Hanging on

1 / JULY 18

At dawn, Kelly, Beame, and Slade stood by the bridge ruins, watching the road on the far side of the gorge where it disappeared around the hillside.

“They aren't coming,” Slade said.

“Give them a chance,” Beame said. “The sun's hardly up.”

A dirty mist lay in the gorge, roiled over the river. Snakes of mist slithered up the bank and danced restlessly before them, touched by golden morning light. Behind, to the east, the sun had risen below the tree line. Hot, orange Halloween light like the glow from a jack-o'-lantern's mouth flushed between the black tree trunks where the forest was thin, and it filled the east entrance to the clearing.

“They aren't coming,” Slade said. He was delighted by the plan, because it made the major look like an idiot And coward. It gave Slade justification for murdering the dumb bastard and taking command of the unit. He giggled.

“Look!” Beame shouted, suddenly excited.

On the other side of the gorge, an odd procession filed around the bend in the road, making for the place where the bridge had stood. Maurice lead the parade, dressed in another — or maybe the same — checkered shirt and pair of baggy pants. Behind him were middle-aged men with their sleeves rolled to their elbows — and older but evidently vigorous grandfathers with their sleeves rolled up too. Only a few teenage boys were included, for most young men were off fighting the war. But there were many strong young girls and determined matrons in their long scrub dresses, hair tied back from their faces. They carried hoes, rakes, shovels, picks. The men pushed creaking wooden wheelbarrows or carried precious tools.

“How many?” Beame asked when the head of the procession reached the gorge and the tail had not yet shown itself.

“We were promised a hundred to start with,” Major Kelly said.

Maurice found a way down the gorge wall, using some of the old bridge's underworks for support. His people followed him, carefully picking their way across the river, stepping from one unsteady mound of rubble to the next. The men with the wheelbarrows lifted these above their heads, and they looked like canoeists fording shallow water.

Beame grinned fiercely. “I believe we might just pull it off!”

“You do?” Kelly asked.

“I don't,” Slade said, giggling.

“For once,” Kelly said, “I have to agree with Lieutenant Slade.”

Two hours later, Lieutenant Beame was down in the ravine with Danny Dew, surveying the wreckage which yesterday's B-17 attack had produced. The two bridge piers were still standing, stone and concrete phallic symbols, but the steel and wooden superstructure and the bridge flooring had collapsed into the gorge. Much of the planking was smashed, charred, or splintered beyond repair, though several large sections like the sides of gigantic packing crates were salvageable. Likewise, some of the steel support beams, cables, angle braces, couplings, and drawing braces had survived and could be used again if Danny Dew were only careful not to crush them when he started through here with his D-7 dozer.

“Over there!” Beame shouted, pointing at a jumble of bridge parts.

“I see it!” Dew shouted. “Ten-foot brace! Looks undamaged!”

They were forced to shout because of the din in the gorge. For one thing, the buckled plating on which they stood was the cap of a heap of refuse which was blocking the middle of the river. The water, diverted into two narrow streams by this barrier, gushed past them in a twin-tailed roar of white spume.

“Is that a coupling?” Beame shouted.

Dew squinted. “Yeah! And a good one!”

Added to the roar of the water were the sounds of fifty French men and women who were doing preliminary salvage that was best completed before the dozer came through. Hammers, wrenches, drills, shovels, and torches sang against the background of the moving river. And, worse, the French jabbered like a cageful of blackbirds.

They were jabbering so loudly that when Beame tried to hear himself think, he failed. They jabbered at the Americans who were giving them directions in a tongue they could not understand, and they jabbered at one another, and many of them jabbered to themselves if no one else was nearby.

“I don't see anything more!” Beame shouted.

“Me either,” Dew said. “I'll get the dozer.” He scrambled down the shifting pile of junk, leaped the narrow divide of shooting water, and came down on both feet on the shore. Very athletic. Beame had always heard that Negroes were good athletes, but Danny Dew was the first proof he had seen. He watched Dew climb the steeply sloped ravine wall and go over the top without effort.

That was when he saw the girl.

She was standing at the crest of the slope, fifty yards from where Dew went over the top. She was watching the workers, the gentle morning sun full on her.

She was the most beautiful girl Beame had ever seen. She looked no older than twenty-one or — two, perhaps only seventeen. Though it was difficult to judge her height from this angle, he thought she must be tall for such a slender girl, maybe five-seven. Her complexion was Mediterranean, dark and smoky. Great masses of black hair cascaded around her face and fell to the sharp points of her widely spaced breasts. All this took Beame's breath away. He was affected by the way she stood: shoulders back, head up, exuding grace, a serene and almost Madonnalike figure.

Though Beame was no womanizer, he knew he had to meet her.

He went down the rubble heap too fast, lost his footing. He tottered and fell into the spume, flailing. He swallowed a mouthful of water, tried to spit it out, swallowed more. He was drowning. He felt himself swept around the rubble. He banged into a steel girder, shoved desperately away, scrambled for the surface, realized that he did not know where the surface was. Then, abruptly, he was in calmer water. He bobbed up, sputtering, shook his head, swam a few strokes to the shore, and crawled out, amazed that he was still alive.

The girl had not gone away. She was up there, watching him now.

Had she been anyone else, he would have run away and hidden until she was gone. But she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Wiping his hands down his sodden trouser legs to press the water out of them, he surreptitiously checked to be sure his fly was closed. It was. He started up the slope.

He did not make it to the top as easily as Danny Dew had done. He slipped and fell twice. His wet clothes took on a patina of mud, and his face was smeared with long brown streaks of topsoil. What did the girl think? She had seen Danny Dew come off the rubble, across the water, and up the hill as if he were walking across a room — and now she saw Beame floundering like the first legged fish that crawled out of a prehistoric sea. He felt like an ass.

But she was smiling. And it was not a cruel smile.

Beame waved and started towards her. The closer he got, the more he saw how beautiful she was. By the time he was standing in front of her, he was numb, speechless in the aura of her radiant beauty. Her hair was really black, not just dark brown. Her complexion was Spanish and flawless, her eyes as large as olives and as black as her hair. Her nose was small, fine-boned, exquisitely arched. Her smile was wide and warm. Her teeth were square and white, her lips two ribbons tied in a sensuous bow.

“Hello,” he said, clearing his throat. “My name's David Beame.”

“Nathalie,” she said.

“What?” He thought she had told him, in French, to get lost. Or worse.

“That's my name,” she said. “Nathalie.”

“You speak English,” he said, relieved that she had not been insulting him. “I'm pleased to meet you, Nathalie.” She was gorgeous.

She was flattered by his ill-concealed admiration. She blushed. Beame was happy he had flattered her. He knew he was blushing too, and he wiped his face with one hand, never realizing his hand was muddy.

“How is it you speak English?” he asked.

“Father taught me.”

“And who is your father?”

“Maurice,” she said.

Could this be true? Could greasy, conniving Maurice Jobert give half the seed to make a girl like this? “I've never seen you before. You weren't at the village dance a couple of weeks ago.”

“I had a summer cold. Papa made me stay in bed until the fever broke.” She cocked her head and looked at him. “You are staring — so intently.”

Startled, Beame wiped a hand across his face to cover another blush.

“You're getting mud all over your nose,” she said, putting one finger to his face, taking it away, showing him the mud.

“Oh,” Beame said, feeling like an ass. He wiped his muddy nose with his muddy hand. Realizing his error, he used his shirttail next. But that was even muddier than his hands. Suddenly, he wished that he had drowned when he fell into the river.

“Are you nervous?” Nathalie asked.

“Me? No. Why should I be nervous?”

“Father says you are all scared of dying. Father says you are the only soldiers he's ever seen who are aware of their own mortality.” She smiled. Just gorgeous. “He likes doing business with you, because you have no illusions.”

“You mean it's good that we're nervous?” Beame asked, surprised.

“Oh, yes. Very good.”

“Well,” Beame said, “I'm very nervous.” He let her see how his hands were shaking. “At times, I'm so terrified I'm not functional. I haven't had a good night's sleep since we landed here.” When she nodded sympathetically, Beame could not let go of the subject. “I have awful nightmares. I can't eat. I pick at my food and get indigestion, and the worst gas… I've been constipated for three weeks. If I could have one good shit, I think—” He realized what he was saying, and he wanted to leap off the edge of the ravine.

She looked down at the workers again, embarrassed for him. She presented Beame with a lovely profile which soothed him and made him feel like less of an ass. Indeed, he felt as if he had been transformed into a spirit by the white heat rolling off her. If she turned and touched him, her hand would go straight through.

After a long silence, he heard himself say, “You're beautiful.”

She looked at him timidly, blushing again. “Thank you.”

Beame's heart rose. She was just what he had thought she was! A flower, an innocent, a girl-woman as precious as anything he had ever wanted. And if he just did not start talking about his constipation again, he might be able to win her.

2

Sergeant Emil Hagendorf had a voice like a 78 rpm phonograph record playing on a turntable forever moving at 60 rpm, and he always sounded morose. “You don't know what it's like,” he said, morosely.

Major Kelly sat down on one of the rec room chairs. “What what's like?”

“Chaos,” Hagendorf said. His pasty face grew paler at the word.

“I live in chaos,” Kelly said.

But the major knew his own ability to cope with the chaotic did not help Hagendorf. Before the war, Emil, the unit's chief surveyor, had developed a comfortable philosophy of life. He believed there was a precise order and pattern to everything in the universe. He thought he could look dispassionately at anything—religion, sex, politics, money — survey it as he would a roadbed, stake it out, and eventually understand it. He had lived by his philosophy, a man of order and routine. He rose at the same hour each morning, neither smoked nor drank, and took a woman only as often as his system demanded one. He planned his future as carefully as he surveyed land, and he was able to cope with whatever came along. Drafted, he went through basic training with high marks, was quickly promoted, seemed at home in the Army. Then, when he was behind the lines with the unit for one week, he became a sloppy, inefficient, falling-down drunkard. And Major Kelly had not been able to rehabilitate him.

“You've got to stop drinking,” Kelly told the chief surveyor when he confronted him in the rec room that morning.

Hagendorf picked up his bottle of wine and went over to the dart board that was nailed to the rec room wall. “See this? It's divided into all these little sections.” He pointed to each of the sections on the board, which took a while. “Throw a dart here, you get five points… or here, you get ten. Or a hundred, here. I once thought life was neat and compartmentalized like that.”

“Life isn't like that,” Kelly said.

“I know, now.” Hagendorf took a long swallow of wine, his whiskered neck moving as he drank, sweat beading on his white face. “My whole philosophy — gone. My sense of direction, fundamental beliefs — destroyed by General Blade. And you.”

“What's that got to do with drinking too much?” Kelly asked.

“You'd drink yourself to death, too, if your philosophy of life was suddenly proven wrong.”

“No. I'd find something else to believe in.”

Hagendorf shuddered. “That's chaos. What do you believe, by the way?”

“That this is all a fairy tale, grand in color but modest in design. You and I are figments of some Aesop's imagination.”

“That's the worst philosophy I've ever heard.” He clutched his wine bottle in both hands. “It's illogical. A good philosophy must be based on logical precepts, on valid proofs. How can you prove we're figments of a cosmic imagination?”

“I don't have time to argue with you, Emil,” Kelly said, his voice rising on each word, until there was a hysteria in it which matched Hagendorf's hysteria. “The Panzers are coming! We have a whole village to build in just six days!” Red-faced, trembling, he unrolled a tube of onionskin paper and flattened it on the table, used a pair of metal ashtrays to hold down the ends. “I have a job for you, Emil.”

“Job?” Hagendorf looked skeptically at the paper.

Briefly, Kelly explained how they were going to hoax the Germans with the fake town. He tapped the paper. “I've done a preliminary blueprint of the town we'll build. You'll mark off the streets and lots.”

Hagendorf blanched. “You can't ask that of me!” His face was soft, soggy, pale as a fish belly. “Surveying again — I'll get a taste of how it used to be. I'll crack up!”

“I've been fair, Emil. You haven't had to work in weeks. Beame and I have done the bridge surveying, but that's simple stuff. I need you for this.” He pointed at the wine. “And no drinking until you're finished with the job.”

“You're killing me.” Hagendorf came over and looked at the plans.

“We already have the road that comes from the east and crosses the bridge.” Kelly traced this with his finger. “We're going to need two more streets paralleling that road — here and here. Then we need two crossing streets that go north-south. Finally, I want a sort of service road running all around the village, at the edge of the woods.”

“This is going to take a lot of time,” Hagendorf said.

“You have today,” Kelly said.

“Impossible!”

“Hagendorf, we have six days. Only six days! Every minute I waste arguing with you, the Panzers get closer. You understand me?”

“Can't do it without wine,” Hagendorf said, finishing his wine.

“You have to. I don't want this marked out by a drunk. You've become a real wino, Emil. You don't know when to stop.”

“Untrue! I've cut back. I've only had one bottle so far today.”

“Jesus, Emil, it's only an hour since dawn. You call that 'cutting back,' do you?”

“You're going to destroy me,” Hagendorf said. His round shoulders slumped more than usual, and he appeared to age before Kelly's eyes.

“Nonsense,” Kelly said. “Now, move! Let's get down to the machinery shed. Your men are waiting. We've dusted off your theodolite and other tools. Hurry, Hagendorf! Six days will be gone before you know it.”

“My theodolite,” Hagendorf said, dreamily. His mind spiraled back to more pleasant times when the world could be measured and known. Abruptly, he dropped his wine bottle and started to cry. “You really are destroying me, sir. I warn you! I warn you!”

Fifteen minutes later, as Kelly stood by the shed watching Hagendorf stagger away with his assistants, Private Vito Angelli — the Angel from Los Angeles as Pullit had begun to call him — came along with his French work crew. They all jabbered at once, laughed, and gesticulated furiously, as if they were on stage and required to exaggerate each gesture to communicate with the people in the back rows. Angelli stopped them at an enormous bomb crater north of the machinery shed.

Kelly hurried over and clapped Angelli on the shoulder. “Going okay?”

Angelli was thin, dark, all stringy muscles, intense eyes, and white teeth. “We've filled in all the other craters below the bridge road.”

Angelli could not speak French, and none of the workers could speak Italian or English. Therefore, Angelli used a lot of gestures and smiled a great deal, and said, “Eh? Eh?” When dealing with his relatives who had come to the States from the old country and who often spoke a different dialect of Italian than he did, he had learned the best way to be understood was to punctuate everything with numerous ehs. It never failed. No matter what you said, if you framed it with a couple of ehs you could topple any language barrier.

Angelli turned to the workers, clapped his hands. “One more hole to fill, eh? Eh? Quick job, eh? But big job gets done pòco a pòco, eh?”

The Frenchmen laughed and went to work. They all had shovels, and they energetically attacked the ring of blast-thrown soil, scooping it back into the crater from which it had come.

“Faster!” Kelly said. They seemed to be working in slow motion. “Angelli, tell them to shovel faster. We've got only six days!”

“But they are shoveling fast,” Angelli said.

“Faster, faster, faster!” Kelly demanded. When Angelli gave the order and the Frenchmen complied, the major said, “You've got excellent rapport here. If all the men could work with the French as well as you do, we might come close to building the town before the Germans get here.”

Angelli grinned. “Then you think we'll do it, sir?”

“Never,” Kelly said. “I said we'd come closer to doing it if we had your rapport with these people.”

“Do not be so negative, bon ami.” Maurice appeared out of nowhere at Kelly's elbow. “The work goes well. You will have a new bridge tonight, with my people helping. Your chief surveyor has begun to mark off the streets and lots. My wonderful people have cleared away random brush and have filled in the bomb craters. We've come so far in so few hours!”

Kelly looked at the bundle of papers Maurice was carrying. Ignoring The Frog's optimism, he said, “Those the forms?”

“Ready for signatures,” Maurice said, handing them over.

Reluctantly, Kelly took them. “The men won't like this.”

“Oh, but they will!” Maurice said. “They are sure to see what a real bargain I am giving them. Americans love bargains.”

Private Angelli looked warily at the forms. “Why won't we like those? What are they?”

“Credit contracts,” Maurice said. “Nothing sinister.”

Angelli was perplexed. “Credit contracts?” he asked, squinting at the bundle.

“One for each man in the unit,” Maurice said. He thumped the middle of his checkered shirt. “Made out by hand, written by me or members of my immediate family, very official.”

“Credit contracts?” Angelli repeated.

“Let me explain,” Kelly said, wearily.

3

Sergeant Coombs was operating the small cargo shuttler when Major Kelly found him. He had been trundling the more compact construction materials from the storage dump by the runway to the men at the bridge, and though it was now well past noon, he had not taken a single rest break. He was sweaty and dirty. His back ached, his arms ached, and his knuckles were skinned and sore. He had stoved his left thumb but had kept on working while it swelled to half again its normal size. He was in no mood for Major Kelly. Only his great respect for the rules and regulations regarding the responsibilities of rank kept him from being completely uncooperative.

“I have something for you to sign,” Major Kelly said.

Major Kelly had spent all morning running around the camp getting the men to sign various papers which he carried in a folder under his arm. He was not dirty or sweaty. Coombs knew that Kelly didn't have an aching back or aching arms or a stoved thumb. He regarded the proffered document scornfully and said, “What is it?”

“Nothing much,” Kelly said, evasively. “Just sign it, and I'll stop bothering you.”

Sergeant Coombs looked at the pile of materiel he had yet to transfer to the bridge, scratched the back of his sunburned neck, and was tempted to sign the damn thing, whatever it was, just to be rid of Kelly. He was still on the shuttler seat, with crates stacked on the forked platform before him. He could sign and be on his way again. But something in Kelly's manner, a sort of phony good humor, warned Coombs. “What is it?” he repeated.

“Just sign it. Quick, now. I've got to get every man's signature if I'm going to keep Maurice's help. And I need Maurice's help. Every minute counts in this, Sergeant. So sign.”

“I won't sign anything that I don't know what it is,” Coombs said.

Kelly's smile faded. “Well, look, you know how much help Maurice has been, bringing in all these workers.”

“Frogs,” Coombs said.

“Yes, perhaps they are. But the fact remains that we need them. And in the days ahead, Maurice will be doing even more for us. And you can't expect him to do it all out of the goodness of his heart. Maurice wants to make a profit from it. That should be something every red-blooded American can understand. We Americans believe in the profit system, free enterprise. That's one of the things we're fighting for.”

“What about this paper?” Coombs asked. For such a stumpy man, he was damned difficult to fool.

Major Kelly was distinctly uncomfortable now. He could not stop thinking about the Panzers. While he was standing here with Coombs, how much closer had the Germans come? Too much closer… Kelly looked nervously at the stack of crates beside the shuttler, at the sky, at the ground, everywhere but at Coombs. “Maurice wants to be paid for his help. Naturally, we're the only ones who can pay him. So what Maurice wants from us — he wants two hundred bucks from every man in camp.”

“I don't have it,” Coombs said.

Kelly shook his head in agreement and frustration. “Who does? But Maurice understands how things are with us. We're paid in scrip when the DC-3 comes in from

Blade's HQ, but most of us lose it to Hoskins or Malzberg in a day or two, at best. Maurice understands, and he does not want to be at all unreasonable. He's willing to extend us credit, provided we sign these forms he's given me. You pay fifty dollars now, the other one-fifty over the next six months.”

Coombs was suspicious. “Six months?”

“That's right.”

“We'll be gone in six months.”

Kelly shrugged. “Maybe he's banking on the war not being over that fast.”

