaching gray-black skies. The last murky light streaked across the western horizon. There were only a few other stragglers making their way to their bunk rooms, and, like Tommy, they had their hats pulled down on their heads, their collars turned up against the few breaths of chilly wind that swirled in. the alleyways between the huts.

Everyone walked fast, eager to get inside before the grip of night tightened completely. His route from the medical services hut took him out to the main assembly area, now vacant, swept dry by the falling temperatures. To his left, he saw that the last of the moon, a single silver sliver, was just visible over the line of trees beyond the wire.

He wished he could take a moment, wait for the stars to begin to blink and shine, injecting familiarity and the odd sense of companionship they gave him, into his troubled imagination.

But instead, as the few other men still abroad in the camp hurried past him, he kept his pace quick and his head down.

As he approached the doorway to Hut 101, he tossed a single glance back over his shoulder, toward the main gate. What he saw made him hesitate.

There was a single electric light, beneath a tin shade, by the gate. In the weak inverted cone of light it shed. Tommy spotted the unmistakable form of Fritz Number One, lighting up a cigarette. He guessed the ferret was about to go off-duty.

Tommy stopped sharply.

Seeing the ferret, even that close to the end of the day, wasn't all that unusual. The ferrets were always alert to the final comings and goings of the camp, afraid that some clandestine meetings were taking place just beyond their sight under cover of darkness. In this, of course, they were absolutely correct. Unable to detect, of course, but correct nonetheless.

Tommy peered around for a moment, and saw that he was virtually alone, save for a distant figure or two, hurrying toward huts on the opposite side of the compound. And in that second, he made a sudden decision he knew was undoubtedly rash. He abruptly turned away from the door to Hut 101, and quickly trotted across the compound assembly area, his boots making dull thudding noises against the packed dirt. When he was twenty yards away from the main gate, Fritz Number One spotted the movement coming toward him, and pivoted to face Tommy. In the growing dark, Tommy was anonymous, just a dark form moving rapidly, and he saw some mingled alarm and inquisitiveness on the ferret's face, almost as if he were frightened by the kriegie-apparition coming through the first gloom of night in his direction.