Hart's War Read online

  “Sounds good, so far.”

  “Well, he had the most intriguing observation.”

  “Which is?”

  “It wasn’t slicing his throat that killed Captain Bedford. No great outpouring of blood from a slashed jugular.”

  “But the wound . . .”

  “Oh, that was the wound that killed him. But it wasn’t delivered like this . . .”

  Hugh stopped, lifted his fist to his throat as if holding a blade, and then drew it across the front rapidly with a cutting motion. “Or like this . . .” This time, Hugh stood facing Tommy and slashed the air between them, like a child playacting at a sword fight.

  “But that’s—”

  “That’s what we thought. More or less. But no, our erstwhile doctor thinks the killing blow was, well, let me show you. . . .”

  Hugh moved behind Tommy and suddenly reached around him with his right arm, grasping the American underneath the chin with his thickly muscled forearm and partially lifting him into the air in the same second, using his hip for leverage, so that Tommy’s toes abruptly reached for the earth. In the same movement, Hugh brought his left hand up firmly, again in a fist, as if grasping a knife, and jabbed it against the side of Tommy’s neck, just beneath the jawbone. A single, sharp blow, not a slash as much as a punch with the fictional point of the blade.

  The Canadian dropped Tommy back to the ground.

  “Jesus,” Tommy said. “Just like that?”

  “Correct. And did you notice which hand held the knife?”

  “Left.” Tommy smiled. “And Lincoln Scott is right-handed. At least, that was the hand he threw the punch at Hugh with. Intriguing, gentlemen. In-fucking-triguing.” Tommy snorted the obscenity, which made the others grin. “And our young doctor-in-training? He based this helpful conclusion on what precisely?”

  “The size of the wound for the first part, and then the lack of obvious fraying around the edges of the wound. You see, a slash produces a different appearance to even the semitrained and partially educated eye than a stab.”

  “And a first-year medical student saw this?”

  Hugh grinned again, punctuating his reply with a quick laugh. “A most interesting medical student. With a most unique background.”

  Pryce was also smiling. “Tell him, Hugh. This is delicious, Tommy. Simply delicious. A fact that tastes nearly as good as a large slice of rare roast beef and a generous dollop of Yorkshire pudding.”

  “Okay. Sounds good. Shoot.”

  “Our mortuary man did all the gangster funerals in Cleveland. Everyone killed by the local mobs. Every last one. And they apparently had a bit of prewar trouble between competing, ah, interests in that fine city. Our soon-to-be doctor laid out the bodies of at least three men with their necks cut in the precise same way, and curious lad that he is, he asked his uncle about it. And his uncle conveniently explained that no professional killer would ever just slash a man’s throat. No sir. Far too bloody. Far too messy. And difficult. And often-times the poor bastard with the neck laid open has just enough energy remaining to pull out one of those quite large thirty-eight-caliber pistols that the gangsters seem to favor and squeeze off a few shots, which, of course, is awkward for the assassin trying to exit, stage left. So they use a different technique. A long-bladed stiletto punched upward, as I demonstrated. Slices the vocal cords on the way to the brain so the only sound you hear perhaps is a little gurgle, twist it around once or twice to mess up the gray matter, and the man drops to the floor dead. Very dead. And it’s neat. Hardly any blood at all. Do it just right, and the only risk you have to yourself is fraying your shirt as the blade passes over the arm that lifts the victim off the floor.”

  “And obviously,” Tommy said eagerly, “the wound is delivered . . .”

  Hugh finished the sentence for him, “. . . from behind. Not in front. In other words . . .”

  Tommy stepped in, “. . . an assassination and not a fight. A sneak-attack, not a confrontation. With a stiletto. Interesting.”

  “Precisely,” Hugh said, with a small laugh. “Good news, as I said. Lincoln Scott may be many things, but he doesn’t seem like some sort of lurking back-stabber.”

  Pryce nodded, listening. “And there’s one other rather intriguing aspect of this style of killing.”

  “What’s that?” Tommy asked.

