Hanging on

1

Major Kelly was in the latrine, sitting down, his pants around his ankles, when the Stuka dive bombers struck. With good weather, Kelly used the last stall in the narrow, clapboard building, because it was the only cubicle not covered by a roof and was, therefore, considerably less offensive than any of the others. Now, in the late afternoon sunshine, a fresh breeze pouring in over the top, the stall was actually pleasant, a precious retreat from the men, the war, the bridge. Content, patient with his bodily processes, he sat there watching a fat brown spider weave its web in the corner behind the door hinge. The spider, he felt, was an omen; it survived, even flourished, midst stench and decay; and if he, Kelly, only spun his webs as well as the spider did, were as tenacious, he would flourish too, would make it through this damn war in one piece, One live piece. He had no desire to make it through the war in one dead piece. And that meant spinning tight webs around himself. Shallow philosophy, perhaps, but shallow philosophy was Major Kelly's one great weakness, because it was the only thing that offered hope. Now, mesmerized by the spider, he did not hear the Stukas until they were almost over the latrine. When he did hear them, he looked up, shocked, in time to see them sweep by in perfect formation, framed by the four walls of the stall, shining prettily in the sunlight.

As usual, the trio of stubby dive bombers came without the proper Messerschmitt escort, flaunting their invulnerability. They came from the east, buzzing in low over the trees, climbing as they reached the center of the open encampment, getting altitude for a murderous run on the bridge.

The planes passed over in an instant, no longer framed in the open roof of the last stall. A turbulent wind followed them, as did a thunderclap that shook the latrine walls.

Kelly knew he was as safe in the latrine as anywhere else in camp, for the Stukas never attacked anything but the bridge. They never bombed the cheap tin-walled bunker that was shelved into the soft ground near the tree line, and they ignored the heavy machinery building as well as all the construction equipment parked behind it. They ignored the headquarters which was half corrugated sheet tin and half clapboard and would have made a dandy target; and they were oblivious of the hospital bunker cut into the hillside near the river — and of the latrines behind HQ. All they cared about was pulverizing the damn bridge. They passed over it again and again, spitting black eggs from their bellies, flames blossoming beneath them, until the bridge was down. Then they bombed it some more. They transformed the steel beams into twisted, smoldering lumps of slag, unrecognizable and unusable. Then they bombed it some more. It was almost as if the three pilots had been severely traumatized by the bridge during their childhoods, as if each of them had a personal stake in this business, some old grudge to settle.

If he avoided the bridge, then, he would be safe. Intellectually, he was quite aware of this; however, emotionally, Major Kelly was certain that each Stuka attack was directed against him, personally, and that it was only good luck that the pilots got the bridge instead. Somewhere deep in Nazi Germany, some fine old school chum of his had risen to a position of influence and power, some old chum who knew just where Kelly was, and he was running these Stuka flights to have him wiped out as fitting retribution for some slight or other that Kelly had done the old chum years and years ago. That was it. That had to be it. Yet, as often as he considered his school days back in the States, Major Kelly could not recall a single old chum of German extraction who might have returned to the fatherland for the war. He still would not give up on the theory, because it was the only one which made sense; he could not conceive of a war, or any battle in it, that was waged on a purely impersonal basis. At one time, he was sure, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt must have snubbed Hitler at a cocktail party, thereby generating this whole mess.

Now, caught in the latrine at the start of the attack, Major Kelly stood and jerked up his trousers, catching them on an exposed nailhead and ripping out half the backside. He slammed through the dusty latrine door into the open area at the south side of the machinery shed. He was just in time to see the Stukas, four hundred yards up-river, arc high over the bridge and punch out their first ebony bombs. Turning, the seat of his pants flapping, he ran for the bunker by the trees, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Behind, the first bombs hit the bridge. A hot, orange flower blossomed, opened rapidly, ripened, blackened into an ugly ball of thick smoke. The explosion crashed across the encampment with a real physical presence, hammering at Kelly's back.

“No!” he shouted. He stumbled, almost fell. If he fell, he was finished.

More bombs plowed into the steel floor of the bridge, shredded the plating squares, and hurled thousands of sharp, deadly slivers into the smoke-darkened sky. These jagged fragments fell back to earth with a wind-cutting hum that was audible even above the shriek of the Stukas and the shattering explosions of more bombs.

He reached the steps in the earth and went down to the bunker door, grabbed the handle in both hands, and wrenched at it. The door did not open. He tried again, with no more success than before, then fell against it and pounded with one fist. “Hey, in there! Hey!”

The Stukas, circling back from the bridge, came in low over the bunker, engines screaming. They established a sympathetic vibration in his bones. His teeth chattered like castenets. Shuddering violently, he felt himself throwing off his strength, letting the weakness well up. Then the Stukas were gone, leaving behind them a smell of scorched metal and overheated machine oil.

Major Kelly realized, as the Stukas shot out across the trees to make their second approach on the bridge, that no one inside the bunker was going to open up and let him in, even though he was their commanding officer and had always been nice to them. He knew just what they were thinking. They were thinking that if they opened the door, one of the Stukas would put a two-hundred-pound bomb right through it, killing them all. Perhaps that was a paranoid fear, but Major Kelly could understand it; he was at least as paranoid as any of the men hiding down in the bunker.

The Stukas, which had grown almost inaudible at the nadir of their swing-around, now closed in again, their engines winding up from a low whistle through a shrill keening into an enraged scream that made Major Kelly's hair stand right on end.

Kelly ran up the bunker steps to the surface and, screaming again, plunged past the back of the machinery building, past the latrine, and along the riverbank toward the hospital bunker. His legs pumped so hard and so high that he seemed in grave danger of hitting himself in the chest with his own knees.

The Stukas thundered in, lower than before, shattering the air and making the earth under him reverberate.

Kelly knew he was running toward the bridge, and he hated to do that, but the hospital bunker was a hundred and fifty yards closer to the span than the latrines had been, offering the only other underground shelter in the camp. He reached the hospital steps just as the first Stuka let go with its second load of bombs.

The entire length of the bridge jumped up from its moorings, twisted sickeningly against the backdrop of smoke-sheathed trees on the far side of the gorge. The structure tossed away I-beams like a frantic lover throwing off clothes. Long steel planks zoomed above the blanket of smoke, then shot down again, smashing branches to the ground, splitting the dry, baked earth.

Kelly looked away, ran down the hospital steps, and tried the door just as the second Stuka let go with its pay-load. The bridge gave some more, but the hospital door wouldn't give at all.

Kelly ran back up to the surface, screaming.

The last plane swooped over the gorge. Flames gushed up in its wake, and smoldering pieces of metal rained down around the major, bouncing on his shoes, and leaving scars where they hit.

The Stukas, peeling off at the apex of their bombing climb, turned over on their backs and flew upside down toward the trees, to lead into a third approach.

“Arrogant sons of bitches!” Kelly shouted.

Then he realized he shouldn't antagonize the Stuka pilots, and he shut up. Was it possible that any of them had heard him above the roar of their own planes and above the noise of bridge sections settling violently into the gorge? Unlikely. In fact, impossible. However, you didn't stay alive in this war by taking chances. It was always possible that one or more of the pilots could read lips and that, flying upside down with a perfect view of him, they had discovered the nature of the epithet which he had so thoughtlessly flung at them.

Suddenly, with the planes gone over the trees, he was alone, standing in a low pall of black smoke that rose like flood waters out of the gorge and spread rapidly across the entire camp. Choking, wiping at teary eyes, he began to run again — then stopped cold as he saw that there was nowhere to run to. Caught with his pants down in the latrine, he hadn't gotten to either of the bunkers in time to be let in with the other men. Unaccustomed to battle, the technicians and laborers in Kelly's unit of Army engineers had developed only one useful talent for battle conditions: running. Any man in the unit could make it from one end of the camp to the other and into the bunkers so fast he'd have won a medal at any Olympic track event. Unless, of course, he was confronted with some obstacle — like pants around his ankles, an exposed nail that ripped out the seat of his pants, or the latrine door. Which was what had happened to Kelly to slow him down. And now he was here alone, waiting for the Stukas, doomed.

The smoke rose around him in black columns, rolled menacingly over the C-shaped clearing in which the camp stood, obscuring the HQ building and the machinery shed and the latrines, closing out life and bringing in death. He knew it. I feel it coming, he thought. He was doomed. He sneezed as the smoke tickled inside his nostrils, and he wished to hell the Stukas would come back and get it over with. Why were they making him wait so long for it? All they had to do was drop a couple of bombs anywhere nearby, and it would be over. The sooner they did it the better, because he didn't like standing there in that smoke, sneezing and coughing and his mouth full of an oily taste. He was miserable. He wasn't a fighter. He was an engineer. He had hung on as long as he could reasonably hope to; the war had finally defeated him, had foiled his every stratagem, destroyed his every scheme for survival, and he was ready to face up to the awful truth. So where were the Stukas?

As the smoke gradually cleared, leaving only the gorge clouded in ugly vapor, Major Kelly understood that the Stukas weren't coming back. They had done all they needed to do in their first two passes. He wasn't doomed after all, or even injured. He could have remained in the latrine, watching the spider, and saved himself all this effort. But that wasn't the way to hang on, to stay alive. That was taking chances, and only madmen took chances. To stay alive, you moved constantly this way and that, searching for an edge. And now that the Stukas were gone, so was Major Kelly's pessimism. He would come out of this in one piece, one live piece, and then he would find General Blade — the man who had dropped their unit two hundred and fifty miles behind German lines — and he would kill the son of a bitch.

2

“This is a fairy tale, grand in color but modest in design,” Major Kelly said. He stood on the burned grass at the edge of the ruins, a fine gray ash filming his shoes and trousers, his big hands and his shirt, and even his face. Sweat ran down his forehead, streaking the ashes, and fell into his eyes. The acrid fumes that rose from the broken bridge and stirred around his feet added an eerie and inhuman touch to his shallow philosophy. Continuing in the same vein, he said, “None of this is real, Sergeant Coombs. It's all a fairy tale of death; you and I are merely the figments of some Aesop's imagination.”

Major Kelly, a dreamer who always hoped to find a whore in every nice girl he met, was given to such fanciful extrapolations rather more often than would have pleased General Blade if that august commanding officer had known.

Sergeant Coombs, short and stumpy, forty-five years old and a career man, was not given to fanciful extrapolation, not even in his dreams. He said, “Bullshit!” and walked away.

Major Kelly watched his noncom plod — Sergeant Coombs did not walk like ordinary men — back toward HQ, wondering what he ought to say. Though he was clever at formulating odd bits of philosophy, Kelly had no talent whatsoever for discipline. Sergeant Coombs, canny for all his stumpiness, understood this and took advantage of the major. At last, when the noncom was at the door of the corrugated shed and would shortly be out of reach, Major Kelly shouted, “Bullshit to you, too, Coombs!”

Coombs jerked as if he had been shot, swiftly recovered his composure, opened the shed door, and stepped grandly out of sight.

Below Kelly, in the ravine, the bridge lay in a chaotic heap. Too much smoke obscured the structure for him to get a good look at it; however, as a vagrant breeze occasionally opened holes in the fumes, he did get a few brief glimpses. He didn't like what he saw. Everywhere he saw destruction. That was a word that usually was used in conjunction with another word Major Kelly liked even less: death; death and destruction. Although no one had died on or under the bridge, Major Kelly was deeply disturbed by what the suddenly made and just as suddenly closed holes in the smoke revealed. The bottom of the ravine was strewn with chunks of concrete and jagged lumps of stone, all scorched black and still radiating wavering lines of heat. Trees had been shattered by the explosions and by hurtling lengths of steel. Most of these had not caught fire, but their leaves were blackened and limp, little wrinkled lumps like thousands of huddled bats clinging to the branches. The bridge beams rose out of the rubble at crazy angles, ends broken, twisted by the explosions and by the intense heat, looking like nothing so much as the ribs of some prehistoric monster, the weathered bones of a behemoth.

The holes in the smoke closed again.

Lieutenant David Beame, second in command of the unit, thrust head and shoulders above the black vapors, as if the stuff were solid and he had broken through with some effort. He spied Kelly and scrambled up the slope, stumbling and falling, cursing, finally gaining the fresh air at the top. He was covered with grime, his face an even black except for white rings around his eyes where he had repeatedly rubbed with his handkerchief. He looked like a vaudeville comedian in blackface, Kelly thought. Wisps of smoke trailed after Beame, soiled ribbons that the breeze caught and twined together and carried away.

“Well, Dave,” Kelly said, “what's it like down there?” He really didn't want to know, but it was his place to ask.

“Not so bad as before,” Beame said. He was only twenty-six, twelve years younger than Kelly, and he looked like a college student when he was cleaned up. Blond hair, blue eyes, and downy cheeks. He could never understand that it was always as bad as before, that nothing ever improved.

“The bridge piers?”

“Nearside pier is down. I couldn't even locate the struts through the anchorage and down to the pile. All gone. Farside pier's okay, bridge cap in place and the bearings sound. In fact, the farside cantilever arm isn't even bent. The suspended span is gone, of course, but we still have a third of the bridge up.”

“Too bad,” Major Kelly said.

“Sir?”

It was Major Kelly's duty, as directed by General Blade, to see that this bridge, which spanned a small river and a larger gorge for some nine hundred feet, be kept open. The bridge was presently behind German lines, despite the great advances the Allies had made since Normandy. No one had yet seen any Germans around here, except those in the Stuka dive bombers which had knocked out the damned bridge three times after Kelly's men had rebuilt it. The first time, in its initial existence, the bridge had been destroyed by the British. Now that Allied armored units hoped to cross the gorge at this point, whenever the German Panzer divisions had been turned back and finally overwhelmed, it must be maintained. At least, General Blade thought it must. This was one of his private contingency plans, a pet project. Kelly thought that General Blade had lost his mind, perhaps because of chronic syphilis, and that they were all going to die before any Allied armored units could ever use the bridge. Though Kelly believed these things with a deep and abiding pessimism, he also believed in getting along with his superiors, in not taking chances, in hanging on. Though they were all going to die, there was a slim chance he would last out the war and go home and never have to look at a bridge again. Because this slender thread of hope was there, Major Kelly didn't tell the general what he feared.

