Hogan's Heroes: Hands Across the Sea (1/?)
Aug. 5th, 2010 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
what_we_dreamSeries: Hogan's Heroes
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Notes: This is UNFINISHED, and likely to remain so
Summary: Newkirk and Carter: one of the strongest, and most volatile, friendships of the series. A series of vignettes.
"A sudden thought strikes me; let us swear eternal friendship" (The Rovers, John Frere)
Carter isn’t naturally suspicious. It was usually a good thing back home, where he’d known everyone in the community since he was a child and had hardly ever had to consider nottrusting them. Since coming to Germany, it’s caused him nothing but trouble.
He spends 3 long months in Luft Stalag 7, and makes the same mistakes repeatedly in different circumstances. That loses him what little of his Red Cross package the Krauts deliver, the small fold of currency he had on him when he was shot down, and any chance of even treatment among the prisoners. It also earns him a month in the cooler when he ends up taking the fall for a pair of corporals, the worst 31 days in his life.
The escape is long and hard, and he spends three days awake and tense as a bow-string, lying in cold hollows at the edge of forests during the day and travelling by night. With no help from the other men in the Stalag he has no map, no food, no proper clothes and no papers. On the third day he falls asleep on his feet, and is captured by a roving patrol.
It’s the luckiest thing that has happened to him since leaving home.
He’s taken in for a round of interrogation, and then reassigned to Luft Stalag 13. Even as the scapegoat of Stalag 7 he’d heard of its reputation: the one POW camp in Germany with no escapes. He knows as soon as he hears it that he will spend the rest of the war in this camp. And that, if he will be there for perhaps years, he cannot let Stalag 7 happen again. Cannot be himself.
He spends the entire trip in the truck in self-imposed silence, ignoring the other three men being shipped to 13 along with him. He won’t trust anyone, won’t help anyone with anything that doesn’t benefit him, won’t be anything but suspicious.
They arrive in the late afternoon, and the compound is relatively empty; probably most of the men are eating. The four of them are ushered into the Kommandant’s office by an overweight sergeant. The Kommandant’s a balding man wearing a monocle, and doesn’t seem like much at first glance. Carter thinks it must be a front for a cruel, callous keeper, and congratulates himself on his deductions. He’s assigned to barracks 2, while the other men are given to 17 and 18.
“You’re an escaper,” the Kommandant tells him. “We’ll have Colonel Hogan keep an eye on you. You won’t have any chances in this camp.”
He’s not sure what that means, but he picks up his bag and is escorted across the compound to the building directly across from the Kommandantur. The hardest barracks in camp to escape from.
Carter takes a deep breath, and reaches out a gloved hand to open the door. It pulls open away from him before he takes hold, and a pair of men tumble out with baseball gloves and a ball. A Brit and a Frenchman; they stumble to avoid hitting him and circle around instead.
“’Ere, you our new bunkmate, then?” The Brit, a corporal, turns him around with quick fingers and pats him in a friendly manner. The other – also a corporal – elbows his friend in the side.
“It’s not nice to steal from people you’ve just met,” he says, darkly.
The Brit smiles with false innocence, and produces what looks very much like Carter’s wallet with a flourish. “Couldn’t ‘elp meself, mate. You looked so glum.” He hands it back with good grace, and Carter almost slips it back into his pocket before remembering to check it. When he looks back up the two men are watching him closely.
“Uh, Sergeant Carter, US Air Corps,” he says, not sure what they’re waiting for.
“We can see that,” says the French corporal, and Carter wonders whether he’s offended them already or if the men in this camp are just all bad tempered. Whether he’ll become like that too – and then stops, because of course he already has. It’s what he’s made himself into. But then the Frenchman, who barely comes up to Carter’s shoulder, smiles and shrugs.
“LeBeau and Newkirk,” he says, gesturing to indicate himself and the British corporal. “Welcome to Stalag 13.”
“Thanks,” replies Carter thoughtlessly, then rebukes himself.
Corporal Newkirk slips the glove off his hand and gestures at the building. “You want a tour? ‘Ey, you already been through the delousing station?”
Carter shivers. “I had my last two weeks ago.”
This raises eyebrows. “You’re not a new prisoner?”
“I was in Stalag 7 for three months.” Now that he’s in the conversation he’s not sure how to get out of it, except by being as curt as possible.
Newkirk whistles. “We ‘ear they’re pretty tough,” he says, impressed, and LeBeau nods. “You were lucky to get a transfer,” he adds, which makes no sense at all. And then, before Carter can say anything, “What regiment were you with before that?”