Coombs would not swallow that. “There's something you're not telling me.”

Kelly sighed, thinking about the Panzers, about the minutes melting away. “You're right. You see, this paper you're to sign… well, it's an admission of collaboration with the Nazis.”

Coombs looked at Kelly as if the major were a stone that had come suddenly to life before his eyes. He could not believe what he was hearing. “Admit I collaborated with the krauts, even if I didn't?”

Kelly smiled nervously. “Maurice has written a different confession for each of us.” He looked down at the paper in his hand and quickly scanned the neat paragraphs of precise, handwritten English. “Yours states that you sabotaged the equipment which you were assigned to maintain, that you interfered with the building of the bridge.”

Coombs did not know what to say.

“You can see where Maurice might feel he has to use such an extreme credit contract,” Kelly said. He liked to call the paper a credit contract rather than a forged confession or something equally distasteful. “This kind of document would guarantee his money even if we were transferred out of here before we paid him in full. None of us would want his contract turned over to Allied military officials.”

“What did you confess?” Coombs asked.

“Transmitting information to the Nazis via our wireless set.” He forced the rumpled paper into Coombs's hand, gave him a stubby yellow pencil. “Just sign the damn thing, Sergeant. Time is our greatest enemy.”

“I won't sign.” Coombs's jaw was set, and his pulse pounded visibly at neck and temples.

“Sergeant, you must. I've got more than forty men to sign up yet. If one refuses, others will too. And the deal with Maurice will fall through… You'll die with the rest of us!” He was trying to scare the sergeant, and he scared himself in the process.

“I'm not afraid to fight,” Coombs said.

Exasperated, Kelly watched Coombs try to hand back the confession. He refused to touch it. He swatted Coombs's hand as if trying to push back more than the paper — as if he were fighting off the inevitable death rushing down on them. Couldn't Coombs see that one man's pride or stubbornness could kill them all? After a full minute of this thrust and counterthrust, with the credit contract getting pretty badly mutilated, Kelly leaned toward Coombs. “What the fuck rank are you?” he screamed.

Coombs looked at him as if he were witless. “Sergeant.”

“And I am a major, right?” Kelly drew himself up to his full height. “Sergeant, as your commanding officer, I order you to sign that paper and give me fifty dollars. Now.”

Coombs's face drained of color as he realized his dilemma. He was in a spot where he had to go against one of the two moral principles that made him tick. He either had to refuse an order from a legitimate superior — or cooperate with this coward and become, in effect, a coward himself. For a long moment he sat on the shuttler, swaying back and forth as if buffeted by two gale force winds. Then, leaning quickly forward and holding the confession against one of the packing crates on the forked cargo platform, he signed his name. His need for order, for a sense of rank, for rules and regulations, had won out over his loathing of cowardice.

“Fifty dollars,” Kelly said, taking the signed document.

As the sergeant handed over the money, something else occurred to him. “This isn't all Maurice is getting, is it?”

Kelly was uncomfortable again. He was anxious to be off, signing up the other men. Precious minutes were being wasted! Besides, he was a bit ashamed of this business. Sometimes, he was shocked at the immoral things life forced him to do… “Maurice gets a few other little things,” Kelly admitted. “Like your cargo shuttler… the camp generator when we leave… ”

Coombs was distressed. “What else?”

“Only one other thing,” Kelly assured him. “A toll-booth.”

Coombs could not make any sense out of that. He scratched the back of his neck, spat in the dust, taking as long as possible to respond. He knew Kelly and some of the others thought he was stupid. He was not really stupid at all, just taciturn and grumpy. For the life of him, though, he could not see what the major was talking about, and he was forced to look stupid. “Tollbooth?”

“After the Panzers pass through and we're safe,” Kelly said, “we're going to build a tollbooth on the other side of the gorge, in the road just before the bridge. It'll have a pole across the road and everything. Maurice's people will work there, bring extra money into Eisenhower.”

“Oh.” Compared to an operator like The Frog, Coombs supposed he was stupid.

“As soon as you pay Maurice the rest, he gives back your contract. Thanks for your cooperation, Sergeant.” Kelly turned and ran back toward the HQ building where several men were hurriedly reviewing the construction plans in the shade by the rec room door.

Lieutenant Beame was one of them. However, he was standing pretty much by himself, thirty feet from the knot of men.

Major Kelly went straight to him, because he liked to get each man alone when he was selling the idea of the credit contract. He knew it would be dangerous to let them group together when he delivered his spiel. It had to be a one-to-one relationship in which he could employ what little talent for discipline he possessed. He had to be able to concentrate on one man in order to overwhelm his victim with his practiced patter and with dire predictions of what the Panzers would do to them if they did not get this damned village built in just six days.

“Got something for you to sign,” Kelly said, giving Beame the paper.

“Oh?”

All the while that Kelly explained the fine points of the credit contract to Lieutenant Beame, the lieutenant stared over Kelly's shoulder at nothing in particular, a silly smirk on his face. When Kelly asked him to sign the paper, Beame took the pencil and scrawled his name in sloppily looping letters. He was still grinning drunkenly. He gave Kelly the scrip without quibbling, and his expression remained eerily mongoloid.

“What's the matter?” Kelly asked. “What are you grinning about?”

Beame hesitated. Then: “I met a girl.”

“I don't understand,” Kelly said.

“The most beautiful girl I've ever seen.” Beame almost drooled.

“Who?”

Beame told him. “I asked her to come back this evening for a romantic dinner. Maybe you can meet her then.”

“In the mess hall?” Kelly asked.

The mess hall, which was the rec room, was anything but romantic. And the food Sergeant Tuttle served them was hardly the stuff of a lover's supper. Sergeant Tuttle was camp cook. He had not been a cook in civilian life, but a sanitation worker in Philadelphia.

“Not the mess hall,” Beanie said. “I've bought some groceries from Tuttle, and I'm going to cook the supper myself. We'll eat down under that stand of pines along the riverbank.” Beame looked at Kelly, but Kelly was strangely unable to catch the lieutenant's eyes. It was as if Beame were looking through him at some vaguely perceived paradise.

“Are you in love?” Kelly asked.

Beame's grin became sloppy. “I guess maybe I am.”

“That's foolish,” Kelly warned him. “Love is a form of hope, and hope is a terminal disease. You get in love with someone, you become careless. Your mind wanders. Next thing you know, you collect a two-hundred-pound bomb down the back of your shirt. Love is deadly. Just fuck her and forget the love part.”

“Whatever you say,” Beame said. Unmistakably, though, the lieutenant had not heard a word the major said.

Kelly was about to press the point, in hopes of saving Beame before it was too late, when Lieutenant Slade arrived with his form. “You get one of these?” he asked Kelly, shoving a yellow paper into the major's hand. He gave one to Beame, who did not even glance at it.

“What's this?” Kelly asked, giving Slade a suspicious look.

“It's a questionnaire,” Slade said. He had an armful of them.

Kelly read the headline across the top: who is the traitor?

“We all know there's a traitor in camp,” Slade said. “Someone keeps telling the German air force when the bridge is rebuilt so they can bomb it again right away. Last night, when I called General Blade and after you gave him our supplies order, I asked him to have this questionnaire printed and delivered when the DC-3 came in. He thought it was a good idea.” Slade pointed to the list of questions and blanks where the answers were to go. “Just fill these in. You don't have to sign your name or anything. There's a response box nailed to the wall outside the rec room, and it's unmonitored. When you have this ready, deposit it in the box.”

Kelly looked at the paper. The first question was: “Right off, are you the traitor, and would you like to confess if we guarantee you a light punishment?”

“See how it works?” Slade asked. “Even if we don't obtain a confession, I will be able to analyze these forms and find out who our informer is.” He smiled, immensely pleased with himself. “Statistical analysis. That's all it is, Major.”

Kelly opened his mouth to tell Slade that he was an idiot, then thought better of it. He read the second question from the sheet: “Have you noticed anyone in the unit behaving strangely lately?”

“That one ought to get a response,” Slade said, nodding his head emphatically. He belonged in an asylum.

With this credit contract business, Major Kelly could not afford to make any new enemies or antagonize old ones. Therefore, he told Slade that the questionnaire was a marvelous idea. “Here, now you take one of my forms,” he said, giving The Snot his credit contract.

Slade looked at it with as much suspicion as Kelly had shown while studying the questionnaire. “What is this?”

“A credit contract,” Kelly said. Using the stature of his rank, the weight of his command, the force of his personality, and the mesmeric quality of his gaze, he tried to make Lieutenant Slade sign the paper and pass over the fifty dollars in scrip.

“I won't sign this paper,” Slade said, when Kelly was done. “And I am not going to give you or Maurice fifty dollars in scrip.” He did not seem to be particularly angry. Indeed, he was grinning at the major. “This is craziness, you know. Opting for this cowardly plan in the first place — then asking your men to hock their reputations to pay for it. This is more than I ever hoped for. You have gone way too far this time.”

“Minute by minute, the eventual arrival of the Panzers becomes more of a reality, a nearer threat,” Major Kelly said. He was beginning the argument which, in his own mind, was the most forceful one in favor of hocking their reputations and anything else on which Maurice wanted to take a lien. “If we tried to fight off a force as large as this Germany convoy—”

“Are you ordering me to sign this?” Slade interrupted, rattling the credit contract in Kelly's face.

The major considered it for a moment. He had successfully pulled that stunt with Coombs. However, though they were much alike on the surface, Coombs and Slade were utterly different underneath. What worked on one might only bring a stiffer resistance from the other. “I can't order you to do anything like that,” Kelly said.

“Damn right,” Slade said. He dropped his credit contract, turned away from them, and hurried over to the men by the rec room door.

“You're in for trouble now,” Beame said.

Kelly watched as Slade conferred with the men standing in the shadows. He was gesturing with one hand, clutching his questionnaires against his chest with the other. He kept pointing at Kelly.

“Sowing dissension,” Beame said.

Most of the men laughed at Slade and walked away from him. But a few, a sizable minority, remained and listened. They might have thought that Slade was an ass, but they nonetheless shared his philosophy. The seed of rebellion was dormant in them, but susceptible to water and gentle cultivation.

“He's telling them not to sign your paper,” Beame said.

“They have to sign.”

“I thought you couldn't make it an order?”

“I can't,” Kelly admitted. “But if too many of them refuse and we can't get up the money that Maurice wants, the whole deal will fall through. The people from Eisenhower won't help us. We won't be able to build the town by ourselves. We won't be able to hide from the Germans. We'll all die.”

In the next hour, fifteen men refused to sign credit contracts.

4

In the flickering campfire light under the copse of pines by the river, Nathalie was even more beautiful than she had been the first time Beame saw her. Her black hair, like that of an Egyptian princess, blended with the night. Her face was a mixture of sensuous shadows and warm brown tones where the firelight caught it. Images of flame flashed in her eyes. She smiled enigmatically as a sphinx as they sat side-by-side on the ground and watched their dinner cook.

She was near enough to touch, but he did not touch her. Sitting with her legs drawn up beneath her, leaning against the trunk of a pine, wearing a simple sleeveless white dress that was cinched at the waist by a red ribbon, she looked too fragile to survive the lightest embrace.

Beame leaned forward and looked into the pan suspended above the fire. “Done,” he said. “I hope it's good.” He put a thick slice of dark bread in the center of each mess tin, ladled the main course over the bread. Steam rose from it.

“What is this called?” Nathalie asked.

He handed her a mess tin. “Shit on a shingle,” he said, without thinking.

“Pardonnez-moi?”

“I mean… that's what it's called in the mess hall,” Beame said. “Uh… out here it's creamed dried beef.”

“Ah,” she said, cutting into the soggy bread with her fork. She tasted one morsel. “Mmmmm.”

“You like it?”

“It is very good.”

He looked at his own serving, tasted it, found it was good. “That's funny. I must have had this a thousand times, and I always hated it.”

After they were finished, they had red wine, which was her contribution to the evening.

“I've never had wine from a tin cup,” Beame said.

“It would taste the same from crystal.”

“I guess it would.” He wanted to kiss her, but he knew that was improper this early in their friendship. Besides, if he kissed her he would probably faint and miss the rest of what promised to be a fine evening.

They watched the fire slowly dying, and they sipped wine. As the fire darkened, Beame's head lightened. He was able to forget the bridge, the Nazis, everything. In the weeks the unit had been here, this was the only time he had felt at ease. “More wine?” he asked, when he came to the bottom of his cup.

She swallowed the last of hers. “Yes, please.”

When they settled back again, cups replenished, he was conscious of the silence, of his inability to engage her in trivial conversation. “You may have noticed my—”

“Mauvaise honte?” Her voice was husky and pleasant.

“What's that?”

“Bashfulness,” she said. “But I like it.”

“You do?”

She nodded, looked away from him. She sipped her wine; it glistened like a candy glaze on her lips.

A few minutes later, he said, “Say something in French. Just anything. I like the sound of it.”

She thought a moment, one long finger held to the corner of her mouth as if she were hushing him. “Je ne connais pas la dame avec qui vous avez parlé.”

The words flowed over Beame, mellowing him. “What does that mean?”

“It means — I do not know the lady with whom you spoke,” she said.

French was a fantastic language, Beame thought. That was such an ordinary sentence in English but so poetic in her tongue.

“Well?” she asked.

Eyes closed, lolling against a tree, Beame said, “What?”

“Won't you tell me who the woman was?”

Beame opened his eyes. “What woman?”

She met his eyes forthrightly. “This afternoon, just after you invited me to dinner, a woman came up from that bunker and called to you. We said our goodbyes, and you went to talk with her.”

“Oh, that was Lily Kain.” He explained how Lily happened to be in the unit.

“She's lovely,” Nathalie said.

“She is?”

“Don't tell me you have not noticed. I suppose she has many suitors.”

“Lily?” Beame asked. “Oh, no. She and Major Kelly have a thing going.”

“I see,” she said, brightening somewhat. She drained her cup and handed it to him. “May I have more wine?”

When he filled her cup and returned it, their fingers touched. The contact was more electric than he would have expected. Sitting beside her again, watching the fire, he realized he had forgotten how beautiful she was. Now he was once more slightly breathless.

She did not sit back against the tree, but knelt, using her calves for a chair. She held the wine in both hands and was very still. In time, she said, “The frogs are singing.”

“I always thought they just croaked,” Beame said. But when he listened, the frogs did seem to be singing. “You're right.” In the faint-orange ember glow, he suddenly saw her nipples against the tight bodice of her dress… He looked quickly away, ashamed of himself for staring even as long as he had.

She sipped her wine. He sensed that she was staring at him, but he could not look up. He was a mess of confused emotions inside; his previous serenity had strangely vanished. “Say something else in French, will you?” he asked.

She looked around at the trees, at the half-seen needled branches overhead. She stared at the fire and listened solemnly to the singing frogs. “Je pense que cela doit être la plus belle place du monde.”

“That's lovely. What does it mean?”

She smiled. “I believe that this must be the most beautiful place in the world.” She saw Beame's perplexity. “Don't you think it is?”

“It's nice,” he said, unconvinced.

“But you can't think of it without thinking of the war,” she said.

“Yeah. I guess, otherwise, I might agree.” His eyes traveled to her breasts, then rose guiltily again. He realized, suddenly, that she had seen him look at her so covetously. Their eyes met, they both blushed, and they looked away from each other.

“Tell me about America,” Nathalie said, a while later.

“Hasn't your father told you about it?” Beame asked, his voice thick and barely recognizable.

Before Nathalie could reply, her father replied for her. “I most certainly have told her about America,” he said, stalking like a brontosaurus out of the trees and into the small clearing. He threw an exaggerated shadow in the campfire light. “And I have also told her to avoid all soldiers no matter if they are German, American, or French.”

Nathalie came quickly to her feet. “Father, you must not think—”

“I will think what I wish,” Maurice said, scowling at them.

He no longer looked like a fat, greasy old man. The strength born of years of hard labor was evident in the powerful shoulders and in the hard lines of his face. He looked capable of tearing Beame into tiny, bloody pieces.

“We were only talking,” the lieutenant said, also rising.

“Why did you not ask my permission?”

“To talk?” Beame asked. He glanced at Nathalie. She was staring at the ground, biting her lip. “Look, Mr. Jobert, it was just a nice little dinner—”

Maurice advanced another step, cutting the lieutenant short with one wave of his right hand. The campfire illuminated the lower half of his face but left his eyes and forehead mostly in shadows, giving him a demonic appearance. “Just a nice little dinner? What of the wine?”

Beame looked guiltily at the bottle which rested against a tree trunk. “The wine—”

“I provided the wine, father,” Nathalie said.

“That makes it much worse,” Maurice said. “Alone at night, drinking with a soldier—at your own instigation!”

“He's not like other soldiers,” she said, a bit of fire in her now. “He is a very nice—”

“All soldiers are alike,” Maurice insisted. “American, British, French, German, whatever. They have one thing in mind. One thing only. Now, girl, you come with me. We're returning to the village.”

Beame was helpless. He watched as Maurice led the girl out of the woods, out of sight, out of the lieutenant's life. “I didn't even touch her,” he told the darkness where Maurice had been.

The darkness did not respond.

“I wish I had touched her,” Beame said.

The roof had been taken off the main bunker at the south end of the clearing, and preparations made for erecting one of the fake buildings over this ready-made basement. As a result, the men who had been sleeping there were dispossessed. And for the first time since the unit had been dropped at the bridge, the tents had been broken out and set up. They were lined in a haphazard way, the rows wandering, intersecting randomly — more the work of a troop of inept first-year boy scouts than that of a trained Army group.

Major Kelly walked briskly along one of the tent aisles, followed by twenty men. He had personally chosen each of his escorts, and he had made certain that they all had four things in common: each was big and muscular; each was mean; each was rowdy; and each one had signed his credit contract.

They stopped before a tent which looked like all the others that stretched away in the darkness, and Kelly used a flashlight to consult the chart he had prepared before sundown. “This is Armento's tent,” he told the men with him. Armento had been one of the nineteen bastards who had not signed their credit contracts. Smiling grimly, Kelly leaned down, pulled back the flap, and shouted, “Up and out of there, Private Armento!”

Armento had worked hard all day on the preparations for the construction of the village, and he was sleeping sound as a stone when Kelly called him. Shocked by this intrusion into his deserved rest, he nearly knocked the tent down when he scrambled out of it. “What? What? What?” he asked Kelly and the men behind Kelly. He rubbed his eyes. “What?”

“Sorry,” Kelly said. “Emergency. Got to requisition your tent.”

And he was sorry to have to use pressure tactics on Armento and the other holdouts who had not signed their confessions. He felt like a monster, an insensitive creep, another General Blade. But he had no choice. The Panzers were coming. Death was coming. There was nothing else to do.

Five of the men behind the major, all bigger than Armento, knocked down the tent and rolled it up. Before Armento could ask any questions, Kelly led his husky escorts down the aisle to the next victim.

By now, everyone was out of his tent. Most of the men were grinning, because they knew what was up. Only nineteen of them were bewildered…

Kelly was directing the tearing down of the eighth tent, embarrassedly parrying all questions, when Lieutenant Slade arrived. Slade was furious. “You are harassing the men who stood with me, the men who wouldn't sign those insane credit contacts.” Slade shook a finger in Kelly's face.

“Not at all,” Kelly said, feeling like a heel. “The hospital staff says we're short of bandage materials. If we suffer another Stuka attack, the shortage could be a matter of life and death. So we're confiscating a few of the tents to cut them into strip bandages.” He felt ill, and he hated himself.

