Death In Captivity Read Online Free Page A

and Hanover, and a stream of visitors came and went with items of information which he found helpful in his strange, self-imposed task.
    All over the camp, from each of the five big living huts, from the Senior Officers’ quarters, from the Orderlies’ Billet, from the barber’s shop, from the canteen, and the shower baths, the quiet, invisible, network floated out, like a thousand spiders’ webs of gossamer over an early morning field. A subaltern in the Royal Corps of Signals – in peace time a professor of history at Oxford – who was sitting in a deck-chair against the wall of the camp theatre, found himself reminded of Oman’s description of Craufurd and the Light Brigade at their watch on the Portuguese frontier. ‘The whole web of communication quivered at the slightest touch.’ He himself had a tiny part to play: the outer main gate was under his observation. If it opened he would drop his book. If anyone dangerous came through he would stand up.
    The gate remaining shut he was able to continue his reading in peace.
    The object of all this organisation, the heart of the labyrinth around which this watchful maze of attention had been constructed, lay in the kitchen of Hut C.
    In the middle of the kitchen, set in a six-foot square slab of concrete let into the tiled floor, stood the stove. It was a huge cauldron, shaped like a laundry copper, and it still hissed and bubbled from its morning coffee-making. Apart from a few shelves, almost the only other fitting in the room was a pair of hanging clothes-driers of a sort not uncommon in old-fashioned kitchens, made of slats of wood, and suspended, on two pulleys each, from the ceiling. They were covered, as usual, with prisoners’ private laundry, underclothes, stockings and sports kit. The only odd thing about them – and no doubt the matter was so obvious that it never occurred to the Italians as being odd at all – was that the racks appeared to be a trifle too well made for their function. However great the weight of damp laundry to be hung on them, it seemed an unnecessary precaution to have bolted the pulleys right through, at both ends, to the solid beams of the roof. Nor did it seem really necessary that the racks, instead of being raised by a single pulley, should be operated at each end by a small double block and tackle. The obvious is rarely apparent.
    At five minutes past nine, four officers entered the kitchen. Two of them went to the clothes rack and lowered them to their fullest extent so that they hung just above the stove. They then took out, each of them, a short length of wire rope with a hook at both ends. One hook went over the pulley, the other round one of the four legs of the stove. No word was spoken; nor was any word necessary since they had been performing this particular operation twice every day for several months.
    Each man took up the slack on his pulley. There was a moment’s pause. Then, in tug-of-war parlance, they ‘took the strain’.
    For a moment nothing happened.
    ‘Ease her a little on the left,’ said the leader. ‘You’re jamming her.’
    Suddenly, with no perceptible jerk, smoothly as a hydraulic press, the whole of the concrete slab came up out of the floor, with the stove fixed to it. When it was about three feet up the leader gave the sign, ropes were fastened, and, as silently as they had come, the men departed.
    The stove, despite its ascension, continued to bubble and hiss merrily.
    Such was the entrance to the oldest of the existing undiscovered tunnels in a camp whose Commandant had boasted that no tunnel was possible.
     
    One had only to see it in operation to realise why it had escaped all searches. Like the African elephant in its native jungle, it defied detection by its immensity. The Italian Security Police, as they probed and searched with ant-like zeal each night, running steel spikes between bricks and tapping on floors with leather hammers, were looking for something altogether different –