The Fighting Agents (Men at War 4)

he clipboard went back inside the prison. The other two guards went to a small BMW motorcycle, kicked it into life, and waited for the truck to leave the courtyard.

Then they followed it, ten or fifteen yards behind, making a series of slow turns on the cobblestones so they would not catch up with it and have to stop.

St. Gertrud's prison was on the edge of Pecs. Three minutes after leaving the prison, the truck was groaning in low gear as it climbed a narrow and winding cobblestone street. The motorcycle had to come to a stop three times to wait for the truck to get ahead.

The truck climbed to the top of a hill, then started down the other side, equally steep and winding. The truck moved very slowly, in low gear, for it had snowed the night before, and there was a layer of slush over the cobblestones.

When the road was clear, the truck went down the hill at a terrifying rate.

When it had almost reached the bottom of the hill, the truck turned off onto a road that appeared to be paved with coal. There was a dirt road under the coal, but coal falling from trucks had then been crushed under other trucks, so that there was in fact a three-inch-deep layer of coal paving the road.

When the truck reached the mine head and stopped, the prisoners, without being told what to do, got off the truck and walked to the shaft head.

There, suspended from an enormous wheel, like a monstrous water bucket over a well, was a steel-framed elevator. The prisoners filed onto it until they closely packed it.

Then the basket descended into the mine.

Fifty feet from the surface, it began to get dark. At one hundred feet, they could see nothing at all; it was like being blind. By three hundred feet, however, their pupils had reacted to the absence of light and dilated to the point where some sight returned.

At five hundred feet, when the basket stopped with a groan and then bounced up and down until the elasticity of the cables had expended itself, there were faintly glowing electric lights.

The prisoners were issued carbide headlamps by a foreman. They gathered around a table to clean them. Then they filled the brass fuel tanks with fingernail-size pellets of carbide, adding water, and quickly screwed the covers in place. The headlamps began to hiss as the water reacted chemically on the carbide and produced gas. The prisoners ignited the escaping gas from a lamp burning on the table, then adjusted the lamps to their heads.

The foreman looked over the prisoners and gestured at two of them. They went to him as the others walked into a tunnel.

I have been selected to shovel donkey shit, First Lieutenant Eric Fulmar, Infantry, Army of the United States, thought. I wonder why. That job usually goes to the old men; shoveling donkey shit and spreading straw doesn't require as much strength as wielding picks or sledgehammers or coal shovels.

The basic motive power in the mines was donkeys. They were hitched to a coal car and dragged the full car to the elevator. They were then unhitched, the coal car manhandled onto the basket, and the basket hauled to the surface.

The donkeys were then hitched to an empty coal car, which they dragged back along the rails to be filled again with coal.

Eric at first had been horrified at what appeared to be cruel and inhumane treatment of the animals, even though he was aware that, in the circumstances, there was little room for him to pity anything, human or animal. He had then expected any minute that the Gestapo or the SS--or the Hungarian version thereof, the Black Guard--would show up and introduce themselves by knocking him down and kicking his teeth out to put him in the right frame of mind for the interrogation to follow.

But that had not happened. Except for one man, the last Black Guards he had seen were the ones who had carried him and Professor Dyer to St.

Gertrud's prison. That man had been a corporal or a sergeant (Fulmar was not sure about their rank insignia) he had seen the next morning. That morning, the one Black Guard had been sitting backward on a chair watching, as prison guards went through the paperwork.

A prison guard had dumped on the table the contents of a gray paper envelope containing all the personal property taken from him when they had arrested him on the barge. Except for his wristwatch and his money. The prison guard, in soft German, had told him to identify the property taken from him, and to sign a form he handed him. It had not seemed to be a propitious time to bring up the missing money or the wristwatch.

"Your property will be returned to you at the completion of your sentence," the guard had said.

Fulmar had said nothing, praying that his relief would not be evident on his face. He had quickly come up with a scenario that seemed to make sense, but was frightening because it seemed to be too good to be true: He and Dyer had been arrested not because the Gestapo and the SS-SD were looking for them all over German-occupied Europe, but because they seemed to be black marketeers who had come to Hungary with a good deal of money in search of foodstuffs.

Painfully aware that it was wishful thinking, he began to realize that the Black Guards who had stopped and searched the barge and found them had been looking for black marketeers--not to bring them before the bar of justice, but to find them with large amounts of cash that could "disappear" between the time they were arrested and the time they got to the police station.

If the Black Guards charged them with black marketing, which was a serious crime, requiring a formal trial, the state would take the money Fulmar had , with him. If, on the other hand, they were charged with "unauthorized travel," the euphemism for Austrians and Germans who came privately to Hungary to buy sausage and smoked ham and salami for their own use, there was no need for the subject of the money to come up at all.

"May I ask, Sir, what my sentence is?" Eric had asked very carefully.

"You have been sentenced by the Municipal Magistrate to three months' confinement at hard labor for unauthorized travel to Pecs," the prison guard had said.

"Yes, Sir," Fulmar said.

"Thank you. Sir."

"Three months in the mines," the Black Guard had said, in barely understandable German, "will be good for you. And maybe it will even teach you that you can't slip things past the river patrol."

There was a suggestion there that if he had offered the Black Guard on the boat a little money, he would not have been arrested at all.