Bobby Campbell stared at the steel rungs of his prison cell.
He'd been trained to survive incarceration. All American pilots had been. Getting shot down behind enemy lines was a known risk for combat aviators. And when that happened it was only a matter of time before the pilot was captured and interred as a prisoner of war.
Bobby, like all fighter pilots, was an officer. Traditionally, army officers were leaders of men. Even the most junior infantry lieutenants commanded a platoon of more than thirty soldiers.
Bomber pilots were also commanders. They weren't just in charge of flying the plane; they were responsible for the lives of their crew: the navigator, the mechanic, the medic, and the gunners.
But fighter pilots were different. Bobby didn't command a platoon or a crew. When he flew his P-39 Airacobra he was alone in his cockpit. There were other fighter pilots around him, fighting with him, all junior officers just like he was. But he didn't have any authority over them; he didn't command them.
And yet, he was an officer. The entire point of being an officer was to lead and command men. So if he was ever shot down, if he was captured and imprisoned, that would become his new duty. There were no planes to fly in a prison camp. He could no longer do his duty as a pilot. But there were men: other American and allied prisoners of war. Bobby would no longer be a pilot, but he'd still be an officer. The lives of those men would be his responsibility.
And, even though they were prisoners, those men were still soldiers. The U.S. Army believed that a soldier didn't stop being a soldier just because he was captured, disarmed and imprisoned. The U.S. Army expected its soldiers to fight. That was a soldier's duty. But, after capture, the style of that fight necessarily changed. A prisoner didn't have weapons. A prisoner wasn't expected to kill.
Instead, he was expected to escape.
And Bobby, as an officer, as a commander of those men, was expected to lead that escape.
In some ways Bobby had looked forward to the challenge. He loved mental games and he'd always been good at them. In fact, he believed he'd be better at planning escapes than he'd been at flying planes. The greatest achievement of his young life had been a sort of escape, not an escape from prison, but an escape from the desert.
When Bobby's best friend, Jack, had been forced down in the middle-east during a sandstorm, Bobby had gone after him into the teeth of that storm. Bobby, too, lost his plane. But he found his friend. He'd used his intelligence and cunning to outwit nature.
He was certain he could outwit German prison guards.
And it all made sense to Bobby. He instinctively understood why Army brass wanted its soldiers to escape. The more soldiers escaped, the more guards the Germans would have to post to prevent future escapes. The more guards the Germans posted, the fewer men they'd have available to fight on the front lines.
It was pure, mathematical logic. It was exactly the kind of logic Bobby appreciated. And so although he never exactly hoped he'd get shot down, he did spend more than one night fantasizing about engineering a daring escape from some remote Bavarian castle. He didn't necessarily expect to spend time in a German prison, but he was mentally and emotionally prepared to do so.
What he wasn't prepared for was to spend time in an American prison. He'd never expected to be locked up at Leavenworth.
Yet here he was.
His crime was treason.
Bobby had never thought of himself as a traitor. When he told Karen Hamilton about America's fail safe plan to bomb Russia in the event that the Soviet Union surrendered to Germany, he thought his beloved fiancé would be coming back home with him to America. He never expected her to stay in Russia. And, more, he never expected her to tell a Russian.
He should have been more careful. What was the saying in all the propaganda movies? "Loose lips sink ships." But those movies were wrong, too. The femme fatales that seduced secrets out of naïve GI's in those films were Nazi spies. Karen wasn't a Nazi, and she wasn't a spy. She was just a young woman doing what she thought was right.
And Bobby had paid for her choices with his freedom.
Bobby was confident he could escape. He'd memorized the guards' schedules. He knew their patrols down to the second. And he'd identified a window of opportunity at six in the morning.
That's when the night shift ended, an hour before dawn and two hours before reveille. During that period the night guards checked out and the day guards checked in. But that took time. Bobby had determined on average it took the guards twelve and a half minutes to sign their log books, secure their side arms, and pass over the keys.
