Hanging on

1

Dawn tinted the horizon even as Major Kelly and Vito Angelli were tying up the loose ends of the operation. And on his way back to the rectory, the major was forced to lie low while a Wehrmacht squad marched up and down St. Ignatius changing the sentries at the intersections. By the time he reached the churchyard, Kelly knew it was too light for him to return to his room by way of the rose lattice and the rear window. Even if Rotenhausen and Beckmann were not up yet — and they surely were — the chances of some guard on a nearby street spotting him on his climb to the porch roof were too great to be ignored.

The bold approach was called for.

Nearly half an hour after dawn, he entered the back of the church. He hurried through the sacristy, up onto the altar platform, down into the auditorium, and out the front door. He winced as the rain struck him anew. He paused only a second at the top of the church steps, then went down to the street.

The Wehrmacht sentry on duty at B Street and the bridge road was wearing a green rain slicker and a disgusted look. He hunched his shoulders against the rain and paraded back and forth, putting as little into the duty as he could. He gave Kelly a brief smile but did not stop him, for he had just been posted and did not know that the priest had never passed from the rectory to the church.

Kelly went up the porch steps, crossed the porch, went through the front door with the rain still stinging his back. In the rectory foyer, rivulets of water streamed from him onto the floorboards.

General Adolph Rotenhausen was just then coming down the steps from the second floor, tamping tobacco into his pipe. “Father Picard! Where have you been at this hour, in this terrible weather?”

“At the church, General,” Kelly said.

“Oh, of course,” Rotenhausen said. “I suppose you have to get ready for Mass each morning.”

“For what?” Kelly asked.

“Mass, of course,” Rotenhausen said.

Before Kelly could respond, the general's aides appeared at the top of the steps with the officer's belongings, which they brought down and took outside into the morning rain.

Rotenhausen came to the open door, looked across the porch at the raindrops bouncing on the street. “Miserable day for travel.” He looked at his watch. “But Standarten-führer Beckmann was out there an hour ago… Sometimes, I think those madmen deserve the world.” He glanced at Kelly and, for the first time, saw how wet the priest was. “You couldn't be so drenched just from crossing the street, Father!”

“Uh… I went for a walk,” Kelly said.

“In the rain?”

“Rain is God's creation,” Kelly improvised. “It is refreshing.”

Rotenhausen looked at Kelly's dripping suit, shook his head. He turned and continued to watch the rain slash in sheets across the bridge road.

Also watching the storm, Kelly thought of Lily's wet breasts. For a moment, he was warm and happy… and then he realized he could not afford to love her. He had almost made a drastic mistake.

Rotenhausen puffed on his pipe.

Thunder rolled across the sky. Behind the steady drumming of the rain was the dinosaurian roar of Panzer engines as the convoy prepared to pull out.

“We don't have to worry about Allied bombers today,” Rotenhausen said.

As he spoke, his aide ran up onto the porch. The man took a folded slicker from under his own raincoat, shook it out, and held it up for his chief. The general slipped his arms into the plastic sleeves and buttoned up, turned his collar high. He flipped his pipe upside down and tapped it against the door frame. Ashes fell on the wet porch floor.

“Good luck at the front, sir,” Major Kelly said.

“Thank you, Father. You have been most gracious.”

“Not at all.” Which was true.

Rotenhausen smiled, nodded, and turned away. He and his aide went down the steps and east along the bridge road to the first tank in the long convoy.

The rain continued to fall.

A flash of lightning made shadows jump across the veranda floor.

The first tank, Rotenhausen's tank, lurched into the middle of the road, tracks churning up mud and gravel, and started toward the bridge two and a half blocks away.

Still, no alarm had been raised at the west end. Bobo Remlock had not yet arrived. Maybe the Panzers would all get across before Old Blood and Guts made the far side.

Kelly left the front door. He hurried through the deserted house, passed through the kitchen and out onto the rear lawn.