“Canvas bandages? Ridiculous! If you're not harassing these men who stood with me,” Slade said, “why are you demolishing only their tents?”

“Are we?” Kelly feigned surprise. He consulted his chart. “Why, we just picked the names out of a hat.” Into which, of course, they had only put the names of the men who had not signed their contracts.

Lieutenant Slade followed them, ranting impotently as the tents came down. As they were folding up the eighteenth square of canvas, he planted himself in front of Kelly. “You aren't going to rip down my tent. You won't bully me into signing away my good name!”

“I'm not bullying anyone,” Kelly said, wishing it were true. “Besides, your name wasn't drawn from the hat. We aren't confiscating your tent. You will be snug and warm and dry tonight.” Kelly looked at the sky, pointed at the thick gray thunderhead clouds rushing westward. “Sure does look like rain before morning.” He was conscious of all the other men looking skyward with him. “These other fellows whose names were drawn at random from a hat will have to put up with a soaking, I'm afraid. But we couldn't make it any fairer… ” Any unfairer. Kelly sighed. “We have to remember there's a war going on, and that some of us must make sacrifices. At least we don't have to put everyone out in the rain, eh? You needn't worry, Lieutenant.”

Slade saw the full implications of what the major had said. He grimaced. “Very cunning, sir. But you are not going to divide and conquer us. We aren't going to put our lives and futures in the hands of a man like Maurice, no matter what you do to us.”

“I admire your strong character,” Kelly said.

Ten minutes later, the eighteen tents had been stacked in a corner of the hospital bunker. They made quite a mound.

Lily Kain put her arm around Kelly's waist and detained him at the bunker door as he was leaving. “You really think it will work?”

“Work?” Kelly asked. “Never. Oh, this and a few other things I have planned might get them to sign their credit contracts. But that won't mean very much in the end. We're all going to die. We just have to go through this charade now to keep the fairy tale moving. You know?”

“Don't start with that fairy tale shit,” Lily said.

“Can't help it. Puts things in perspective. Keeps me alive.”

A can opener of lightning took the lid off the night, and thunder rumbled like an escaping vacuum. Rain bounced on the steps, spattered on their faces, ran into the hospital bunker behind them.

Kelly smiled, happy that the men were now almost certain to sign their contracts. Then he frowned, depressed by the realization that he had been forced into becoming a somewhat ruthless manipulator of people.

Well… anything to hang on.

5 / JULY 19

Shortly after dawn, two men came to see Major Kelly in his quarters. They were both wet, shivering, pale, water-wrinkled, and defeated even though the rain had stopped falling half an hour ago. Kelly was slipping into clean, dry fatigues when they rapped on his blanket wall. “Help you fellows?” he asked, peering around a woolen corner. He smiled warmly.

Two minutes later, only seventeen men had refused to sign the credit contracts.

It's working! Kelly thought, when they had gone. But then he remembered that the Panzers would arrive in little more than four and a half days. Right now, he should be engaged in the serious planning which was essential to the early stages of the construction of the fake village. The bridge was up, the preliminary work done, and now he ought to be plunging into the main project. Instead, be was wasting time and energy trying to trick the holdouts into signing their damned confessions. If he was achieving his lesser goal, he was also losing the chance to attain the greater one. He might eventually get every man to sign his contract — but by then he would have wasted so much time that they could never build the village before the Germans arrived…

Nevertheless, he was the first in line for breakfast at the mess hall, because he wanted to have a front row seat for the morning's carefully planned drama. “Looks delicious,” Kelly told Sergeant Tuttle when the cook ladled hot cereal into his mess tin.

Tuttle leaned across the steaming kettle. “I don't like doing this,” he whispered.

“We need Maurice's help,” Kelly whispered back at him. “Without it, we all die. These bastards have to be made to sign.”

“I know,” Tuttle said, looking back at the line of impatient men.

“Two more came across. Kasabian and Pike. You can treat them like you normally would,” Kelly said.

“But the others—”

“You know what to do with the others.”

Kelly got the rest of his breakfast and sat down at one of the crude tables. He toyed with his cereal, but his attention was riveted on the men in the breakfast line who had not cooperated in the matter of the credit contracts.

Private Armento was the tenth man in line, first of the troublemakers to reach Tuttle. The cook looked over Armento's shoulder, silently pleading with Kelly. The major turned his thumbs down. Reluctantly, Tuttle “misjudged” the position of Armento's plate and poured a ladle of hot cereal all over his hands.

Quite a lot of commotion followed.

Then, Private Aaron Lange, another holdout who was immediately behind Armento, got the hot-cereal treatment when he held out his tin. When he and Armento finished dancing around the room and blowing on their reddened fingers, they came over to Major Kelly and signed their credit contracts.

“I'm glad you men have finally seen where your best interests lie,” Kelly told them, putting their contracts with the others that had been signed.

All morning, one by one, the holdouts began to see the same light which Armento and Lange had seen. Private Garnett put his signature on his contract after he tripped and fell with his second full mess tin. He had also tripped and fallen with the first. Private John Flounders signed up when, after waiting in the serving line for twenty minutes, he discovered that, curiously, Sergeant Tuttle ran out of hot cereal just before Flounders was to be given his. When the morning's work assignments were read and Private Paul Akers learned he had been assigned to that detail which would shovel out the old latrine ditch and carry the stinking contents into the woods, Akers came around to Kelly's way of thinking. Private Vinney, who was also assigned to the latrine job, lasted for less than five minutes before throwing away his shovel and signing up. And three other men stayed with it until they were accidentally bumped into that vile trench by two workmen who were trying to jostle past them with a heavy length of pine planking…

At 9:15 that same morning, Kelly went over to the hospital bunker and waved the completed forms at Lily Kain. “When they ask for their tents back, you can tell them we found a crate of bandage materials that we'd overlooked. Tell them we won't have to cut up their tents after all.”

“They signed?” she asked.

“All but Slade.”

“But will Maurice be willing to overlook Slade?”

“Sure,” Kelly said. “If I sign a second confession and guarantee to pay Slade's two hundred bucks, why should Maurice be upset?”

“You'd do that?” she asked.

“Do I have any choice?”

“I guess not.” She brightened, smiled, puffed out her wonderful chest. “Well! Now that this is settled, everything should run pretty smoothly.”

“No,” Kelly said. “This is only a reprieve. We have Maurice's help now, but that won't matter. Something worse will come up. We'll be delayed a few more minutes or hours. We can never get this finished in time. We're all doomed.”

In the next two hours, the race against time was begun in earnest. All over camp, projects were launched. Thanks to Angelli's ability to cross all language barriers, the Americans and the French worked fairly well together. Ditch-like foundations for the walls of the fake buildings were marked and cut. A few outhouses, were framed and erected. In the midst of all this, Danny Dew roared around the clearing on his virility symbol, scraping out the streets which Hagendorf had surveyed yesterday.

The demolition of the HQ building was quick and dangerous. Headquarters had to come down, because it was obviously a temporary structure and military in origin. It would not have fooled the Germans for a minute. Therefore, after breakfast, the shortwave radio and the furniture were moved out of HQ, and a crew of workmen dismantled the corrugated metal roof. An hour later, the roof was gone, and the walls began to fall, slamming the earth like a series of angrily closed doors, casting up obfuscating clouds of dust. Armed with hammers and pry-bars, goaded on by Major Kelly—"Faster, faster, faster, for Christ's sake!" — Maurice's laborers swarmed over the thin partitions. They separated metal from wood, tore one plank from the next, stacked the materials where they could later be used in the construction of the village.

The Frenchmen, Kelly thought, were like Eskimos stripping the carcass of a huge old walrus, leaving behind them nothing of value.

It was a pleasant thought, and he was still thinking it when Tooley came running over from the machinery shed waving his arms and shouting. “Major Kelly! Major Kelly, why did you put Hagendorf in the box, sir?”

“Hagendorf?” Kelly knew it was a bad idea to ask for an explanation. He sensed another crisis that would waste precious minutes. But he also knew that if he ran away, Tooley would only run after him. “Hagendorf? In the box?”

“Yes, sir. In the box, sir.”

“What box?”

“In the machinery shed, sir. Don't you remember which box you put him in?”

“I didn't put him in any box,” Kelly said, feeling not unlike a character in a Lewis Carroll fantasy.

Tooley wiped his broad face with one hand, pressed the hand on his shirt, and left a huge wet palm print. “We were clearing out the machinery shed so it can be knocked down. The last thing we came to was this big crate Sergeant Coombs has been meaning to convert into a tool chest for several weeks. The crate was supposed to be empty; but Hagendorf was inside. With maybe twenty bottles of wine. He's naked and drunk, and he insists you put him in the box.” While he talked, Tooley unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. His thick weight-lifter's torso was shiny with sweat and alive with muscles.

“I didn't put Hagendorf in the box,” Kelly said.

“We didn't force him out, because we didn't know why you put him there.”

“I didn't put him there.”

“We didn't want to interfere in whatever you were doing. We thought maybe you put Hagendorf in there to guard the box.”

“Hagendorf isn't guarding the box,” Kelly said, wiping sweat from his own face.

“That's what I said. I said you must have put him in the box for some other reason.” Tooley spat on the dry earth.

“I didn't put Hagendorf anywhere,” Kelly said.

“Hagendorf says you did.”

“Let's go talk to Emil about this,” Kelly said.

Thirty French men and women and a dozen of Kelly's men were clustered in the late morning sunshine outside the open machinery shed door. The noise and stench of perspiration were unendurable. Kelly and Tooley pushed through the crowd into the cool, dark, empty, and comparatively quiet interior which had been gutted for demolition. “Why aren't these people working?” Kelly asked.

Tooley shrugged. “They're Angelli's people, and they aren't worth a damn when he's not egging them on. Of course, he's up at the hospital bunker.”

Kelly stopped just inside the door. “Is Vito hurt?” He hoped not. Angelli was essential. No one could handle the Frenchmen like he could. Besides Maurice, he was their only real contact with the French.

“It's not that,” Tooley said. “He's okay. He's just up there romancing Nurse Pullit.”

“Romancing Nurse Pullit?” Kelly was not certain he had heard right.

“Well sure. The nurse is attractive. Sooner or later, someone was bound to fall for her.”

“Fall for her?” He felt as if he were Tooley's echo.” Not that too!”

The pacifist did not seem to see anything strange in the Angelli-Pullit romance. “There's the box,” he said, pointing across the room. “Hadn't we better get Hagendorf out of it?”

The only thing remaining in the large, main room of the shed, besides Sergeant Coombs and Lieutenant Beame, was an unpainted crate near the far wall. It was eight feet long, four deep, and four wide. It looked like a natural pine coffin. Standing at the foot of it, Coombs might have been a mourner. A disgruntled and angry mourner. “Hagendorf won't get out of this box you put him in,” Coombs said, as Kelly approached.

“He's not in there to guard it,” Tooley told Coombs.

“Then why'd you put him in there?” Coombs asked Kelly.

“I didn't put him in there.” Kelly reached the crate and peered inside.

Hagendorf, the chief surveyor, was lying in the box on a bed of his own clothes, naked as the day he was born. If he had been born. Kelly was not sure about that. Naked, pale, chubby, Hagendorf looked more like something which had been hatched. “You put me in here,” he told Kelly.

Kelly looked at the two dozen wine bottles which surrounded the surveyor. More than half were empty. “You got wine from Maurice, and now you're drunk, Emil.”

“This is my coffin,” Hagendorf said. “You put me in it. You made me get out my theodolite and survey your crazy village. You're the one who gave me a glimpse of the order and purpose I once knew and can never know again.” Hagendorfs voice had grown quavery. Now, he started to cry. “You destroyed me. You put me in this coffin — you and no one else.”

“Get out of the box,” Kelly said. “It's heavy enough without you in it.”

“I'm dead,” Hagendorf said. “I can't get out.”

Kelly sighed, looked at the others. “Let's get him out of there.”

“No you don't!” Hagendorf screamed as they reached in for him. He spread his legs, braced his knees against the side of the box, his feet against the bottom. There was a supporting frame holding the sides of the crate together, and the surveyor gripped this with fingers like chitinous claws. Though Coombs pulled at his legs, Tooley at his left arm, Beame at his right arm, and Kelly at his head, all of them grunting and putting their backs into it, Hagendorf would not be moved. He was the most tenacious corpse they had ever seen.

“Look here, Emil,” Major Kelly said, letting go of Hagendorf's head and wiping the chief surveyor's spittle off his hand, “we don't have time to fool with you. The goddamned Panzers are coming, Emil. We have a whole town to build before they get here. This shed has to come down and fast. This site has to be made ready for another building. These walls have to be torn up so we can reuse the wood and metal. Now, you come out of that fucking box, or I won't be responsible for what happens to you.”

Hagendorf began to blubber again, and when he spoke his voice was, once more, the 78 rpm record played at an eternal 60 rpm. “I'm dead and rotting… What more can happen?” He held on to his coffin, his soft pudgy body now lumpy with muscles that had not been flexed near the surface of Hagendorf s body for as long as ten years.

Kelly picked up an empty wine bottle, and held it like a club. “Emil…”

“You destroyed me,” Hagendorf said, tears running down his face.

“No violence, please,” Tooley said, rubbing his hands together as he watched the scene leading inevitably to spilled blood.

“I'm sorry, Emil,” Kelly said. He swung the bottle at Hagendorf s head.

The surveyor jerked out of the way. The bottle missed him, shattered on the side of the crate.

“Hold him down,” Kelly told the others.

Coombs grabbed the surveyor's legs, while Beame stood across the box from Kelly and pressed down on Hagendorf s chest. Tooley wanted no part of it.

Kelly picked up another bottle and raised it over Hagendorf's head. “We haven't any time to waste, Emil. But I'll try to make this just a tap,” he said when he saw Hagendorf was watching him intently through a veil of tears.

Then he swung the bottle.

Hagendorf let go of the box, grabbed Beame and pulled him in as a shield. The bottle smashed on Beame's golden head, spraying glass and dark wine.

“Ugh,” Beame said, and passed out. Blood trickled out of his scalp.

“You killed Beame,” Tooley said, stunned, hugging himself.

“It's just a tiny cut,” Kelly said. “I didn't swing hard enough to kill him.”

Coombs was disgusted. “Now you've got two of them in there.”

Kelly considered the crate for a while. “Maybe we could get a bunch of men in here and carry the box out with Hagendorf still inside.”

“With Hagendorf and Beame inside,” Tooley said. He had stopped hugging himself, but he looked at Beame out of the corner of his eye as if he remained unconvinced that the lieutenant was alive.

Kelly saw that getting Beame out of the box was going to be every bit as difficult as getting Emil Hagendorf out of the box, because Hagendorf was holding tightly to Beame to shield himself from further violence. Kelly could almost hear the clatter of Panzer tread, louder by the second… “We'll get a dozen men—”

“No,” Coombs said. “If we lift that box and Hagendorf starts jumping up and down or rocking in it, we'll fall with it. Someone'll break a leg. Or worse.”

“Worse — like Beame,” Tooley said.

“Beame's okay,” Kelly said. He ignored the two of them and searched desperately for a solution. He could not leave the crate here and order the shed's demolition, for Hagendorf would probably be killed by collapsing walls. Major Kelly did not want to kill anyone. Petey Danielson had been enough… “I've got it!” he said, suddenly turning from the crate and crossing the musty room to the doorway where the workers stood in the sunlight and squinted curiously at him. He located one of his own men, Private Lyle Park, and spoke to him for a minute or two.

Park was a tall, angular Tennessean, all bone and gristle, with a surprisingly gentle face as fine as water-carved, sun-bleached sandstone. He nodded vigorously as Kelly talked, then turned and disappeared through the press of jabbering villagers.

“What's that cocksucking bastard up to now?” Coombs wanted to know.

“I've always sort of liked Fark,” Tooley said.

“Not Fark. Kelly.”

“Oh, you're right about him!” Hagendorf cried from inside the crate. He had pulled the unconscious lieutenant over him like a coverlet, and he peered up at Coombs from the hollow of Beame's right armpit. “Kelly's a bastard. He—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Sergeant Coombs said.

A few minutes later, Private Park pushed back through the crowd and handed something to Kelly. The major took it, nodded, came back across the room. He walked straight up to the crate, holding a small object in one hand which was pressed flat against his thigh. He looked at Hagendorf who was still peeking at the world through the curious perspective of Beame's armpit. “Last chance.”

“You put me in here!” Hagendorf cried. “You did it!”

Kelly sighed. He picked up a wine bottle, raised it, faked a swing.

Hagendorf rolled the hapless lieutenant into the blow— and unwittingly bared one of his own pale, hammy, naked thighs.

Raising the object Fark had fetched for him and which Tooley and Coombs now saw to be a hypodermic syringe from the hospital, Kelly plunged it into the surveyor's thigh just as he checked the downswing of the empty bottle and spared the unconscious Beame another wound.

Hagendorf screamed, tried to throw off Beame. He scrabbled at the sides of the box, desperate to get up. The needle broke in his flesh. It dangled from his leg, focal point of a spreading circle of blood. In seconds, Hagendorf was fast asleep.

Private Tooley shook his head admiringly. “You'd make a good pacifist. That was very clever. That puts an end to the Hagendorf crisis.”

Kelly looked down at the chalky, chubby man who was half-concealed by Lieutenant Beame. “Maybe not. If Hagendorf has gone over the edge — and if he hates me as much as he seems to, maybe he deliberately did a bad surveying job for the village. Maybe he sabotaged it.”

“Hagendorf wouldn't do that,” Tooley said.

“Hagendorf is crazy,” Kelly said, dropping the ruined syringe. It clinked when it hit the packed-earth floor. “He was driven crazy by his own sanity. Before he came into the Army, he was too sane for his own good. His sanity drove him out of his mind. He saw everything in blacks and whites. When it came time for him to test his philosophy, Hagendorf could either be wholly sane or wholly insane. He was already wholly sane. So he had to become wholly insane.” He looked at Tooley and Coombs and saw that they did not understand a word of it. They were looking at him as if he were wholly insane. “Hagendorf is a crazy wino,” Kelly said, simplifying it for them. “He'll do anything. I'll have to check up on the work he finished yesterday before we go on with too much more of the building.”

On his way out of the shed, Kelly looked at his watch. How much time had he wasted with Hagendorf? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Too much.

Suffering from a severe headache, traces of blood still crusted in his yellow hair, Lieutenant Beame went straight from the hospital bunker to the secluded knoll in the woods where he and Nathalie had secretly planned to have lunch together. He was very circumspect about leaving the camp, and he was sure no one saw him go. He crept cautiously through the woods, took a circuitous route to the knoll through blackberry brambles and treacherous ground vines.

Natalie was waiting for him.

But so was her father.

“You are scum!” Maurice said, advancing on Beame as the lieutenant backed off the knoll and into the trees again. “My daughter will not be brought to ruin by a quick-handed soldier. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Beame said, backing into an oak tree. “But—”

“She will be courted openly, not behind my back. And she will not be made a fool of by some carousing GI. Need I say more?” He loomed over Beame, his big belly perfect for intimidating anyone he could back against a wall.

“Father—” Nathalie began, behind the old man.

“Do not interrupt your father,” Maurice said, without turning back to her. He pushed at Beame with his belly, crushing the lieutenant against the oak.

“Sir,” Beame said, “you don't seem to realize—”

“I do not wish to become violent,” Maurice said. “But I can if I must.” As example, he clenched his fist and thumped Beame once, on top of the head, right on the spot where the bottle had broken. “Understand?”