Beame, wiping at the grime on his face, still waiting for some sort of explanation, coughed.

“What I meant,” Kelly said, “was that I wished they'd taken out the entire bridge.”

“Sir?”

“Beame, what is your civilian profession?”

“Civil engineer, sir.”

“Beame, if you had no bridge to keep rebuilding here, more than two hundred miles behind German lines, if no one bombed this bridge so that you could repair it, what the hell would you do with yourself?”

Beame scratched bis nose, looked around at the clearing, the encircling trees, the smoking gorge. “I don't know, sir. What would I do?”

“You'd go mad,” Major Kelly said. He looked at the sky, which was very blue; and he looked at the cantilevered bridge, which was very demolished. He said, “Thank Christ for Stukas.”

3

Lieutenant Richard Slade, darker and chubbier than Lieutenant Beame and looking somewhat like a choirboy with a vicious streak, was called The Snot by everyone in the unit except Sergeant Coombs. Slade did not know this, and he would have been enraged if he had heard the nickname. He was a young man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. Now, he came trotting out from HQ to tell Kelly that General Blade was going to call through in fifteen minutes. “The General's aide just placed the alert call in code,” Slade said.

Kelly tried to keep his torn trousers out of sight. “That's not supposed to be until tonight.” He dreaded talking to the general.

“Nevertheless, he'll be on in… about twelve minutes now. I suggest you be there, sir.” He pushed his thick, brown hair back from his forehead and surveyed the bridge below. “I imagine we'll be requiring supplies again.”

“I imagine so,” Kelly said. He wanted to punch Slade in the mouth. Even when Lieutenant Slade used the correct form of address, he imbued the obligatory “sir” with a sarcasm that infuriated the major.

Slade said, “Sir, you'd better make a supplies list before he calls, so you can read it quickly — and so you won't forget anything.”

Major Kelly gritted his teeth so hard he almost broke his jawbone. “I know how to handle this, Lieutenant Slade.”

“I was only making a helpful suggestion.” The lieutenant sounded hurt, though Kelly knew he wasn't. You couldn't hurt Slade, because Slade had a huge, rubber ego that bounced your insults right back at you, quick as a wink.

“Dismissed,” Kelly said, though he knew he wasn't a good enough disciplinarian to make the word mean anything. He was tall, lean, well muscled, and hard-looking. He had very black eyebrows and what he fancied was a piercing gaze, and he should have been able to keep a man like Slade in line. But he couldn't. Probably, that was because Slade realized how terror-stricken he was. Being terror-stricken made him less like an officer and more like an enlisted man.

“Will the Major entertain another suggestion?” Slade asked.

Why the hell did he have to talk that way? Entertain, for Christ's sake! Entertain!

“What is it, Lieutenant?” Kelly attempted to be abrupt, icy, and harsh. That wasn't one of his better roles, however, and Slade seemed to think he was only being stupid.

“We rebuilt the bridge after the British bombed it, and the Stukas showed up to destroy it again,” Slade said. He was one for repeating what everyone already knew, as if the fact gained some deep clarity that only his voice could impart to it. “When the Stukas went, we built the bridge a second time. The second flight of Stukas came and knocked the bridge down again. Yesterday, we completed repair of the bridge, and now the third flight of Stukas wiped it out.” He looked at Kelly and Beame, waiting for some reaction. He seemed unaware of the fumes that rose from the gorge, and he was the only man present who was dressed in immaculate fatigues.

“So?” Kelly said at last, realizing they would remain there through the night and the following day and even beyond that if he did not prod the lieutenant.

“I believe we have an informer in our midst.”

Kelly looked incredulous, but not too incredulous, since Slade just might be right. “Who do you suspect, Slade?”

“Maurice,” the lieutenant said, triumphant, grinning, The Snot.

Maurice was the mayor of the only nearby French village, a hamlet of four hundred souls, so small it hadn't been on any of their maps when they were first dropped here behind German lines, following the successful landing at Normandy. For the most part, the townspeople were farmers and laborers; Maurice owned the only grocery and the hardware store, a third of the town's businesses which lined the single main street. Maurice was perhaps sixty years old, drank too much, bathed too little, and bragged that his eldest son was in Brittany working in the FFI—Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur—and had renamed his town Eisenhower once the Normandy invasion had acquainted him with that word.

Slade, seeing the disbelief in their faces, said, “I know that's an unpopular notion. I know how much everyone here likes Maurice and how much everyone thinks Maurice has done for us. But you'll remember that I have never fully trusted him, and you'll admit that he has the best opportunity to report to the Germans.”

“Surely there isn't a radio in Eisenhower,” Kelly said. “And he would need one to make reports… ”

“Perhaps it was dropped to them by a German night plane,” Slade said. He always had an answer, which was another reason why everyone hated him.

Kelly wiped the soot off his face, looked at the blackened palm of his hand, wiped his hand on the seat of his pants, and jumped when his fingers slid over his own bare ass. Embarrassed, he said, “I can't picture that.” He wondered if there were long black finger marks on his behind.

Slade wasn't done. “Why is it that the Stukas have never given our position to any element of the German army? Why haven't they sent ground troops after us, to wipe us out? Why is it that the Stukas bomb the bridge but not our positions? The machines, all our supplies, stand unharmed so we can rebuild the bridge again. Could it be the Krauts are playing some sort of game with us?”

“What would their purpose be?” Kelly asked.

Slade frowned. “I haven't worked that out yet, but I will.” He looked at his watch, snapped his head up so suddenly he'd have lost his toupee, if he were wearing one, and turned back toward HQ. “General Blade will be coming through in less than four minutes.” He trotted away.

Beame, who wasn't given to swearing that much, said, “That fucking little creep gives me the fucking horrors.”

“Let's go talk to the general,” Major Kelly said.

4

The big wireless transmitter was a malevolent, hulking monster that always intimidated Major Kelly. It hummed like a swarm of bees, singing some monotonous and evil melody that echoed ghostily behind every voice that came and went over its open channel. Perhaps, if he spoke to someone other than General Blade on the set, it would not seem so monstrous. If he could talk to Betty Grable or Veronica Lake or to his mom, it might seem, instead, like a big old shaggy dog of a radio. But there was only General Blade.

Once they had exchanged call signs, General Blade said, “Blade calling Slade for Kelly.” Then he laughed. Finished laughing, he said, “Slade? Blade. This is the Blade and Slade Show, and our first performer today is Major Walter Kelly.”

“I can't take it again,” Lieutenant Beame said, bolting for the door. It slammed noisily behind him.

“General Blade calling, sir,” Lieutenant Slade said. He looked quite serious. He never seemed to see anything odd in the General's insane patter.

Maybe Slade had syph too. Maybe he was already rotten in the center of his brain, crumbling and almost dead.

Kelly sat down in the single metal chair that decorated the radio room, looked around at the rough board walls, the dust, the spider webs, the board floor. The chair was cold against his bare behind, but it wasn't the sole cause of the shivers that coursed through him. He lifted the table mike and said, “They bombed the bridge again, General.”

“They bombed what?” General Blade asked.

In a number of ways, Kelly thought, Blade and Slade were similar. The lieutenant was always telling you what you already knew, while Blade was always asking you to repeat what he had already heard. Perhaps Lieutenant Slade was the bastard son of General Blade; perhaps both of them had contracted VD from the same woman: Blade's mistress and Slade's mother.

“They bombed the bridge, sir,” Kelly repeated.

“How?” Blade asked.

“With three airplanes and several bombs,” Major Kelly said.

“Three airplanes, Kelly?”

Kelly said, “They appeared to be airplanes, sir, yes. They had wings and flew. I'm pretty certain they were airplanes, sir.”

“Was that sarcasm, Kelly?” the general croaked through the hulking monster on the table before Kelly.

“No, sir. They were all Stukas, sir.”

After a long silence, when Kelly was about to ask if he had died in the middle of the Blade and Slade Show, the general said, “If there were three planes, but none of them attacked your buildings, and all of them dropped on the bridge, doesn't that tell you something interesting?”

“Maybe they like us and don't want to hurt us, sir.”

The general was silent even longer this time. When he spoke, he spoke gently, as if to a child. “One of their own people is there with you — an informer.”

Kelly looked at Slade who smiled and vigorously nodded his thin, pointed head. Keep it up, Kelly thought. Keep shaking your head, and maybe it'll fall off. Maybe the syph will have rotted through your neck, and your head will fall off, so grin and shake your head.

To the microphone, Kelly said, “Informer?”

“How else do you explain their attacking only the bridge? How do you explain their not sending in a ground force to deal with you?” But the general really didn't want any military strategy from Kelly, or any cheap philosophy either. He went on before the major could answer: “Do you fully understand that the whole idea of keeping this bridge open is mine, Kelly? When it proves to have been a wise move, I'll be rewarded for it. But by God, until it does pay off, I have my neck stretched under the ax. Do you think it was easy for me to get you and your men, the construction equipment and materials, flown two hundred and fifty miles behind German lines?”

“No, sir,” Kelly said. He remembered that ordeal quite well, even these four long weeks later: the parachute drop, clearing the brush and marking the temporary runway for the first plane full of heavy equipment, the hard work, the tight schedule, the terror. Mostly the terror.

Blade said, “Do you think it's a simple matter to keep this whole maneuver hidden from the more petty officers back here at command, from men who would like nothing better than to pull me down into the mire and climb over me on their way to the top?”

“I can see that it isn't easy for you, sir.”

“Damn straight!” The general cleared his throat and paused to take a drink of something. Probably blood.

Choke on it, you pig, Kelly thought

The general didn't choke. He said, “I want a list of your requirements, to augment whatever's salvageable there. The stuff will be flown in after midnight tonight. I want the bridge back up, no matter what the cost!”

Kelly read off his hastily scribbled list, then said, “Sir, how's the front moving?”

“Gaining ground everywhere!” Blade said.

“Are we still two hundred and thirty miles behind enemy lines, sir?” The last time he had talked to Blade, the front had advanced about twenty miles in their direction.

“Only two hundred miles now,” Blade assured him. “In a couple of weeks, you'll be on the right side of the fence.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, let me have Slade.”

The lieutenant took over the chair, pulling it close to the scarred table on which the radio stood. “Uh… Slade here, sir.”

“This is Blade, Slade.”

“Yes, sir!”

Major Kelly stood behind Slade, watching, hypnotized by the horrible routine he had witnessed countless times these past four weeks.

“Slade, Blade signing off. Another edition of the Blade and Slade Show is over.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Christ!” Major Kelly said, bolting for the door.

5

The hospital bunker was an abominable hospital in every respect, but the worst thing about it was the stink, the rich blanket of revolting odors that permeated the place and could not be chased out. The hospital had no windows, being a bunker, and no fresh air. Even with the door wide open, the place constantly stank of burnt flesh, decay, sweat, vomit, and antiseptics. Lily Kain, who nursed the sick and the wounded, said you got used to the smell after a while and didn't even notice it any more. But that notion had no appeal for Major Kelly; he wanted to be aware, always, of the smell of death and corruption. If the hospital ever started to smell nice to him, he knew, his number would be up.

Immediately inside the bunker, a battered table and two rickety chairs stood to one side, the nurses' station. Beyond, ten cots stood in shabby imitation of a genuine hospital ward, five along each wall, a thin gray blanket folded on each, meager comfort against the chill in the subterranean room which gave little evidence of the bright summer day aboveground.

Three low-wattage bulbs strung on a single frayed cord for the length of the rectangular room, powered by the small camp generator, did little to dispel the gloom. The walls seemed draped in a heavy purple fabric of shadows, and the corners were all pitch black. Kelly glanced quickly at those corners when he came in, and he felt as if inhuman creatures lurked there, waiting and licking their scaly lips, and watching with big, demonic eyes.

Cockroaches and fat centipedes scurried along the earthen floor and clung to the rough ceiling, moving in and out of pools of light, silent, cold, many-legged.

Only two patients resided in the hospital bunker when Major Kelly arrived there fresh from bolting the radio room. One of these was Liverwright, who had been wounded in one of the previous bombings, six days ago. He had been bathing in the river when the Stukas made their first pass, and he had taken a three-inch sliver of steel deep in his right thigh. The second patient was Kowalski, the zombie.

Three people attended the patients, though none of them had medical training. General Blade had not been able to kidnap a doctor or a medic for them, as yet.

Lily Kain, the only woman with the unit, was cutting gauze into neat bandage squares when Kelly arrived, her scissors making crisp snipping sounds in the heavy air. Because of the heat aboveground, and because she apparently had reptilian blood, she was wearing one of her skimpy, sequined dancer's costumes, out of which her ass cheeks bulged. She had the kind of ass cheeks that bulged well: pale, firm, beautifully formed, without the hint of a droop. Indeed, everything about Lily Kain was perfectly formed, all five-feet-six of her. She had thick black hair and wide-set black eyes and a freckle-spotted face, little upturned nose, full lips — a wet-dream face. Her breasts were big and incredibly uptilted; they threatened to spill out of her dancer's costume. Her waist was tiny, and her hips almost fleshless, legs long and flawless. She gave Kelly a fierce hard-on.

“Watch your jugs,” Kelly said, grabbing her sequined backside. “Watch your jugs, or they'll fall out of your suit.”

“You watch them,” she said. Her voice was cool, almost a whisper, but with force enough to let a man know she had her own resources. “You're better at watching them than I am.”

“How are they?”

“My jugs?”

“No,” he said. “I know your jugs are fine. How are the men? Anybody hurt in today's raid?”

“Everyone made it to the bunkers in time,” she said. Her pretty face was dotted with sweat, but it hid no deception. She didn't know about Major Kelly's being caught with his pants down in the latrine, and he was not about to tell her. She stopped folding gauze and cocked her right eyebrow. Lily had a way of cocking her right eyebrow that made you think she was going to shoot you with her nose. “I'm worried about Liverwright. Six days, and he can't seem to heal. He may get blood poisoning yet.”