The cold rain hit him again, but he hardly noticed. He was too worried about getting his head blown off to be concerned also about catching a cold. His baggy trousers were sopping wet and hung on him like a pair of old-fashioned beach pantaloons for men.

He passed through the hidden gate in the fence, and ran between two fake houses in which his men huddled fearfully. He crossed B Street, ran the length of the cemetery, and crossed A Street to the rear of the village store.

Lieutenant Beame was watching for him and threw down a rope from the store roof. Kelly took hold of the rope, tested it, then climbed the fifteen feet of vertical wall to join the lieutenant in his observation post.

Beame was not alone, though he should have been. Lily was there, too, braless beneath her habit. Pullit and Nathalie were behind Lily. Maurice was there, watching over his daughter, and Angelli was watching over Pullit. Danny Dew was sitting by the T-plunger with a rifle over his knees.

“We couldn't let you face this alone,” Angelli said.

“Of course not,” Kelly said.

“We had to share the danger with you.”

“What else?” Kelly asked. “Just keep down. Don't stand up, or someone on the street will see you.”

“No sign of Old Blood and Guts,” Beame said when Kelly knelt beside him.

The village store was the best observation post for the coming showdown. It was the only structure in St. Ignatius with a flat roof — not because French country shops had flat roofs, but because they had simply run out of the necessary beams and shingles and had been unable to give the place anything but a flat roof. Furthermore, the store faced the bridge road, where all the action, if there were any, would transpire; and it was close enough to the bridge to allow them to establish the detonator here.

Beside Beame, next to Danny Dew, the heavy T-plunger stood on the wet wood, waiting for its crossbar to be stroked down and the dynamite touched off beneath the nine-hundred-foot span.

And now they were prepared to do just that.

Kelly turned to Maurice. “You shouldn't be up here. You should be on the other side, waiting for Remlock.”

Maurice hesitated, looked at Nathalie, then at Beame. “You will see that they are kept apart?”

“Yes, yes,” Kelly said, impatiently.

“Very well.” Maurice went down the rope ladder and disappeared.

Kelly wiped a hand over his face and looked east along the bridge road. Rotenhausen's convoy was pouring into the far end of the town. Already, the first Panzer was halfway past the convent, less than a block from then: position and little more than a block from the bridge. Behind the first Panzer was another, and another — then two long-barreled Jagdpanthers, two heavily armored cars with 75 mm cannons, then a motorcycle with sidecar which was darting in and out of the convoy, working its way to the front where it belonged. Rotenhausen was starting slowly, but he would reach the bridge in less than two minutes.

Kelly saw that they would have to blow the span even if Bobo Remlock did not show up. If they took a chance and let Rotenhausen start across, and if Remlock showed up when some of the German tanks were already on the other side, there would be no way to avoid a battle that would level St. Ignatius — and kill everyone who pretended to live there.

He stooped low on the roof, trying not to be seen, and he placed both hands on the T-plunger.

“Already?” Lily asked.

He nodded.

“Just a minute, then.” She took a rifle from beneath her voluminous habit. “I thought we all ought to be armed, if it comes down to that.”

“You're going to fight tanks with rifles?” Kelly asked.

“Better than fighting them with rocks,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“I don't love you, Kelly.”

He kissed her, quickly. “I don't love you.”

To the east, the advance motorcycle escort weaved around the two leading tanks and shot out in front of the convoy with a loud growl. As Rotenhausen's Panzer churned by the last of the churchyard toward the A Street intersection, the motorcycle flashed past Kelly and the others, went over the bridge approach, and accelerated toward the west bank.

Over there, six German soldiers armed with automatic rifles stood guard over the farside approach. The cycle with its two Wehrmacht soldiers sped out of the bridge and blurred past them, roared toward the bend in the road — and braked suddenly when the first of General Bobo Remlock's tanks, a British Cromwell, hove into view, cruising at top speed.