  “It is the exact same method of silencing a man that is taught by His Majesty’s Commando Brigades. Neat. Quiet. Effective. Fast. And, by extrapolation, perhaps taught by your American counterparts in the Rangers. Or elsewhere in your more clandestine services.”

  “How do you know that, Phillip?”

  The older man hesitated before replying.

  “I’m afraid I have some education in commando techniques.”

  Tommy stopped, staring at the frail barrister.

  “Phillip, I can’t really see you as a commando.” He laughed as he spoke, but when Pryce turned toward him, the laugh faded, for he saw his friend’s face had fallen, graying even in the sunlight, stricken with a hurt that seemed to reverberate from deep within.

  “Not me,” Pryce said, choking slightly. “My son.”

  “You have a son?” Tommy asked.

  “Phillip,” Hugh chimed in, “you never said anything—”

  Pryce raised his hand to stop the other men’s questions. For an instant the older man seemed so pale that he was almost translucent. His skin had turned a pasty, fishlike color. At the same time, he took a step toward them, but he staggered as he came forward, and both Tommy and Hugh reached out, as if to grasp him. Again he held up his hand, and then, abruptly, Pryce simply sat down in the dust of the perimeter path. He looked up sorrowfully at the two fliers, and said slowly, painfully, “My dear boys. Dear Tommy and Hugh. I’m sorry. I had a son. Phillip Junior.”

  Tears were pushing at the crinkled edges of the wing commander’s eyes. His voice seemed like leather cracking under tension. Between the tears that started to slide down his cheeks, Pryce smiled, as if this great sadness within him was also, oddly, amusing.

  “I suppose, Hugh, he’s the reason I’m here, now.”

  Hugh bent over toward his friend. “Phillip, please . . .”

  Pryce shook his head. “No, no. Jolly well should have told you lads the truth months ago. But kept it all bottled up, you know. Stiff upper lip. Carry on and all that. Didn’t want to be more of a burden than I already am . . .”

  “You’re not a burden,” Tommy said. He and Hugh dropped to the ground and sat next to their friend, who started to speak as his eyes traveled beyond the wire, out toward the world beyond.

  “Well, my Elizabeth died at the start of the Blitz. I’d asked her to go to the country, but she was stubborn. Delightfully so, you know, truly that was why I loved her. She was fearless and she wasn’t for a moment going to allow some little Austrian corporal to run her out of her home, no matter how many damn bombers he sent over. So I told her when the sirens sounded, to make her way to the underground, but she sometimes preferred to sit out the raids in the basement. The house took a five-hundred-pounder straight on. At least she didn’t suffer. . . .”

  “Phillip, you don’t have to . . .” Hugh said, but the older man simply smiled and shook his head.

  “So then there was just Phillip Junior and myself. And he’d already enlisted, you see. Nineteen years old, and a commissioned officer in the Black Watch. All kilts and pipes swirling with that screeching noise that the Scots call music, claymores, and tradition. His mother, you see, she was a Scot, and I think he thought he owed it to her. The Black Watch, Clan Fergus, and Clan McDiarmid. Hard men all. They were trained as commandos, fought at Dieppe and St. Nazaire, and Phillip Junior would come home on leave and show me some of the more exotic techniques he’d been educated with, including how to silence a sentry—which was precisely what we’ve run into here. He used to say that their instructor, this wiry little red-haired Scot you could hardly understand his brogue was so thick, would always end his lectures on kil
ling with the phrase: ‘Gentlemen, remember: Always be neat.’ Phillip Junior loved that. ‘Be neat,’ he’d say, as I cut us some beef for dinner. And then he’d laugh. Great laughter, boys. He had a huge, unrestricted bellow of a laugh. It would simply stir up like a volcano and burst forth. He loved to laugh. Playing rugger during his public school days, he’d be grinning and laughing even with blood dripping from his nose. I thought when his mother was killed that he would no longer take such joy in life, but even with that sadness weighing on him, he was still irrepressible. He loved every breath he took. Delighted in it. And he, in turn, was loved. Not just by me, his dull and doting dad, of course, but by his chums at school, and all the young ladies at socials, and then by the men he commanded, because all of them knew him to be guileless and brilliant and dependable. A child becoming a man. He seemed to grow larger with every minute, and I was in awe of what the world held out for him.”