“No negativism,” Kelly ordered. “This is, after all, just a fairy tale, a fable. We're all figments of some Aesop's imagination, bound to his will.”

“I'd like to reduce Blade to a figment of my imagination, then cut his balls off,” Lily Kain said. Lily Kain, though freckled and pug-nosed and inordinately pretty, was not your average, reserved, quiet American girl.

“I just finished the Blade and Slade Show,” he told her. “Supplies will be coming in tonight.”

“Parachute — or a landing?” she asked. She looked pitiful, lost and delicate and needful of comforting. Major Kelly wanted to comfort her. He wanted to pat her hand and console her and say, “Now, now.” He also wanted to rip her skimpy sequined costume off and split her right there, but he managed to restrain himself.

“They'll land,” he said. “The shipment's too heavy for a parachute drop this time.”

This pleased Lily Kain. Every time a transport landed, she hoped she could persuade the pilot to take her back to Allied territory. After all, she didn't belong here. Everyone knew that. If anyone forgot it, even for a moment, Lily reminded him.

“I don't belong here,” she reminded Kelly.

And she didn't belong here, if the truth were known, the only woman in a unit of Army engineers, two hundred miles behind German lines, dressed in a sequined costume out of which her jugs might pop at any moment. General Blade was responsible, in part, for her being there. Though unable to supply the unit with a doctor or a medic, General Blade had managed to divert a USO troop across the front to the unit by the bridge. Certain air corridors were open, not well patrolled by the Germans, and such a thing could be done without too much risk. Still, there was the matter of diverting the troop from somewhere else, from a place where they were expected, and no one could understand how General Blade had managed that. When Major Kelly had observed that obtaining a medic ought to be a cinch after such a coup, the general had accused Kelly of a lack of appreciation for his hard work in getting the USO people there, and had pouted and refused to speak to the major for nearly a week. Anyway, the troop had given them a great show, as such shows went — a juggler, a bad comedian, two singing sisters with buck teeth who called themselves Irma and Imogene, a magician, a mimic whose every imitation sounded like Fred Allen (partly because the mimic himself sounded like Fred Allen), and a dancer — and they'd accepted the unit's invitation to supper and drinks afterward. They had not been aware that they were behind German lines, but they'd been nervous enough to drink heavily. Lily Kain boozed like a man and passed out like one, too. Singing “Over There,” the troop boarded the special plane from General Blade's headquarters, leaving much later than they had anticipated. Only after they had gone for an hour did Kelly, Danny Dew, and Lieutenant Beame bring Lily Kain out from the latrine stall where they had hidden her when she passed out.

“I don't belong here,” Lily Kain repeated.

“I know,” Kelly said. “But—”

“I gave Liverwright the morphine,” Nurse Pullit said, interrupting them, smiling and nodding at Kelly. “His hip looks worse than ever.”

Nurse Pullit was the second person assigned to the hospital bunker to tend the wounded. Nurse Pullit was actually Private Pullit in drag, and Private Pullit was not a nurse at all. No one could say where Private Pullit had gotten the white uniform he wore, but it looked good on him. He had hemmed the skirt so that it fell just above his dimpled knees, a somewhat daring fashion, and he kept the uniform well starched. He wore a bandanna over his head to conceal his still predominately male hairline, a cheerful scarlet cap that made him look a bit like a Negro mammy. Except he wasn't a Negro. Or a mammy.

When he had first volunteered for hospital duty and had shown up in his uniform, with his legs shaved and his face lightly powdered, the wounded men had attempted to get up and return to their duty stations. Even Private Stoltz, whose left leg had been broken in two places and only recently set, argued with Major Kelly that he was well enough to return to his post. Stoltz had actually made it up four of the six steps to the bunker's door before he screamed and passed out, bumping back down and badly cutting his forehead on the concrete edge of the last step.

Now, however, the men were grateful that Nurse Pullit had been assigned to their unit as a laborer, for Nurse Pullit proved to be adept at suturing wounds, applying bandages, lancing infections, and offering sympathy. Besides, Pullit's legs really weren't that bad.

“Everything all right, Nurse Pullit?” Major Kelly asked.

“Poor Liverwright,” Nurse Pullit said, quietly, casting a glance back at the man in the first cot against the far wall. Nurse Pullit's lips drew into a bow and made a tch-tch-tching noise.

Before he realized quite what he was doing, Major Kelly had put his hand on Nurse Pullit's ass. Rather than insult Nurse Pullit by drawing back, he kept his hand where he had inadvertently put it, though he certainly felt strange.

“Is there anything I can do, anything that you need?”

“We've got good supplies of medicine,” Nurse Pullit said, batting her thick lashes over her blue eyes. No. His lashes, over his eyes. “We could do with a doctor, but that's up to that nasty General Blade. However, there is something I wanted to ask you… ”

“Yes?”

“Well,” Nurse Pullit said, “Lily has a delightful pair of white pumps in her costume trunk. The heels aren't really that awfully high. I could manage them, even on this dirt floor, and they would add so much to my uniform if I had them.”

Major Kelly looked down at the combat boots on Nurse Pullit's feet. “I see your point,” he said.

“Then I can have them?”

“Of course.”

“Oh, thank you!” Nurse Pullit squealed. “I'm the happiest nurse in the world!”

6

The third person assigned to the hospital bunker was Private Tooley, the pacifist. Private Tooley was six feet tall, weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds, and had once lifted weights. His arms were like knotted hemp covered with tar, thick and rippled, lumped with muscle. He could do more work than any three men when a bridge needed to be repaired, and he never once complained about the eighteen-hour days a repair job might sometimes require. No one could understand, then, why Private Tooley was a chickenshit pacifist.

Sergeant Coombs, as bewildered about Tooley as everyone else, confronted the private in the HQ rec room one night, over a bottle of Jack Daniels. They had both been sitting in the small, board-walled room, sprawled on benches, backs against the wall, drinking and counting the spiders on the ceiling. The air was hot and thick, the night silence even thicker, and eventually they could not ignore each other any longer. At first, their conversation had been gruff, unconnected, meandering. With more liquor, and once they had all the spiders counted, it got spirited.

“What would you do if someone attacked your grandmother?” Sergeant Coombs wanted to know. “You're a pacifist, so what would you do?”

“Who would want to attack my grandmother?” Tooley had asked.

“Let's say it isn't sexual.”

“She isn't rich, either,” Tooley said.

“Seriously, suppose you were there, and someone attacked your grandmother with a gun. Would you shoot him first?”

“Do I have a gun too?”

Coombs nodded. “Yes.”

“I wouldn't have a gun.”

“Why not?”

“I'm a pacifist.”

Coombs had reddened, but he said, “Suppose, just for the sake of this discussion, that you had a gun, a real gun.” He took a pull of the whiskey, keeping his eyes on Tooley.

“How good am I with the gun?” Tooley asked.

Anticipating a loophole, Coombs said, “You're an excellent shot.”

“Then I'd shoot the gun out of his hand.”

Coombs took another drink, looked at the spiders, kept Ms temper in check, and said, “You're a lousy shot.”

“You just said I was an excellent shot.”

“I take it back.”

“If I was a lousy shot, I wouldn't try to kill him,” Tooley said. “I wouldn't dare try.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I might hit my grandmother instead.”

Coombs stared at the bottle for a long time. When Tooley was about to touch him to see if he had passed out, the sergeant said, “Suppose you were driving a truck on a cliff road, too fast to stop. A little girl suddenly appears on the road, just around a bend. You either hit the little girl or drive over the cliff and kill yourself. You either crush and mangle this beautiful, blue-eyed, curly-headed little child — or you drive over the cliff. What would you do?”

“What happened to the man with the gun?” Tooley asked. “What did he do to my grandmother?”

“Forget him,” Coombs said.

“How can I forget him? What if he kills Grandma while I'm out driving this truck?”

“Forget the first example,” Coombs said. “Let's pretend you're in that truck. What would you do?”

“I'd blow my horn for the little girl to get out of the way.”

“Your horn doesn't work.”

“I'd wave and yell at her,” Tooley said, raising his voice, almost as if the child were in front of him, as if this bench were the seat of a wildly careening truck.

“She couldn't hear you above the roar of the truck!” Sergeant Coombs said, standing, waving his fists for emphasis.

“Jesus Christ!” Tooley screamed. “How stupid is this kid? If she sees a truck bearing down on her, isn't she going to run for the bank and get out of the way?”

Triumphant, still standing, jumping up and down a little in his excitement, Coombs said, “She's too young to walk.”

“Can she crawl?”

“No!”

“I'd drive over the cliff!” Tooley shouted. He grabbed the liquor, rocking the entire bench on which he sat, his eyes squinted tightly shut, waiting for the crash.

Coombs said, “Suppose your mother was in the truck with you?”

“My mother?” His eyes snapped open.

“Your mother.”

“What the fuck would my mother be doing with me, in a truck, driving along a sheer cliff on a narrow road at sixty miles an hour? Why the hell isn't she back there helping my grandmother who's being attacked by the man with the gun who doesn't want to rape her?”

“I don't know anything about your family,” Coombs said. “I only want to see how your chickenshit pacifism gets you out of this one?”

Tooley leaned back, hugging the liquor bottle to his chest. His eyes were white, unblinking. He licked his lips. Tense, thinking furiously, he was still a huge man, but he resembled a child. A frightened child. He said, “I'd slam on the brakes!” He leaned forward, as if hit in the pit of the stomach. “I'd try to stop before I hit the kid!”

“Hah!” Coombs roared.

“Hah?”

“You should hit the kid and save yourself and your mother. What the hell does a stranger mean to you, anyway?”

“But if I braked in time…?”

“Hah! You'd slam on the brakes, going at sixty on a narrow road, send your mother through the windshield and kill her instantly. Bam. Dead. You'd fishtail past the little girl, smash her to jelly, plummet over the damn cliff, and crash through your grandmother's house and kill the old woman and yourself and several innocent bystanders. That's what would happen, and all because of your chickenshit pacifism!”

Tooley huddled into himself even more, stunned at the crisp, awful vision of ultimate catastrophe which he had been given.

“No, Tooley,” Coombs had assured him, “it won't work. Pacifism is a wonderful idea, but it just isn't applicable to the real world.”

Then he got up and walked out of the rec room, leaving Tooley glued to the bench.

However, Sergeant Coombs didn't manage to make Tooley change his outlook. The private still refused to pack a gun and spent most of his time helping the wounded in the hospital — especially Kowalski, who was the second patient, a regular zombie.

Fresh from talking with Nurse Pullit, Major Kelly walked to the end of the bunker and sat down next to Tooley on a gray cot which was drawn up close to Kowalski's cot. He pointed at the mute figure between the sheets, and he said, “How's your zombie doing today?”

“Same as usual,” Tooley said, though he was disturbed by the major's choice of words.

Kowalski was lying quietly, his head heavily bandaged, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He had collected a piece of bridge support in the back of his head when the British bombed the gorge four weeks ago, and he had not moved or spoken to anyone in all the days since. He stared at the ceiling and dirtied his pants and took food from Tooley which, once he had digested it, he craftily employed to dirty his pants again.

“There's a plane coming in tonight,” Kelly told Tooley. He saw a fat centipede skitter along the floor, near the end of the bunker. It gained a shadowed wall and disappeared, probably on its way to the ceiling. He wondered if there were anything clinging to the ceiling just above his own head.

The pacifist looked at the zombie and then at the major, and he said, “Do you think they would take him back where he can get good medical attention?”

“You know what they'd do with him, even if they did agree to take him. They'd open the bay doors and dump him out at twenty thousand feet”

Tooley winced.

Kelly looked around at the patients, back at Nurse Pullit and Lily Kain who were engaged in an animated conversation about the nurse's new pumps. Pullit kept pointing to his combat boots and making odd gestures. “Tooley, I didn't come to the hospital bunker to look in on the patients. I came to see only one person.”

Tooley nodded, smiling. “Lily Kain, sir. Gorgeous jugs!”

“Not Lily,” Major Kelly said.

Perplexed, Tooley scratched his head. “Nurse Pullit?”

“Not Nurse Pullit. Why would I come to see Nurse Pullit?”

“Nurse Pullit's got pretty good legs,” Tooley said.

“Not Nurse Pullit,” Major Kelly said. He wiped the back of his neck, which was sweating, and he finally glanced up at the low ceiling. In the dim circle of light from the nearest bulb, there were no centipedes over him.

“Kowalski, sir?”

Kelly looked dumbly at the pacifist. “What about Kowalski?”

“Is that who you came to see, sir?”

Kelly frowned. “No, Tooley. I came to see you.”

“Me?” Tooley was genuinely surprised and pleased. “Well, this is nice of you, sir. I can't offer much in the way of entertainment, but—”

“Tooley,” Kelly said, lowering his voice even further, his words hissing like sandpaper along the concrete ceiling, deadened by the dirt walls, rattling on the corrugated tin, “you're the only one I can trust. I know you wouldn't turn informer and leak information to the krauts, because you don't want to see either side win.”

“Through force,” Tooley amended. “I want us to win, but I don't really believe in force.”

“Exactly,” Kelly said. “But someone has been leaking information to the krauts, and we have to find out who he is.”

Tooley nodded soberly. “You think this informer might have come to me, since I'm an avowed pacifist — might have thought of me as material for a second subversive in the camp.”

“That's it.”

“He hasn't,” Tooley said. “But if he does, I'll let you know right away, sir.”

“Thanks, Tooley,” Major Kelly said. “I knew I could depend on you, no matter what everyone says about you.”

Tooley frowned. “What does everyone say about me?”

“That you're a chickenshit pacifist.”

“I'm a pacifist all right. But where do they get the other part of it, do you think?”