Through tears, Beame said, “Uh… yeah. Yes, sir.”

Maurice turned away from him. “Come on, my dear,” he told the girl, in French. “And in the future you must respect your father more.”

Major Kelly ate lunch while riding around on the D-7 dozer with Danny Dew. He had to stand up, wedged between the open dash and the roll-bar behind Dew's chair— which was a tight fit and only crucial inches from the churning tread. That made for a messy lunch, but not merely because the dozer shimmied and bounced so much. It was messy chiefly because Kelly was eating a stewed-tomato sandwich.

“Is that a stewed-tomato sandwich?” Danny asked when Kelly climbed on the dozer, holding the oversized sandwich in one hand. Red juice and slimy seeds dripped from Kelly's fingers, ran down his wrist and under his cuff.

“Yeah,” Kelly said. “Because of my hair.” He bit the sandwich, and juice sprayed all over his face.

“A stewed-tomato sandwich is good for your hair?” Dew asked.

“No. It's not good for my hair. But it isn't bad, either. It's neutral. It's meat that's bad for hair growth, you see.”

“Meat?” Dew asked.

“Meat. So I eat vegetable sandwiches.” He took another bite. “Can we get going? I want to see the whole camp. I want to be certain that Hagendorf designed the streets the way I laid them out. I don't trust the crazy drunken bastard.”

Dew started the D-7, taking his eyes from Major Kelly's disgusting repast only with the greatest effort.

They roared away from the riverbank and circled the camp on the service road that edged the forest. Clouds of dust sprayed up behind them; and because the dozer could not proceed with any real speed, the dust often caught up with them, swept past, bringing temporary blindness and laying a soft, golden-brown patina over them, a sheath which darkened Kelly and lightened Danny Dew.

Already, Danny had finished most of the work on the streets. With the dozer's monstrous blade barely scraping the surface, he had smoothed the land which Kelly had charted and which Hagendorf had staked. He had plowed off four inches of topsoil, then rolled back and forth over the streets to compact and harden the well-aerated earth which lay beneath the sod. This made the fake village's streets lower than its houses, conveyed an impression of much use, years of wear.

“Looks pretty good, doesn't it?” Danny Dew shouted above the engine noise.

“Not good enough!” Kelly shouted.

“Looks like we're going to build a village in four days, doesn't it?”

“No,” Kelly said. “Never.”

The major was not the least bit pleased by any of the pleasant things he saw. The streets had been marked off just as he had planned them. All that remained to be done to them was the removal of the ridges of dirt which the plow had built up on both sides of the street, and the smoothing out of the dozer's tread imprints from the hard dry earth.

Already, half the convent's foundation was up: a low stone wall that was to be the base for the enormous building. Last night, there had been no stones here, just the shallow trench in which the wall would be erected. Now, two sides of the convent's square underpinning — each a-hundred-twenty feet long — were up, and the other two sections had been started at trench bottom. Well before the Germans arrived, the convent would stand complete, looming on the north side of the bridge road, in the heart of town. Ideally, the entire convent would be of stone. But they had neither the time nor the cement to put up anything so elaborate. As is was, the mortar between the fieldstones had been poorly portioned out; and the stones had been so hastily laid that, to the professional eye, they looked like the obvious short-term hodgepodge they were. Fortunately, none of the Germans would be architects. The size of the convent, the forbidding design, would convince them that it was as real inside as out. But inside, of course, there would be nothing at all. Except the big machines.

“We sure will fox them!” Danny Dew shouted, grinning, looking a little bit like Stepin Fetchit.

“Not for a minute,” Kelly said.

The dozer rumbled down the bridge road, moving slowly eastward.

Across the road from the convent, a work crew had dug sixteen postholes, filled them with concrete, and anchored one four-by-six pine beam in each pit. These thrust up in a rectangular pattern, rustic columns with nothing to support. They were joined at the ground by flanking beams to help brace them. This afternoon, perpendicular beams would be fitted at the top to support the floor of the second story. The walls would go up tomorrow, both exterior and interior, and the finishing touches could be applied even while the roof was going on. This was to be the only fully built structure in the church-oriented town, the only one with a second level inside as well as out, the only one that might fool a carpenter or architect — for it was, if they had any say in it, where the German commander would make his temporary headquarters for the bridge crossing. It was the rectory.

Danny slowed the D-7 as they passed a group of men who were working diligently on another house, one of the many nuns' residences. All of the buildings — aside from the rectory and the church — would be built with more speed than craft on bare wooden platforms. They would have no insides at all. Walking into one would be like walking from one side of a stage setting to the other. In an exceptionally high wind, some of these hollow, flimsy structures might move around like sailing ships on water. With that disasterous prospect in mind, Major Kelly had ordered that nearly all the platform houses would be one story high, which made the village look odd but only slightly out of character.

“You think Hagendorf did it right?” Danny shouted.

“It looks that way,” Kelly said. “But we haven't heard the last of Emil. He's still a troublemaker.”

As they turned off the bridge road into the service road by the woods, heading back for the southern end of camp, Lieutenant Slade ran in front of them, waving his arms like a railroad signalman. Danny shifted down, braked, the tread clattering and squealing. The dozer stopped five feet in front of The Snot.

“I've seen enough for now!” Kelly shouted. “I'll get off here and see what Slade wants!”

What Slade wanted, Kelly soon discovered, was to complain. “I want to complain,” he said as soon as the dozer was far enough away to make conversation possible.

“Well, well,” Kelly said. He did not enjoy listening to his men's complaints, though that was one of his functions as commanding officer. He must listen, sympathize, advise… It was unfair. He had no one to whom he could deliver his complaints. This was the worst thing about the war: his helplessness. “Well, well,” he repeated, wishing Slade would drop dead.

“Nobody's filled out my traitor questionnaire,” Slade said. More than ever, he looked like a wicked choirboy. “You didn't even answer it. It's the worst thing that's ever happened to me.” He seemed caught between rage and tears. So he just sulked.

Kelly slapped his clothes, brushing off the chalky dust that made him look a bit like Boris Karloff as The Mummy. “That must be an exaggeration. This—”

“Is the worst thing that's ever happened to me,” Slade insisted, his mouth drawn so far down at the corners that his lips seemed in danger of catching under his chin. “It's proof the men don't respect me.”

Major Kelly was surprised by Slade's tone. It was full of human anguish, suffering, and sensitivity which Kelly had thought a pig like Slade would be incapable of. Incredibly, he felt a surge of compassion for the lieutenant. “Nonsense, Slade. The men do respect you.”

“No, they don't.”

“Sure, they do.”

“No,” Slade said. “Behind my back, they call me The Snot.” Shining tears hung at the corners of Slade's eyes.

“Nobody calls you that.”

“Sure, they do.”

“Well, maybe they do,” Kelly said. “But they mean it affectionately.”

“You're lying,” Slade said, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “If they cared about me, respected me, they would have returned their questionnaires.”

Kelly suddenly realized that he knew nothing about the lieutenant. Though they had been together in Britain before D-Day, had surely exchanged past histories, the major could remember none of that. All he could remember about Slade was what he had discovered after they were dropped behind German lines… Furthermore, this eerie gap in his memory was not precipitated by his loathing of the man. Indeed, he realized he could not remember anything basic and personal about any of his men. Why? Why should he have forgotten all that was good to know about them — while retaining only the knowledge of their foibles and insanities? But he knew… It was not good to be intimate with war buddies. You could not afford to make friends. Making friends, you lost them… You had to know their foibles and neuroses, because you had to know how to protect yourself from them. Judging from the behavior of the men since the unit had been parachuted in here weeks ago, they too had come to understand the joys and benefits of friendlessness. They had escaped from the responsibilities of friendship, escaped into drinking, gambling, insanity.

“What will I tell General Blade?” Slade asked, snuffling. “I'll be humiliated!”

The trickle of compassion Kelly had begun to feel when Slade cried now swelled into a torrent. He put his arm around Slade's shoulder and began to walk with him along the service road, in the shadows of the pines and sycamores. “I'll talk to the men, Richard.” It was wise to have no friends to lose to the war, but Kelly now saw there was a point where isolation and distrust were more damaging than valuable. “I'll make sure they fill out their forms.”

“Would you?” Slade asked, nearly quivering with pleasure.

Kelly smiled. “Richard, we have got to be more open with each other. Any time you have a complaint, you come right to me with it. Don't let it fester.” They went past a group of workers who were taking a twenty-minute lunch break, and Kelly gave them the thumbs-up sign. They looked at him as if he were an institutional case, but he failed to notice. He was brimming with camaraderie and compassion. “It's time we tried to know each other, Richard.”

“I do have another complaint,” Slade admitted. “You want to hear it?”

“Of course! Don't let it fester!”

They left the service road and walked down the street that was parallel to the bridge road. Workmen were erecting several skinny outhouses and laying the platforms for nunneries and for a deaf-mute school.

“Well,” Slade said, “I think we should stop trying to hide from the Germans.”

“Oh?”

“We should stand and fight,” Slade said. He was encouraged by Kelly's attitude, by the major's arm around his shoulders. “It's cowardly to hide.” Maybe Kelly had come to his senses and would act like an adult. Maybe there was no longer any need to kill him and assume command. “We should fortify the clearing and blast the hell out of those krauts. We have handguns. Maurice could supply a mortar or two.”

“A mortar or two.”

“I'm aware we'd all be killed,” Slade said. “But think of the history we'll make! They'll know all about us back in the States! We'll be heroes!”

Kelly stopped walking and dropped his arm from Slade's shoulder.

Slade stopped a couple of paces ahead of the major. “Right, sir? Isn't it sick and cowardly to hide? Shouldn't we fight like men? Don't you agree?”

Kelly sucked in a deep breath. “You're an asshole, Slade,” he shouted, his voice growing louder by the word. “You're an idotic, simpleminded emotional and mental wreck!” He could not imagine how he could have forgotten the Slade who had shot that German soldier in the back of the head, or the Slade who thought war was glorious, or the Slade who read the Army field manual for relaxation. “You're insane, Slade! You're a monomaniac, a fiend, a myth-enthralled child, a monster!”

“I thought you wanted to be friendly,” Slade said, his face ashen.

“Fuck friendliness!” Kelly roared.

“You were going to be warm and understanding.”

“Fuck warmth and understanding!” the major screamed, spittle flecking his chin. He stomped his foot as if he had just squashed those virtues under his heel. “I want to be cold, hostile, isolated! I don't want to hear your fucking complaints. You're a creep, Slade. Everybody loathes you!”

“I'll get you for this,” Slade said. “So help me—”

“You're an imbecile, Slade!” Kelly screamed, red in the face now.

Slade turned and ran, arms out in front of him like a comic-book character fleeing a grisly, risen corpse. The workmen stopped working to watch him go.

“And another thing!” Kelly shouted, doubled over as if suffering cramps. “No more messing around with that questionnaire! We don't have time for that shit! We have four days! Four days, and we need every minute of them for serious business!”

Slade scrambled over a slight rise, then down the river-bank, out of sight. He was probably just going to sulk in a patch of cat-o'-nine-tails. Dreamer that he was, Kelly hoped Slade intended to drown himself.

Drained, Kelly turned abruptly and walked into Angelli and Pullit. Without a word of apology, emptied of words now, the major pushed past them. A dozen long strides later he stopped, turned, suddenly conscious of the anomaly he had just seen. Pullit and Angelli were walking hand-in-hand. Kelly remembered what Tooley had said: Angelli was romancing the nurse; he had fallen for her…

“Private Angelli!” he called. When the loving couple turned, Kelly said, “Come here, Private.” He hoped he sounded stern.

Vito and the nurse exchanged a few brief words. He kissed the nurse on the cheek, and Pullit hurried off toward the hospital bunker.

“Yes, sir?” Angelli asked, walking back to the major. He was not wearing a shirt. His slim, brown torso was sweat-slicked — and decorated with what seemed to be a fresh tattoo: two letters, N and P. They were done in blue and red, and they were so fresh that the swelling had not yet gone down.

Kelly looked sideways at Angelli, as if he were ready to turn and run if the private made a wrong move. “Uh… what's this about you and Nurse Pullit being… well… having a — romance?”

“Isn't she perfect?” Angelli asked, grinning winningly.

Kelly winced. “She's not a she. She's a he. Angelli, what is going on here?”

“I think I love her,” Angelli said, as if he had not heard Kelly's news. Or did not believe it.

“Pullit is a him,” Kelly insisted. “Look, this is — sick. Vito, I know that some of the men have gotten strange since the pressure was put on, but this is too much. It's too far. You have to get over this.”

“I'll never get over her,” Angelli said, dreamily, smiling just the way that Beame had smiled when talking about Nathalie Jobert.

“Vito, we have four days or so to build this town. That means we need full and enthusiastic cooperation between us and the French. There are only three people who can generate that cooperation: Maurice, me, and you. I need you to keep the largest French work crew on the ball. And this morning, you weren't with them. You were romancing — Pullit.”

Angelli was hard-muscled, scrappy, not at all in line with Major Kelly's picture of a pervert. Yet he sighed and said, “I wish I could speak French. It's the language of love”

Major Kelly backed up a few feet. “Look here, Vito. I'm ordering you to stay away from Nurse Pullit. You will be severely punished, maybe even court-martialed, if you go near the nurse.”

Angelli's face fell. He touched the swollen letters on his chest. “But I might lose her if I'm not persistent.”

“Good,” Kelly said. “Now, get back to your work crew. For Christ's sake, man, the Germans moved ten miles closer while you two were strolling around, holding hands, mooning over each other! Move your ass!”

The labor strike came at four o'clock that afternoon.

Major Kelly was up in the framing beams of what would soon be the second level of the rectory, inspecting the joists and the angle braces. Most of the men around him were his own, for this job required nearly all skilled labor. He was not, therefore, immediately aware of the cessation of work noises in the rest of the camp.

Lyle Fark brought the news. “Major!” he called from the bridge road in front of the would-be rectory. “Major Kelly!”

Kelly crawled along the grid of wooden beams and looked down at Fark. “What is it, Private?”

The Tennessean was unnaturally agitated. “You've got to come down. That Maurice is losing his mind. He's called a labor strike!”

Kelly just leaned out over the skeleton of the rectory and stared at Fark, unmoving, unable to speak.

“Do you understand, sir?” Fark shuffled his feet. Dust rose around him.

“A strike,” Kelly said. “A work stoppage.”

“Yes, sir. He says his people aren't getting paid enough.”

“My people are not getting paid enough,” Maurice said.

He had gathered all one hundred French workers at the bridge. They were climbing onto the three flatbed German trucks which they now used to shuttle to and from Eisenhower. They were jabbering and laughing.

“They've taken everything we've got. You've milked us dry already!” Kelly said, pulling on a pair of imaginary udders.

“Not at all,” Maurice said. “You still have a great deal which my people could use.” He made a long face. “I have just realized how much you and your men have, and how little you are paying my poor people to save your skins. It seems I must now reopen negotiations if work on the village is to continue.”

“But what can you want?” Kelly asked. He was ready to give up anything, even the clothes on his back. “I'll even save my shit and package it as manure,” he told The Frog. “Anything!” That imaginary thunder of Panzer-tread grew even louder, the thump of marching feet close behind…

“If you can't see what is left for you to pay us with,” Maurice said, scratching his hairy, bloated stomach which peeped out between halves of his shirt, “then perhaps you need some time to think.” He turned toward the trucks, then back to the major. “And there is one other thing. Besides an increase in pay for my people, I want you to obtain for me a written guarantee from this Lieutenant Beame of yours. I want him to swear in writing that he will not attempt to court my daughter.” Maurice hunched his shoulders and balled his fists at his sides. “I will not have my daughter used by a soldier.”

As the last of the Frenchmen got onto the trucks, Kelly said. “This is ridiculous. Look, can't you wait until we can talk—”

Maurice was adamant. “I do not believe you will negotiate in good faith until you realize I am serious about this work stoppage.”

“You're wrong!” Kelly declared, throwing his hands up. “I'll negotiate in the very best of faith. I'll do anything! You can have my teeth for piano keys!”

“I do not want your teeth,” Maurice said. “You have much more to offer.”

“But what?” Kelly asked. “You've got two hundred bucks from each of us. And you're going to get a toll-booth—”

“The very fact that you cannot imagine what to give us is proof that you will not bargain seriously at this time,” The Frog said, turning, walking away, climbing into the cab of the first track.

The three vehicles started up. Smoke plumed from the tail pipes.

As the first track started for the bridge, Nathalie Jobert jumped off the bed of the last one and ran the few steps to Kelly. She grabbed his hands and held them tightly. “Monsieur, please do not hate my people because of my father. Do not even hate him. He is more bluff than fight. He will be back tomorrow, and he will help you build your village if you'll only give him the bulldozer and the shortwave radio. That is all he wants. In fact, he will not even hold put for that written guarantee from David.”

“He can have the shortwave radio,” Kelly said. “But I don't see how I can give him the dozer. That's Danny Dew's virility symbol, and he won't take kindly to my giving it away. You know, I need Danny. I can't finish the village without him.”

“But the dozer and radio are all that will satisfy my father, Major.” She let go of his hands and returned to the last track, which was waiting for her. She jumped onto the bed, sat with her long legs dangling over the lowered tailgate.

“Anything but the dozer,” Kelly said.

She shook her head. Her black hair spread out like a silk fan, folded up. “I wish I could help. But that is all my father would take.”

The truck started away. It entered the bridge. Crossed the bridge. Went around the bend on the other side. Out of sight.

6

“We should send a commando squad into Eisenhower tonight and kill that crazy frog bastard,” Sergeant Coombs said.

Major Kelly ignored the sergeant's suggestion.

Instead, he gave the men a pep talk. And he tried to flog them into accomplishing their own work and that of the Frenchmen now on strike. He doubled job assignments. Mind racing feverishly, he looked for and found and implemented all tolerable shortcuts in their construction procedures. He cut the supper break down to fifteen minutes. He stalked from one end of the clearing to the other, doing his Patton imitation: badgering, cajoling, screaming, shaking his fist in the faces of the goldbrickers, joshing, berating, threatening…

“If we don't get our little religious community built before the Germans get here, we're finished,” Kelly told them. “They have rifles, pistols, automatic pistols, cannons, ack-ack guns, grenades, submachine guns, mortar, flamethrowers, tanks… They'll grind us into fish meal. Any of you want to be made into fish meal? Huh? Any of you?”

None of the men wanted to be ground into fish meal. They worked hard, then harder, and finally hardest.

A three-man search party went looking for Lieutenant Beame when Kelly learned that the junior officer had not shown up at his work assignment after lunch. Beame was supposed to be guiding the blueprinting and initial construction of the church tower, a job only he or Kelly was qualified to do. But he was missing, and his men were idle… Half an hour after they set out, the searchers came back with the lieutenant. They had located him on a grassy knoll in the woods where he had been lying on his back, looking at the sky and daydreaming.

“What's the matter with you?” Kelly demanded of Beame. “You're the only man here besides me who can do this sort of planning. You're the only other full engineer. I need you, Beame. You can't go wandering off into the woods—”

“I can't stop thinking about her,” Beame said. “Nothing else matters except her. And he won't let me see her… ” He looked like a sad clown.

“Who?” Kelly asked. “Who's he and who's she?”

“Maurice is he. Nathalie is she. I love her, but he won't let me near her.”

“Love can get you killed,” Kelly told him. “I order you to stop loving her. Get on the ball, Beame! Don't desert me now.”