“162nd,” he answers. “Shot down over Dusseldorf.”
The men nod, and Newkirk steps forward to open the door. “C’mon in. You’ll have to see the colonel anyway. What about the other men who came in with you?”
“I don’t know them,” says Carter, and strides in past the man without further words.
The barracks isn’t much different than the ones at 7, maybe a bit larger. There’s a stove with a pot on it heating what smells like coffee, which is a difference; they weren’t allowed fires this early in the year, and private rations were usually traded or stolen and rarely made it to the cooking stage.
“You’re bunk is there,” says Newkirk, pointing at the lower bunk of the bed right beside the door. “I’m upstairs, so if you need me, just knock.” Carter doesn’t know what to make of that and so just ignores it and tosses his bag onto the bunk, regretting the movement immediately as it means he’ll have to leave it behind unsupervised when he goes to talk to the colonel. He doesn’t have much in it, but now he won’t have anything when he comes back.
The senior POW, Colonel Robert Hogan, isn’t what he’s expecting. He had predicted a man crushed by the captivity and the hopelessness, probably prematurely grey and depressed. The colonel is a youngish man, full of vitality and highly engaged. He chats to Newkirk and LeBeau as they usher Carter into his quarters – a section of barracks 2 separated by a thin wall – and doesn’t even require them to come to attention. Carter does, standing stiff and saluting until the colonel returns it and gestures for him to stand at ease. Newkirk and LeBeau stay in the room, a fact which not only seems not bother the colonel but apparently passes completely unnoticed.
“So, an escapee,” the colonel says, glancing at Carter with dark eyes and an easy smile. “From Stalag 7. How’s Captain Williams?”
“Fine, sir,” says Carter flatly. His natural instinct is to respond to the colonel’s friendly attitude in kind, but it’s not hard to prevent himself when thinking back to 7’s senior POW, who did little to control the men under command other than to see that escape attempts were kept to a reasonable rate.
Hogan nods. “Still got that limp, does he?” he asks with even greater camaraderie, eyes wandering now.
Carter frowns. “No, sir. No limp.”
“Huh, must’ve healed up. Never mind. What regiment were you with?”
“The 162nd, sir. Shot down over Dusseldorf,” he repeats without emotion. He’s said the words so many times in the past three months that they hardly seem real anymore. Carter doesn’t mind; he’d just as well forget that night.
“162nd, eh? So that’ll be Colonel Miller?”
“No, sir, Colonel Stanley.”
“Right, right. But you know Parker, right? Everyone knows Parker.”
“…I don’t think so, sir.”
Hogan looks at him in shock. “Hm, I thought everyone knew Parker.”
“Afraid not, sir.” Carter’s really starting to hope all conversations with the colonel aren’t going to be such a stiff question-and-answer routine. He’s also starting to wish the man were crushed and depressed; it would make it a lot easier to keep from responding to his enthusiasm. But for a reason he’s not sure of the man seems to relax now, or at least shift into a different gear.
“Alright, Sergeant,” says Hogan, straightening and losing some of his extreme cheerfulness. “I think we can trust you.”
There’s a tandem protest from Newkirk and LeBeau, but the colonel waves it off. “He’s in the barracks, we can’t just hope he won’t notice. You knew we’d have to fill the bunk eventually.”
Carter listens, mystified.
“Truth is, Sergeant, we’re running a … call it a Traveller’s Aid Society. We help downed airmen get back to England, and do what we can to give the local Underground a hand. The reason there’s no escapes from Stalag 13 is because we make sure there aren’t.”
Carter frowns. “I don’t… come again, sir?” This isn’t what he was expecting. Is it a trick? Some kind of a trap? He’s trying hard to be suspicious, but he doesn’t have enough experience, and it’s becoming harder and harder to draw a line in the sand.
“We’ve been ordered by London to stay here and help the war effort from behind enemy lines. We’ve got a radio, and tunnels that give us access to the outside when we want it,” says Hogan, as if it were nothing. “We can leave whenever we want, provided we come back in time for roll call. Now, you’re new to camp so we won’t expect you to help out with anything for a while, but since you’re in our main base of operations you had to know.”
Carter just stares.
“Maybe we should show ‘im, sir?” suggests Newkirk. Hogan nods, waving them off.
“Fine, fine.”