“I wouldn't know.” Kelly said. He got up, scanning the ceiling for centipedes, pulling his collar tight around his neck. “Anyway, keep your eyes open for any unusual— incidents.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kowalski suddenly dirtied his pants.

7

Crickets worked busily in the darkness, telegraphing shrill messages across the flat, open runway area toward the trees which thrust up on all sides. The crickets, Major Kelly was sure, were working for the Germans.

The sky was overcast. The clouds seemed like a roof, lighted from behind by dim moonlight, low and even, stretched across the land between the walls of the forest. Occasionally, heat lightning played along the soft edges of the clouds like the flash of cannon fire.

At the eastern end of the runway which Danny Dew had gouged out with his big D-7 dozer, Major Kelly, Beame, and Slade waited for the DC-3 cargo plane. They stood close together, breathing like horses that had been run the mile in little more than a minute and a half. They stared toward the far end of the open strip, at the tops of the black trees, heads pushed a bit forward as they tried to catch the first rumble of the plane's engines.

A frog croaked nearby, startling Beame who jumped forward and collided with Kelly, nearly knocking the bigger man down.

“A frog,” Slade said. But he didn't sound sure of himself.

The frogs, Major Kelly thought, were in league with the crickets, who were telegraphing messages to the Germans.

Abruptly, silencing the crickets, the sound of the plane's engines came in over the trees, low and steady and growing.

“Move!” Major Kelly said.

To the left and right, enlisted men struck matches, bent down and lighted tiny blue flares at each corner of the runway. They looked like overgrown altar boys at some alien worship. At the far end of the crude strip, another pair of men did the same, briefly lighted by an intense blue glow before they stepped back into the shadows under the trees. Now the pilot had a means of gauging the length and width of the runway. This really wasn't much for the pilot to judge by; he might as well have tried an audio landing with the sputtering of the flares as his only points of reference.

By the same token, the four blue lights weren't much for a random patrol of German night bombers to beam in on, either.

The pilot, Major Kelly knew, would already have begun to scream. He always began to scream when he started losing altitude a mile out over the trees to the west. When he came in sight of the blue flares, he would scream even louder. He said their permanent runway wasn't much better than the temporary affair he had first landed on. He said it was too short, too uneven, and too narrow. He said it wasn't macadamized, that the oil-and-sand surface was extremely treacherous. He said the four blue flares hurt his eyes and interfered with his judgment when he was putting down, even though he had to have the flares or not land at all. Besides, he said, the runway was behind German lines. Even if General Blade did have him by the short hairs, the pilot said, he had no right to send him and his plane and his crew behind German lines. He said this again and again, until Major Kelly went to great lengths to avoid him. The pilot had to shout about this to Major Kelly, because the general had forbidden him to tell anyone else that he had been behind enemy lines.

“What do you want to be behind enemy lines for?” the pilot would shout at Kelly, his face red, his hands fisted in the pockets of his flight jacket.

“I don't want to be here,” Kelly would say.

“But here you are.”

“On orders,” Kelly would say.

“That's your excuse,” the pilot would say.

There was really no reasoning with the pilot, because he was consumed with terror the entire time he was at the clearing.

Now, by the south side of the HQ building, twelve enlisted men waited to unload the materials which would, when combined with sweat, remake the bridge. All of the enlisted men were as nervous as the pilot, but none of them was screaming. The first time the pilot had brought the big plane in, the enlisted men had screamed right along with him, bent double, faces bright with blood, mouths open wide, eyes watering, screaming and screaming. But Sergeant Coombs had been infuriated by this display of cowardice. He had punished them the following day with KP duty and a severe calisthenics session. Because they feared Sergeant Coombs more than they feared the Germans, the men were forced to express this nervousness in less obvious ways. They stood by the HQ building, in the shadows, snapping their fingers, popping their knuckles, grinding their teeth, slapping their sides, clicking their tongues. One of them was kicking the side of the corrugated tin wall as if he did not believe it were real, as if he were testing it. The enlisted men, more aware of their mortality than the officers, were always afraid that the krauts would catch the cargo plane on radar, would follow it and bomb the shit out of the runway and the camp. The Stukas were friendly. The Stukas, for some reason, only wanted the bridge. But a flight of German night planes couldn't be counted on to limit its objectives. So the enlisted men sweated out each landing and each takeoff, suffering from the same terminal disease that afflicted Beame: hope. They didn't understand that nothing improved, that it wasn't any use sweating out anything. Whatever would happen would happen. Then, when it did happen, that was the time to sweat.

The cargo plane's engines grew even louder now, tantalizingly near, though the plane remained beyond the patch of open sky that the surrounding woods permitted them.

“It's close,” Slade said.

Suddenly, the big aircraft was there. It came in so low over the pines that Kelly had difficulty separating it from the black trees. It carried only two running lights, one on each wing tip, and it seemed more like some gigantic bird of prey than like a machine.

“Here comes the plane,” Slade said, though everyone had already seen it. Nothing ever improved. Not even the lieutenant.

“He isn't putting it down fast enough,” Lieutenant Beame said. He thought: Christ, it's going to plow right through us, knock us down like three bowling pins at the end of an alley.

The DC-3 slanted in fast, correcting.

“Not enough,” Kelly said.

The pilot had not cut back. The props churned as thunderously as when the craft had slipped in over the trees.

“What the hell's he doing?” Lieutenant Slade demanded.

The big plane roared toward them, a prehistoric behemoth bellowing a mindless battle cry. Its tires were still off the rugged, oiled strip. The tiny running lights on its wings seemed, to Kelly, to swell until they were gigantic searchlights.

“Run!” Beanie shouted. But he couldn't run. He could only stand there, hypnotized by the onrushing plane, blinking at the half-seen blur of the whirling props.

The pilot gave up on it. The craft rose sharply, tilting dangerously toward the dark earth, swooped over the three men and the trees behind them, racketing away across the forest.

“He's going to try again,” Lieutenant Slade told them.

Able to run now that it wasn't necessary, Beame turned and loped into the trees, bent and vomited on a patch of wild daisies.

The moment the DC-3 had passed over them, all the fear went out of Major Kelly. Temporarily, at least. He had watched the plane plunging toward them, and he had been sure that he would die in seconds. The whole situation had that ironic touch which was so much a part of the war: surviving the Stukas and the Germans, he would now be slaughtered accidentally by his own people. When he wasn't, when he realized that the plane had passed over and left him unhurt, he chose to take his safety as an omen. If he had not been killed that time, he would not be killed the next. The pilot would put his ship down, and everything would go as planned. He would survive. For tonight, anyway. Maybe he would be blown to bits the first thing in the morning, but for the remainder of the night, he could rest easy.

The engine noise of the DC-3 faded, moving around them, then grew in volume again as the pilot made his second approach.

“Here he comes again,” Slade said, unnecessarily.

Beame, back from vomiting on the daisies, said, “God.”

The transport came into sight again, over the trees. It slanted in much more quickly than it had before. In fact, it angled too sharply, touched the runway at too high a speed, bounced. Tires squealed. The walls of the forest threw back echoes that sounded like anguished human cries. The aircraft shuddered, touched again, bounced again. The third time down, it stayed down. Its engines, thumping like a hundred hammers slamming into a block of wood, cut back, whined down, stopped with a suddenness that left them all deaf.

The silence of the night rushed in like collapsing walls of cotton, and they were too stunned to hear anything at all. Gradually, they began to perceive the crickets once more, the frogs, the breeze in the trees, the pounding of their own hearts.

“She's down,” Slade said.

Even if they hadn't been watching, they would have known the plane was down, for in the cricket-punctuated night, they could now hear the pilot screaming. At some point during the flight from the west, he had cranked open a vent window, and now his arm was hanging out that window, and he was beating on the side of the plane. The sheet metal boomed like a drum, counterpoint to the pilot's unmelodic wailing.

Lieutenant Beame ran to the flare on the right, threw sand on it, and watched it sputter out. I would have gone out as easily, he thought, if the pilot had muffed that first try. I would have blinked out like a damped flare. He turned quickly and walked to the second spot of blue light, unwilling to carry that train of thought any further. He threw sand on this flare and looked toward the far end of the strip where someone else was just smothering the flares down there.

Above the runway, though he was still screaming, the pilot put out the running lights on the wings of the DC-3.

“There go the men to unload the plane,” Lieutenant Slade said.

Beame squinted, but he could not see them. He had been night-blinded by the flares.

“Oh, God,” Lieutenant Slade said, his voice breathy. “Isn't it all so inspiring?”

8

Lily Kain's high heels went tock-tock-tock on the wooden landing steps as she climbed up the hatchway in the hull of the cargo plane. She went inside, into darkness, her footsteps echoing from metal walls. Hunched over to keep from hitting her head on the low ceiling, and careful not to touch the loops of poorly insulated wire which drooped from their overhead moorings, she went forward to the cockpit and leaned inside.

“Hello there!” she said, trying to be cheery and sexy.

“Hello,” the copilot said, turning around in his sweat-stained flight seat. He was a tall, thin kid from Texas with an Adam's apple that made him look like he'd swallowed a whole orange and got it stuck in his throat.

Lily ignored him. He was too young and ineffectual to help her. She turned all her charm on the pilot, who had just stopped screaming, and she said, “Hello there!”

“Hello, Lily,” the pilot said. His voice was hoarse.

“That's a nice costume you're wearing,” the kid from Texas said. He gulped wetly, as if the orange had come unstuck.

During the day, when the heat baked the earth and the trees stood limp and parched, Lily Kain wore a dancer's costume, even though the men had begun to call her Miss Cock Tease. She couldn't understand why they were upset by her near nudity; after all, they walked around shirtless, alt bronze and hairy. Didn't they understand that all those lovely, bunched and sunbrowned muscles made her horny? Sometimes she wanted to grab one of them and throw him down and rip off his khaki slacks and rape him. The only thing that gave her pause was the knowledge that, in the Army, rape was a crime punishable by ten years to life imprisonment. That would make her anywhere from thirty-four to — when she got out. It just wasn't worth it, not for a transitory thrill.

In the evenings, if it was cool, she wore one of Major Kelly's work uniforms which she and Nurse Pullit had cut down to size and resewn by hand. Lily's street clothes had been carried off with the rest of her USO troop, and she had been left behind with nothing more than a trunkful of scanty costumes. At least the work uniform afforded her a means of modesty whenever the mood struck her. It seldom struck her. Modesty just wasn't worth it.

When the transport plane landed this night, the air was chill, and it was a night for the work uniform and for modesty. However, Lily was wearing a pale-white velvet dancer's costume when she went to see the pilot. It was cut high along her hips, revealing all of her long legs, and it was cut so tight through the crotch that she knew she'd never be able to have children once she got out of it. She didn't want any children, of course. Raised a Roman Catholic, part of a large family, she had sworn off having her own kids when she'd been fifteen. One night, sitting at the family table, she'd looked around at all those shining Irish faces, then looked at her washed-out mother and her dried-up father, and sworn off pregnancy. Pregnancy was the most vicious disease imaginable. Now, she actually welcomed the murderously tight fit of her dancer's costume. It was tight in the top, too, so that her ample jugs were like tortured balloons that might squeak free and fly away. The costume had no back whatsoever. It was cut to her dimpled ass and gave a hint of backside cleavage. She might as well have been nude. That was the idea.

“Why don't you come outside?” Lily asked the pilot as she watched him watch her jugs. “We'll go for a walk.”

“I don't feel like it,” the pilot said, watching her crotch now, his fine eyes desperately searching for a stray, curling pubic hair.

He always refused to get out of his plane when he landed. He told the men in Kelly's unit that he had been given a vision in a dream, and that this vision had warned him not to get out of his plane when he landed supplies there. In the dream, the pilot had seen FDR and Truman sitting on matched commodes with their faces wreathed in golden light. In unison, speaking as sweetly as angels, they had warned the pilot with this: “If you ever leave your plane at Kelly's camp, your life won't be worth a fart.” Then they farted in unison, for emphasis. When Lieutenant Slade first heard about the pilot's vision, he said, “Inspiring!”

“Oh, come on,” Lily said, holding a hand out to the pilot.

“No.” He was adamant. He had suddenly abandoned his pubic-hair search and had focused on the bulkhead beside her.

Abandoning all pretense, as she always had to, Lily said, “Take me with you, please!”

“You know we can't, Lily,” the pilot said. Though he was looking at the wall, he was seeing Lily in his mind's eye. He began to sweat.

“Why can't you?” she asked, pouting her full lips.

“Officially, you aren't here.”

She twisted slightly, leaning against a steel strut that reinforced the cabin walls against major flak damage. She was lighted exotically by the green and amber scope bulbs on the control panels, and she looked very good. Long legs, perfectly curved. Firm thighs. Hips just wide enough. No waist at all. Swelling breasts, jammed up, nipples almost peeking over velvet cups. Face half in shadow, full lips parted with a promise of more than just a kiss. She looked tremendous.

“You look tremendous,” the pilot said, still staring intently at the wall. “But that won't do you any good. You aren't here; no one's here.” But he looked back at her jugs, now, as if they were here. “This place is two hundred miles behind German lines, and the high command hasn't ordered anyone in here yet. Therefore, there isn't anyone in here. Yet. And I can't bring back someone who wasn't here to begin with.” When he was done with his speech, he was breathing heavily, and he was looking at her jugs more longingly than ever.

“You can't deny your senses,” Lily said.

“Yes, I can,” the pilot said.

“If I'm not here, who are you talking to?”

The pilot was silent awhile, thinking about that. The sounds of the ground crew unloading the big transport through both its bay and cargo doors were audible but somehow removed from his reality, a distant background noise that reminded the pilot of carnival workers setting up tents and stands and rides in the fairgrounds near the house where he lived as a child. He would have liked to think about that some more, except he remembered where he was and was too terrified to think about anything but death.

“Who are you talking to if I'm not here?” Lily asked again.

“A figment of my imagination,” the pilot said.

“Major Kelly's already used that one,” she said.

“What?”

“Never mind.” She thought a moment. “If there isn't anyone here, who are these supplies for?”