Kelly also had to keep an eye on Angelli, who kept trying to sneak away to see Nurse Pullit. Vito was one of the few men quick and limber enough to slip around on high beam frames, troubleshooting connections and looking for flaws in supports and braces. He was vital, even when there were no Frenchmen for him to oversee. And now when their chances were evaporating like water in a teakettle, he was playing the love-sick schoolboy. Even when he was working, Vito was, like Beame, in such a state of longing that he could accomplish only a third of the work he should have done.

When night came, they worked on, though they ordinarily would have stopped and called it quits until dawn. There was not much that could be done in complete darkness. If they used enough lanterns to throw sufficient light on their work, they risked becoming targets for Allied and German planes. Tonight, they compromised. Kelly allowed the use of half the lanterns they needed — which provided just enough light to attract the dreaded bombers but not enough to permit efficient labor.

Finally, at 10:30, Tooley came to see the major. The pacifist was pale, sweaty, filthy, exhausted. His ropy muscles did not look so formidable as they always had before. His thick neck seemed to be made of rubber and was supporting his head with difficulty. “Let them stop, Major! For God's sake, be merciful!”

“The Germans are coming. We can't stop. We're dead if we do!”

Tooley shook his head. It was almost more effort than he could endure. “They're so tired and terrified of attracting night planes that they aren't getting anything done, anyway. And if you expect them to achieve anything tomorrow, you have to let them rest tonight.”

Kelly knew the pacifist was right. “Dammit!” He sighed. “Okay. It's all useless anyway. It's a fairy tale. It can't be real. Tell them to knock off. We couldn't finish it in time even if they worked twenty-four hours a day.”

By eleven o'clock, the camp was dark and still. Rushing silently westward, marshmallow mountains of cumulus clouds obscured the moon and stars. The shadows had all run together in one inky pool. A few tent flaps rustled in the variable wind which had sprung up halfheartedly from the east, and the crickets chirruped softly and intermittently in the nearby woods.

Neither the wind nor the crickets was sufficient to rouse the men. Those not yet asleep soon would be, when weariness became greater than fear.

The roof was off the main bunker, and none of the men could see much sense in sleeping in a roofless bunker. It would be like wearing a bulletproof vest made of cardboard, or like wearing cotton galoshes in a rainstorm, or like dating your own sister. Therefore, they had put up the tents, most of them precisely large enough to accommodate two men in complete discomfort, though a few — like Major Kelly's — were spacious. Because they were temporary and did not deserve much planning time, the tent rows were haphazardly drawn, an intriguing maze that confused and confounded everyone. The pegs were makeshift and poorly wedged, while the taut guide ropes made a treacherous tangle in the darkness. Still, the tents were better than the roofless bunker. As Kelly had said, “As long as you can't see the sky, you can pretend that you're shielded by sheets of steel. You can pretend the tent is made of heavy armor. You can trick yourself into sleeping better.”

But Major Kelly was one of the few men who was unable to trick himself into sleeping better. Or at all. He lay in his tent, in the diffused orange light of a single, oily candle, and he worried about everything: the Germans, Hagendorf, the Germans, Lieutenant Beame, the Germans, the romance between Angelli and Pullit, the strike and the possibility that he would have to give away Dew's bulldozer, the Germans….

Suddenly, Private Tooley, breathing like a spent horse, poked his head through the unsecured tent flaps and cried, “Major!”

Kelly sat straight up, smacking his head into a tent pole.

“It's awful!” Tooley gasped.

“What? What?” Kelly rubbed his head and stumbled to his feet.

“Kowalski just made another prediction. It's horrible!”

“You broke in here to tell me about that bag of shit?” Kelly asked, incredulous.

“He's been right before,” Tooley said. “In fact, he's never been wrong.”

Major Kelly was worried in spite of himself. “What's he saying now?”

“Come quick and see!” Tooley said, dropping the flaps and disappearing.

“Tooley!” Kelly pushed out of the tent, looked around. The pacifist was twenty yards away, running towards the hospital bunker. “Damn!” Kelly said.

Two minutes later, he stumbled down the hospital's uneven, earthen steps, breathing like a horse that had been in the same race as Tooley. He struck his shoulder on the door frame, staggered inside. The lights were dimmer and the stench twice as bad as he remembered them. A veritable flock of centipedes scattered in front of him. He shivered, went down the aisle to the end of the bunker where Pullit, Lily, Liverwright, and Tooley stood by the mad Pole's bed.

Kowalski was rigid, eyes wide and tongue lolling. He had a fat, pale tongue, utterly disgusting. He was sitting in a steaming puddle of his own urine, and he looked curiously as if he belonged there.

“What's he saying?” Kelly asked, wheezily.

As if on cue, Kowalski said: “Too little time… no time… less than we need… never build town… never… too little time… less than we think… ”

“He means the Panzers,” Lily said. Her face was drawn and fearful — and sexy.

“If we don't have time to build the fake town,” Tooley said, “there will be bloodshed.” Despite his muscles, Tooley sounded like a frail spinster facing a gang of undiscrim-inating rapists. “What are you going to do about it, Major?”

“He means the strike will slow us down,” Kelly said. “We already know that.”

“He's talking about something else,” Tooley said. “Something worse than the strike. Something that has not yet happened.”

“Even if he is,” Kelly said, “what can I do? He hasn't given me enough to go on. Why don't we have enough time? What terrible disaster is pending?”

Tooley looked at the zombie, patted his head. “Tell us more, Kowalski.”

Kowalski was silent.

“He's already warned us,” Lily said. “He hasn't anything more to say.”

Refuting her, Kowalski leaned toward Lily and said, “Cu… ”

“Yes?” she asked.

Everyone leaned closer, listening intently. The walls seemed to recede; the dreariness was replaced by a sense of the cosmic, a spiritual mood that was undeniable and hinted of forces beyond the ken of man. The lights were no longer dim, merely mysterious. The centipedes were forgotten. They listened to the wise man's words as if the fate of the world hinged on his pronouncements.

“Cu… cu…” Kowalski's eyes were fever-bright. His tongue moved obscenely between his cracked lips as he tried to finish what he wanted to say. “Cu…”

“He's got something big to say,” the pacifist insisted. “I know he does.”

“Cu… cu… cu…”

“He's almost got it!” Tooley fisted his hands, arms bulging as he pulled for Kowalski.

Major Kelly felt, all of a moment, in the midst of a miracle, some fundamental religious experience which he would treasure the memory of for the rest of his days. He had not been so choked up and teary since he had seen Margaret Sullavan in Back Street.

Watching Lily, Kowalski rocked back and forth. His tongue fluttered. His eyes blinked so rapidly it seemed the lashes would give him flight. “Cu… Cu…”

Lily held her hands out to him, encouraged him as one might encourage a baby who was walking toward his mother for the first time. “Don't give up, poor dear,” she cooed. “Tell us. Try, Kowalski. Tell us, poor baby.”

“Cu… cu… cunt!” Kowalski squealed, lunging for her. He ripped open her khaki shirt and pawed her bare breasts. He gibbered with delight.

Pullit screamed.

Liverwright was immobilized by the sight of Lily's jugs.

Still screaming, Pullit ran for the bunker door, red bandanna trailing behind. “Help! Help, someone!”

Going to Lily's rescue, Kelly stumbled on a cot brace, staggered, and fell heavily onto the makeshift bed. The cot collapsed.

Kowalski rolled into the major, and for an instant their faces touched nose-to-nose. Kowalski's eyes were wide and bloodshot, but possessed a certain lucidity which Kelly had not seen there for long days. “Cunt, cunt, cunt!” he screamed. Then, like a door closing, the semirationality left his eyes, and a bottomless stupidity returned. Drool ran out of the left corner of his mouth and down his chin.

Private Tooley grabbed the major by the scruff of the neck and hoisted him to his feet. “You okay, sir?”

Kelly nodded dumbly, brushing at his clothes.

“What do you think?” Tooley asked.

“About Kowalski? Shoot him. Put him out of his misery.”

Tooley was hurt. “No! I think he's getting much better.”

“Sure he is.” Kelly said. “Sure he is.”

Although he thought Kowalski should be put out of his misery, Major Kelly was worried about the zombie's prediction. They could not withstand another crisis. Even if they settled the labor strike, they had little chance of getting the village built in time. If one more problem arose…

“You don't look sleepy,” Lily said, taking his arm as he reached the bunker door. “I'm not sleepy either. Why don't we take a walk together?”

They walked to the woods, then to the knoll where Beame had expected to meet Nathalie for lunch. And then, of course, they stopped walking and undressed and made love. Even as worried as he was, Kelly was ready for Lily Kain.

When they were finished, they lay side-by-side in the grass and stared at the clouds overhead. Stars popped out between bands of mist, then disappeared once more. “You're a gem,” Kelly told her. “You're the only woman I've ever known who hasn't the slightest reservation about having it put to her.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Every girl wants to have it put to her.”

“You're wrong,” he said, squeezing her hand.

“I can't believe that. Every woman wants to have it put to her. It's fun!”

“Well… most women probably do want to have it put to them, but they won't admit it,” Kelly said.

“Then how do they ever get it put to them?”

“Reluctantly. They protest, repeatedly refuse — give in reluctantly.”

“What a waste of time,” Lily said.

“And when they've had it put to them, when it's over, they cry and say how ashamed they are. Or pretend they didn't enjoy it.”

“I always enjoy it,” Lily said.

“I know,” Kelly said.

Before they had become lovers, when she masturbated at night, her moans and cries roused the camp. Every man in the unit was enthralled by her performance, listening intently to the symphony of garbled noises until, by her crescendo, she was leading an orchestra of self-abusers. And now, of course, there were the regular shows beneath the bridge…

Kelly put his arms around her. And though his terror did not go away, it dwindled for the next fifteen minutes and was almost forgotten as they moved together a second time.

Afterwards, he slept. And he dreamed. Usually, the dreams were about Petey Danielson: vivid, colorful replays of the man's guts falling out onto the dry earth…

When he woke, trying to scream, Lily was there beside him. She smoothed his wet brow with one hand and cooed softly to him. “It's okay. It was just a bad dream, darling.” Her warm flank was pressed against him, and the full weight of one large breast fell against his chest. She kept on smoothing his brow until his heartbeat slowed considerably and his dry mouth grew moist.

“How long was I asleep?”

“Maybe an hour,” she said.

He started to sit up, but she pressed him back down. “We ought to be getting back,” he said.

“Let's sleep out here tonight. The mosquitoes have gone. It's cool.”

When he thought about getting dressed and walking back to his tent and undressing again for the night, he said, “Okay.”

She snuggled up against him and kissed his ear. “I love you, Kelly.”

“Don't say that.”

“It's true.”

“It's crazy. Love can be deadly. When you're in love, you go around in a daze. You stop being careful. You get killed. Don't be in love with me.”

“You're in love with me, too,” she said.

He closed his eyes, let the sounds of the forest settle over him like a fog: wind in branches, grasses rustling, crickets, toads, the scurrying sound of squirrels. , “Forget the love part. Let's just fuck and forget the love part, huh? Otherwise, we're dead.”

“Go to sleep.” She smoothed his forehead like Florence Nightingale in an old textbook drawing he had once seen. Except Florence Nightingale had not been nude.

“Promise you won't love me,” he insisted.

“Go to sleep.”

“Promise.”

“Okay, okay! I promise not to love you.”

He sighed happily. “Good. I don't want to die yet.” He drifted toward sleep for a few minutes, then stirred, suddenly worried. “The Panzers! We—”

“Go to sleep, darling,” she said. “Tomorrow's time enough to worry about the Germans. Remember, I don't love you.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

He tumbled into sleep again, dreaming of bombs which exploded like pastel clouds of chalk dust: green, yellow, blue, and purple. Men fell down dead, gushing pastel blood. The cries of the dying were muted and soft like the calls of giant pastel jungle-birds.

Except for Lily who comforted him and kissed him each time he woke, everything about the night was horrible. And now there were only four days left in which to build the village.

7 / JULY 20

The French workers returned to the clearing at noon, six hours after they were scheduled to arrive.

“Why waste six hours?” Kelly asked Lyle Fark when the private brought the news. “Why not return when they were supposed to, so we could negotiate and get this damn strike over with?”

“Psychology,” Fark said. “Maurice wants you desperate before he sits down to bargain with you.”

Maurice entered Kelly's tent five minutes later, mopping at his face with the tail of his checkered shirt. His enormous, round stomach was exposed, pale as a large honey-dew melon, hairy as a coconut, the navel large and deep, “Your Private Fark met me at the bridge,” he told Kelly. “He says you are prepared to negotiate.”

The tent was large enough to contain a small table and two straight-backed chairs. Major Kelly was behind the table. He pointed to the chair in front of it. “Sit down. Let's talk business.”

“Certainement, man ami,” Maurice said, sitting where Kelly had pointed.

“You were supposed to be here at dawn,” the major said, trying to be as reasonable as he could. He wanted to pick up the table and break it over the mayor's head. But he knew that would not facilitate an end to the labor strike.

“You have worked my people so hard,” Maurice said, shrugging. “They were in need of a long night's sleep.”

Kelly bit his lip until he thought blood would come, but he managed to keep his hands off Maurice's throat. “What do you want?”

Maurice frowned. “You have not yet thought of anything to offer?”

“The shortwave radio,” Kelly said. “You want it?”

Maurice brightened, wiped sweat from his face. “It would be of great benefit to my community, cut off as we are from so much of France.”

“It's yours,” Kelly said.

“Merci. But it is not enough.”

The major gritted his teeth and spoke through them, sounding like Humphrey Bogart. “What else? The D-7 dozer?”

“Ah,” Maurice said. “That would be fine.”

“This isn't easy, Maurice. You know the dozer is Danny Dew's virility symbol, his own way of hanging on in this chaos.”

Maurice shrugged. “He will adapt.”

Major Kelly had spent all morning wondering if Danny Dew would adapt. And he had been certain the black bastard would not. Danny depended on that big machine too much; he would not let it go without a fight.

“I need Dew,” Kelly told Maurice. “I can't risk making an enemy of him. Without him, we'll never get the village done. There are jobs only the dozer can accomplish — and only under Danny's hand. So, we're going to have to keep this a secret. Not a word of this transaction can get back to Danny.”

“One day, it must,” Maurice said. “When the dozer leaves this clearing.”

“That's my one condition,” Kelly said. “You can't take possession of the dozer until we can con a new one out of General Blade — then, if Danny still won't give the old one up, you can have the replacement. It will be a better machine, anyway.”

“And if you can't get another bulldozer from Blade?” Maurice asked.

“I will. I'll tell him this one's already been ruined.”

Maurice thought about it awhile.

Kelly looked at his watch. The minute-hand seemed to sweep around the dial as if it were marking off seconds.

At last, Maurice said, “I am not an unreasonable man, Major.”

Kelly gritted his teeth so hard he almost broke his jaws.

“I will be satisfied with this arrangement, if you write it out in the form of an ironclad contract which I have spent most of the night drafting.” The Frog took a long sheet of paper out of his trousers and put it on the table.

“I'll sign anything,” Kelly said.

“And what about the written guarantee from your Lieutenant Beame?” Maurice asked, leaning conspiratorially over the table.

Kelly felt that he owed Nathalie Jobert a favor. She had told him what her father would settle for, and she might give additional help in the future. “I am afraid that cannot be obtained,” Kelly said. “He is adamant. And I can't rightly order him to sign. This thing between Beame and your daughter is a private affair and should not come between you and me.”

Maurice scowled.

“You must compromise now,” Kelly said. “I've come more than halfway.”

“You are right,” Maurice said. He struck the table with one hand. “I accept your offer. The strike is ended.”

“And Danny must not learn about the dozer. It is essential we keep that a secret.”

“We will try,” Maurice said, drawing a tiny cross over his heart.

Kelly pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. His head brushed the canvas ceiling, and horseflies rose noisily from the outer surface. “In all honesty, I have to say that I am making this deal only because most of my men still think we can build the town in time to fool the krauts.”

“And you don't believe we can, man ami?”

“There never was much of a chance,” Kelly said, edging around the table. “And now that you've wasted nearly a whole working day with this strike of yours, there's no chance at all.”

“You are quite wrong.” Maurice rubbed his pudgy hands together. “C'est vrai,” he added, seeing Kelly's skepticism. “I would not have called the strike without first finding some way to make up for the lost time. We will be done with your false town ahead of schedule, my friend. All thanks to the miracle of prefabrication.”

“Prefabrication?” Kelly asked. He wrinkled his nose, partly in an expression of bewilderment and partly because Maurice Jobert was sweaty and smelly. “I don't understand.”

“You will!” Maurice said. He went to the entranceway, and lifted a canvas flap. “Be at the bridge in one hour, and you will understand perfectly.” He chuckled madly and winked at the major.

At 1:20 that afternoon, Maurice returned from Eisenhower with the first truckload of pieced-up barn walls. They were standing on edge in the back of a board-sided German cargo truck, each panel twelve feet high and twenty feet long — which was precisely the size of a wall of one of the single-story platform houses that comprised a sizable portion of the fake village.

The striking workers had not slept away the morning, after all. Instead, they had scouted barns, sheds, stables, and outbuildings which were firmly constructed, dismantling some of these and cutting them into maneuverable sections. They had taken only tightly joined panels that could pass as the walls of houses and churches. A passable exterior was all that mattered, for the insides of the fake houses would not be plastered or finished in any way. And after cutting up a barn, they had enough walls for seven or eight single-story platform buildings. A stable might build half a convent. A milk house could be sawed up and put back together as a two-story nuns' residence.

“It will save an incredible amount of time,” Maurice told Kelly as the major inspected the walls stacked in the back of the truck. “One of the most time-consuming jobs is putting the siding on the buildings. Now, we can nail it up in huge pieces.”

Kelly was not so sure. “No matter how well built a barn is, the wall is only a single thickness of wood. Some of the boards are not going to meet perfectly. Light will escape through them. Anyone looking at a fake house, made from these panels, will see light showing through the slats and know that it's a phony.”

“Then no one must light a lantern inside any house but the rectory — and the church,” Maurice said. “Your men must pass the night in darkness.”

“They haven't much choice,” Kelly said.

Though the individual partitions were heavy, there was plenty of sweaty, dirty, grunting, fear-driven manpower to cope with them. Twenty men wrestled each monstrous twelve-by-twenty wall from the bed of the German truck, and balanced it between them with considerable shouting and staggering back and forth.

“For God's sake don't drop it!” Private Fark screamed, as he took the front position on one of the walls. “It'll kill us if we lose control!”

With sunbrowned muscles bulging and sweat running in salty streams, with grunting and cursing that would have embarrassed many of the hard-working Frenchwomen if they had understood it, the walls were moved from the truck and toted to various platform houses which were now framed but not yet sided. The walls were balanced precariously against the frames of the platform houses, again by sheer muscle power, and the carpenters went to work nailing the panels to the beams which had been waiting since yesterday. Twenty long nails across the top, one every foot, then the same ratio down both sides, hammers smacking loudly, a chorus of blows echoing across the camp. When the straining, sweat-slimed men let go of the wall, the carpenters scurried along the base, praying that the thing would not rip loose and collapse on them, and they nailed that edge down as well. Then, while Maurice went for another load and while the majority of the husky laborers went to other tasks — of which there were many — the carpenters resecured the walls, pounding in again as many nails, one exactly between each pair they had already placed. At the corners of the building, where the prefabricated panels often did not meet in perfect eye-pleasing harmony — and where, in fact, there was sometimes as much as a two-inch gap despite the cut-to-order nature of the materials — the carpenters nailed up vertical finishing boards from foundation to eaves; these ran perpendicular to the horizontally slatted ex-barn-walls and provided the one-story structures with a surprisingly well-constructed appearance.

