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There was a terrible temptation to press his luck, to offer them more money to let them go. But he realized in time that he was so overexcited by fear that he couldn't trust his own judgment. He was deeply aware that a vein on his temple was pulsing in time with his heart. And his ears rang.

"I will remember that, Sir," Fulmar said, managing a weak smile.

Smiling, the prison guard waved him out of the little office.

As quickly as the first scenario had come to him, others followed, and they were not nearly as pleasant. A hundred things could go wrong: Professor Dyer might paniG. He might decide to try to save his own skin by turning on Fulmar. And Gisella had not been arrested. So he might decide that turning himself and/or Fulmar in would somehow help her.

But above all, there was the alarm sounded for all of them by the Gestapo and the SS-SD. It was wishful thinking gone mad to hope that no connection would be made between the two men the entire German security services were looking for and the two "persons traveling to Pecs without authorization."

But there had been nothing to do about that possibility but pray.

On his second day in the mines, Professor Dyer had crushed his fingers under the wheels of one of the coal cars. He had been taken from the mine, howling in pain. It had been easy then to imagine that the accident would attract the authorities to him, but that hadn't happened, either.

Dyer's hand had been treated and bandaged. And he now spent his days one-handedly sweeping out the cells in St. Gertrud's and replacing the straw in the mattresses.

Every night, when he got back, Fulmar had to display a confidence that he did not feel at all. He had to reassure Dyer they had nothing to worry about, that all they had to do was avoid attracting attention to themselves, and they would be turned free.

And every morning, he gave the professor what he hoped was an encouraging wink as he filed out of the

cell block to get on the truck.

The donkeys in their stalls stood waiting stoically to be led out and hitched to the coal cars. They didn't seem to mind, obviously, doing what was expected of them. Being in the mines, for them, was the way things were.

The mine corridor where the donkeys had their stalls was several hundred feet long; the donkey stalls occupied the center portion. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of donkey manure. There was a sharp odor on top of that, ammonia like from donkey urine.

Three-quarters of the way down the line of stalls the donkey-shit car sat waiting for attention. As they approached it, Fulmar understood why he and another muscular young prisoner had been selected from the line of incoming miners. There was more than donkey shit to be loaded aboard the donkey-shit car today. There was a dead donkey.

"Tot [dead],"the foreman said, quite unnecessarily.

Then he showed them how one of the sides of the donkey-shit car could

be removed, and how, with the aid of a block and tackle, they were to load the carcass onto the car. The donkey's eyes were open, a curious white. And he was already starting to decompose, and to smell. When they got the block and tackle in place and hauled him out of the stall onto the tracks, the movement caused the contents of his lower bowel, not ordinary donkey shit, but a foul smelling bluish semiliquid, to pass from his anus.

More of it came out after they had rearranged the block and tackle and dragged him onto the car. Fulmar felt nauseated, tried to fight it down, and failed.

The foreman laughed at him and said he could tell that he was a city boy who had never lived on a farm.

After they got the donkey carcass into the car and closed the side, they went down the line of donkeys and shoveled the donkey shit into the car. By the time they were finished, you couldn't see the donkey carcass.

And then they hooked a donkey to the car to drag the car to the elevator.

Fulmar had another unpleasant thought. He didn't know how long he had been in jail and working in the mine, and therefore did not know how much longer he would be in the mines. He thought he was a damned fool for not having made a scratch on his cell wall once a day. Then he would have known.

Then he thought it really didn't matter. Long before his ninety-day sentence was up, they would find out that he wasn't a black marketeer.

And soon after that, some other prisoner would roll his dead body off somewhere in a cart, just as he was doing with the donkey. The donkey. Fulmar thought, was actually better off than he was. The donkey had not had the ability to stand around imagining what was going to happen to him.

VII

lONE]

Headquarters, Commander-in-chief, Pacific Pearl Harbor Naval Hase

Lieutenant Commander Stuart J. Collins, United States Navy, Cryptographic Officer, Headquarters, CINCPAC, was aware that the lieutenant commander in

the crisp white uniform in the outer office of CINCPAC was looking askance at his uniform. Commander Collins's khaki uniform was mussed and wilted, and there were sweat stains under the armpits.

The cryptographic section, in the basement of the neatly white-painted, red-tile-roofed headquarters office building, was of course air-conditioned. But it had been air-conditioned in 1937, when no one could have guessed how many people and how much equipment it would be necessary to stuff into the three small rooms. It was hot down there, and people sweated.