“Here we go!” Danny Dew said, lying flat on his stomach and bringing his rifle up where he could use it.

Rotenhausen's Panzer, the first in the German convoy, was through the A-Street intersection and on the approach to the bridge when the general saw the enemy tank. The Panzer bit into the cracked macadam and held on, chugging to a stop at the brink of the bridge, at the corner of the village store. Looking over the edge of the roof, Kelly and the others could see the top of Adolph Rotenhausen's head just four feet below.

The rest of the German convoy slowed and stopped.

Even while Rotenhausen's tank was jerking to a standstill, Kelly looked westward again. Only a few seconds had passed since the cycle had taken the lead in the German line and zoomed across the bridge, though Kelly could have sworn it was more like two or three hours. Over there, the motorcycle was still bearing down on the cruising Cromwell and trying to come to a full stop on the wet pavement. Abruptly, the front wheel came up. The cycle rose like a dancing bear, then toppled onto its side. The monstrous, British-made tank slowed a bit, though not much, and ran right over the screaming Wehrmacht cyclists, grinding them into the mud.

Nathalie cried out.

“Sadistic bastard,” Lily hissed, staring at the Cromwell as if she could vaporize it with a look of pure hatred.

“One guess who's commanding the Cromwell,” Beame said.

“Old Blood and Guts,” Kelly said.

“Yeah. Big Tex.”

“The Last of the Two-Fisted Cowboys.”

“The Big Ball of Barbed Wire himself.”

“The Latter-Day Sam Houston,” Kelly said.

“Yeah. The Fighting General.”

“Old Shit for Brains,” Kelly said. “No doubt about it.” He could not understand how he could go on like this with Beame. He had never been so terrified in his life. And he had a great many other terrors to stack this one up against.

The six German riflemen on the far side turned and ran when the Cromwell crushed the cyclists and kept on coming. They were halfway back across the bridge now, every one of them a religious man no matter what his beliefs had been a few minutes ago.

Behind the Cromwell, other Allied tanks loomed out of the curtain of gray rain: several Shermans, two British M-10s, another Cromwell, an armored car with twin cannon… Some of these left the road and deployed southward, all turning to face across the ravine, mammoth guns trained on the village and on the part of the German convoy which they might be able to reach. The lead Cromwell and several other tanks remained on the road and stopped at the farside bridge approach, bottling it up.

“Massah Kelly,” Danny Dew said, “I do wish I was back in Georgia. Even dat sorrowful ol' place do seem better than this.”

It was an almost classic military problem. The Germans held the east bank of the river. The Allies held the west bank. And no one controlled the bridge between.

The showdown.

“If we get out of this,” Beame whispered to Kelly. “I'm not going to take any of Maurice's guff. I'm going to ask Nathalie to marry me.”

“He'll eat you alive,” Kelly said.

“Once, he would have. Not now.”

“Good luck.”

“I won't need it,” Beame said. “I know what I want now. Just so I live to have it.”

The wind gusted across the roof, stirred the nuns' habits, pummeled them with thousands of tiny, watery fists.

To the south of the bridge on the other side of the gorge, one of the dark-brown M-10s elevated its blackened cannon to full boost. Kelly watched this without fully grasping the implications of the movement. A second later, one shell slammed out across the river. Just one. None of the other tanks opened fire, and the M-10 did not immediately follow through with a second round. The long shot arced high over the river and fell squarely into the building which was next to the store on A Street. The blast was a gigantic gong, then a compact ball of fire, and finally a violent wave of force that flung Kelly, Beame, and the others flat on their faces, even though they had already been kneeling. The armed T-plunger tipped over without setting off the dynamite under the bridge.

The house which had taken the shell was chewed into toothpicks and spewed in all directions. The burning floor collapsed down into the hospital bunker where Tooley, Liverwright, Hagendorf, and Kowalski did not have a chance. They probably did not even have time to look up and see it tumbling in on them, Kelly thought. Just a great noise, heat, a flash of pain, and endless darkness.