  Pryce took a deep breath.

  “They had a rule, you know, in the commandos. Behind Kraut lines, if you were wounded, you were left behind. A nasty rule, that. But essential, I suppose. The group is always more important than the individual. The target and the assignment are more important than any one man. Any one life.”

  Pryce choked on the words.

  “But you know,” he continued, “that simply wasn’t my boy’s style. No. Not Phillip Junior. Too loyal, I suppose. A friend would never abandon a friend, no matter how awful things appeared, and that’s what he was. A friend to all.”

  Hugh was gazing through the wire. He had a faraway look in his eyes, almost as if he could just make out the prairies of his home, just beyond the sentinel trees at the edge of the Bavarian forest. “What happened, Phillip?” he asked quietly.

  “His captain took three rounds in the leg, just tore it all to hell, you know, and Phillip wouldn’t leave him. North Africa, you see. Not terribly far from Tobruk, in that great mess of things Rommel and Montgomery made. So my Phillip carried his commander ten miles through that damnably hot desert with the Afrika Korps everywhere around them, right up on his back, the captain threatening to shoot himself every mile of the way, ordering Phillip to leave him behind, but of course Phillip wouldn’t. They walked all day and most of the night and they were only two hundred yards from British lines, and he finally handed over the captain to a couple of the other men. There were German patrols working everywhere in the night, the lines were so fluid, you didn’t really know who was friend and who was foe. Very dangerous. Possible to get shot by either side, you see. So, he sent the team ahead, carrying the captain, and he stayed behind to cover their retreat, last man with the Bren gun and some grenades. Told them all he’d be right along in a shake or two. The others made it home. Phillip didn’t. Don’t know exactly what happened. Missing in action, you understand, not even officially dead, but of course I know the truth. I got a letter from the captain. Nice fellow. An Oxford don, actually, read the classics and taught some Latin and Greek before the war. He told me that there had been explosions and machine-gun fire from the spot where Phillip had set up his rearguard. He told me that Phillip must have fought desperately hard against all the odds, because the firing went on for some time, furiously, more than enough time for the rest of his team to reach safety. That was Phillip, wouldn’t you know. He would gladly have traded his life for those of the others, but he wouldn’t trade it cheaply. No, not Phillip. It would take more than a few of those Kraut bastards to kill him. The captain, he lost his leg. But he lived because my boy carried him to safety. Phillip, they put him up for a VC. And he lost his life.”

  Pryce shook his head again.

  “He was beautiful, my boy. Perfect and lovely and beautiful. He could run, you know. Run forever. I could see him on the playing fields when he was younger at the end of a match when everyone else was wheezing and dragging and he would still be loping along, laughing, effortless. Just for the joy of it. And I suppose that was the way he felt, right up to the end, even with the bastards closing in on him and his ammunition expended. And on the day I got that letter from the captain, Hugh, any hope I had left within me died, and all I wanted to do was to kill Germans. Kill Germans and die myself. Kill them for killing everything I loved. And that’s why I climbed into that Blenheim alongside you, Hugh. And the gunner I replaced? He wasn’t really ill. No. I ordered him out, because I wanted to man that gun. It was the only way I knew to kill the bastards.”

  Pryce sighed hard, raising his hand to his cheeks, gently touching with his fingertips the moisture flowing down. He looked over at Tommy and Hugh.

  “You boys, you both remind me of Phillip in different ways. He was tall and studious, like you, Tommy. And he was strong and athletic, like you, Hugh. Now, damn it, don’t either of you die. I couldn’t stand it, you see.”

  Phillip Pryce took a deep breath. He wiped the tears away from his eyes with the sleeve of his tunic.

  “I think,” he said slowly, inhaling deeply with seemingly every third word, “that it would do my poor torn and broken heart good to see our young and innocent Mr. Scott live, as well. Now, let us turn our attention to this morning’s hearing.”

