A/N The first two scenes were originally part of chapter 3. The chapter break had been moved to end on a better note as long as chapter 4 has not been posted yet. The scenes per chapter may be reversed again in a few days. 2019-07-04: scenes per chapter are now reversed.

Thanks Abracadebra for the challenge!

Unbeta'ed.

Pawn in the Game

Kinch was sharpening his pencils. They were already pretty sharp but maybe he could make them sharper. The radio had stayed stubbornly silent the last two days. London had accepted the report about the failure with the same indifference as the first time. But Kinch knew there would be an aftermath. You didn't fail such an important mission without any consequences. He had never bothered to find out what possible sentences there could be, but in time of war they were harsher than in peacetime.

"So," a voice said behind him, startling Kinch. "What's going on?"

Kinch swirled around and glared at the intruder. "Olsen," he said in greeting and nodded to him. "What are you doing down here?"

Their outside man leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. Apparently, he tried to look relaxed but the deep frown on his face betrayed his real tension. "What happened?"

Kinch turned back to his task. His pencils were sharp enough that he could use them as weapons; used against the neck or into the eye, they could even be deadly. "Nothing," he answered without looking up from his task. "Why do you ask?"

His guest snorted. "Why do I ask?" Olsen circled the table until he faced Kinch. "One. Newkirk has lost all games today. It's like playing with a ghost. He doesn't even mind that we're cheating, or maybe he doesn't even see it. I'm not sure that he is even in the same room."

Olsen leaned forward against the table while Kinch gave him a barely visible shrug.

"Two," Olsen continued, "the soup tasted worse than what was offered in the German mess hall. If I didn't know it better, I'd assume LeBeau was trying to kill us with salt."

Kinch hadn't left the radio except for roll call and for some sleep. The bread LeBeau had brought him had been dry and hard but if he believed Olsen better than the soup.

"Three," Olsen said while he used his fingers to show the number, "Carter is trying to create a new explosive to destroy a safe from the outside -"

As if to make a point, the tunnel shock with another failed experiment. Dirt and small pebbles rained down on them but Kinch was used to it by now.

"- and nobody is stopping it as the Colonel is holed up in his office and you're down here. So yes," Olsen said and straightened, "I think something did happen and I'd like to know what."

Another explosion rocked the tunnels. Olsen cowered while Kinch remained sitting, drumming his fingers against the table. Carter's attempts were harmless compared to the figurative explosion that would happen some day in the near future.

"Preferable before I die in a cave-in," Olsen added while he straightened again.

Kinch sighed. "You'll know when the whole world knows," he said fully aware how cryptic he sounded. But his tired thoughts couldn't produce any better words.

"That's reassuring," Olsen said with more heat in his voice than the situation warranted.

Kinch glanced across the table. Worry had produced a hard tenseness around Olsen's shoulder that wasn't usually found in this easy-going guy. Maybe they had really acted worryingly. He sighed again. "It's-"

Before he could add another charge to their ever growing list of failures, the radio crackled to life. Kinch dropped the pencils. The way they scattered across the floor ensured that he could return to sharpening them again after this call.

"I'll get the colonel," Olsen said and sprinted upstairs. Kinch watched him running off, surprised that he knew that the colonel would be needed. The damage by the unexpected failure had been far more outspread than assumed. Somehow, he had missed how the rest of the camp had elected Olsen to come down and make sense of them.

With more dread than usual, Kinch answered London's call. Hogan came down without his usual smirk. Nothing in the way he moved showed the reluctance he surely felt. Only as he grabbed the radio Kinch could see the small trembling in his hand.

Kinch caught his eyes and nodded his support before he turned and left the room. Some calls had to be done without an audience.

He stayed near, not going upstairs, but also far enough to only hear Hogan's voice without being able to understand the words. Leaning against the wall, he crossed his arms and waited.

"And?"

Kinch jerked in surprise before he recognized Newkirk. Beside him, LeBeau and Carter also had come down.

He shrugged.

"What are they going to do?" Carter asked. "Surely, they can't blame him. We did our best."

"Oui. We even tried it a second time."

"We still failed," Newkirk muttered. "Something like that never ends well." The dark expression on his face told a story, but Kinch was too tired to figure it out right now.

"I don't think there's a tutorial or a book of rules for the work we do. So it's not like-"

"What!" Hogan's voice was loud enough to carry his shock across the room and around the corner where his team was waiting.

"We'll hide him with the Resistance. They won't get him," LeBeau said and nodded to Newkirk as if they had already planned ahead. "After the war he'll be just a French citizen."

Kinch was speechless for a moment. "You can't -" Then he broke off. It wasn't a thought he hadn't entertained himself, but he knew that Colonel Hogan would never go for it. He would bend, re-interpret and stretch an order, but he would never outright refuse one. Whatever London would order him to do, he'd do it.

"With all due respect!" Now Hogan sounded only angry not shocked.

"Do you think they'll relieve him off his command?" Carter wrung his hands. "I don't know if I can survive this without ..." he trailed off. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Carter only knew Stalag XIII as a spy command post and never had to live through the beginnings when it had been a normal POW camp.

"Yes, yes. Papa Bear out!"

It was their signal, and they moved as one.

Colonel Hogan stood frozen next to the radio. His hand was still balled into a fist. He neither seemed angry nor annoyed. Kinch narrowed his eyes until he could label the expression – frustration. "Colonel?"

Suddenly Hogan started to laugh.

Kinch glanced around but was only met by confused and slightly worried stares. He didn't think that London could actually say anything that would break Colonel Hogan but the laugh sounded slightly maniac.