“And appearances are all that matter,” Major Kelly told Lieutenant Beame as they inspected the first prefabricated building to be finished. “The krauts won't be going into any of these places. Just the rectory. Maybe the church, if any of them are Catholics.”

“But the church and the rectory will be real,” Beame said. “So we'll be safe. We'll pull it off.”

“Never.” It was the most positive reply Kelly had in him.

And yet the afternoon went fairly well, so far as the other men were concerned. A great deal was accomplished. The ten-foot-square entrance foyer of the convent — into which the Germans might venture, though no farther — was framed and walled, even though the convent's larger outer walls had not yet been thrown up. A few outhouses were completed and roofed. “You call yourselves members of the Army engineers?” Kelly screamed at his men. “It takes you two hours to build a goddamned shithouse? Faster! Faster, damn you!” The rectory walls crept toward a nonexistent second-story roof, these not prefabricated but crafted with care; and between the porch posts the floor of the rectory's veranda took shape, and the stoop in front of it and the steps leading down from the stoop and the sturdy banisters on both sides of the steps. “Three and a half days!” Kelly screamed at the men working the rectory job. “That's all you have. Not a month!” The town's small church, built on low stone walls similar to those that would give the convent the air of permanence it needed, was framed from foyer to auditorium to sanctuary to sacristy, complete with an eighteen-foot bell tower in which there would not be any bell. Hopefully, the Germans would not notice this omission, arriving as they were in darkness and leaving in the early morning light. A few picket fences were set up around small lawns. And off the street behind the convent, four men worked hard on an old-fashioned stone well complete with its peaked roof, winch bar — but no bucket attached. An isolated religious community would have a few open wells. But who was to say these must function after so many years? This was a dry well. Principally, it was a dry well because the distance between the top of the well wall and the bottom of the pit was six feet, and half of that aboveground. This well could never draw water. But it looked as if it once had. And appearances, as Kelly kept telling his men, were all that mattered. Throughout the afternoon, then, the fake community went as the stone well went: smoothly, steadily, with much sweating, cursing, scraped hands, torn fingernails, cuts, bruises, tortured muscles, suspected hernias, known hernias, and exhaustion. Very little of what they built could be used, but it all looked as if it had been lived in for decades.

Therefore, Kelly should have been happy.

But he distrusted happiness. He forced himself to scowl all through the long, hot afternoon.

He was still scowling at suppertime. He stood by the mess tent at the southern end of the camp, eating a boiled-potato sandwich (with mustard) and scowling at the other men who were hastily consuming creamed chipped beef on toast and cling peaches. He ruined many good appetites.

“Why are you so depressed?” Lyle Park asked. “Those prefab walls are doing the trick. The work is coming along well.”

Before the major could tell Park about Kowalski's latest prediction, they were interrupted by Lieutenant Slade. Shouting and waving, Slade ran along the tent row, leaping gracelessly over guide ropes and pegs, dodging the men who were sitting before their tents eating supper. The men tried to trip Slade, but he was too quick and watchful for them to succeed. He stopped at the mess tent and unconsciously saluted Major Kelly. “Urgent message, sir! Call from General Blade!”

“Blade's on the radio now?” Kelly asked, around a mouthful of bread and boiled potatoes.

“It's about the Panzers,” Slade said.

Kelly paled. “What about the Panzers?”

“I don't know,” Slade said. “That's what the general wants to talk about.”

Slade appeared to be sincere. Kelly had not overlooked the possibility that Slade was engaged in some elaborate hoax designed to make a fool of his superior officer. Slade would want to get even for yesterday, for the things that the major had shouted at him. But right now, Slade was sincere. He seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, that he hated Kelly. His awe of General Blade was not faked; that old syphilitic bastard must really be on the shortwave set.

Kelly dropped his mess tin and ran. None of the men in front of the tents tried to trip him, but they worked hard to get Slade who ran close behind. Again, they failed.

Since the HQ building had been torn down to make way for the fake community, the radio was being sheltered in Slade's tent, the only tent other than Major Kelly's which was roomy enough to hold the monster and the square wooden table on which it stood. Major Kelly stooped and entered the gloomy canvas room. The place smelled of wet straw and a few dozen mice. Since neither seemed to be present, Kelly supposed that both odors were endemic to the lieutenant. Wrinkling his nose, he went quickly to the radio and picked up the microphone just as Slade entered the tent behind him.

“Kelly here, sir,” the major said, voice heavy with dread.

“Kelly?” Blade asked, unnecessarily.

“Yes, sir.”

“How's my favorite major?”

Kelly frowned. “I don't know, sir. How is he?”

“Who is this?” General Blade asked, suddenly suspicious.

“This is Major Kelly,” Major Kelly said.

“Well, then… how's my favorite major?” Blade asked again.

Kelly hesitated. “Is that a riddle, sir?”

“Is what a riddle?”

Kelly decided that if it were not a riddle, it was a joke. He was expected to repeat the straight line, and then Blade would give him the punch line. He sighed and said, “How is your favorite major, sir?”

“That's what I asked you,” General Blade said, somewhat gruffly.

Kelly wiped at his face with one palsied hand. “Sir, I'm confused. I don't know anyone under your command except my own men. I don't know your favorite major and I can't—”

“You're beginning to confuse me,” General Blade said. “Let's just talk about the Panzers, okay?”

Swallowing hard, Kelly nodded at the microphone.

“Okay?” Blade asked.

Kelly nodded.

“Kelly?”

Kelly nodded vigorously.

“Is that okay? Kelly, are you there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you come up with any plans to use against them?” the General asked.

Kelly suddenly realized that the General did not know about the fake town. He had called three nights ago, a few hours before Maurice came to the major with this plan for hoaxing the Germans, and he had not called back since. “We have a plan,” Kelly admitted. But he knew there was no way to explain the fake village to Blade, not in a few minutes and not over the radio and not when they were both confused. So he lied. “Same as before. We'll masquerade as Germans.”

“I suggested that a few nights ago,” Blade said.

“We're taking your advice, sir.” Blade had apparently forgotten all of the faults with the masquerade plan, which Kelly had detailed in their last conversation. Syphilitic old men probably could not retain anything when their brains had finally decayed to the consistency of cold oatmeal.

“Well,” Blade said, “what I called to tell you won't come as bad news — not now that you're prepared for the krauts.” He took a sip of coffee or blood. “Kelly, you won't have to sit on pins and needles for three more days, waiting for the Panzers. Our original information was faulty. They left the staging area at Stuttgart two days early. So they'll reach you around midnight on the twenty-first, two days earlier than we thought.”

Kowalski had been right again.

“Tomorrow night, sir?”

“That's right, Kelly.”

For the next few minutes, they talked about Panzers. The general described the size and quality of the force, though nothing had changed in that regard since he had described it a few nights ago. They were still dead. Doomed. Mincemeat.

“Will you be able to handle them?” Blade asked.

“Sure.” All he wanted now was to get Blade off the air, stop wasting time.

“I hope so,” the general said. “I don't want my favorite major to be hurt.”

Kelly could not understand what in the hell the general's favorite major had to do with any of this. Who was this bastard Blade loved so much? Then Kelly decided that the average syphilitic old man could not always be expected to make sense. “Nothing will happen to him, sir. Your favorite major will come through this war unscathed. I'm sure of it.”

“That's the kind of talk I like to hear!” Blade said. “Well… I'll be getting back to you in a couple of days, once this is over. Good luck, Kelly!”

“Thank you, sir.”

Kelly put the microphone down. It brought him nothing but static now, a sound oddly like that you could hear when you held a seashell to your ear: distant, forlorn, empty, as lonely as old age. He switched it off.

“Well,” Slade said, “this puts a new light on the case, doesn't it?”

Kelly said nothing.

“We'll never finish the town before midnight tomorrow,” Slade said, a titter barely muffled behind one hand. “We'll have to fight the krauts.”

“No,” Kelly said. Fighting meant violence. Violence meant death. “We aren't taking any chances. We have to hang on, even if there isn't any hope, even if we dare not hope. I keep thinking… Hansel and Gretel may crawl into the oven, but they don't get burned, you know? And Jack only suffered bruises when he fell down the beanstalk. I don't know… All I do know is that we can't take any initiative. We just play our roles, no matter how crazy they get. So… Maurice will have to supply us with fifty more workers — a crew to cut up barn walls in and around Eisenhower and deliver them to us while the other hundred workers are committed solely to the job in the clearing. The new crew can start cutting walls tonight. We'll work later, until eleven or twelve, by lanterns. We have to play our parts.”

“This is disgusting!” Slade stamped his foot petulantly. “Cowardly! What will people think of us Stateside? What will history say? What will mother say?”

Kelly left the stinking tent and went to see Maurice about the additional workmen.

8 / JULY 21

At 2:00 in the morning, Lieutenant Slade quietly pushed back the tent flaps and stepped outside. He looked at the summer sky. The moon peeked from between fast-moving gray clouds that appeared to be packing into a single seamless bank as they rolled westward. The soft flicker of heat lightning pulsed behind the overcast. There would be no rain tonight. The air was warm, but not moist. The light wind was as dry as sand. However, when these clouds collided with those cold, moisture-laden thunderheads sailing in from the sea, rain would fall in bucketfuls. That would be farther west, toward the Atlantic. Tonight, in this part of France, the sky would remain overcast, but there would be no rain.

Good, Slade thought. The deeper the darkness and the fewer the obstacles it otherwise imposed, the better weather it was for assassination.

Slade looked up and down the twisting, cluttered tent row. No lights showed. No one moved. The silence was profound. In the darkness, even when a piece of the moon threw pale light into the clearing, the tents looked like concrete rather than canvas shelters; they resembled the sharply angled humps of an antitank defense perimeter.

The men were sound asleep, except for those patrolling the bridge road a mile to the east and a mile to the west of the camp as an early warning system to guard against any surprise enemy movement on that highway.

And except for Lieutenant Slade, of course. The assassin.

Slade stepped quietly across the dusty footpath to the tents which faced his own, and squeezed between two of them without alerting the men who were sleeping inside. He walked away from the tents and the woods behind them, heading north toward the bridge. His ultimate destination was Major Kelly's tent, where he would cautiously peel open the flaps, take out his revolver, and blow the major's head off. However, in case someone had been watching him, some snooping son of a bitch peering out a crack between tent flaps, Slade walked in the opposite direction from Kelly's tent, until he was certain that the darkness would have finally concealed him from any unknown observer. Then he stopped and looked at the low sky, catching his breath, trying to still his booming heart.

Now was the time.

Slade unbuckled his trousers, and took his potato-sack mask out of his undershorts. He had kept it there ever since he had fashioned it eight days ago. He had developed a rather severe rash on his testicles and stomach from continuous abrasive contact with the burlap, but he did not care. All that mattered was that no one had yet seen the mask — and no one would see it in connection with Lieutenant Richard Slade. Only Kelly would see it and know who was behind it. Then the bastard would die.

Now was the time.

Slade pulled the scratchy mask over his head. He buckled his trousers and took the heavy black revolver from his pocket. His hands trembled. To steady his nerves, he opened his mouth and sucked in a deep breath. He nearly choked on a mouthful of burlap. He spat it out, coughed, sneezed, and began to wonder if this was really a good idea.

But, yes, it was essential that he go through with it. If the unit was to organize and fight the Germans, that organization had to begin right away. There was no time for equivocation; Major Kelly must die. Slade must blow his head off and assume command. Tonight.

Now was the time.

He started for the eastern edge of the camp where he could follow the trees southward until he was behind Kelly's tent.

But he kept bumping into things. In less than ten steps, he bumped into a lumber pile. He recoiled from that only to bump into the blade of the D-7 dozer a moment later. Ten feet beyond the dozer, he walked into the collapsible loading crane and gave himself a knot on the forehead. Trying to be more careful, he walked with his hands out in front of him like a blind man feeling his way — and he fell into the seven-foot-deep main bunker from which the roof had been stripped two days ago. Work on the fake structure which would stand on the bunker had been postponed in favor of other projects, but in his blood lust Slade had forgotten about that. It was almost as if he were trying to walk into things. He wasn't trying to walk into things, of course. It was just damned difficult to see where he was going in the dark with a burlap bag over his head.

Getting painfully to his feet, surprised that he had broken no bones, he stuck his revolver in his pocket, and pulled himself out of the abandoned bunker. His shoulder ached; his head ached; he had twisted his ankle. Yet he would not give up. Outside again, on his hands and knees, he tugged the mask into place and looked around.

The tent site was silent. He could not recall if he had cried out when the ground dropped from under him. But even if he had, he had apparently not been loud enough to wake any of the men. Good. Now was the time.

Once more, he hobbled toward the eastern arm of the forest.

Petey Danielson was in the dream, sitting in a mystic, cross-legged pose, his glistening intestines spilled all over his lap. He dug his hands into them, trying to stuff his guts back into his torso…

Finally, Kelly woke, gagging, sweaty, his hands fisted. In a few minutes, when he retained only a vague impression of the nightmare, he became aware of a pressure in his bladder. Because he felt as if Danielson's spirit were lingering within the tent, he decided fresh air and a good piss were exactly what he needed. He got up and went outside.

The best way to get around while wearing a burlap bag over your head, Slade discovered, was to crawl on your hands and knees. He had learned this valuable lesson after walking into three trees. By the time he reached the corner of the clearing where the southern and eastern arms of the forest met, he was shuffling along quite nicely on all fours, making good time.

Slade figured he was wearing holes in his trousers, but he did not care. He cared only about blood. Kelly's blood.

In five minutes, he stopped directly behind Kelly's tent, his back to the woods. He knelt there, surveyed the camp, found it as quiet and still as it had been when he started his journey. A thrill of murderous anticipation coursed through him.

Now was the time.

He got to his feet, and as he did he heard movement behind him in the trees. Before he was fully erect and could turn to face the danger, Major Kelly collided with him, and they both fell down. Hard.

Falling, Kelly was surprised to see, by the weak light of the moon, that he had walked into a man wearing a potato sack over his head.

The man in the sack was so surprised he screamed.

“What the hell—” Kelly got shakily to his feet.

When he fell, the man in the bag had been trapped between Kelly and the trees. Now, he pushed up, whirled away from Kelly, and ran. He crashed headlong into a baby oak, staggered backwards, stunned by the collision.

“Hey!” Kelly said, his balance regained.

The man in the bag recoiled from the sound of the major's voice and plunged deeper into the woods. Flailing at the bushes on all sides, he tripped on a tangle of vines and fell into a cluster of milkweed plants.

“You there!” Kelly shouted.

Stumbling to his feet, slapping at his own face as if he were angry with himself, the man started to run again. He got five feet before he took a low hanging pine branch across the neck and very nearly killed himself.

“I don't understand,” Kelly said.

Coughing horribly, the man in the bag pushed past the offending tree. In a few steps, he hit a thrusting outcropping of waterworn limestone and went head over heels down a small hill, out of sight.

Major Kelly stood there for several minutes, listening to the man smash and batter his way with brutal and self-destructive force farther into the barely yielding forest. Eventually, the noises grew faint, fainter still, and faded away altogether.

Confused, Kelly returned to his tent and stretched out on his sleeping bag. But he could not sleep now.

The Germans were drawing nearer by the minute, and already there were too many of his men with severe neuroses that required him to waste precious time away from the construction of the fake village. There was Angelli mooning after Nurse Pullit, and Beame daydreaming about a girl he could not have, and Hagendorf drunk and unpredictable… and now there was this striking new direction which Lieutenant Slade's madness had taken, this running around in the middle of the night wearing an old potato sack over his head… He had known, watching the man in the bag nearly kill himself in the woods, that it was Slade. But knowing did not help. He still could not explain this new streak in the lieutenant's psychosis. All it could mean was more trouble.

And they already had more trouble than they could handle.

9

Major Kelly spent all morning running from one end of the clearing to the other, checking up on the work crews and solving construction problems with a rapidity and cleverness he had never known he possessed. Nothing could stump him. It was exhilarating — and it was killing him.

Half the engineering problems should have gone to Beame, but the lieutenant was not functioning at his best level. He probably would not be all right again until he found a way to bypass Maurice and get to Nathalie. The girl really was a gorgeous little piece, Kelly thought. But how could Beame let her good looks get between him and the job at hand? Didn't he realize that death was staring them in the face and preparing to bite their heads off?

Most everyone else realized this. With the midnight deadline swiftly approaching, the other men worked harder and faster than they had ever worked in their lives. The camp, the slowly fleshing skeleton of the fake village, hummed with fear and dread. The brutal sun cut through the clouds and made the earth sizzle, but not even that could burn away the cold sweat on the backs of their necks. Beame was about the only goldbricker today.

Besides Angelli, of course. Vito was supposed to be working on the crisis that had arisen with the village school. The two-story building, which was framed completely and walled on three sides, had begun to sway slightly in the wind and threatened to collapse now that it was nearly done. Angelli should have been exploring the beams in the school roof — which only he could do quickly and surely — and should have been directing his workers toward the trouble spots he found. Instead, Angelli was up at the hospital bunker romancing Nurse Pullit. As a result, his French work crew stood idle. And the men waiting to finish the siding job on the school were also put behind schedule.

Kelly ran the whole way to the hospital, cursing Angelli's neuroses and his romantic Italian blood. When he came through the bunker door, he saw the lovebirds pressed into the corner on his right. They were giggling. Vito was trying to unhook Nurse Pullit's bra through the thin, silky fabric of her uniform.

“Vito!”

Angelli jumped back and dropped his hands from Pullit, looked as shamefaced as a small boy caught at the cookie jar. Nurse Pullit blushed and made a show of straightening the rumpled white dress.

“You come with me,” Kelly said, turning and stalking out of the bunker. When he had Angelli outside, marching him back to the school, he said, “This has got to stop.”

The private scratched the tattoo on his chest.

“The Panzers are coming, Angelli!” Kelly shouted, spraying spittle all over the private's face. “We've no time for this sort of thing!”

“I can't be away from her for more than a few minutes at a time,” Angelli said. “I can't bear it for longer.”

Kelly was enraged. “Pullit is not a woman! Get that through your head!”

“She's the kind of woman I always wanted to marry,” Angelli said, as if he had not heard the major. “She's witty, vivacious, and yet shy. I'd never be ashamed to introduce her as my wife.”

Kelly frowned. “Vito—”

“Don't get the idea I'm only interested in her mind and personality,” Vito said, nudging Kelly in the ribs as they walked toward the school. “She has fantastic legs, a nice round ass, beautiful big jugs—”

“That's just one of Lily's bras. Those aren't real jugs. Those—”

“And she has such a lovely face,” Angelli said. He sighed.

“Angelli,” Kelly said, with proper gravity, “you haven't—”

“I certainly haven't!” Angelli said, scandalized by the suggestion. “It isn't that I haven't wanted to. She does excite me. But she's a virgin, and I just could not take advantage… Well, I know you just caught me trying to take off her bra, but that wasn't anything serious. I wouldn't have pressured her into going the whole way. Mostly, we've just held hands. She's too innocent a woman for me to—”

Kelly put a new strength in his voice. “Nurse Pullit is not a woman. She—”

“She's almost a saint,” Angelli said. “I know, sir. She is not an ordinary woman. Not at all. She's a living saint!”