  Lincoln Scott was seated on the edge of his lone bunk in the empty room when Tommy, accompanied by both Hugh and Pryce, entered. It was shortly before ten A..M. and the black flier was holding the unopened Bible in his lap, almost as if the words within could emanate directly through the worn dark leather binding and be absorbed into his heart through the palms of his hands. He rose as the three men entered. He nodded toward Tommy and Hugh, and then looked at Phillip Pryce with some curiosity.

  “More help from the British Isles?” he asked.

  Pryce stepped forward, his hand extended.

  “Precisely, my boy. Precisely. My name is Phillip Pryce.”

  Scott shook his hand firmly. But at the same moment, he smiled, as if he’d just heard a joke.

  “Something amusing?” Pryce asked.

  The black flier dipped his head. “In a way, yes.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I’m not your boy,” Scott said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said, ‘precisely, my boy. . . .’ Well, I’m not your boy. I’m not anyone’s boy. I am a man.”

  Pryce cocked his head to the side.

  “I don’t think I totally follow . . .” he started.

  “It’s the word: boy. When you call a Negro boy, it is derogatory. Slave talk. Out of the past. That’s what Captain Bedford called me, over and over, trying to get beneath my skin,” Scott said, his voice level, but marked with a cold, edgy restraint that Tommy recognized from their prior conversations. “He, of course, wasn’t the first cracker bastard to insult me that way since I enlisted, and probably won’t be the last. But I am not your, nor anyone else’s, boy. The word is offensive. Didn’t you know this?”

  Pryce smiled. “How intriguing,” he said with unmistakable enthusiasm. “What is a modest term of friendliness in the speech of my country takes on an utterly different connotation to Mr. Scott, with his background. Fascinating. Tell me, Lieutenant Scott, are there other words in common English use that are impregnated with such different meanings that I should be aware of?”

  Scott seemed slightly taken aback by Pryce’s response.

  “I’m not certain,” he said.

  “Well, if there are, please let me know. I sometimes think when talking to young Tommy here, that we made a great error a couple of centuries back when we allowed you Americans to appropriate our wonderful native tongue. We should never have shared it with you adventurers and ne’er-do-wells.” Pryce spoke rapidly, almost merrily.

  “And why are you here?” Scott interrupted sharply.

  “But, my dear . . .” Pryce stopped himself. “My dear lad? Is that acceptable, lieutenant?”

  Scott shrugged an agreement.

  “Well, I am here to lend a little behind the scenes assistance and expertise. And before you enter into this morning’s little hearin
g, I wanted to meet you for myself.”

  “You are an attorney, as well?”

  “Indeed, I am, lieutenant.”

  Scott looked askance, as if not believing the wisp of a man standing in front of him. “And you wanted to inspect me? Like some side of beef? Or a carnival sideshow freak? What was it that you came over here to see?” He threw out the questions with a harsh near-rage, so that they blistered the air of the room.

  Pryce, still breezy, hesitated briefly, like a comedian’s pause before dropping the punch line. Then he fixed the black flier with a single, penetrating look.

  “I expected to see only one thing, lieutenant,” he said quietly.

  “And what was that?” Scott replied, his voice slightly high-pitched. Tommy could see that the knuckles of the hand holding the Bible had turned a lighter color, he was squeezing them so tightly.

  “Innocence,” Pryce responded.

  Scott took a deep breath, filling his barrel chest with air.

  “And how is it that you can see this, Mr. Pryce? Is innocence like a flight jacket that I can put on in the morning, or when it’s cold? Is it in the eyes, or the face, or in the way I stand at attention? Is it a mannerism? A smile, perhaps? Tell me, how does one wear a quality such as innocence? Because I’d like to know. It might help in my situation.”

  Pryce seemed delighted by the questions thrust in his direction like so many rifle shots.

  “You wear innocence by not pretending to be something other than what you are.”

  “Then you should have no problem,” Scott answered, “because that’s the way I am.”