That was twelve and a half minutes during which no one was on patrol.
That was twelve and a half minutes of empty hallways.
Bobby had also figured out how to pop the lock on his cell door.
Three weeks ago he'd shoved his fingers down his throat and wretched all over his cell. That forced the guards to strip his bunk, mop the floor, and inspect his living space. They left their key in the cell door so as to prevent themselves from getting locked in.
But Bobby had carefully placed a strip of wax paper inside the lock. He'd stolen the wax paper when he was on kitchen duty three days earlier.
The guards had no idea it was there. So when they finished their cell inspection, retrieved their key, and left, Bobby carefully fished the paper out of the lock.
To most people it would have looked like a crumpled bubblegum wrapper.
But Bobby wasn't like most people. His mind didn't see a crumpled piece of paper.
He saw a portrait.
Bobby had carefully un-crumpled the wax paper on the edge of his wash basin. Analyzing each fold, he cut apart the two-dimensional image in his mind, and re-constructed it in his imagination. He puzzled out exactly how the fold lines and, especially, the scratches on the wax, would have been caused by pressure from a foreign object.
It was a meticulous but logical next step to construct the shape and dimensions of that foreign object. It required immense concentration and an almost photographic memory.
Bobby had both of those things.
And when he was finished with the exercise in logic and imagination, he also had something else.
He had a key.
It wasn't the real key, of course. The real key was still attached securely to a guard's chain which was, in turn, attached to that same guard's belt buckle.
But it was a perfect mental facsimile of a key.
It took Bobby three weeks to transform that mental image into a physical object. He used a bed spring, twisting it and bending it over itself, with enough force to make his fingers bleed, night after night.
And tonight he had perfected it.
He hadn't tried it yet...he wouldn't do so until it was actually time to escape. But he was certain it would work.
And that is why he was so certain that he could have escaped a German prisoner of war camp. Even here, in Leavenworth, at one of the most secure prisons in America, Bobby was moments away from freedom.
Once five am came, he could pop open his cell door. The corridors would be empty all the way to the laundry room. There he could tumble down the chute to the yard. In the yard he could sneak to the motor pool. There he could crawl between the axels of a panel van. And then he'd have a ride to freedom.
Escape hadn't just been a fantasy for Bobby, it had been a successful mental exercise. Successful not just because it would result in freedom, but also because it had kept his mind occupied.
Bobby was dangerously close to despair. He had loved his fiancé, Karen. He had been faithful to her for the two years they had been forced apart. More than just faithful, he had dedicated his young life to tracking her down across two continents. He'd tried to rescue her. He had risked his life for her.
And now he had sacrificed his freedom for her.
But she had rejected him.
As a result of that rejection Bobby had lost everything. Not just his freedom, but also his future.
Bobby could sense a wide gulf of depression yawning at the edges of his consciousness. He knew that if he gave into that depression he would be lost for years, if not for his entire lifetime. But his mind was all that Bobby had left. If that, too, were crippled by despair, he would have nothing.
So, just as he had been taught in the Army Air Force, Bobby planned his escape. That planning had kept him focused and sharp.
It kept the depression at bay.
But now that planning was over. Now was the moment of decision. Should he escape? Or should he stay?
In a prisoner of war camp it would have been his duty to escape. But this was not a prisoner of war camp. This was Leavenworth. What was his duty here?
He hadn't yet been convicted. His military hearing hadn't even yet been scheduled. The Army was too busy fighting a war. There was still a chance Bobby could be exonerated.
But, Bobby knew, that was improbable to the point of almost being impossible. He had disclosed classified information to a civilian who had, in turn, disclosed classified information to a foreign national. By the letter of the law Bobby was guilty of treason. He could not rely on innocence to save him.
But would escape save him?
Where would he go? What would he do?
He'd be a fugitive and, worse, a deserter. America was gripped in a patriotic fervor. They hated deserters and they were terrified of Nazi spies and traitors. If anyone suspected Bobby was either one of those, they might not even turn him back in. They might just try to kill him themselves. They'd never give him a chance to explain, to plead, to describe how he'd been blinded by love. They wouldn't care. Only one fact mattered: he was a traitor.