Kelly gave up on Angelli. There was no reasoning with the private just now. They reached the school building, which was still swaying in the wind, and Kelly said, “I'm not going to try to explain to you the truth about Pullit. I just want you to find the trouble with this building and get it fixed. Now! Fast, Angelli. And if you run back to the hospital before you're done, I'll shoot your balls off. You won't be any good to Pullit or anyone else, ever.” Wasting precious minutes…

The afternoon was both good and bad. Five new outhouses were built. But Sergeant Coombs got into a fight with a French worker. The roof and porch roof were added to the rectory. But a truck hauling prefabricated walls had engine trouble, and its shipment was delayed an hour. The church took shape, and the pews — borrowed from a chapel outside of Eisenhower — fit in perfectly. But Coombs got into a fight with another Frenchman and tipped over a mixer of precious concrete.

Major Kelly shrugged off the good reports and brooded about each scrap of bad news.

At six o'clock, as the afternoon gave way to evening, he was brooding about the concrete which Sergeant Coombs had spilled. He stood at the top of the convent steps, watching the workers swarm over the church and the rectory across the street. Men came to him with problems which he quickly solved. Occasionally, he looked eastward to see if Angelli was still guiding his French work crew.

He was watching Vito when Danny Dew drove the D-7 onto the bridge road and roared down through the center of town, throwing up a wake of yellow dust. Dew stopped in front of the convent. He left the dozer running, jumped off, and came up the steps two at a time.

“What's wrong?” Kelly asked.

If a black man could look pale and drawn, Danny Dew was pale and drawn. His eyes were wide, glazed with fear. “Major… there's a rumor going around… ” He was unable to put his fear into words.

“Danny? What's wrong?”

Dew leaned against the railing and shuddered, wiped the back of one hand across his mouth. “There's a rumor going around that you traded the D-7—for more help from Maurice.”

“Well,” Major Kelly lied, “it's only a rumor, Danny. I didn't do any such thing. I know what the dozer means to you.”

“I got to have the D-7,” Danny said. “Nobody can take that away from me, Kelly. I'd die. I'd wither up and die.”

Kelly patted Dew's shoulder. “I know, Danny. I wouldn't pull something like that. Besides, we need the dozer. I couldn't afford to give it away.” He was a bit surprised at how smoothly the lies came out, how sincere he sounded.

Danny began to regain control of himself. The shakes grew less severe, and some of the terror left his eyes. “You serious?”

“Danny, you know I would never—”

In the same instant, both men heard the change in the sound of the dozer's engine. It was no longer just idling. They turned as one and looked down the convent steps.

Emil Hagendorf sat in the driver's chair, holding down on the brake pedal while he pumped the accelerator. The big machine rocked and groaned beneath him. He laughed, waved at Kelly and Dew.

“Stop him!” Kelly shouted, leaping down the steps.

Emil let up on the brakes.

The bulldozer lurched forward. The steel track seemed to spin for a moment, kicking up dust and chunks of macadam.

Major Kelly jumped from the fourth step and landed feet-first on the wide band of tread. He waved his arms, trying desperately to maintain his balance. The dozer was moving even as he reached it, and he was dragged forward like a man on a horizontal escalator belt.

“Emil, stop!” he shouted.

Hagendorf looked over at him and laughed.

Kelly backpedaled, trying to keep from being tossed in front of the dozer and chewed into tiny pieces. His feet slipped on the knobbed tread as it flashed under his feet. He felt as if he were walking across a spinning sheet of ice in the center of a pitching sea.

Pulling the wheel hard to the right, Hagendorf took the dozer off the bridge road. Under the engine noise, there was no longer the clatter of steel meeting a paved surface.

Kelly did not look up to see where they were going. All of his attention was concentrated on the grinding, steel caterpillar belts. He stretched out, grabbed the roll-bar which rose behind Hagendorf, and pulled himself onto the dozer frame, away from the deadly tread.

“Welcome aboard!” Hagendorf shouted.

He was drunk.

Holding onto the roll-bar, Kelly wedged himself into the same meager niche he had occupied while inspecting the village with Danny Dew a couple of days ago. He bent down and screamed in the chief surveyor's ear. “Stop this thing, damn you!”

Hagendorf giggled. “Maybe that will stop us,” he said, taking one hand from the vibrating steering wheel long enough to point to something ahead of them.

Kelly followed the extended finger. “Hagendorf, no!”

An instant later, the dozer plowed into the side of one of the single-story platform houses. The place came apart like a paper construction. The wood broke, splintered, gave way. They surged through the wall. The platform cracked and came apart under them, fodder for the ferocious tread. They drove the whole way across the room as the roof dipped slowly toward them, then crashed out through the opposite wall in a shower of pine planking, nails, and heavy beams.

Hagendorf was laughing like hell. A splinter had caught him on the left cheek bad enough to let a steady stream of blood course down his face and drip off his chin. Otherwise, he appeared unscathed.

Major Kelly did not know if he had been hurt himself, and he did not look to see. “Emil, you'll kill yourself!” he screamed.

“You killed me already!” the surveyor yelled. “You and your chaos!”

“You'll kill me!”

“Jump.”

“Emil, we need this machine.”

“And I need a sense of order!”

The dozer slammed straight into an outhouse. It started to climb the board wall, but then the building went down. Kelly was almost flung out of his niche. The dozer dropped squarely back onto its tread, rattling his teeth. With his left hand, he got a tighter grip on the roll-bar, squeezing it so hard that his knucklebones looked as if they would pop through his skin. The narrow outhouse crumpled into useless pieces as they drove over it.

Hagendorf angled sharply toward the river.

Toward the ravine.

He pushed down on the accelerator.

“No!” Kelly screamed.

The major let go of the roll-bar and threw himself at the chief surveyor, tore Hagendorf's right hand from the steering wheel, punched and gouged the pudgy man until he had climbed atop him. Hagendorf was sitting on the driver's chair, facing front; and Kelly was sitting on Hagendorf, facing the other way, looking directly into the smaller man's bloodshot eyes. The major used his elbow to chop at Hagendorf s left arm until the surveyor finally let go of the wheel altogether.

Unguided, the D-7 roared toward the ravine, straight for the steepest part of the bank.

Kelly hated to be brutal, but he knew the situation called for extreme measures. He punched Hagendorfs face again and again. Blood streamed out of the smaller man's nose.

Hagendorf kept trying to reach around the major and grab the untended steering wheel. He did not trade blow for blow, but concentrated only on regaining control of the bulldozer.

“Give up, dammit!” Kelly shouted.

The chief surveyor would not give up. Even though Kelly had him pinned to the seat, he struggled forward, blinking back tears and blowing bloody bubbles out of both nostrils.

Behind him, Kelly knew, the ravine was drawing closer. Any moment, they might plunge over the edge…

He punched Hagendorf in the mouth. And again. The pudgy man's lips split open. In an impossible, curious slow motion, a single tooth slid out of Hagendorfs mouth, rolled over his ruined lower lip. It came to rest on his round chin, pasted there by a sticky film of blood.

“Please, Emil! Please, give up!”

Hagendorf shook his head. No.

The dozer jolted over something. For a second, Kelly was sure they had plummeted over the ravine wall. Then the dozer rumbled on.

The major struck Hagendorf again, battering him around the ears now. And, at last, the chief surveyor slumped back against the brace behind the seat, unconscious.

Thank God. Thank you, Emil.

Kelly reached behind and grabbed the wheel. Using that to steady himself, he managed to turn around and — at the same time — keep the unconscious man from sliding off the dozer. When he had the wheel in both hands, he used his buttocks to pin the surveyor in place, then looked up.

The ravine was no more than ten yards away.

He stomped on the brake pedal.

Trying to rear up, the bulldozer lurched like a wounded horse in a bad cowboy movie and almost threw them off.

Kelly held on for both of them. He wheeled the machine away from the gorge and braked again.

They came to a shuddering, clanking halt parallel to the drop-off, two feet from the edge of the precipice. Below, the river gushed between its banks, dark and somewhat evil now that the angle of the sun denied it light.

Kelly looked once at the foaming water and the jagged rocks, looked once at the twenty-four inches of earth which separated him from death — then promptly turned his attention elsewhere. He looked back the way they had come, saw the ruined platform house and the demolished outhouse. Both would have to be rebuilt… Neither was a particularly difficult piece of work, yet he felt this was the last setback they could endure. Each minute counted — but thanks to Emil Hagendorfs wild ride, each minute would not count for enough.

Kelly looked at his watch. Almost seven o'clock. The Germans would be here in five hours. Maybe sooner.

It could not be done.

Nevertheless, you had to pretend you were going to hang on, even if you were a character in a fairy tale about death. If you stopped pretending, you were sure to die.

He climbed down from the dozer, already composing a list of jobs that might be speeded up in order to obtain workers for the rebuilding of the two structures which Hagendorf had knocked down.

“My big D!” Danny Dew shouted, running toward the dozer. “My big D was hurt!”

Major Kelly ignored Dew. He walked back toward the platform house which Emil Hagendorf had driven through. It was a jumble of broken beams and splintered boards.

Two dozen of his own men and forty or fifty Frenchmen had gathered at the wreckage and were spiritedly discussing Hagendorf's wild ride. Now, they crowded around Kelly, jabbering excitedly.

The major gave them the cold eye, then the tight lips, then the very serious frown — all to no avail. Finally, he just screamed at the top of his voice, “Shut up! Shut up!” When the laughing and jabbering ceased, he said, “What in the name of God are you idiots doing here? Why aren't you working? Why are you wasting time? What are you laughing about? This is serious!” He felt as if his insides were all rising into his skull and would soon explode out of the top of his head. And he was almost looking forward to that. “We have less than five goddamned hours! Move your asses! I'll kill any son of a bitch who isn't back to work in one minute!”

There must have been something particularly ferocious in his voice. Although he was known as a man with no talent for discipline, the workers stared at him for a brief moment, then turned and ran.

Too soon, the sunset came in a glorious splash of orange and red. The red deepened into purple.

Night fell. Kelly could almost hear the crash.

It was 9:30 before any workers were available for the reconstruction of the platform house and the outhouse which Hagendorf had knocked down. Even then, Kelly could find only four of his own men and six Frenchmen who had finished their other chores.

By ten o'clock, the damaged platform was patched enough to support the crude framework for the one-story house. Twenty minutes later, that frame was in place, except for the roof beams.

“We'll make it!” Lyle Fark told Kelly.

“No, we won't.”

“We only need another hour, at most. We'll be done half an hour before the Germans arrive — plenty of time left to change into our French clothes and hide these fatigues.”

“What if the Panzers get here early?” Major Kelly asked.

While Fark and the other men hammered more frantically than ever, Kelly rounded up eleven more workers who had completed their job assignments. They were weary, sore, stiff, bruised, and full of complaints. Nevertheless, they worked on the reconstruction of the damaged building.

The road to the east remained deserted. But the Panzers could not be more than a few miles away.

Occasionally, Major Kelly imagined that he could hear the great machines and the clattering steel treads… “Faster! Faster, faster!” he urged whenever the ghostly tanks rumbled in the back of his mind. “Faster!”

But it was a command his men had heard too often in the last few days. It no longer registered with them, had no effect. Besides, they were already working as fast as they possibly could.

At ten minutes of eleven, Lyle Fark said, “The roofs almost done. We have to put the windows in, then clean up the place. But we can do it. I told you we could do it.”

Kelly shrugged. “It doesn't matter. We're all dead anyway. The krauts will see through this in ten minutes. Or less.”

A window frame was raised to a precut hole in the prefabricated wall, nailed into place.

“You keep saying we haven't a chance,” Fark said. “If you really believe that we're doomed to fail — why have you worked us so hard to get the village done?”

“What else was there to do?” Kelly asked.

10

Major Kelly thought he looked like a genuine priest. He was wearing sturdy, well-kept black shoes with extra-thick wartime rubber soles and heels. His black trousers were worn but dignified, cut full in the legs and generously cuffed. An almost perfect match for the pants, his black cotton suit jacket was worn at the elbows but was otherwise quite impressive. The vest and clerical collar had been made especially for him, sewn by a woman in Eisenhower, and did most to confirm his image. A black felt hat with a shiny black ribbon band covered his balding head; it was creased and looked fairly old, but it was clearly not the hat of a laborer or farmer. The hat was a size too large for him and came down almost to the tops of his ears, but that only made him look more genuine: a backwoods priest, a man not much of this world.

Yesterday, Kelly had laughed at Maurice's suggestion that he play the town's ranking priest. “My French isn't good enough,” Kelly had said.

“At one time,” Maurice admitted, “it would not have passed. But in the weeks you have been here, you have recalled your schoolboy French and have learned even more. Naturally, your French would not impress one of my countrymen. He would spot you for a foreigner. But it will sound fine to General Rotenhausen, because his own command of the language is far worse than yours.”

“And if one of the other krauts speaks French?”

“Several might,” Maurice said. “But none will be fluent in it. Only the German military's elite officers are well enough educated to speak it fluently. And none of them will be in a convoy moving toward the front.”

“I don't know… ”

Maurice was adamant. “I cannot pretend to be the priest, because Rotenhausen knows me. He knows this is not my village and that I am no holy man. I must not even show my face so long as he is here. And which other of my people would you trust in such a crucial, sensitive role?”

“None,” Kelly admitted, glumly.

“Whoever plays the town priest must be able to soothe Rotenhausen and the other German officers. He must make them believe at once that they face no danger in this place, and he must do everything to dissuade them from holding a building-to-building search before they settle in for the night. I believe you can do all of this,” Maurice had said. “As head of the parish and chief resident of the rectory, you will be at the center of the German command the whole night long, where you can discover and eliminate any potential danger to your men.”

Reluctantly, Kelly had agreed that he would be the priest. But he had been sure that they were all doomed.

Now, at 11:05 on the night of July 21, shortly before the German force was scheduled to arrive, Kelly looked into the streaked mirror which hung on the wall of the town priest's bedroom, and he decided there was at least a minute chance he would pass. He did look pious and religious. And when he spoke in French, to his reflection, he could hardly believe that he had not always been like this: a man of God. Just so the Germans didn't ask for a blessing or a Mass, or even a table grace.

He turned away from the mirror and surveyed the second-floor back bedchamber of the only fully completed house in the entire village. The room was not large, but comfortable. The walls were roughly plastered, white and pleasant except for finger smudges near the door and by the head of the bed, the signs of use which Kelly's men had so meticulously applied only a few hours ago. The bed was full size, the mattress sagging in the middle, framed with a brass headboard and brass posts at the foot. Beside the bed stood a squat nightstand with a chipped enamel knob on its shallow drawer. On the stand was a washbasin and a walnut-encased heirloom clock. The big mahogany dresser stood by the room's only window, the streaked mirror rising from the back of it. The window was tightly covered by a blackout blind which had been taped to the sill. On the wall by the door, a crucifix hung over a religious calendar. The room was simple, neat, lived in.

Too bad, Kelly thought, that the whole village was not this carefully structured and detailed. But that was wishful thinking. Hell, he could even now hear hammers hammering and saws sawing as the workers tried frantically to get the last of the fake houses in shape.

Kelly stepped into the hall and let the bedroom door remain ajar. He went past the other three upstairs rooms, all larger than the one he had left but otherwise identical. At the head of the stairs, he stood in the center of a hand-woven rag rug and looked at the rectory altar: two crucifixes, a small plaster statue of the Virgin, a red satin cloth with white lace trim covering the slim pine table on which all these artifacts stood. It was an excellent touch. He even crossed himself, though he was an atheist.

The steps squeaked realistically as he went down to the first floor. Considerable effort had been expended to get the proper noise into them.

The banister along which his hand slid during his descent was worn with use, the grain sharply raised by decades of unconscious polishing. Like all the furniture in the house, the banister came from Eisenhower. Maurice had uprooted it — and other paraphernalia — from his own home, where it had been for sixty years. As payment for this extra service, The Frog wanted nothing more than every item in the unit's possession which he had not already obtained: Sergeant Tuttle's field kitchen and all the cooking utensils; the men's personal revolvers; the tents… Major Kelly had been relieved by the reasonableness of this demand, and he had readily agreed. He had been certain that, at the very least, half a dozen of his men would have to be contracted to Maurice as indentured servants for the rest of their natural lives.

Downstairs, there were more white walls, handmade rugs, religious pictures, and crucifixes. The front room off the porch contained several comfortable chairs, a bench sofa with scattered cushions, a knickknack stand full of more religious articles, a stool by the only window — the glass for which had come from Eisenhower — and a fireplace with logs and tools stacked on the hearth.

The dining room-study combination was half the size of the front room, dark and cloistered. The two narrow windows were covered with blackout blinds as were the windows elsewhere in the house, and the floor was covered by a deep maroon carpet. The furniture was heavy, and there was too much of it. The air here was stuffy. It reminded Kelly of a funeral parlor. Lately, though, everything reminded him of funeral parlors.

The downstairs bedroom was small and neat, quite like his room upstairs, except that the bed was not brass. Quite out of character for a priest, he suddenly wondered if he would ever get to put it to Lily Kain on a brass bed.

The kitchen, behind the dining room and bedroom, was large and airy, full of heavy old cabinets, a worktable, and a second dining table with four high-backed chairs.

Kelly walked over to the porcelain sink, which had also come from Maurice's house in Eisenhower, and he worked the handle of the green iron pump. On the sixth stroke, water gushed into the sink.

“Fantastic!” Lieutenant Beame said. He was dressed in coarse gray trousers and shirt with green suspenders and a dirty brown fedora worn back on his head. He was playing a deaf-mute tonight. It was a ludicrous thought. “How can you get water out of a pump when there isn't any well for it to be drawn from?” Beame had not been assigned to the building of the rectory.

“We put a six-foot pit directly under the sink,” Kelly explained, watching the last of the short burst of water as it swirled down the drain. The drain fed into a second pit so that the dirty water would not mix with the clean. “Then we lined the pit with concrete, put a tin lid on top, and ran the pump line into the pit.”

“And filled the pit with clean river-water,” Beame said, smiling appreciatively at Kelly's ingenuity. “But what if all the Germans want to wash up? Is there enough water in this pit to draw baths for a dozen officers?”

“No,” Kelly said. “But we constructed a crawl space under the house so a man could keep check on the water supply and add to it as it's depleted.”

“Who?”

“Lyle Fark's handling that.”

“Good man,” Beame said. He looked around the kitchen, nodding happily. “We're going to fool them. I know we are, sir.”

Beame seemed almost normal. He certainly was not indulging in a lover's daydream right now. “What's happened to you?” Kelly asked. “Did you decide to forget about Nathalie?”

Beame frowned. “No. But I've realized that this hoax isn't going to work unless we put our hearts into it. And if the hoax doesn't work, I'm dead. And if I'm dead, I can't ever have Nathalie.”

“Wonderful!” Major Kelly said, clapping his hands in delight. “Now you're talking sense. You sound just like me.”

“And we will fool the krauts,” Beame said. “I feel it in my bones.”

“I'd feel better if you felt it in your brain,” Kelly said.

“We will fool them.”

“If we can maneuver General Rotenhausen into choosing the rectory for his headquarters,” Kelly said.

“We can do that.”

“And if we can keep the Germans from looking into any of the other buildings except the finished ones — rectory, church, convent foyer, village store… ”

“You'll do it, sir. You'll outfox them.”