“No,” Beame said. “No, no, no!” He stared in horror at the flames which licked up from the bottom of the hospital bunker. A jug of alcohol burst; blue flames spurted briefly skyward, dropped away.

Nathalie was crying, crossing herself, praying.

Lily was cursing the M-10 and giving it the same look of loathing she had directed against the Cromwell.

Major Kelly's first thoughts were insane. First, he decided that Hagendorf had at least been released from a world of chaos by the ultimate chaotic event. And Tooley would not have to witness any more violence. And Liverwright did not have to die slowly now; he was finished in an instant. And most insanely of all — Kowalski had been released from the compulsion to predict a future which he was powerless to change. It was even a bit funny… Kowalski had forecast every violent event which had plagued them — except his own demise. What good was it to see the future if you could not see and avoid the source of your own death? And if a genuine fortune-teller could not avoid his own grave, what chance did an ordinary, balding, middle-aged slob have of living to celebrate his next birthday?

Kelly began to cry.

He did not know if he were crying for the dead men or for himself. It did not matter very much.

Angelli and Pullit were also crying, comforting each other, hugging. Kelly did not bother to go over and separate them.

Without warning, the second shell from the M-10 plowed into the side of the gorge just short of the village store. The earth leaped up like a bronco under the buildings. Inside the store, canned goods and other merchandise fell from the shelves in a series of tinny explosions.

“Hey!” Beame said. “Hey, they're after us — not the Germans! They must think that we're up here spotting for the kraut artillery!”

“Nuns, spotting for the kraut artillery?” Kelly asked.

But he saw the M-10's cannon elevate a couple of degrees more and line up a new trajectory. The third shot would get them as surely as the first had accidentally slaughtered Tooley, Liverwright, Hagendorf, and Kowalski.

“Jesus Fucking Christ!” Kelly screamed, surely loud enough to be heard over the Panzer engines in the street below. He shoved clumsily to his feet and. turned toward the T-plunger, took a single step, and was knocked to his knees by a tiny snapping sound off to his right. He looked down at his arm and saw blood running over his clerical suit. He had been shot.

But by whom?

Then he saw Lieutenant Slade coming onto the roof.

2

All night long, Lieutenant Slade had prowled the fake town looking for Major Kelly. When he had first lost the bastard after following him and Tooley from the convent to the west side of A Street, Slade had been sure he would pick up the trail in no time. But minutes and then hours passed, and Kelly was nowhere to be found. And the longer

Slade took to find him, the less chance there was that the coup could be pulled off and the Germans defeated by clever commando tactics.

Where was Kelly hiding?

Slade raced from one end of St. Ignatius to the other, looked in all the buildings, did everything but pry under the rocks. He never thought to look down in the gorge, out in the middle of the river, or up under the bridge, because he could not have conceived of Major Kelly doing anything as dangerous and brave as wiring the bridge with explosives.

Then, just minutes ago, he had been standing in the sacristy doorway at the back of the small church, staring out at the graveyard and trying to think if he had forgotten to look anywhere. To his great surprise, Kelly had come bounding down one of the aisles between the tombstones, wearing a muddy clerical suit. He had crossed A Street and gone up to the roof of the village store, leaving a convenient rope ladder dangling behind him.

Slade knew there was no longer any chance of killing Kelly and organizing the men into commando groups. He was going to have to settle for just the first half of his plan. Perhaps, after he had murdered the major and the Panzers had gone, he could shape the men into killer squads and prepare them to do battle with any other German force that happened through this way.

After Maurice Jobert came down from the store roof and disappeared into the ravine, Slade hurried across the churchyard and over to the west side of A Street. He reached the back of the village store just as a shell slammed into the hospital bunker on his left. He was thrown to the ground, knocked to the verge of unconciousness.

