Author's Note: This is set just after "Hogan's Hofbräu".

Can you believe I started writing this one around November 2012? And I've had a longer story cooking since summer of that year, which is barely reaching two thirds of completion. Not to mention the few plot bunnies that just will not come out of the Gonculator. I just hope that 2014 will be kinder to my muse than 2013 has been …

Huge "thank you"s to Emily, beta reader extraordinaire, and Tricksterrune (aka Runenklinge) for her invaluable linguistic assistance.

Disclaimer: All characters here belong to Bernard Fein (and his estate) and Albert Ruddy. I have no idea whom Finagle's Law does belong to, since I'm told there wasn't a Mr Finagle.

Out of the Frying Pan

Chapter One

Midnight tolled at the St Johannes dem Täufer church, and Hammelburg fell silent again.

Hilda tightened her woolly cardigan around her shoulders to ward off the cold and smiled at the three retreating figures.

"Good night, boys! Danke schön!"

Newkirk, Carter and LeBeau all waved at her; Newkirk winked, LeBeau grinned and Carter smiled good-naturedly. The soldiers from the 4th Panzer Army had been a little less talkative than they had been the day before, but they had let a few key facts slip over their plates of Schäufele that would presumably make Colonel Hogan – and a lot of people on the other side of the radio – happy. The lovely Hofbräu owner's sunny face was a small but significant bonus.

Still, Newkirk privately thought, the sooner this waiter job was over, the better. The Adolf Hitler Division had gone half a week ago, and with it the two officers who had so effectively extorted money from Klink for their (alleged) "Beautify Berchtesgaden" operation. Unfortunately, the day after, the 4th Panzer Army had stopped by on the way to the Russian Front, so the "Stalag XIII work detail" had temporarily taken up work at Hilda's Hofbräu again.

Waiting tables all evening was a more tiring business than it sounded, especially when said waiters were doing a little spying on the side.

LeBeau appeared to be following the same train of thought, as he muttered with a yawn, "If I have to make Sauerbraten again ten years from now it'll be too soon. And don't talk to me about Reibekuchen."

"What's Reibekuchen?" Carter asked with mild interest. LeBeau shot him a glare and reached up to pull the American's aviator's hat over his eyes.

"It's a kind of German potato pancake," Newkirk explained with just the right pitch in his drawl that made LeBeau's glare jump to him instead. Honestly, sometimes it was too easy to get him riled up. "Deep fried, goes well with pumpernickel apparently. Oh, cheer up, LeBeau," he added sotto voce as they crossed the Adolf Hitler bridge out of Hammelburg, "I thought you liked getting out of camp once in a while. At least you got to cook – we took orders and listened to mostly useless gossip all evening."

"I know, but these barbarians always have to order the same things! And one of them even ordered Liverwurst with chocolate! Chocolate!"

"Well," Carter mused, "you haven't tried it, have you? Then you don't know if it's really that bad." He yawned, too, and took a look around, ignoring LeBeau's disbelieving stare. "Boy, that fog looks thick. Was it already like that when we got to the Hofbräu?"

Newkirk was about to make a disparaging comment out of habit, but he closed his mouth and glanced around as well. Carter had a point. With the sunset deceptively thin wisps of mist had risen from the earth, slowly, but surely, and now the whole wood was wreathed in a pale fog which hid everything more than sixty feet away.

"Can't be helped now," he said in a less jaunty tone than he liked. "Don't worry, we'll be back to camp in no time if none of us wanders off." Instinctively his eyes searched for Carter. The bloke was so absent-minded he had practically elevated his talent for getting lost to an art form.

"Next time we'll have the Colonel ask London for a weather forecast before we go." LeBeau's joke fell a little flat, and he thrust his fists into his pockets, not quite able to hide the uncertainty in his eyes. "Or perhaps we could borrow a truck from the motor pool."

Newkirk rolled his eyes. "Sure, because a patrol finding three Allied prisoners in a German truck would not get nosy and ask nasty questions. Look, if we're spotted here, we'll just say we cut through the wire and scarpered."

LeBeau silently conceded the point, and they all made their way through the treacherous fog.

After a while, though, Newkirk heard him murmur, "I miss the city."

"Why?" Carter asked in genuine surprise, as though the very idea was daft.

LeBeau pulled one end of his scarf over his shoulder and replied, "You can't get lost in Paris. There's always a sign to tell you where you are and let you know where you're going. But here? All the trees look the same. Especially in that fog."