“What supplies?” the pilot asked. He was gripping the edges of his battered flight seat with both hands, fighting off an urge to rise up and rip her clothes off and fuck her through the floor of the plane. His face was sheathed in sweat.

Lily sighed. “If you're not behind German lines, where are you?”

The pilot smiled and relaxed a bit. “Iowa City, Iowa.”

“What?”

“I can see the cornfields from here,” the pilot said, looking out of the windscreen at the cornfields.

Lily followed his gaze but could see nothing other than darkness and a few men carrying heavy crates of supplies. A small collapsible loading crane trundled toward the transport's cargo doors. But no cornfields.

“You're crazy,” she said.

“No. I see fields of corn, endless fields, tall and green.”

Lily stepped forward and touched the pilot's cheek as he stared out through the windscreen, and she jumped in surprise as he nearly leaped out of his flight seat. He smiled nervously and tried to pull away. He was pudgy and redfaced and in need of a shave; even when he wasn't terrified, he would have looked rather ordinary and unappealing. Still, she said, “I think I could get to like you.”

“What's there to like?” he asked. “A knot of nerves, spastic colon, stomach ulcers… nothing… ”

“Still, I could,” she said. She bent closer to him, her jugs right in front of his face now. She was willing to tell the pilot anything to convince him to take her back to Allied territory. Actually, she found him revolting; however, telling him these fantasies didn't hurt anything. “We could have lots of good times.”

The pilot took a thermos from a pouch on his seat, opened it, and poured himself a cup of steaming coffee. He did all this slowly, deliberately, as if he were trying to give himself time to gather his wits and meet the challenge she presented. His hands shook so badly that the coffee kept slopping over the rim of the cup. He said, “I'm sorry, Lily, but you don't arouse me at all.”

“Don't I?”

“Not at all.”

Suddenly, Lily could see only a bleak future. She could see another week here at the camp, another week of waiting for the inevitable flight of Stukas, another week of wondering if she would go home as a corpse or as a girl with a brilliant theatrical career ahead of her. Those were the only two possibilities, because she couldn't see any way she could go home as a corpse with a brilliant theatrical career ahead of her. She realized that she would have to go further than before, would have to pressure the pilot more than ever.

“So you might as well go,” he said, slopping coffee all over his hand.

She reached behind, found the zipper on her velvet costume, tugged it down and peeled to the waist. Her large, fine breasts fell forward, a symphony of jiggling flesh, the dark nipples high on the top of their matched upward thrusts, hard and prominent.

“Gosh,” the kid from Texas said. He squirmed in his seat, making the cracked leather squeak.

Lily ignored him. She had to ignore him. For one thing, he couldn't help her get out of the camp. For another, if she paid him any attention at all, he'd lose his head and take her while her back was turned.

The pilot watched her jugs. He seemed hypnotized. When he began to speak, he sounded far away, as if repeating something he'd memorized in church but had never really believed. “I am not aroused by you, because General Blade wouldn't like it if I were aroused by you and brought you back. You'd go around telling everyone about Kelly and this camp and the general's contingency plan, and you'd get the general in all sorts of trouble.”

She moved slightly as she shook her head and her breasts shivered deliciously, the nipples swelling, the cleavage touched with a blush. “No, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't tell a soul. What would happen — you and I would have lots of fun. That's all that would happen.”

“Gosh,” the Texan said, still squirming. “Gosh.”

The pilot licked his lips. He was shaking like a train on a bad track, close to derailment. Half the coffee in his cup was gone now, though he had not drunk any of it. “I know you better than that,” he said. “I've heard you curse the general, and I know what you'd do. The general wouldn't want you to come back. Whatever the general wants, I want. There's a war going on. In a war, the little people only survive if they do what the big people tell them to do. I'm a little people. The general is a big people. The general doesn't want me to be aroused by you, and therefore I'm not aroused.”

Lily slipped out of her costume altogether.

The Texan sucked in his breath and almost choked.

“You've got an erection,” Lily told the pilot.

“I haven't.” He was shaking so badly now that his coffee cup was empty. The controls in front of him gleamed wetly; steam rose off them.

Lily dropped one hand to the juncture of her thighs and performed a magic trick in which one of her fingers disappeared. “Yes, you have.”

The pilot looked down at his lap, at the telltale, arrow-headed bulge in his slacks.

Lily was running both hands up and down her body now, cupping her fine breasts, now her buttocks, caressing her thighs, almost encircling her waist.

The pilot opened his thermos bottle and dumped the whole batch of steaming coffee into his lap. He winced, bit his lip until blood came, but did not move otherwise.

“It didn't work,” Lily said.

The pilot looked at his lap. He was still erect. “Damn,” he said. By now, he had bitten his lip so hard that blood gleamed on his chin. His clothes were sodden with perspiration, and his hair lay in lank, damp strands across his dripping forehead. “I want what the general wants.”

“You'll run out of coffee sooner or later,” Lily said.

“No, I won't,” the pilot said. “I brought three thermos bottles.” He showed her the other two. “I want what the general wants,” he repeated.

She stared him straight in the eye for a long minute, then sighed. She stopped caressing herself and picked up her costume. “I guess you're telling the truth.”

“I am.”

“It's sad,” she said.

She turned and started out of the cockpit.

“Wait a minute, Lily!” the Texan said.

She turned, breasts slapping together, flushed green by the control lights. “What is it?”

His Adam's apple hobbled up and down. “I — Well, I don't care what the general wants.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But you aren't the pilot.”

“I could be — one day soon.”

“Hey!” the pilot said. “What's that supposed to mean?”

The Texan shrugged. “You might take a flak fragment in the neck.” He smiled at Lily, as if he were anticipating that development with pleasure.

“If it happens,” Lilly said, “then we'll talk.”

She went back through the plane, down the narrow corridor in the center of the fuselage, toward the hatchway where she had come in. She stopped only once, to slip back into her velvet costume and pull up the zipper.

Outside, on her way back to the hospital bunker, she began to think about the only two words that mattered: death and sex. Deep down in every man or woman's mind, those were the two words that really counted for anything, two animal urges or conditions of the species which drove you relentlessly through life. You tried to avoid death for as long as possible, while grabbing all the sex you could get. Ordinarily, built as she was and uninhibited as she was, she would be able to function well in a world governed by those drives. But the war had turned everything around. She had sex to offer, and that was how she could avoid death. But the only way the pilot could avoid death was to refuse sex. The irresistible force and the immovable object. Two deer, they were, with antlers locked and no way to escape.

“Nice night, isn't it?” an enlisted man asked when she passed him on her way to the bunker.

“Fuck off!” she said.

He stopped as if he'd walked into a wall. “Jesus!”

Sulking, she went down the hospital bunker steps, calling for Nurse Pullit. She needed a shoulder to cry on.

9

Three days after the bridge was bombed out, it was nearing completion once again, straight and true, spanning the gorge and the river in the middle of the gorge and the unsalvageable ruins of the previous bridges that the Stukas had destroyed. This speed was not particularly amazing, since Major Kelly was commanding a trained crew of construction workers and some of the best Army engineers in the war. In fact, their progress with the bridge was amazingly slow. After all, with the guiding help of the Army engineers, only twelve thousand American and Canadian workers had built the monumental Alcan Highway from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska: 1,671 miles of roadway completed in only eight months, when it was clear that the Japanese were operating in the Aleutians and that such a highway was desperately necessary for North America's defense. In the Pacific theater, the Army engineers had cleaned out the demolished ruins of old bridges and had spanned jungle rivers with portable Bailey bridges in mere hours. Later in the war, when the Ludendorff Bridge would be damaged under Nazi attack and eventually fall apart carrying Allied traffic, Army engineers would replace the span in less than half a day, though it was 1,068 feet long. Therefore, Major Kelly's unit was actually ponderously slow in replacing the ruined bridge by their camp. There was a reason for this. So long as the bridge was unable to bear traffic, no Stuka flight would be dispatched to bomb it, and they would be able to count on some peace and quiet. Once the bridge was up again, however, they'd have to sit around on tenterhooks, waiting for the dive bombers. The longer they took to rebuild the bridge, then, the better.

In fact, Major Kelly would have liked to take about a month or six weeks to rebuild the bridge. The only thing that kept him from taking that long was the realization that General Blade would order Lieutenant Slade to kill him and assume command.

As the bridge neared completion, Major Kelly and Lieutenant Beame inspected the bearings on the new bridge cap after the nearside canitlever arm had been fastened down on shore and to the pier. All that remained, when their inspection was completed, was the anchoring of the suspended span between the two cantilevers. While they were still beneath the bridge, clinging to the concrete supports by means of belts and mortared chain handholds, soaking up the cool shadows while they worked, Sergeant Coombs came to the edge of the river and yelled down at them.

“The Frog's here!” he yelled.

That was Sergeant Coomb's way of saying that Maurice, the mayor of the only French village nearby, had come to see the major. Sergeant Coombs had few friends among the peoples of other races and religions. The sergeant didn't particularly care. As he often said to Slade when they spent an evening together reading over the Army field manual, “There was a rich kid in my hometown who had a black governess, a big ugly woman. Parents thought it was classy to have a nigger tending their kid. Worse than that, she wasn't a citizen of the States. She was French. A frog nigger. Or a nigger frog, whichever way you see it. Top that off with the fact she was a Catholic. A mick frog nigger. Or a nigger mick frog. Or a frog nigger mick. Whichever.” When Lieutenant Slade would ask what had happened, as he always did, the sergeant would cluck his tongue and finish the story. “The mick nigger frog was with them twenty years. The kid grew up, got drunk, raped a girl, and slit her throat. Got electrocuted. The kid's old man started taking up with whores, gave his wife the clap, and had nearly everything taken from him in the divorce settlement. The wife started betting the horses and running with young jockies and lost most of what she took off the husband. If they hadn't hired that nigger, where might they be today?”

“The Frog's here!” the sergeant shouted again.

“I heard, I heard!” Major Kelly said, scrambling up the ravine, dust rising in clouds behind him, stones kicking out from under his feet and falling down on top of Beame who tried to keep up with him.

“I am not a frog,” Maurice said, stepping into sight a dozen paces from Coombs. “People are not animals — except, perhaps, to the Nazis. One should never refer to human beings with the names of animals. It is degrading. I refrain, after all, from calling Sergeant Coombs a pig.”

Sergeant Coombs colored a pink, hamlike shade, and turned and stomped back to the corrugated shed where he tended the construction machines that he loved. He didn't salute Major Kelly or request his commanding officer's leave. He did, however, say, “Bullshit.”

Major Kelly shook Maurice's hand, marveling as always at the inordinate greasiness of Maurice's complexion. The man's round chin was like a large, oiled bearing. His cheeks were slick. His nose was beaded with oil in the creases and shined overall. His hair was combed straight back, pasted to his round head by a heavy coat of clear lubrication. Fortunately, Major Kelly thought, Sergeant Coombs had not yet called Maurice a greasy frog.

“What brings you here today, Maurice?” Kelly asked. But he knew what brought Maurice there: the possibility of a profit. The possibility of a profit motivated Maurice like food or sex or liquor or success motivated other men.

Quite to the point, Maurice said, “I would like to have your backhoe. The Cat, you know which I mean?” He wiped his greasy hands on his baggy trousers and looked past the major at the heavy, camouflage-painted piece of equipment.

Major Kelly shook his head sadly. “You know we can't permit Army property to be used for a civilian project.”

“You misunderstand, Major!” Maurice said. “I do not wish to borrow the backhoe. Au contraire! I wish to own it.”

“You want to buy the backhoe?”

“No, no, no.”

“You want me to give it to you? Just give you The Cat?”

“That's right, Major.”

Major Kelly wished that Maurice didn't speak English so well, that the channels of communication between them were severely limited. It was dangerous to be able to communicate with the old son of a bitch. Just past the turn of the century, when he was seventeen, Maurice had immigrated to America where he'd remained until just after the First World War. He had returned to France because, as he told the major, there was a greater chance of his making a fortune there. He had not done badly in the States, and he hoped to use his capital to invest, cheaply, in the shattered motherland and then grow along with her as she was restored. He'd done well, though not so well as he had thought he would. In France again, he found that his countrymen were not enamored of Americans, not in the least, and that they distrusted any Frenchman who had once gone to live with the Yanks. Still, he had made and lost and remade and relost fortunes. Right now, he was trying to make a fortune by screwing Major Kelly to the wall. He tried this about once a week. He hadn't failed yet to get what he wanted.

“I suppose,” Major Kelly said, “that there's a good reason why I should just give you the machine.”

“An excellent reason,” Maurice agreed, wiping a hand over his white, greasy hair. His fingers were greasy too.

“Information to sell?”

Maurice nodded. “Information that will save your lives,” he said, grandly. Maurice could be grand, when he wanted. Even with his hair all slicked back and his face greasy, he could be grand.

“You exaggerate, surely.”

“Never.”

“What's the nature of this information?”

Maurice looked meaningfully at the backhoe and arched one bushy eyebrow.

“You can't expect me to give you the machine without knowing what I'm getting in return,” Major Kelly said. “That's not nice, not nice at all. I am always nice to my men and nice to you — so why is everyone nasty with me?”

Maurice nodded sadly, sympathizing with the major, but he would still not say what the information was that he had to sell.

Major Kelly turned and pointed at the camouflaged backhoe which sat on the edge of the riverbank, by the bridge entrance, digging-claw up and bent, mud crusted on its teeth. “Do you know what that piece of equipment costs? Do you realize how important it is to my mission here?”

“Quelque chose.”

“It is not a trifle,” Kelly said.

Maurice pulled at his greasy nose and sighed, “Coûte que coûte—it will not save your lives.”

Major Kelly watched the little frog carefully, and he finally decided he had to trust him. He couldn't risk ignoring the bastard, in case he really did have something vital to say. Maurice was just the sort to let them die in order to teach them a lesson.

“So?” Maurice asked.

“All right. You can have the damn thing. But not until you've told me what you came to tell me.”