When he finally got to his feet, he stared across the gorge and saw the Allied tanks for the first time. He did not understand how they could have arrived at this most propitious moment, but he did not stop to wonder about them. If the Allies were going to recapture this part of France today, it was more important than ever that he kill Major Kelly. When the liberation was completed, Slade wanted to be able to prove to the conquering troops and to all the American people and not least of all to his mother that he had done everything within his power to wreck Major Kelly's cowardly plans.

He went quickly up the ladder to the roof, stepped onto the slippery pine planks. Kelly was immediately in front of him, running across the roof. Slade pointed his.45-caliber revolver and pulled the trigger.

3

Major Kelly was surprised that the revolver had made so little noise. Then he realized that the Panzer engines and the echoes of the exploding shell had blanketed the shot. And then he realized that it did not matter if the krauts heard the shot — because whether or not they heard it, he was dead.

Slade sighted in on him, holding the big gun in both hands as he lined up the second shot.

Looking into the muzzle, Kelly tried to think of brass beds.

“Major!” Beame shouted.

Before Kelly could tell the lieutenant that he was too late, Beame tackled Slade from the side. The two lieutenants went down hard enough to shake the hastily laid roof, and rolled over and over as they punched at each other. The gun clattered away from them.

“Little Snot!” Lily cried, and threw herself into the melee.

Suddenly, Kelly remembered the M-10 tank which had been preparing to fire a third round. He got off his knees and staggered over to the T-plunger. He turned it over, set it upright. Without checking to see if both copper wires were still wound to their terminals, he jammed the crossbar down.

The gorge filled with two simultaneous cracks! and then a pair of duller but more fundamental whumps! that chattered back from the low sky.

The bridge wrenched sideways on its moorings, steel squealing like pigs at the heading block. The anchor plates on both the nearside and the farside approaches buckled and popped loose. They flew into the air and rolled end for end, catching the morning sunlight. Then they fell like leaden birds back to the earth. One of the piers gave way.

The concrete had been shattered by the dynamite, and now the pieces separated and fell away in different directions. They made big splashes in the river.

The bulk of the bridge shifted lazily westward toward the remaining pier, overpressured that weakened pillar, and broke it down into a dozen irregular slabs.

Beame knelt at Kelly's right side. “She's going down!” he cried, oblivious of his split and bloody lip.

Lily knelt on the left. “You okay?”

Kelly was holding his wounded arm. “Fine. Slade?”

“Knocked him out,” Lily said.

“Look!” Beame said.

Four of the German riflemen were still on the bridge, only a few steps from the safety of the St. Ignatius shore. They had been thrown to the deck with tremendous force when the dynamite blew. As they struggled to their feet, dazed and bloody, their uniforms ripped and their pot helmets dented, the second pier crumbled. The bridge sluggishly parted company with the gorge walls and its anchors. Two of the four Germans, not yet recovered from the first blow, were pitched out into space as the long structure rolled like a mean horse. The remaining pair clung to the twisted steel beams and rode the bridge to its final resting place.

They did not have a chance.

The bridge dropped.

It bounced on the rocks below and broke up like a ship might, slewing sideways in the river, every part of it strained against every other part. Rivets popped from their fittings, deadly bullets that whined off the superstructure. Twenty-foot beams snapped loose, jumped up. They quivered momentarily in the gray rain. Lazily, they fell back into the body of the ruined span.

This was a slower death than the bridge had ever before suffered, but it expired just as completely, settling into a mass of useless materials.

“Christ, what a show,” Danny Dew said.

Nathalie knelt beside Beame and put her arms around him, held tight to him. He kissed her cheek, leaving bloody lip prints.

Gradually, silence returned.

And after a moment of silence, Kelly became aware of the Panzer noise and the drumming rain.

On opposite sides of the gorge, the Allies and the Germans stared across the void at one another and wondered what in the name of God they were to do now.