"Sir?" Kinch tried again to get his attention. "What did London say?"

The laughter died down. Sighing, Hogan turned to his men, a dark smirk tugging at his lips. "We got played!"

"What!" Newkirk did outrageous like nobody else except maybe LeBeau.

"What!" The Frenchman said right on clue. Then he paused. Irritated, he tilted his head. "What do you mean we got played?"

Kinch had a bad feeling about this. What if London really had been happy that they had failed? What if they were meant to fail? He closed his eyes in defeat. "It wasn't the real plan."

"No," Hogan said and the last traces of laughter vanished from his face. "They were decoys." He shook his head. "They had created several fake plans with wrong dates and places."

"And the German spy stole such a fake plan? Or was this plan left for him to find?" Kinch asked, but in truth he could guess the answer.

"Yes, but the German High Command didn't take it seriously enough." Hogan found his smirk again. "But what good does a decoy do if it's not taken serious?"

Finally, LeBeau freed himself from his shock. "We were willing to die for a fake plan? Nothing has changed for the invasion because they got the papers? I almost -" he broke off, his lips pressed together to keep the words in.

"They can't do this!" Carter blinked. "That's not nice."

Newkirk snorted. "We do it all the time," he snapped back, "you have yet to complain about it."

LeBeau muttered in French, his eyes blazing in anger.

Hogan sighed. "It was necessary so the real plan has any chance to succeed. Now the Germans are going to position their troops and anti-aircraft guns somewhere far off the right beach, and we'll get into the Fortress Europe. We were meant to fail. It was our part."

"Hey!" Olsen called from above through the bed opening. "Schultz is looking for you, LeBeau. You may want to make an appearance before he calls in the dogs." His gaze lingered longer as if he tried to guess what was going on. Kinch would love to help him out with that but for the time being he wasn't even sure himself what all of this meant.

"Alright." Hogan clapped his hands together. "Time to get back to the business at hand." He looked over to Carter. "No more experiments with new explosives. We need our tunnels."

Carter nodded. But the expression of hurt stayed on his face.

Kinch didn't know if he took it harder that they had failed or that they had been played. Either way, London was really putting everything into D-Day. They were willing to shatter trust and working teams to raise the chance of success.

"LeBeau, taste your stuff before you offer it to anybody else. The soup was almost deadly."

LeBeau shrugged but nodded. "I'll save some of it for the guys in London. Maybe drop it onto their head."

That got a smirk out of Newkirk. "You Frenchmen wouldn't even -"

Colonel Hogan held up his hand and stopped him. "Let's not get into this now."

"We almost died for these papers," Carter whispered. "Why didn't London tell us that they were fake?"

Newkirk sighed. "If we wouldn't have desperately tried to get these papers, the Germans wouldn't have taken them serious. It's easy like this." He shrugged. "They played it well."

It all came down to it. For London, it had been worth it, but as Kinch looked around and noted the solemn faces he asked himself if he agreed with that assessment.

"It doesn't change anything at all. Making the decoy believable was as important as protecting or retrieving the real plans. Actually, it may have been even more important." Hogan was back being the perfect leader and officer. "Every single gun that's not aimed at the patch of beach our guys are going to land is a win and worth our blood."

For a motivational speech, it wasn't bad. Kinch didn't really felt better about being played. But everything was fair in war and love, and it never had been about his feelings after all.

Carter, LeBeau and Newkirk nodded and slunk off to their respective duties. Most likely, they all were needed to calm Schultz down, who had been by now running around the camp in search of LeBeau for a long time.

Watching them go, Kinch resigned himself to stay down here for a few more hours. As he went by the colonel, he saw the mask of the perfect officer and gentleman slipping for a moment, showing just how hard the last few days had been on him.

"I know what they say – treat people like you want to be treated."

Kinch didn't say anything. It wasn't like Colonel Hogan expected an answer to his musings. He bent down and retrieved his pencils. Two of them were broken. Good news was that he would have time to fix them as nobody was being recalled or relieved of duty. And yet it seemed like a fitting allegory for their situation.

"So, I guess I don't like how I treat people," Hogan continued his musing, "because I don't like being Klink in this game, no matter how important it is." He made a face before he sighed again.

Kinch nodded. "That's our sacrifice for the victory." He could acknowledge that they neither acted nicely nor honorably most of the time even if he didn't lose any sleep over it.

"Let's hope D-Day is actually worth it."

"It's the beginning of the end," Kinch said. "It's going to be worth it." He balled a fist. It had to be worth it.

Hogan gave a single nod. Then he turned and left.

Kinch remained alone in the silent tunnel once again. Whatever sacrifices they had to do would always pale in comparison to the men storming the beaches.

He grabbed his knife and started to sharpen the first pencil. Better be prepared for whatever London else would need.

Nobody was surprised as a few days later, London ordered Colonel Hogan for a quick meeting to London. While LeBeau and Newkirk assumed that it was still about the failure, Kinch was fairly sure that somebody in London had realized how far they had pushed and wanted to repair the damage by trusting Hogan with more details about D-Day.

Of course, Hogan brought back an even crazier mission. But that too, was just part of the game.

The End

A/N Inspired by the real life "Operation Bodyguard" - to quote Wikipedia: A World War II deception plan employed by the Allied states before the 1944 invasion of north-west Europe. The plan was intended to mislead the German high command as to the time and place of the invasion. The plan contained several operations, which culminated in the tactical surprise over the Germans during the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) and delayed German reinforcements to the region for some time afterwards.

Thank you for reading!