"You've never been to London," Newkirk retorted with a smirk. "Signs or not, when the smog comes down, you can't see five feet in front of you. Believe me, I've seen a few pea soupers in my time, and this little fog doesn't come close. At least you can breathe in here."

"To think that I used to want to go to London …"

"Oi! I'm a Londoner, I'm allowed! You're –"

"Hey, did you hear that?"

Newkirk swallowed the comment he had been about to make – so did LeBeau, by the looks of it – and they both glanced at Carter. "Hear what?"

Carter peered around into the dark, but couldn't seem to find anything wrong with their surroundings.

"Nothing. I thought I heard … Nope, nothing."

Newkirk listened intently, too, but apart from the usual forest sounds, he didn't make out anything of note. The damp cold drew an involuntary shiver from him. "Why don't we get a move on, eh? Before something unpleasant turns up."

"Entièrement d'accord," mumbled LeBeau, who kept rubbing his gloved hands for warmth. He was also stealing glances around him, as though he were feeling edgy as well. Whether this was because of Carter's false alarm or because he had actually heard something to warrant their unease, Newkirk didn't know.

Carter said nothing, and kept staring in front of them as though the power of his gaze alone were enough to lift the fog, his head tilted forward slightly. He looked uncharacteristically preoccupied.

"Something on your mind, Carter?" Newkirk asked in a low voice after a while. The American shook his head.

"Just the fog. And the thing I thought I heard earlier."

There was something in his voice that Newkirk didn't like, as though the 'thing' he heard earlier was a definite possibility instead of a simple false alarm. He could have shaken his head and said something derisive about some people getting other people spooked for nothing; but the other two didn't look like they were in the mood for sarcastic banter, so he aimed for reassuring rather than mocking.

"Well, I can't deny the fog's making things a little more … interesting, but it's not like we could get lost, right? We know these wood like the back of our hands! Look, there's the tree we hid behind last year while those Krauts were shooting at us – I can see the bullet marks!"

He might have missed his mark, or the Peter Newkirk approach to reassurance needed some work. Either way, there was a beat, during which Carter and LeBeau stared at him oddly.

Newkirk shrugged. "Well? It's as good a marker as anything."

LeBeau made the familiar wry grimace that said exactly what he thought of Newkirk's choice of markers; the next second, the expression on Carter's face shifted.

"Uh, the thing I thought I heard earlier?" he whispered, urgency creeping into his tone. "It's back."

Ignoring the little voice that told him that Carter was probably imagining things, Newkirk pricked up his ears. The next moment, he caught the last sound he would have expected to hear tonight: the shrill whine of a plane in distress, far in the distance, but getting closer by the second.

The three men leaped for cover under the nearest large tree as one. No need risking getting seen by the wrong kind of eyes.

"I hope the pilot has a parachute," LeBeau whispered. "What do you think, one of ours or one of them?"

"Yeah, and what's it doing here, all alone?"

"No idea," muttered Newkirk, still listening closely. "But that's a Messerschmitt, I reckon. Took a nasty hit, by the sound of it."

"Then I take it back," said LeBeau darkly. "Forget the parachute."

Newkirk gave a wry smirk, but Carter didn't seem to have heard at all. His eyes were still fixed upwards, and in the relative darkness Newkirk thought he gone pale.

"Guys? I … I think it's coming straight at us!"

Half a second later, the plane crashed into the ground, pieces zinging everywhere and hitting everything in their way. When it hit the dirt, the blast sent debris flying through the air in a shower of earth before the battered metal gave one last faint teeth-gnashing groan and began to settle.

Then the fuel tank exploded.

Fortunately, Carter's estimate turned out to be off by about five yards.

Translations/Notes:

Danke schön: "Thank you very much"/"Thanks a lot."

Schäufele: Traditional German dish, made from pork's shoulder meat.

Liverwurst: Pig's liver sausage. I don't know how commonplace cold cuts with chocolate for breakfast is in Germany, but a few years ago, in a hotel in Donaueschingen (Baden-Württenberg), I saw a little old German lady take mortadella with Nutella for breakfast.

Entièrement d'accord: (I) entirely agree.

The third definition of "interesting" in the summary was inspired by one of my favourite lines from Serenity, the movie sequel of Firefly. Because yes, sometimes "it's going to be interesting", not unlike saying "what could possibly go wrong?", really does mean that …