Kelly hoped the lieutenant was right. If a German went into one of the other buildings, then the whole scheme would come crashing down around their heads. If the Church's immunity from search and seizure did not protect them tonight, nothing would. And Kelly would never get to put it to Lily Kain on a brass bed. Or on anything at all. “I don't think we have a chance, Beame.”

“I pray we do,” Beame said. “I pray to God you're wrong.”

“Don't pray,” Kelly said, running a finger around his tight clerical collar. “I'm an atheist.”

“This is no time to be an atheist,” Beame said, leaning on the kitchen table.

“It's the best time to be an atheist,” Kelly said. “If you pray, you get the idea someone's listening. When you get the idea someone's listening, you get the idea someone cares. And when you think someone cares, you're soon sure that your prayers will be answered. And when you think God is going to answer your prayers, you get careless. And some kraut blows your head off.”

While Major Kelly was putting on his ecclesiastical suit and while the men were finishing the last few jobs that would make the false community complete, Lieutenant Slade secreted himself in a dense clump of underbrush on the edge of the forest. He settled down to wait for the Panzers. He was not supposed to be in this place at this time. According to Kelly's master plan, he should be spending the night with three other men in one of the false houses. But Slade was not going to play their game anymore. He had plans of his own…

As he lay there, his thoughts drifted and, though he did not want to think about it, went inevitably to the disastrous assassination attempt he had made on Kelly just last night.

Christ, what a mess!

When he had collided with the major, his heart had nearly stopped. Then, in his frenzy to escape unidentified, he had crashed headlong into that oak, sustaining one of the four worst injuries of the night. Turning from the tree, certain that Kelly was reaching for him, he had taken only a few steps when his ankles caught in a ropy vine, and he fell full length into those milkweed plants. Several swollen pods had burst, spewing thousands of sticky seeds all of which were topped by puffs of airy cotton for the wind to catch and blow away. By the time he had stumbled erect, the milkweed fluff had sheathed his head, filling the eye holes in the potato sack, and totally blinding him. Panicked, he slapped at the stuff, not fully aware of what it was. Behind him, Kelly shouted, so Slade ran again. And that damned branch had slammed across his throat and nearly knocked him to his knees. That was the second of the four worst blows. He felt as if he were being throttled: his ears rang; his tongue popped out of his mouth; and his eyes watered like hydrants. That might even have put an end to his flight if Kelly had not shouted again and reminded him of his danger. Pushing away from the tree — well, he had fallen over that treacherous projection of limestone and rolled down that hill into the blackberry bushes, where he had become tangled in thorny vines. He imagined he heard Kelly again, and he pulled loose of the brambles, turned, and ran. He went some distance before he fell into a lovely half-acre pond in a moody sylvan setting… Sodden, shivering, spitting mud and pond scum, he got up and banged his head into an overhanging limestone shelf. That was the third of his four worst injuries of the night. When he eventually crawled out onto the shore, he was so relieved to be done running, so shattered, prostrate, demoralized, and out of gear that he flung himself flat on his back — and cracked his head on a stone as large as a pony. That was the fourth of his four worst injuries. After that, things got better. In two hours, he reckoned his way out of the forest and back to his tent. There, stripping out of his muddy, bloody, shredded clothes, dropping his disheveled burlap mask into one of his boots, he collapsed on his cot and slept like a dead man.

This morning, upon waking, he had destroyed the burlap mask.

He realized now that he had been thinking like a coward. He should not hide behind a mask when he murdered the major. The act should be open and straightforward. Later, when he won his medals, no one would be able to say he had been devious. He was not just a modern Brutus. He was a hero!

Furthermore, Slade now realized that murdering Kelly yesterday would have been strategically foolish and premature. He had no guarantee that the other men in the unit would fall in behind him and fight the krauts once the major was out of the way. Most of these bastards were as cowardly as Kelly was. They would have insisted on finishing the fake community and trying the hoax without Kelly.

A mosquito buzzed around Slade's head. He crushed it against his cheek, and wiped his bloodied hand on a patch of thick grass.

Out in the phony village, someone risked another lantern in order to have light to work by.

Slade leaned back against a tree trunk and thought about his new plan. It was much better than the old plan… He would wait here in the woods until the Germans had settled in for the night. If they didn't see through the hoax at once, he would bide his time until they had posted guards and gone to sleep. Then he would come out of the woods and thoroughly reconnoiter the village. He would learn the position of each sentry, the placement of the main body of troops. He would formulate a plan of attack. And only when that was done would he murder Major Kelly. Then, when the men saw that their situation was desperate, when they had no choice but to strike at the krauts as he ordered — or let him strike alone and less efficiently — they would fall into line. A commando team would slip into the rectory and slit the officers' throats while they slept. Next, they would quietly remove all the sentries. And next… well, anything could happen then. But whatever happened, they would be real heroes.

“We'll fool them,” Beame insisted. He pointed at the sink, pumps, and cabinets. “Who'd ever suspect this was all thrown together in four days?”

Father Picard, nee Major Walter Kelly, shrugged. He walked over to the kitchen hallway. “I'm giving the town one last inspection. Want to come?” He hoped Beame did not want to come, for the lieutenant's optimism made him uneasy.

“Sure,” Beame said.

“It's almost eleven-thirty. The Germans will be here soon. Let's go.”

Beame extinguished the kerosene lamp on the table by the front door.

Outside, they crossed the porch, went down the four steps to the brief lawn, which, much abused during the construction, was the least convincing thing about the rectory. The night was muggy and overcast. The crickets were silent.

The rectory stood on the corner of the bridge road and B Street. B Street was one of the two north-south lanes Danny Dew had made with his D-7 dozer, and it was the farthest east of the two. A Street, sister to B, also paralleled the river but was one block closer to the bridge. The two-lane bridge road had become their main street, and diagonally across it from the rectory stood the enormous, three-story, weathered gray convent. To the west side of the house, across the narrow B Street, was the quaint little town church.

Kelly and Beame stood in the middle of the bridge road and looked east toward the break in the trees where the tanks would pass within the hour. The village continued one block in that direction. On the north side as one looked eastward, there were four single-story houses with meager lawns between them, church-owned homes for deaf-mutes. All of the houses were the same inside — hollow, gutted, phony — but differentiated externally by minor details: the size of the porches, condition of the paint, shape of the windows. Though the houses were the same in their dimensions, and though all of their windows were made lightless by identical sets of blackout blinds, they did look like separately conceived and constructed dwellings. On the south side of the block, there was only the rectory, rectory lawn, and an outhouse tucked in between two big elms.

The village extended two blocks to the west along the bridge road. The whole north side of the first block beyond the rectory was occupied by the massive convent and its board-fenced yard. Across the street from the convent, again commanding a full block, was the church and churchyard. Then, over beyond A Street and the river, there were a couple of houses and the village store.

Kelly switched on his flashlight and walked north on B Street.

“It looks so real, doesn't it?” Beame asked, awestricken.

“Pray the krauts think so,” Major Kelly said.

“I thought you told me not to pray.”

“That's right,” Kelly said. “I almost forgot.”

B Street ran only two blocks north-south, half the length of its sister, A Street. The northern block, above the bridge road, was faced with a sixty-foot barrackslike nunnery and a stone well on the east, and with the convent and convent yard fence on the west. Everything was nice and tidy.

From B, they entered Y Street. This was the northernmost of the town's three east-west roads, parallel to the bridge road. It ran one block east, with nothing but two church-owned houses on each side, their outhouses, scattered elms. Across Y Street, facing the mouth of B, stood a fake two-story house in ill-repair.

“Why didn't you give the streets French names?” Beame asked. “Won't the Germans think it's odd — naming streets after letters of the alphabet?”

Kelly sighed, tugged at his collar. “The letters are for our benefit in a crisis. The krauts won't expect a town this small to have formal street names.”

Turning west, they followed Y Street towards the river. On their left was the convent. On the right, there was only open lawn until they reached a two-story fake house at the end of the block. This one was also poorly maintained. Actually, every two-story structure in the village was ugly and decaying — except for the rectory. They did not want Rotenhausen to take a fancy to some building which had no floors inside and no inner walls or furniture… The rectory had to outshine all the others, make a quick and obvious impression.

The second block of Y ended at A Street, which was four blocks long and ran north-south. The first block contained a nunnery and two houses. Kelly shined the flashlight over these, then turned south.

“One thing bothers me,” Beame said.

“What's that?”

“Why hasn't the bridge been bombed since we put it up?”

“Well… the Allies think they've already knocked it out with that B-17,” Major Kelly said. “And the Stukas won't touch it now that they know the Wehrmacht wants to use it.”

Beame frowned. “If the German air force knows the Wehrmacht wants to use the bridge and is cooperating by not bombing us — won't it also have told the convoy to expect to find us here?”

“Maybe not,” Kelly said. “There's something strange about the Stuka attacks.”

“Strange, sir?”

“Remember,” Kelly said, “they never bombed us, just the bridge. And they always knew when we'd rebuilt it. I don't know what's going on here, but it isn't all jake.”

“Jake who?” Beame asked.

“Jake nobody. Just jake.”

“He doesn't have a last name?” Beame asked, puzzled.

“Jake is an expression,” Major Kelly said. “I meant that everything about those Stukas is somehow not right. It's all false.”

“Oh,” Beame said. “I see. It's not jake.”

“Just like General Blade isn't all jake,” Kelly said. “At first, I thought he sent us here because he was senile. Lately, I've realized there's got to be more to it than that. I don't know what, though. I wish I did.”

The next block of A Street contained a stone well, a sixty-by-forty-foot school for the deaf and, on the east, the fourth wall of the convent yard fence which several workmen were still nailing in place.

And then they reached the bridge road again. To the east was the church and rectory. One block to the west was the bridge. Only three structures fronted the bridge road on that last block: two houses and the church-owned store in which the products and handicrafts of the deaf-mutes were sold to tourists and those in nearby villages. The store was fully completed and stocked with quilts, canned goods, jewelry, clothing, carpentry, and other items which had been taken from Eisenhower and which would be foisted on the Germans as produce of the deaf-mutes if any krauts wandered into the place.

The third block of A, the first south of the bridge road, was faced by two one-story houses on the west. Beneath the first of these was the hospital bunker in which Tooley, Kowalski, Liverwright, and Emil Hagendorf would pass the tense night. Hagendorf would pass the tense night as a prisoner. They had purchased a great deal of wine from Maurice to keep Hagendorf drunk and docile.

On the other side of the block was the churchyard. It was dark and quiet. Kelly could see half a dozen rounded tombstones and the vague outlines of others lying in the deeper shadows. Altogether, Maurice had provided forty-five grave markers which he had borrowed from church and family plots in and around Eisenhower. These had all been set in fresh concrete, over nonexistent graves. More than anything else that had been done, these gave the town a past, an illusion of age and endurance. When Kelly directed the flashlight beam in among them, the sandstone and granite markers gleamed and rose up in chalky skirts from the pools of blue-black shadows on the ground.

The final block of A Street, the southwest corner of the town, held platform houses, sheds, and outhouses. Kelly played his light back there, and he suddenly thought that he and Beame seemed like two watchmen examining a movie lot on their late rounds. They went no farther south.

Z Street was the third east-west lane, south of and parallel to the bridge road and the northernmost Y Street. Z was two blocks long, like Y. On its south side rose a school for normal and deaf-mute children, a stone well, several platform houses built together over what had once been the unit's main bunker. On the north side of Z, the churchyard occupied the first block. The second block contained an open-air shrine to the Virgin Mary, complete with statue and encircling flagstone walkway. Then came three single-story dwellings, all shabby, all with broken-down porches, one with a slightly sagging roof.

“I've been thinking about Blade,” Beame said, stopping in the middle of the street. “About his not being all jake. Do you think his being involved in the black market has anything to do with our being sent here?”

Kelly stopped and turned. “Blade's in the black market? How do you know?”

“I don't know,” the lieutenant said. “But when we were in Britain waiting for D-Day, I heard rumors. I got friendly with junior officers on Blade's staff.”

“And they said he dealt in the black market?”

“Implied. They implied it.”

Kelly thought about that a moment, then shrugged. “I didn't think Blade was smart enough to play that game. But even if he is, what could that have to do with our being sent here?”

“Nothing, I guess. It was just a thought.”

They turned from Z into B Street, into the only block they had not yet inspected. On their left was the churchyard and church. On the right was a one-story house with a ratty front lawn, a fence running eastward, and then the rectory and the rectory lawn.

“Back to Square One,” Kelly said.

Kelly was impressed with himself and his men, even if all of this had been for nothing, even if they were doomed. In little more than four days, they had constructed the shells of twenty-five single-story and three two-story houses. They had built one two-story house complete: the rectory. The thirty-foot convent walls had been nailed up, as had the high board fence that surrounded that whole block, and the convent's entrance foyer had been fully finished to provide a place for the German general to pay his respects if he should take it in his head to do so. The shells of two large schools and two nunneries had been thrown up. The church had been built in full, except for the bell tower, which had no stairs or bell… and except for the pews which had been borrowed from a country church near Eisenhower. The forty-by-twenty-foot town store had been finished inside and out. They had built another house which Hagendorf had bulldozed to the ground. In addition, they had put up three stone wells, eighteen sheds, twenty-eight outhouses… There were three stables tucked near the woods, horses in each. In some ways, of course, the town was atypical of a French country village. There were no barns in sight, for one thing. And there were no structures made completely of stone. But this was, after all, supposed to be mainly a Catholic retreat, a church facility; the Germans could not expect it to look like just any other town. All in all, the accomplishment was enormous, and the patina of reality just thick enough to hoax the Germans. Though, naturally, the Germans would not be hoaxed. They would see through it sometime before dawn. They would kill everyone. Even though he knew he was dead, Major Kelly, alias Father Picard, was impressed with himself and his men.

“It's perfect,” Beame said.

“So long as no one goes inside an unfinished building. If anyone does—”

He stopped in midsentence as a sixteen-year-old French boy, Maurice's nephew, roared out of the night on a stolen German motorcycle. The boy came down the bridge road from the east, past the fake houses, his hair streaming in the wind. He had been standing watch on the road, and now there was no doubt what he was shouting above the cycle's chattering engine. “They come! Germans! They come!”

Someone screamed in terror.

Only after the scream died away did Kelly realize it was his own. Get hold of yourself, he thought. It's a fairy tale. Face up to your role. There isn't anything else for you to do.

11

The German convoy's advance motorcycle escort shot out of the trees to the east, doing better than forty miles an hour, heading straight for Major Kelly and the people behind him. It slewed to the right in a puff of dust and gravel, turned broadside in the road, and came to a tire-scorching stop in a cloud of blue smoke. The young Wehrmacht soldier driving the cycle and the second man in the sidecar looked stupidly at each other, brows beetled under their pot helmets. They slowly examined the houses and the crowd of French villagers, priests, and nuns which filled the lane only twenty feet ahead.

Kelly almost began to pray, cracked his knuckles instead.

A few of Kelly's people waved. Most remained still and silent, uncommitted to this violent presence.

The soldier in the sidecar pulled a map from between his legs, unfolded it in the light of a hand torch which the driver held for him. A few lanterns burned by the church and rectory, but not enough to help the two Germans. The soldier traced their route with one thick finger on the map, talking to the cyclist as he did so. The driver nodded impatiently and pointed to the crowd in front of them as if to say that the senses could not be denied and the map, therefore, must be all wrong. There was a town by the river, despite what the cartographers had drawn.

We're dead, Kelly thought. One of them will be unable to believe the map makers were wrong. That's the German way. Believe the printed word before you believe what the eye shows…

Suddenly, behind the motorcycle, dwarfing it and the houses on the north side of the bridge road, a Panzer jerked forward from the deep forest shadows like a prehistoric sawtoothed reptile smashing its way out of an egg. The wicked black muzzle hole came first, a round mouth in the vaguely illuminated neck of the barrel, a death-spitting orifice that riveted every man's eye. Then came the churning treads, great clattering, banging bands of pitted, bluntly bladed steel that ripped up the broken macadam roadbed and tossed it out behind in fist-sized chunks. Heavy, downsloped tread fenders, thickly coated with mud, shielded most of the tracks from sight but did nothing to soften the terrifying sound of them. The brutally insistent parallel treads snapped and crunched the ground beneath them as a beast might grind up a man's fragile bones in its teeth. Abruptly, the entire tank hove into view: an armadillolike bow with a dragon's middle and stern, scaly and muddy, covered with curious protuberances, green-gray, scarred. The side-hung head lamps had been fitted with blackout caps, permitting only a thin slot of light to lance out from the bottom half of the lenses; the effect was that of a dragon with its eyes slitted while cautiously stalking prey.

Behind the first behemoth came a second. It broke through the trees, growling close at the tail of the leader, eyes slitted too, adding to the cacophony of tread and engines.

As Kelly's eyes adjusted to the scene, he could make out a long line of narrow, blackout headlights stretching to the top of the eastward rise and out of sight. We're all dead, Kelly thought. Mashed. Crushed. All destroyed.

The first Panzer slowed down. Its whirling tracks stuttered noisily. The heavy-duty engines screamed down the musical scale and settled into a deep-throated, unmusical rumble as the tank halted with much shuddering and rattling behind the two soldiers on the motorcycle. Thin white smoke rose lazily from the well-meshed gears inside the tread band, drifted eastward.

Behind the first tank, the second tank stopped as well, rocking back and forth for a few seconds as its frame worked against its tracks. Along the sloping highway, out to the undefined crest of the dark hillside, the rest of the convoy came to a standstill.

Major Kelly, or Father Picard as he must now be, was out in front of the other villagers by a full yard. He looked up at the shelved front of the Panzer and wondered what in hell he was doing here. They were all dead. Crushed. Mashed. And worse. Why in the name of the God he didn't believe in — why had they not run away?

And then he remembered why. They were behind German lines. There was nowhere for them to run.

On the rectory steps, Lieutenant Beame looked from the tanks to the convent where Nathalie was standing in a nun's habit. He was suddenly, incredibly terrified of losing her. Why had he let Maurice put him off? Why hadn't he knocked that fat old frog on his ass and taken Nathalie? Why hadn't he reacted to Maurice like a man? This was the perfect woman. Nathalie was what he had always dreamed about — and more. They were perfect for each other both spiritually and, he was somehow certain, sexually. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted the other women of his dreams — Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, Dorothy Lamour, Ann Sheridan, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr, Jane Russell, Esther Williams, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, cute little Mary Astor, the Andrews Sisters whom he had wanted to assault all at the same time, Bonita Granville, Gene Tierney… Nathalie was more desirable than all of those women put together. And now he had lost her. His optimism had vanished in the face of the German power; and he felt certain that he would never see the sun rise.

Standing on the convent steps in her nun's habit, Lily Kain reacted to the Panzers much as Beame had done. She imagined that she could smell death in the muggy night air. She wished Kelly could have found the time to put it to her today. Maybe the sight of these huge war machines would have been easier to take if she had had it put to her recently. Sighing, she raised both hands and waved at the Germans in order to keep from throwing up her nun's habit and diddling herself.

The officer commanding the first Panzer, General Adolph Rotenhausen, clambered out of the hatch and down the side of his tank, stood for a moment on the muddy tread fender. He was a tall, whiplike man, not an ounce overweight. His face was square and harsh, though the features were in no way brutish. There was aristocracy in his heritage; it showed in his carriage and in his thin-lipped smile. His hair was cut close to his head, a white-blond cap that caught the light from the scattered lanterns and gleamed with it. He jumped from the fender and walked swiftly toward Major Kelly.