But what was the alternative? Spending his life in prison? That was no life at all. And, despite his treason, Bobby was still a patriot. He wanted to help fight.
He couldn't fight from prison.
Perhaps he could defect. Karen had found a way to escape the besieged city of Leningrad. She'd found a way to escape all the way across Russia deep into Siberia. She'd even secured a flight across the Bering Strait in Alaska.
Perhaps Bobby could do the same thing in reverse. Perhaps he could travel across America, into Alaska, and across the Bering Strait to Siberia.
He had friends in Siberia: Lenka and Bel and Katya and the other Russian female pilots he'd been smuggling planes to. They might help him defect.
And his best friend, Jack, was still stationed in Alaska. He was still part of the lend-lease operation that flew American planes into Russia. If Bobby could just reach Nome, he might have a chance. He might get back into this war, fighting for Russia. They were desperate for pilots, weren't they?
Jack would help him. Jack had to help him. Bobby had protected Jack, he'd never squealed about Jack's love affair with Bel, a Russian pilot. He'd kept Jack's part in the treason secret. Even if they weren't best of friends, Jack would have to help.
Jack owed him.
Bobby heard the bolt unlock on the corridor security door. That meant it was time for the changing of the guard. Bobby didn't have much time: twelve minutes, that's all.
Twelve minutes to escape, twelve minutes to reach the laundry room, slide down the chute and cross the yard. Twelve minutes to hide between the axels of a panel truck.
Twelve minutes was enough time, but only just barely.
And maybe, just maybe, if Bobby made it to Russia, maybe he'd see Karen again.
Bobby made his decision. He got up, reached under his cot, and withdrew the hidden bedspring.
He walked silently to the prison door.
The cell and the corridor beyond were pitch black. Bobby would have to feel his way in the darkness.
He reached his hands around the bars and began to jimmy the lock.
There was a click.
But it wasn't the click of his cell door's lock.
It was the click of a light switch.
Bobby squinted against the sudden bright illumination. He blinked his eyes and squinted down the hallway.
There were three men there now, men walking toward him. Two of them were members of the night guard. Between them was someone new.
Bobby's heart sank. His hands were still around his bedspring key, the bedspring key still stuck in the cell door.
His fingers were bleeding, their lacerations cut back open in his attempt to jimmy the lock.
He was literally caught red-handed.
"What is that," asked one of the men, stopping crisply on the other side of Bobby's cell door.
Bobby squinted and looked at the man. He didn't look like he was in the military. He was older, in his early fifties. He had a trim beard. He wore a tweed jacket and a tie. His steel eyes looked large behind a pair of horn rimmed glasses.
Bobby pulled the bed spring out of the lock and held it up for the man to inspect.
The man took it, heedless of Bobby's blood, and turned it over in his hand. He raised his glasses and held it up to his eyes. "Is this a bedspring?"
"Yes, sir." Bobby replied.
"A home-made key?"
Bobby didn't answer.
The man looked back and forth to the two guards beside him. They stood in slack jawed shock. "I guess we got here just in time," the man muttered. Then he returned his attention to Bobby. "Do you know who I am?"
"Yes, sir," Bobby replied, truthfully. "You're Dr. Parsons. You were my history professor at Columbia."
"That's right. But I work for the government now. Here." He handed Bobby back the bedspring.
Bobby took it. He was confused. None of this made sense. "Why are you giving it back to me?"
Dr. Parsons shrugged. "I think you'll want to keep it as a souvenir." Dr. Parsons then turned and started walking away back in the direction from which he came. He paused halfway down the hallway and looked back over his shoulder at Bobby. "Aren't you coming?"
Bobby looked back and forth at the two guards. They unlocked the cell, swung open the door, and stepped aside to give him more room. Bobby shook his head in confusion and jogged down the hall after his former history professor.