“I must have the backhoe first,” Maurice insisted.

The Frenchman jammed both hands into his baggy trouser pockets and looked at the earth, suddenly so still that he appeared to have turned into a column of stone. The illusion was so convincing that Major Kelly felt a solid hammer blow to Maurice's head would crack him into thousands of shards. Kelly had to fight off an urge to go looking for a construction mallet. He knew Maurice would stand this way until he got what he wanted or was refused it outright. And, in the meantime, death was bearing down on them in some form the major couldn't guess.

Kelly sighed. “Okay.”

“Excuse me?”

“You can have The Cat.”

Maurice smiled. “You won't regret this.”

“I better not,” Kelly said, trying to sound fierce.

Maurice turned toward a copse of pines that stood two hundred yards along the riverbank, waved both hands in some prearranged signal. Two young men stepped out of the shadows under the trees and started walking toward Kelly and the frog. “A couple of village boys,” Maurice explained. “They will take the backhoe away.”

“They know how to drive it?”

“Yes.”

The boys, both between sixteen and twenty, went directly to The Cat and began exploring it, until they felt secure. They both climbed aboard and turned to look at Maurice.

He ordered them to start it.

They did, let it idle.

“I suppose you'll want gasoline, too,” Kelly said.

“Cela va sans dire,” Maurice said, grinning.

“Beame,” Kelly said, “bring five ten-gallon cans of gasoline from the camp stores and lash them to The Cat.”

“Yes, sir,” Beame said. He was unhappy with the order.

“He's a good boy,” Maurice said, watching Beame hurry off toward the machinery shed.

Kelly didn't answer that. “Maurice,” he said, “you are not an ordinary man. You are something else, you are—”

“Dégagé?” Maurice asked.

Struggling with his college French, Major Kelly looked for an epithet he wanted. “Chevalier d'industrie.”

Maurice actually bristled. He stood stiffly, face twisted, his greasy hair trying to stand straight up on his neck, his eyes blazing. “You call me a swindler?”

Realizing he had gone too far, reminding himself that he had never been very good at maintaining discipline, the major said, “That was not how I meant it. I meant—'One who lives by his wits.' ”

Maurice unbristled. “Thank you, Major,” he said. “I am honored to be so considered by a man I respect as much as I respect you.”

As Beame delivered the cans of gasoline to the two young men on the backhoe, Kelly said, “Now, what information has cost me so dearly?”

Maurice was suddenly nervous. “A Panzer unit is moving towards the front, complete with an armored supply convoy and approximately a thousand infantrymen.”

Major Kelly wiped at his nose. Looking at Maurice, he had begun to feel that his own nose was bedecked with bright pearls of grease. His nose was dry. That was a relief. “I don't really see that this is worth a backhoe, Maurice.”

“The Panzers are coming on this road,” Maurice said.

“This road?” Kelly looked southward, across the river, unwilling to accept the possibility that he would have to blow up his own bridge to keep the German tanks from crossing over to the camp.

“You did not hear me right,” Maurice said, as if reading the other man's thoughts. “The Panzers are coming to the front. They will be coming up behind you, from the northeast, from this side.”

Kelly turned away from the river and looked across the clearing to the trees, the single break in them where the dusty road came through. No military traffic had yet used this road, not since they had been here. They were in the backlands, in an unimportant part of France. Now, all of that had changed. “Oh, God. We're all dead.”

“Not necessarily,” Maurice said.

Kelly thought of the huge, lumbering Panzer tanks, the supply trucks, the thousand German infantrymen, all moving through this camp, across this bridge, and he couldn't see any way they weren't going to be made dead. “We haven't any mortar or artillery. We aren't a fighting unit. The only thing we have to protect ourselves are our rifles and grenades. How many Panzers did you say?”

“Twelve.”

“We're dead.”

“Not necessarily,” Maurice repeated. “There are things I could rent you, bits and pieces, certain machines that have come into my possession… ”

“Artillery?”

“No,” Maurice said.

“What, then?”

“German jeeps, uniforms, a German truck.”

Kelly thought about it. “You have these things, really?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Grâce à Dieu.”

Major Kelly was certain God hadn't delivered the German equipment to Maurice, but he didn't feel like arguing about that just now. “I don't see what these things will do to help us,” he said.

“With little trouble,” Maurice said, “you could make the Germans think that this is a camp of theirs.”

“Masquerade as Germans?”

“Exactly.”

“But none of us is fluent in German!” Kelly said. “The moment we have to speak to one of them—”

“You will have to talk to no one,” Maurice said. “The Germans will not stop. Their orders are to rush, and they are wasting no time in reaching the front. They will pass through here with little more than a nod to you.”

“The Stuka pilots know we're not German, and they must have reported us to someone,” Kelly said. “They bomb us all the time. If the Stuka pilots know, the Panzer commanders are going to know, too.”

“Possibly not,” Maurice said. “In Germany, the air force tells the army nothing, for all the services are fiefdoms and jealously guard their own secrets.”

“It won't work.”

“What else can you do?” Maurice asked.

Kelly thought about it some more. “Nothing.”

“Then let us hurry. The Panzers will be here tonight.”

10

Lieutenant Slade tugged at his Nazi uniform where the tightly buttoned jacket fit much too snugly over his hips. He would have liked to ask Nurse Pullit to help him let out the seams of the jacket so that he would not look so hippy and fat, but there'd been no time. “I don't like this plan one bit,” he said. Thinking of his career, he said, “And I want my opinion to go down in the record right now, this minute.” He looked at Major Kelly who wore a black SS uniform complete with silver skulls and a sheathed dagger at the waist. Lieutenant David Beame wore an excellently fitting oberleutnant's uniform and looked dashing. The major and Beame were so resplendent, in fact, one might have thought they were on their way to a dance. It was a good thing there wasn't any dance, though, because Slade would have been embarrassed for any woman — aside from Lily Kain whom he considered nothing more than a cheap hussie — to see him in his tight uniform. “I think what we're doing is all wrong,” The Snot said. “It's degrading and unpatriotic— and it definitely smacks of cowardice.” He could not understand why both their uniforms should fit so well, while his was tight across the hips. Had they planned this? Had the rest of them got together and made certain that his uniform would fit too snugly across the hips and therefore make him seem ludicrous and silly? Maurice would not be above that. It was quite within Maurice's abilities to purposefully supply Slade with an ill-fitting uniform, making him the brunt of private and public jokes. “What we should do,” Lieutenant Slade said, “is make a stand. I'm not saying we would win. But we could deal them a hard blow, and perhaps a decisive blow. We would have the advantage of surprise. And even if that wasn't enough, if we lost, we'd still all make our mark in the history of this war.” Another thing that bothered Slade was the fact that his uniform was that of a private in the German army. If he had to wear a German uniform, it seemed only proper that he should have one of a rank at least equal to his own. Major Kelly, after all, was wearing a lieutenant-general's uniform, and Beame was dressed as an officer. It was degrading to be sitting here in the backseat of the jeep, wearing a tight uniform several ranks below his own. He wanted to cry. He just wanted to cry.

Kelly and Beame didn't want to cry. They wanted to scream and run. Instead, they watched the convoy of German vehicles move slowly down from the highlands toward the clearing, the camp, and the bridge.

Only one road entered the clearing. It came from the northeast, a rudely paved lane that dropped out of the foothills and slanted gradually into the flat land around the river. From where they sat, they could see for more than a mile along that road, to the top of one of the hills where it fell away, out of sight. In the darkness, the lane was studded with what appeared to be an endless stream of headlights. The first of these vehicles was no more than a quarter of a mile away from them, just entering the flat land a thousand yards ahead of the big Panzers. In a couple of minutes, it would be here. Soon after, the mammoth tanks would pass them close enough to be touched. Already, at a few minutes past eleven o'clock, fully an hour ahead of when Maurice had said to expect them, the heavy pounding of tank-tread trembled the earth. The roar of the massive engines, still so distant, was beginning to make conversation almost impossible.

Still, Lieutenant Slade managed to talk. He said, “You know we can't hope to fool them, anyway. Kraut uniforms and an armored kraut jeep don't make us krauts. They'll spot us right off.”

He looked behind them at the silent, dark buildings. All of the American-made machinery was drawn back in among the trees behind the main bunker, out of sight. A row of German transports, holed and rickety but sound enough to the eye, in the dark, flanked the machinery shed. None of the other men in the unit was visible, though they were hidden everywhere, armed and ready to fight if this ruse should fail and the night should end in violence.

But they were acting like cowards, the lot of them, Slade thought. They were unwilling to face the enemy directly, and they actually would not do so unless they had no other choice. What would their girl friends say about them if they could see them now? What would Slade's own mother say? Slade's mother was a very patriotic woman, an Army wife, and an avid collector of war stories, both fictional and factual. Slade's mother believed in heroism. Her husband had been a hero as had been her father and her grandfather. Slade's mother insisted, when he was first sent to Europe, that Slade become a hero himself, even if he had to be wounded or die in the process. To be wounded was preferable to dying, of course, because if he died he could not beguile her with stories about Over There. It would be just terrible if Slade's mother's friends had sons who became heroes, while Slade remained undistinguished in battle. How humiliating that would be for Slade's mother. After all, she had done so much for him, and he could hardly pay her back with humiliation and degradation. And he could hardly let himself be killed before he had a chance to tell her a couple of good stories about heroism. So, if he had to die fighting the goddamned krauts, why couldn't he die in his own uniform? How would his mother ever explain this to her friends? She could bear it, she told him, if he died in some heroic way — but how could she bear the news that he had died in a jerry uniform? And a jerry private's uniform! She wouldn't be able to handle it. She'd crack up.

“The least we can do,” The Snot said, making a final effort to sway them over to his point of view, “is blow up the bridge so the Panzers can't make it to the front.”

Neither Kelly nor Beame replied. Kelly merely nodded up the road where, abruptly, a motorcycle and its sidecar were silhouetted against the oncoming convoy lights. They were not yet to the clearing, but coming fast.

The Snot took out his revolver and checked to be certain it was loaded. How would his mother ever explain to her friends about her son in a German uniform and trying to kill the enemy with an unloaded gun? It was loaded. The Snot hoped he would have to use it.

The cyclist stopped his machine twenty feet from the bridge, and both the German soldiers stared at Kelly, Beame, and Slade. They were fair-skinned and young, athletic men who looked too hard and knowledgeable for their age. They did not seem to be suspicious, merely curious.

Kelly smiled and waved. The noise of the oncoming tanks was too loud for his voice to carry across the hundred yards to the soldiers.

The man in the sidecar got out. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, black with black leather straps, polished. He was more than six feet tall, further elevated by the well-heeled boots, his pot helmet worn back off his forehead in a relaxed fashion. He bent close to the cyclist and said something which made the other man laugh.

Good, Kelly thought, they're laughing.

Suspicious men don't laugh, Beame thought, relieved.

Are they laughing at me? Slade wondered.

The cyclist changed gears and drove away, across the bridge, leaving his companion alone.

It was German routine to station a sentry at the approach to a bridge before the Panzers began to cross it, and it was also German routine for the sentry to inspect the nearside bridge for concealed explosives prior to taking up his post. This man didn't bother with that, apparently because he thought the bridge was already under German control. Instead, he walked across the road, onto the grass, coming directly toward the jeep where Kelly, Beanie, and Slade sat. Great. He wanted to chat.

“Go away,” Beame said, under his breath.

But the sentry did not go away. He came on, smiling, waiting until he got close enough to speak over the thunder of the Panzers that were rushing down on them. He was even larger than he'd first appeared, a husky young brute who would know how to take care of himself in almost any situation. He was handsome in a robotlike sense, his face all hard lines, his hair yellow-white, eyes gleaming blue-green like the eyes of a deer, a perfect specimen of the Master Race. His teeth were even and white.

Behind the sentry, Sergeant Coombs rose from the slope by the bridge. Bent over almost double, he ran lightly over the grass, just out of the bright lights of the approaching tanks. Sergeant Coombs was not handsome, tall, or athletic. He was not blond, blue-eyed, or possessed of good teeth. Nevertheless, Major Kelly was certain which would die tonight. Not Coombs. Never Coombs.

The German, intent on reaching the men in the jeep, didn't hear the sergeant coming.

“No,” Beame said.

Sergeant Coombs drove the knife into the soldier's back, slipped it in between two ribs, and thrust it brutally upwards, probing for the heart.

The soldier screamed.

Even with the Panzers so near, Kelly heard the cry.

Coombs pulled the blade out and watched the German go down on his knees. He had not hit the heart. The soldier was alive and trying to shrug his rifle off his shoulder. He jerked about clumsily, gasping desperately for breath, much too slow to save himself. His face had gone even whiter, his eyes round and blank.

Coombs stepped forward and put his knee in the middle of the soldier's back, encircled his neck with one burly arm, jerked his head up. The German's face turned involuntarily toward the sky, exposing a vulnerable white throat. Kelly thought he could see the pulse beating rapidly in the kid's taut jugular. Then Coombs's big right hand moved. The blade gleamed for an instant, and the strained flesh parted quickly and deeply, ear to ear. For a brief moment, the smooth, grinning second mouth fell open in a leer — then filled up with blood which looked more black than red in that dim light. Filling, the wound then gushed.

The soldier let go of the rifle and reached up to touch the spurting wound. His fingers hooked into the gash, blood spilling down his hand, and then let go with the sudden realization of what they had touched.

“Go away,” Beame said again. But this time he was not sure to whom he spoke: to the dead soldier, to Coombs, to himself, or not to any person, but to a thing, a power?

The soldier was trying to walk on his knees. He was bleeding like a pig at the slaughter, already dead but unwilling to give up. He waddled forward a foot or two, dragging Coombs with him, his head still upturned, his glazed eyes seeking his killer. Then, abruptly, he fell forward on his face, his head half off his shoulders.

