Free Crucified by Michael Slade Page B

we clash over my generation. My mom and her friends are dumbfounded by sexed-up girl power."
    "You're not your mother's feminist?"
    "Girls just wanna have fun."
    "No one—not even God—can fight genetics," Wyatt replied.
    As they left the bar and headed for the elevator, Liz said,
    "So will you come to Germany?"
    "That's difficult."
    "But not impossible?"
    "I have meetings set up to market my documentaries."
    "They can wait. This can't. Don't you want to be there when they open the plane?"
    "Of course, but—"
    "My grandmother's dying," Liz interrupted. "I desperately want to unravel the secret behind her husband's disappearance before she's gone. From your point of view, how can you not go? Unmasking Judas would give you one hell of a book and TV show. Who knows what Christian relics might be in the Judas package, but someone thinks they are valuable enough to steal Mick's archive and gut him on a Judas chair. If you don't go, you'll regret it for the rest of your life."
    They reached his floor.
    The door slid open.
    Wyatt stepped out into the hall.
    He turned to face her.
    Liz kept her finger on the Open button.
    "You drive a hard bargain," he complained.
    "I'm a good poker player."
    "So I see."
    "Y'ain't seen nothin' yet."
    "I'm poor at poker."
    "Why do you say that?"
    "Your buttons in the teashop. If I knew how to bluff, I'd have held out for your bra."
    "What bra?" Liz said, grabbing her pullover by its waist and hiking it up to her chin like a partygoer at spring break.
    In the time it took him to blink, she'd pulled it back down.
    "How do you like them apples?" Liz asked, mimicking the voice of the possessed girl in The Exorcist, then flicking her tongue like a serpent in the Garden of Eden and hooking two fingers from her temples as devil's horns.
    The lift door closed and she was gone.
    Actually, Wyatt was an accomplished poker player.
    Yep, he thought. I'm off to Germany.
     

THE GREAT ESCAPE

    GERMANY, 1944

    At five o'clock in the morning, the windy, cold night began to give way to the dull gray light of a winter dawn. Skinny pines with naked trunks packed together around the prisoner-of-war camp, shutting out the world and increasing the sense of isolation. Earlier, yet another RAF raid on Berlin, a hundred miles to the northwest, had plunged Stalag Luft III into blackout. But with the all-clear, the lights had returned, and now, after an uneventful yawn of guard duty, the Nazi in the "goon box"—what the prisoners called the watchtowers around the camp—was cold, tired, and bored.
    Glaring south like a stilt-legged Cyclops with a ray-beam eye, this goon box was the central tower on the north perimeter. From up here, the sentry shone the searchlight over a barbed-wire fence into the Vorlager, an oblong yard stretching the width of the camp from the guardroom and the gate in the northeast corner. Left to right, the yard held the hospital, "the cooler," and the coal shed. The cooler was the camp's solitary confinement block, a prison within a prison for kriegies who tried to escape.
    Kriegie was short for Kriegsgefangene.
    Prisoner of war.
    Here, in the north compound of Stammlager der Luftwaffe No. 3—Stalag Luft III—the prisoners were officers who flew with Fighter and Bomber Command.
    The searchlight roamed the Vorlager and crossed swords with the beams of other watchtowers. A pair of fences, nine feet high and five feet apart, confined the area where the POWs should be sleeping. Between the fences, coils of barbed wire bristled spikes.
    Beneath the fences, buried microphones listened for sounds of digging up to fifteen feet below. Beyond the fences, a German shepherd trained to leap for the throat prowled with his Hundfiihrer. Inside the fences, fifteen wooden huts were raised above the snow-covered ground on piles, with only the concrete under the stove and the washroom touching the earth. In the middle of the front row was Hut 104. Briefly, the searchlight lingered on that one-story barracks, then it