In one way, the tunnels are astounding. But mostly they’re so far out of his frame of reference, Carter can’t form any opinion of them or the operation the men here are apparently running under the feet of their captors. He can hardly make sense of the factory turning out novelty letter-openers, the forging station printing German marks, or the photography and tailoring station fitting men out with papers and clothes to help them pass as Germans.
Instead, he tries to focus on the men. LeBeau tags along for a while, but then is called away for something and he’s left with just Newkirk as his guide.
The main thing he notices about the British corporal is that he’s the kind of man Carter would like to have for a friend; quick, easy-going and amusing. He only hopes he can keep from blowing it, and his life in this camp.
“Of course, the whole operation gets bogged down when we start getting heavy snowfall – you can brush out tracks for a while, but even the Krauts start to get suspicious of bloody great trails in feet of snow. And besides that, it’s just ruddy freezing.”
“Sure,” says Carter, who doubts that the winters here are worse than North Dakota’s, but with the barracks’ poor insulation – he remembers seeing daylight through the slats in the barracks door – they don’t have to be.
Newkirk, currently leading him back past the coding station being manned by an American staff sergeant, pauses. “Where’re you from, anyway? East coast? West? Don’t sound like a southerner, but I’m no great shakes at Yank accents.” Newkirk puts a terrible southern drawl on the last two words; Carter grins.
“Right smack in the middle, on the northern border,” he says. “Bullfrog, North Dakota.”
Newkirk shrugs. “Never ‘eard of it.”
“Don’t worry, Newkirk, neither has anyone in the States,” puts in the sergeant, smiling. “We’ve got more men here than they do.”
“Actually, we’re home to the State Wheat Fair in October, it really puts us on the map. We’ve got space for three thousand,” says Carter without thinking, and regrets it almost immediately, especially when he sees Newkirk’s face freeze momentarily. But it unfreezes again, and the man slaps him on the shoulder.
“You tell ‘em, mate. C’mon, I’d better take you up and show you the facilities. Better get it over with quick, then maybe you’ll forgive me before the war’s over.” He heads towards the tunnel entrance into barracks 2. Carter follows.
He tries to keep quiet after the afternoon’s slip-up, hardly talks through dinner in the mess hall – he gets a slice of white bread with no apparent stings attached, and actually sits staring at it so long LeBeau asks if he’s waiting for it to eat him. Otherwise the food is much the same, heavy on the cabbage, stingy on the meat, but he thinks there may be a little more flavour to it.
Whatever’s going on in this crazy camp, it may not be entirely as bad as he thought.
Carter spends two days keeping mostly to himself, talking only with the men in his barracks and even then hardly at all. Newkirk and Kinch are more open than some of the others – he thinks he may have offended LeBeau by telling the man his favourite food is hotdogs and mashed potatoes – but they’re both busy with the downstairs operation and anyway he knows he’s not making it easy for them.
He can’t help it; he knows the only way to keep from putting his foot in his mouth is to keep it shut. And now that he’s seen the kind of trust and friendships that have somehow managed to survive in this camp, he’s even more afraid of blowing his chances of being a part of that. Better they think of him as aloof than hopeless.
Nevertheless, he’s never been much good at that, and as time passes he slowly begins to creep in out of the cold, to join their conversations from the fringe. To become a minor, shadowy part of the group. He plays cards – badly – with Newkirk, helps LeBeau train the dogs, carries messages between Kinch and the colonel.
It seems like it might actually work. For almost an entire week.
“Carter!”
Carter’s making his bed when the colonel hollers for him, and stands up so quick he nearly slams his head into Newkirk’s bunk above.
“Coming, sir!” He drops the blanket, edges pulled out of their careful tucks by his startled reaction, and hurries into the colonel’s office. Kinch, Newkirk and LeBeau are all in there, and they all turn to stare at him as he runs in with sharp eyes.
“Yes, sir?”
“Carter, yesterday I told you to tell Kinch to report to London that we did need the sub for pick-up, right?” The colonel’s unusually stern, and Carter flinches into a state near attention.
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you?”
“I sure di –” he pauses. He certainly relayed the message; he remembers running down to Kinch and telling the sergeant… “I told Kinch that…”
“That we didn’t need the sub,” says the sergeant.
“I, uh… I might’ve, sir,” admits Carter. He’s not even sure now. That the message was about the sub waiting, he definitely remembers. Whether it was supposed to or not…
“You might have,” rumbles Hogan. “Let me tell you, soldier, the man we sent out to be picked up by the sub made it back to his safe-house when the sub didn’t show. But he – and the crucial information he was carrying – could just as easily have been picked up by the Krauts.”