11

Sergeant Coombs, the only man not frozen into immobility by the murder, slid his bloody hands under the German's armpits and dragged him backwards to the riverbank, over the edge and down under the shadowed bridgeworks. The scorched grass where the brief struggle had taken place was marred by two long, parallel tracks which had been cut by the dead man's boot heels. And there was blood, of course. Pools of it. Still, the trail was unremarkable. The blood looked like oil, machine oil or maybe grease. No one would notice.

Kelly turned and looked back along the road, as much to get his eyes off the blood and his thoughts off the dead soldier as to see what was happening behind them.

The first of the convoy vehicles lumbered like stolid elephants through the archway of giant pines. They lurched, hesitated, then came on, engines grinding like thousands of badly cast gears: grrrrr-rrr-rrrrr. And then they were in the C-shaped clearing where the camp lay. From now on, anything could happen. In seconds, the Panzers' headlights high on the knobbed turrets would sweep across the bridge: up the slight incline of the approach, over the framing beams, onto the deck… And they would reveal the lack of a sentry. When that happened, the jerries would have to know that something was wrong. They would slow down. They would stop.

When they stopped, everyone would die.

If a couple of shells were fired at the jeep, Major Kelly thought, he and Beame and Slade would be so much jelly decorated with steel slivers and sparkling bits of glass. Pretty but not functional. The only way to hang on was to stay functional.

Kelly looked anxiously at the point along the ravine where Coombs had disappeared with the corpse. What was taking them so long down there?

“Maybe I could take up guard by the bridge,” Beame suggested.

Kelly shook his head. “You're dressed as an oberleutnant, and they'd wonder what you were doing at a private's post.”

“We can't just sit here—”

“We have to just sit here,” Kelly said.

Beame said, “Slade's dressed as a private. He could take up the sentry's post without making the krauts suspicious.”

Major Kelly wiped a film of perspiration from his face and thought about that: was there any chance of Slade getting killed? If there were, he'd send The Snot out right now. At least something good would come of this crisis. Thinking about it, though, he realized Slade would fumble his role and expose them. He'd have to keep the lieutenant in the jeep, out of trouble.

Where were the men under the bridge? This was their job. They'd had time to strip the German soldier, time for one of them—

“There!” Beame exclaimed, pointing.

Danny Dew, the dozer operator, climbed over the edge of the riverbank, dressed in the dead man's uniform. It was a perfect fit, and the rent made by Sergeant Coombs's knife was not visible. Indeed, Danny Dew looked as if he had been born in that uniform, as if he had goose-stepped out of his mother's womb, had saluted the doctor with a stiff arm, and had run the nurse through with his bayonet. He was a marvelous German soldier, muscular and stiff, his head held straight and proud, eyes cold and malevolent as he took up his position by the bridge. The only problem, so far as Major Kelly could see, was that Danny Dew was a Negro, a colored person, so dark that he hinted of blue.

Ordinarily, a Negro wouldn't be assigned to a white unit in the American Army, because there were separate colored regiments. The Army practiced rigid but quiet segregation. The only reason that Danny Dew was in Major Kelly's unit was because he was a damn fine D-7 operator — and the only one available for immediate and quiet transfer to beef up their unit for this crazy mission behind German lines.

“Maybe he was the only one of Coombs's men who'd fit into that uniform,” Beame said.

As the first tank lights splashed across them, Major Kelly looked at Danny Dew's shining black face, his wide white grin. He groaned aloud. He bashed his head against the steering wheel, over and over. That felt so good he didn't want to stop. It made him pleasantly dizzy and caused a sweet, melodic buzzing in his ears which drowned out the roar of the tanks.

“Danny Dew certainly doesn't look Aryan,” Lieutenant Slade said, telling everyone what was already known.

At the bridge, Danny Dew stood stiffly beside the eastern bridge frame, the rifle held across his chest.

“Here comes the first of them,” Slade said.

Everyone had already seen the first vehicle. Even Major Kelly had stopped bashing his head on the steering wheel long enough to look at the first vehicle.

An armored car led the procession, traveling nearly as fast as the motorcycle. Its head lamps struck Danny Dew like a spotlight zeroing in on a star stage performer. The car passed him, jolted across the first floor beam, lights bobbling wildly, and kept on going across the bridge. At the other end, it slammed down onto the roadbed again and disappeared around the bend two hundred yards beyond the river, hidden from them now by a rise in the land and the thickening forest. It had never even slowed down.

“Luck,” Major Kelly said.

“God's on our side,” Slade said.

“Here comes another,” Beame said.

The second armored car was coming fast, though not nearly so fast as the one before it. This driver seemed less sure of himself than his predecessor had been; he was hunched over the wheel, fighting the ruts and the hump in the center of the pavement where the lane had hoved up like a hog's back. He would be too busy with the unresponsive steering of the cumbersome vehicle to take much notice of Dew. However, the five other Germans with him would have more time to look around.

They glanced at Kelly, Beame and Slade as they went by, then looked ahead at Danny Dew.

“Here it comes,” Kelly said.

The car hit a rut, bounced high, slewed sideways, and nearly went off the road. The driver fought, kept control, plunged through the entrance to the bridge and accelerated. In a few moments, he was gone, and still Dew stood at the bridge.

Beame closed his eyes and let his head fall forward with relief. He sucked cool night air into his lungs, then reluctantly raised his head and looked eastward, toward the convoy.

The third armored car came much more slowly than either of the first two. It carried four Germans in addition to the driver, and it weaved uncertainly from one side of the lane to the other. Battered, splattered with mud, it had obviously seen better days. The left rear fender sported a six-inch shell hole. The windshield was cracked and yellowed.

“Why's he coming so slow?” Slade asked.

“Is something wrong with him?” Beame asked. “I can't hear the sound of his engine with the tanks and all; is he breaking down?”

Kelly said nothing. He knew, if he opened his mouth, he would scream.

The armored car passed them, the engine making a peculiar grinding noise. An inordinate cloud of exhaust fumes trailed them. A minute later, they thumped over the bridge approach, slid through the entrance in what seemed to be slow motion, and went across without stopping.

Major Kelly still didn't feel good about Danny Dew standing out there pretending his eyes were blue and his hair yellow, because the Panzers were next. All twelve of them. In each of the Panzers, the captain of the tank stood in the hatch on the top of the turret, watching the way ahead, sometimes calling orders down to the driver in his forward cubbyhole. The driver, in each case, had only a slit to see through and was too busy with navigation to pay attention to a sentry. But the tank commander, topside, would have Danny Dew fixed in his sight for long, long seconds. A minute or more.

“We're all dead,” Major Kelly said. He began beating his head against the steering wheel once more.

“You're beating your head against the steering wheel,” Slade said.

Kelly beat even harder.

“No SS officer ever loses control like that,” Slade said.

For once, Slade was right about something. Kelly stopped beating his head against the wheel and contented himself with gripping the wheel in both hands and trying to break it loose of the steering column.

“Better be careful about that,” David Beame said, nodding at Kelly's whitened knuckles. “If you break it off, Maurice will assess you for it.”

That was true enough. But he had to do something, and he couldn't very well climb into the back seat and pulp Lieutenant Slade's face, as he wanted to do. One of the tank commanders would surely notice a scene like that and become too curious.

The first Panzer approached the bridge. One moment it was a black shape behind bright head lamps. Then it loomed out of the darkness, its great tread clattering on the Tarmac roadbed. It brought with it an odor of hot metal, oil, and dust.

“So big,” Beame said.

Kelly squeezed the wheel.

The tank commander, a tall, fine-boned Aryan, stood in the turret, hatless, his shirt open at the throat revealing fine yellow hairs that gleamed in the reflection of the head lamps. He scanned the men in the jeep, peered menacingly at Major Kelly — but more at the much-feared SS death's-head on his cap than at Kelly's face — then looked imperiously away.

What were these men? Kelly wondered. Where did these legions of hard, fair-faced Aryan supermen come from? Surely, not all the German people were like these; they could not all be so icily handsome, so withdrawn and cold and lifeless. Was Hitler creating these in his basement, through some arcane magic?

The tank commander was watching Danny Dew. His hands were braced on opposite sides of the turret hatch, to keep him steady, and he was staring straight ahead at the sentry.

The steel tread clattered up the incline.

“He's seen Dew,” Kelly said.

The long barrel of the tank's biggest gun nearly scraped the horizontal part of the entrance frame before the giant machine tipped onto the bridge floor and nosed down a bit. A moment later, it was roaring away, toward the far bank of the river. The tank commander had not seen anything out of the ordinary, after all.

“I don't believe it!”

Slade said, “He didn't even notice Danny Dew is a nigger.”

The second tank ground toward the bridge. The commander nodded to Dew abstractedly as he guided his machine through the end posts and away toward the other shore. It reached the other side and soon disappeared around the bend.

“Still ten to go,” Beame said.

Slade said, “Take my word for it. Before this is over, we're going to have to fight them.”

One by one, the next ten Panzer tanks, fully prepared for battle, driven by some of the most dedicated and steely-nerved army technicians in the world, captained by officers who were among the best of the German military class, passed over the bridge without hesitation. A few of the tank commanders nodded at Dew. Most ignored him.

“Here come the trucks,” Slade said as the trucks came into sight behind the last of the rumbling Panzers.

According to Maurice, there were thirty trucks, each carrying more than thirty men in addition to the driver and the officer up front. They were not nearly so large as the tanks. They would be able to streak through the bridge posts without any anxious moments, and each driver would have time to give Danny Dew a quick but thorough looking over.

The first truck hit the graded bridge approach at forty miles an hour, closing the gap between itself and the last tank which was already at the far side of the gorge. It bounced badly in the ruts; the soldiers in the back looked grim as they sat on metal benches and gripped the side slats to keep from falling to the floor. The truck jolted onto the bridge and growled away, followed closely by another and another and still another of the transports.

“This is too much,” Kelly said. “Our luck will change.”

It didn't. None of those drivers, turning glassy blue eyes on Danny Dew as they went by, saw anything amiss. Not just then, anyway. Perhaps later they would think of it. Five years from now, one of these dumb krauts would sit up in bed in the middle of the night and say to a startled wife: “That sentry was a Neger, for God's sake!” Now, though, all the trucks went past without incident.

Behind the last of the trucks, separated from the transports by fifty yards, was the first of the two motorcycles that wrapped up the procession. It passed with a noisy clatter. Immediately after it was by, Danny Dew stepped back and away from the edge of the bridge, rolled over the top of the riverbank and out of sight of the final cyclist. It was in this last sidecar that he would ride away— if he were really a German sentry.

Now came the worst part.

“This is the worst part,” Slade said.

Usually, according to Maurice, the last cycle picked up the sentry. Now and again, however, if the sentry felt like a bit of relief from the windy ride of the sidecar, he would flag down one of the last transports and climb into the back of the truck. Kelly was hoping the man on the last cycle would go on if he saw no sentry waiting, sure that his man had joined the troops in the back of one of the transports. Also, since this was apparently a German camp, the cyclist wouldn't see how anything could have gone wrong. And he wouldn't take the time to stop and search for his man, because he wouldn't want to fall too far behind the main body of the convoy, not in a foreign country where — quite often — the peasants had been known to play some bloody tricks on their conquerors.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that they could not risk a shot now that they had gotten this far without being discovered. They couldn't kill the cyclist yet, if he became inquisitive. The last of the convoy was still in sight, the roar of the tanks far ahead. The night had gotten just still enough to allow a shot to carry to the men in the open backs of the last couple of transports still on the bridge.

The motorcycle slowed.

“He's stopping,” Beame said. His voice sounded like that of a frog only partly turned back into a prince.

The motorcyclist slowed even more.

He looked them over as if they were on display and he was thinking of buying one of them. He scanned the bridge, searching for the sentry he was supposed to pick up, then he looked at them again, having come even with their jeep.

He was young, even younger than the soldier Sergeant Coombs had killed, with his helmet flat down in place and his body girdled up in black leather belts. He looked sharp, not easily fooled, like a farm kid who had found a new sophistication in his uniform and was trying to live down what he considered shamefully simple origins. A long-snouted machine pistol was holstered on his hip, and a completely unnecessary bandolier of ammunition wound around his chest.

He stopped his cycle altogether.

Thinking fast, Kelly grinned and waved him on, pointing after the convoy to indicate that the sentry had already left.

The rider hesitated.

“Go away,” Beame whispered.

The cyclist finally lifted one hand off his bars to wave back, then accelerated and went on his way.

For about ten feet.

Then Lieutenant Slade shot him in the back of the head.

12

The cyclist fell into the handlebars, recoiled lifelessly, and began to slide sideways in a graceless heap.

Unguided now, the heavy motorcycle jolted out of a shallow rain furrow and swung erratically toward the bridge abutment. It was made more stable by the sidecar than it would have been with only its own two wheels, but still its single head lamp made crazy, jiggling patterns on the night.

As the dead soldier tipped into the sidecar which the bridge sentry would have occupied, Slade's second shot took him through the shoulder and passed straight into the gasoline tank under him. There was a flat, contained explosion hardly louder than either of the shots. Flames engulfed the machine and the dead man as the whole bright bundle crashed headlong into the concrete bridge support.

Major Kelly stood up in the jeep and drew his own gun, as did Lieutenant Beame. Slade, standing up in the back seat, already had his pistol out, of course, and he was jabbering about his success in nailing the kraut. Neither Kelly nor Beame said anything. They watched the retreating trucks, waiting for one of them to pull up and disgorge German infantrymen. Then it would be all over. At least, Major Kelly thought, Slade would get it. The whole thing might be worth dying for if Slade were killed too.

The last of the transports had already come down on the roadway on the far side of the gorge and was making for the bend which would put it out of sight. The first motorcycle was close behind it. Surely, either the two soldiers in the motorcycle or the men sitting in the last of the open-end trucks would see the fire, begin to wonder…

But the Germans kept moving away, rounded the bend, were gone. A minute went by. Two minutes. Five. When the Germans had not returned in ten minutes, Major Kelly knew they never would. By the time they saw the last motorcyclist was missing, they wouldn't know where to look for him. Amazing.

