The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 1: The Choir Boy

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.