“Bloody brilliant,” spits Newkirk.
“Completement fou,” adds LeBeau in a similar tone.
Carter looks down at the floor, unable to face them. “I’m sorry, sir. I’ll – I’ll try to be more careful…” He always tries. It just never seems to work out. And sooner or later he ends up making a complete mess of things. Like he’s just done.
“You’ll need to do more than try,” warns Hogan. Carter snaps his eyes up and salutes, carefully looking at the wall behind the rest of the men.
“Yes, sir.” He turns and hurries out without waiting for the dismissal, eager to escape the weight of the men’s combined censure. There’s no point in staying, anyway. He’s ruined his chance, only one week in. Typical.
He’s sitting on his bunk, staring glumly at the floor when the meeting breaks up. Kinch and LeBeau hurry past him without a word, climbing down into the tunnel. Newkirk ambles over to the table and sits, apparently without an assignment. After a minute he draws out a pack of cards and begins to shuffle.
“Want a ‘and, then?”
Carter looks up, and sees the Brit riffling and bridging the cards between dextrous fingers, and grinning.
“Who, me?” He looks around, but there’s no one else on his side of the table the man could be referring to.
“No, the bunk,” says Newkirk, rolling his eyes. “O’ course you.”
Carter shifts, awkwardly. “I figured… figured you wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”
“’Cause you messed up? We all mess up sometimes, mate. The gov’nor, he can fly off the ‘andle a bit when the operation’s threatened; ‘e’ll be right as rain by supper. We’re not gonna ostracize you for one mistake.”
Carter swallows. He should accept it. Just take the offer at face value and say nothing more; that would be the smart thing to do.
It’s not, however, the Carter thing to do. And pretending to be someone else is, sooner or later, just going to cause him to mess up even more than just plain old Carter would.
He slumps, resting his arms on his knees, and looks the corporal straight in the eye. “Wanna know something, Newkirk?” He pauses, then sighs. “It’s not just one mistake. Not with me. I don’t know why, but the one thing I’m good at – apart from blowing stuff up – is messing things up. If there’s one thing that can go wrong, I’ll manage it. I tried to turn over a new leaf here, but you can see how well that worked out,” he says, bitterly. “So thanks, but you’re better off without me. I’ll just ruin your whole operation.” Carter turns to sit with his back against the bunk’s support, facing the tunnel entrance.
He hears Newkirk shuffling the cards a couple more times, and figures the conversation’s over. The Brit’s accepted his words, and he’ll spend the rest of the war being the deadweight in the colonel’s operation. Maybe he could apply to be assigned to a different barracks so they could at least have someone helpful in his bunk.
He’s not expecting Newkirk to speak again, so when the Brit does it nearly causes Carter to lose his balance against the bunk’s thin strut and fall backwards.
“You know, Carter,” says the man lightly, still shuffling, “I can tell you as an honestly dishonest man, we’ve got plenty o’ loyal men here. We’ve got men fightin’ for their countries, for their families, for their freedom. And all of us’re good at one thing: bein’ what we need to be to win this war. You know what that makes us?”
Carter turned his head to face the Brit.
“Makes us one huge troop o’ liars, mate. The colonel, ‘e could convince you ol’ Winnie’s the ruddy Chancellor of Germany. You should see Kinch on the horn with Klink, ‘e could make you believe ‘e’d been in the German Army since birth. Me? I could sell you a watch with no bally hands.”
“You guys’re pretty talented,” says Carter, and means it.
“Maybe we are,” says Newkirk with a grin. “But I’ll tell you what we don’t have too many of. Honest men. Men who speak their minds, who don’t make themselves up to be bigger than they are. Men to keep us grounded. Because let me tell you, mate, if someone’s not around to remind us, we’re liable to forget we can’t fly. And I figure a man like that, maybe ‘e’d be worth a few mistakes.”
Carter stares. “I don’t… I don’t know how to do that,” he says at last.
Newkirk rolls his eyes. “Carter, I’m tellin’ you, all you’ve gotta do is be yourself. And if there’re problems, let the colonel decide if and how to fix ‘em. ‘E’s gotta earn ‘is officer’s salary some’ow, you know.”
Carter blinks, trying to make sense of it all. Newkirk, though, has already moved on.
“Alright, then. Now ‘ow about a bloody ‘and, already?”