Lieutenant Slade watched the smoldering motorcycle and the shapeless body sprawled within it. He smiled. “One more jerry that won't be shooting up American boys.”

“Why?” Beame asked.

“Because he's dead,” Slade said, perplexed by the question.

“Why did you kill him?” Beame amplified.

“What would my mother have said if I'd let them all go?” Slade asked.

“Who?”

“My mother!”

“How would your mother ever find out, if you had let him go?”

“She has connections, sources,” Slade said, looking down at himself. “You'd be surprised at my mother's sources.” He tugged at the hem of his jacket. “I shouldn't have had to wear this silly uniform. Look at my hips. My hips look ridiculous in this uniform.” He looked at the dead German in the middle of the road, a black lump in a wreath of gray smoke. “His uniform fit him well enough.”

13

The sentry's corpse was startlingly white. It lay on its back by the edge of the river, one hand on the middle of its chest as if it were feeling for its own heartbeat. The skin was snowy, unnaturally white, almost phosphorescent. The body hair was too light to be seen. The dead man looked like a big, molded doll, all of painted rubber: long rubber legs, rubber arms, a thick rubber penis now horribly limp and curled over two rubber, felt-furred testicles. In the light of Kelly's torch, there were only two spots of color — the incredible blue eyes, and the red-black blood on the upper torso which had poured out when Coombs had slit the sentry's throat.

That could be me, Kelly thought. Someday, it will be.

He turned away, shifting the beam of his torch, and came upon Danny Dew who was standing directly under the bridge. Leaving the corpse behind, trying to forget it, he went over to the Negro. “That was amazing,” he said.

“What?” Danny Dew asked. He was stripping out of the German uniform. His powerful black body gleamed with perspiration; droplets of sweat clung to the tightly curled black hairs on his chest, like jewels sewn into his skin. He looked like an oiled harem guard. Except that he wasn't a eunuch.

“That none of the Germans noticed you weren't— weren't Aryan,” Kelly said. “That was fantastic.”

Danny Dew laughed, showing lots of white teeth. Were they really white, Major Kelly wondered, or were they only bright by comparison with Dew's dark face? That was one of the great mysteries that had haunted white Americans for as long as Major Kelly could remember. His mother had always said their teeth were not clean and white, but only appeared to be, because the rest of them was “painted so dark.” Major Kelly remembered hours spent in discussions of Negro dental conditions, the family gathered around the kitchen table like a group of psychic gypsies discussing the netherworld. Even this near, even though Danny Dew was a close companion and had been for months, Major Kelly could not be sure about his teeth.

Danny Dew said, “I pretended I was white.”

“Pretended?”

“Well, I was the only one down here big enough to look good in that uniform, so I had to do something, didn't I? So I directed myself at those Jerrys, and I thought white.”

“But you still looked colored.”

“To you. I wasn't directing myself at you. Anyway, looks don't matter. It's all in how you think.”

“Even if you were thinking white, you looked colored,” Kelly insisted.

“If you can't accept it, forget it,” Danny Dew said, tossing off the last of the German uniform and picking up his own pants. “But it's all in the head, Massah Kelly, all in de ole head.”

Kelly leaned back against the hard edge of a bridge support and said, “I can't accept that, no. If all a man had to do to become someone different was to think himself different, there wouldn't be a war. Each of us could be a German, Japanese, Britisher… No one would want to fight anyone else any longer.”

Danny Dew buckled his belt and pulled up his fly, struggled into his shirt which stuck to his sweat-slicked chest. “That's why I wish other people would start using their heads, like me,” he told Kelly. “If everyone just pretended more, we could get out of this crappy place.”

14

At four in the morning, only a few of the men in the camp were asleep. Six enlisted men were sitting in the woods immediately south of the camp, drinking cheap whiskey out of tin cups and singing songs over the graves of the two dead Germans. They weren't really mourning the dead men. But they couldn't just throw them in the ground and walk away. If the tables were turned, they would want someone to drink and sing over their graves, at the very least. They got very drunk, and they ran out of songs to sing.

In the shabby rec room of the HQ building, about twenty men sat on the benches and in the cafe chairs Maurice had provided for a price. They drank more cheap whiskey out of more tin cups. They didn't sing, though. They just sat there, drinking, not looking at each other, as if there were a religious service in progress.

Under the earth, in the main bunker, ten other men were playing poker at a pair of battered wooden tables. No one was enjoying the game, but no one wanted to call it off. If they called it off, there was nothing else to do but think. No one wanted to think.

Other men wandered about the camp, going nowhere, trying not to run into anyone. These were the ones who couldn't play poker. They had to think.

At four in the morning, Major Kelly was in the rec room. He was talking to General Blade, who had just put through an emergency call on the big wireless set. “You've got an emergency, Major,” the general said.

Lieutenant Slade, standing at Kelly's shoulder, stiffened. Maybe he would get to be in a battle, after all.

“Sir?” Kelly said.

“A unit of Panzer tanks, armored cars and infantry trucks are on the way toward you. They ought to be crossing the bridge in a few hours.”

“Twelve Panzers, sir?” Major Kelly asked.

General Blade was unsettled by the major's inside knowledge. “How could you know that?”

“They passed over the bridge three or four hours ago,” Kelly told him. Then he told him the rest of it, except for the account of Slade's gun work. He wasn't trying to protect Slade, not at all. But he was afraid that, if he told Blade about the dead cyclist, the general would recommend Slade for a medal or something, and then The Snot would become unbearable.

“Well,” General Blade said, “I'm glad to see you've got such good relationships with the locals — that you've cultivated them as informers.”

“Yes, sir,” Kelly said. He saw that Lieutenant Slade was fidgeting about, debating whether to insist that Kelly mention the backhoe which they had lost in the bargaining with Maurice. He was probably also trying to think how to let the general know about him killing the cyclist. Kelly placed a finger to his lips to warn Slade off.

Still, the lieutenant said, “Aren't you going to tell him about the backhoe?”

Slade was close enough to the microphone for it to pick up what he had said. General Blade had heard. “Backhoe?”

“You little shit,” Kelly said.

“What was that?” the general asked.

“Not you, sir,” Kelly said.

“What's this about a backhoe?”

“We lost it, sir,” Slade said, loud enough to be heard.

“Lost it?” the General asked.

Major Kelly pulled his revolver from his holster and leveled it at the middle of Lieutenent Slade's face. “You know what this will do to your face?” Kelly asked.

Slade nodded, swallowed hard.

“I'll put one right up your nostril,” Kelly promised.

“A backhoe?” General Blade asked. “Up my nostril? Kelly—”

“It's all right, sir,” Kelly interrupted. “I was talking to Lieutenant Slade.”

“What's going on there, Kelly?”

“Slade's drunk,” Kelly said. “Too much celebrating after the Germans went by.”

The General was surprised. “I didn't think he was that sort — to drink so much.”

“It happens, occasionally,” Kelly said.

Lieutenant Slade colored, opened his mouth to speak. Kelly thrust the revolver close to his face, shutting him up.

“One more thing, Major,” General Blade said. “I've also been informed that the Nazi high command is considering switching a Panzer division from the Russian front and moving it westward within a week or so. That would mean a convoy of eighty tanks or so, supply trucks, truck-mounted 88 mm antiaircraft guns, quite a string. Naturally, if they are dispatched and use the route that'll take them over your bridge, they're going to camp there with you for the night. It would take half a day, anyway, to put that big a force across the bridge.”

“Camp with us, sir?”

“If they come that route,” Blade said.

“But, sir—”

“Don't worry about them,” Blade said. “They'll probably never be dispatched, and even if they are they'll come west on some other highway.”

Kelly nodded, then realized the general couldn't hear a nod. “Yes, sir. I won't worry, sir.” He cleared his throat and said, “Sir, how is the front moving these days?”

“Better. Better. You're only a hundred and ninety miles behind lines now.”

“But that's only ten miles less than—”

“I know how happy this makes you,” General Blade interrupted. “Now, I have to be going, Kelly. I'm glad you squeaked past the first unit of Panzers, damn glad. I wanted you to know about the possibility of that big division being sent your way in a week or so; I wanted you to have time to plan for it, if it comes.”

“Plan? Plan? How can I plan for—”

“It's probably never going to come near you,” Blade said. “But you can't be too careful these days, the way things are. Good luck, Major. I will be in touch, and I'll expect you to keep that bridge open, sir!”

Major Kelly stared at the hissing microphone and returned it to Slade as if tranced by it. “Eighty tanks? Antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks? Infantry? Supplies? Staying overnight? Slade, we can't fool the Germans for an entire night!”

“Like the general said,” Slade observed, “they'll probably never be sent, or if they are they won't come this route.” Secretly, he wished they would come this route, so that there would be one great big fucking battle with lots of heroism and derring-do. To Kelly, because he knew it was what Kelly wanted to hear, he said, “We're in for a change of luck. I feel it.”

Kelly frowned. For all the time he spent reading the Army field manual, Slade was as naive as everyone else. Didn't he know nothing ever improved, not a whit?

15

Things had to improve, Lieutenant Slade thought. The camp was in a very bad way: hiding, choosing to deceive the Germans rather than fight them openly. Major Kelly was a coward. Lieutenant Beame was a coward. All the men were cowards. Something had to change. Someone had to show the men that all was not lost; they could still accomplish something in this war. Someone had to take the reins and be tough with these sons of bitches, make them shape up, put a little guts in their bellies. So far as Slade could see, he was the only one to do it.

He would have to kill Major Kelly.

Once Kelly was dead, Lieutenant Beame would gladly abdicate his role as the new commander of the unit, and General Blade would put Slade in charge. Then, things would improve.

An hour after the general's call, Lieutenant Slade stood in his tiny blanket-partitioned quarters in the main HQ building, fashioning the mask he would wear when he killed Major Kelly. He couldn't very well kill him openly even if Kelly was a coward. Therefore, he had cut two holes for his eyes in the burlap potato sack which he had filched from the food stores down at the main bunker. He looked at the mask and wondered if he should cut a slit for his mouth. If he wanted to talk with the mask on, he would need a slit where his mouth was. Otherwise, his voice would be muffled. On the other hand, he didn't have anything to say to Major Kelly. He just wanted to kill him. He wasn't going to lecture him first. Okay. No other holes.

He pulled the sack open and slipped it over his head, tugged it around until the holes were directly in front of his eyes. He could breathe well enough, though the bag made the air smell like dirt and potatoes. Bending stiffly, he looked at himself in a small, cracked mirror which he had laid on his cot. Not bad. Not bad at all. Sinister. Frightening. He would give Kelly a real scare before he put a few bullets in the bastard's gut, a real scare indeed.

He took the sack off his head, folded it and tucked it in his trousers, inside his undershorts. He didn't want anyone accidentally uncovering the bag and remembering it later, after Kelly had been killed by a mysterious man in a mask.

The only thing he had to worry about now was when to do it. Tonight? No. Not yet. Give Kelly more time to show his cowardliness. It might even be a good idea to put it off as much as a week. Then, when he did kill the son of a bitch, General Blade would be even more disposed to treating the matter lightly. General Blade would see what a coward Kelly was, and he would be pleased to have Richard Slade in charge of the camp.

Smiling, Slade put the cracked mirror under his cot. He lay down and picked up the Army manual from the pasteboard trunk at the head of the bed, and he started to read by the shimmering yellow light of the single, tiny electric bulb.

16

The next morning, after Maurice reclaimed the equipment he had rented to them, The Snot said, “This conclusively proves that Maurice is in league with the krauts.” He looked at Major Kelly, then at Beame, and he did not seem to understand that they wanted to beat his face to a pulp. Even the pacifist, Tooley, had confessed that, at times, even he wanted to beat The Snot's face to a pulp. Slade continued, “If we accept that we have a traitor in the unit, our morale will decline. But if we look outside our ranks for the culprit, our morale can be maintained and our field of suspects narrowed. And Maurice stands head-and-shoulders above all other suspects. He has access to German equipment… and you certainly don't believe those stories he told you about partisan work, about stealing the German equipment, laying ambushes for German patrols on other highways! How'd he really get those things? Hmmm?” Slade took their silences to mean they were speechless, utterly unable to imagine how Maurice had really gotten hold of those things. He said, “Suppose he was consorting with the Germans, selling them information in return for trucks, uniforms, and artillery? And then he was renting these same things to us in return for the backhoe and — and whatever else he could get, maybe the dozer the next time. Suppose that's what he's doing. You see, of course, what he has in mind, what his eventual goal is.” Again, he interpreted their silence as sheer stupidity. He smirked, actually smirked, and said, “Maurice is establishing a small army of his own: trucks, artillery, construction equipment, guns, and uniforms. You mark my words. When he feels he has enough strength, he's going to declare Eisenhower a separate, free French nation!”

Major Kelly and Lieutenant Beame walked away from The Snot. They went to the bridge and stood looking it over, each afraid that he could not control his urge to pulp Slade's face.

Slade mistook their retreat for a concession to his point and their lack of response for a weakness of will that made it impossible for them to act. He called after them: “When the time is ripe, that village will secede from the rest of France! And when the war is over, they'll discover that backhoe and whatever else Maurice has of ours, and they'll say the United States of America urged the village to secede, that we meddled in the internal affairs of our great ally, France. It will be a black day for America's foreign image!”

Even down by the river, where the water sloshed over the rocks and pieces of bomb-blasted bridgework, Kelly and Beame could hear the lieutenant shouting. The major wished a few Stukas would make a bombing pass. On Slade. If he just knew who the traitor was, who was reporting to the Nazis every time the bridge was rebuilt, he would try to arrange just that, a bombing run on Slade. He'd station Slade at some lonely point, far away from the camp and the bridge, and then he would get the krauts to run a bombing mission on him: three Stukas. He would use four blue runway flares to mark Slade's position. If that worked well, then he'd try it with Coombs. And, most definitely, three Stukas with full loads. This would have to be a very final sort of operation, because he didn't want to risk a badly botched bombing and end up with another Kowalski on his hands.