The Great Escape by Paul Brickhill Read Free Book Online

flooring torn up, even Dopey, the dimmest of the ferrets, would have guessed that something was wrong. When Crump was making “Harry’s” trap, the floor was up for about ten days and covered with spare paillasse when a ferret wandered near by. It would never have passed undetected in later days, but in the first weeks of the north camp occupation the ferrets were not well organized and the gamble came off.
“Harry’s” Trap Door
    Only a few dozen people in the whole camp knew where the trap doors were. A lot of the rest didn’t even know what huts they were in. That was how good the security was. Yet nearly everyone was working in some way on the X organization. A couple of days after we moved into the compound, blank sheets of paper had been pinned up in all huts with such headings as “Volunteers for cricket or softball teams will please put their names down here.” Little X in every block went around interviewing everyone who signed to see if he had any useful skill, from languages to mining and needlework.
    Anyone who could sew went to join Tommy Guest’s tailoring section. Artists went to Tim Walenn’s forgery factory, miners into the tunnels, engineers to Johnny Travis’ department, and so on. The rest became stooges or penguins, the penguins being the people who dispersed the sand from the tunnels. Most, of course, became stooges, doomed to hour after hour of skulking and spying on ferrets and warning of their approach to any danger area.
     
    Junior Clark had the compound divided into two sections, “D” for danger zone and “S” for safe. “S” was the east half of the camp where the gate was. The rest was “D” zone, where the tunnels and factories were. As soon as a ferret penetrated into “D,” he was tailed, and if he got within fifty yards of an exposed tunnel or factory, work was packed up right away till he wandered off again.
    Down by the gate, the “Duty Pilot” sat with his runner, watching everyone who came into the camp, noting on his list the time they came in and the time they went out. He sat there every minute of every day without a break, never moving till the next man came to relieve him. All over the camp there were warning points to relay his sign messages. Near him was a little cement incinerator, an innocent-looking Red Cross box, and a coal scuttle. If the coal scuttle alone was lying carelessly on the incinerator, it meant there were only a couple of administrative German staff (pretty harmless) wandering about. If the Red Cross box was tossed up too, it meant ferrets in. There were various combinations and positions.
    Over by the back of 110, a man lounging on a stool with a book kept his eyes on the incinerator, and if the box and scuttle position flashed a danger sign he got lazily up and rearranged some shutters. Across by a corner of Block 120, a man casually blew his nose, upon which George Harsh, looking out of a window of 123, put his head around the door and said pithily, “Ferrets. Pack up.” And then the trap was on in seconds, the wires folded down, and sand and cement paste smoothed into the cracks.
    Every factory had its own stooges watching in case a ferret got through the general screen. There were nearly three hundred stooges altogether rostered in shifts. The organization needed them all.
    The whole scheme was taking shape so smoothly that Roger one morning said thoughtfully to Floody and George Harsh, “You know, this time it might really be home for Christmas for some of us,” and for once they didn’t laugh.



Chapter 3

    Floody had dug only six inches into the dirt under “Tom’s” trap when he came to the yellow sand. The gray dirt was only a thin layer over the surface of the compound, and everywhere underneath was the bright yellow subsoil. Whenever the ferrets saw it they knew there was a tunnel, and the heat was on till it was found. With three tunnels going, there would be about a hundred tons of yellow sand to disperse, about as