4

Dreadfully weary, Major Kelly walked around the village store, one hand against the wall to balance himself. Wet, muddy, bloody, he came out on the bridge road where the German convoy stretched eastward as far as he could see. He went looking for General Adolph Rotenhausen.

The general was standing in the hatch of his Panzer. He was fearlessly eyeballing General Bobo Remlock, who was standing up in his Cromwell turret nine hundred feet across the ravine. “Father Picard!” Rotenhausen cried when he saw Kelly standing ankle-deep in a mud puddle beside the tank. “This is a dangerous place right now. Go back to your church and—”

“No,” Kelly said. He slopped through the mud, put one foot in the huge mud-clogged tread gears, and clambered up until he stood on the tank fender. “I am worried about my people, my village.”

“There is nothing you can do now,” Rotenhausen said. “You should have done something sooner. You should have stopped the partisans from blowing up the bridge.”

“I knew nothing of that,” Kelly said. “And I guarantee you, General, that no partisans take shelter in St. Ignatius. They must have come up the river from some other town.”

Rotenhausen turned his aristocratic face to the sky. The rain stung it, rolled off his white cheeks onto his glistening slicker. “It doesn't matter whether I believe you or not. The deed is done.”

Kelly wiped nervously at his face. When would Bobo Remlock get tired of sitting over there and lob another shell at them?

“There is no other bridge in the area wide enough to accommodate your Panzers,” Kelly said, just as he and Maurice had planned for him to say. Right now, on the west bank, Maurice was imparting this same information to

Bobo Remlock. “But ten miles to the north, near the base of the mountains, there is a place where the gorge becomes shallower and the river broadens. You could get over to the west if you went up there.”

Rotenhausen perked up for a moment, then squinted suspiciously at Kelly. “Why do you tell me this?”

“I don't want my village destroyed,” Kelly said. “Already, several of my people have died. And I have been injured myself.”

For a long moment, Rotenhausen looked across the mist-bottomed gorge at the Cromwells, Shermans, and M-10s. Then, as the tanks on that side began to pull back, turn, and start north, the German made his decision. “I must get this convoy turned around,” he told Kelly. “We'll reach that ford before they do, Father Picard.”

“Good luck,” Kelly said, jumping down from the tank. Holding his wounded arm, he walked over to the village store and leaned against the wall and watched the tanks move out.

5

Danny Dew raised the sledgehammer over his head and brought it down on top of the shortwave radio. The metal casing bent, but nothing broke.

Major Kelly was standing beside Dew, his arm in a sling. The bullet wound was not serious, merely a crease; but it pained him too much to allow him to wield the hammer himself. “Again!” he shouted.

“Yes, Massah,” Dew said. He swung the hammer a second time. One of the casing seams popped open.

“I don't understand why you have to destroy it,” Lily said, looking mournfully at the shortwave set.

“Neither do I,” Beame said. He was standing next to Nathalie and Maurice, though The Frog was glaring fiercely at him.

“I don't ever want to talk to Blade again,” Kelly said. “Even if I gave the radio to Maurice, Blade would have a way of reaching me.”

“Mon ami—” Maurice began.

“Again, Danny!” Kelly said.

Dew raised the sledgehammer. His hard black muscles rippled. He put his strength into the swing and broke the glass in the front of the radio. The blow echoed in the large, one-room convent building, whispered for a long time in the rafters overhead.

“But you have to talk to Blade,” a handsome young soldier said, stepping up between Lily and Private Angelli. “He's your commanding officer.”

Kelly could not remember ever having seen this young man, which was odd, since he prided himself in knowing all his men by their first names. “He isn't my commanding officer any longer,” Kelly said.

Lily stamped one foot, a gesture that made her breasts jiggle in the velvet cups of her dancer's costume. “Kelly, I won't let you—”

“Danny, hit it again!”

Dew struck the radio another vicious blow. It crashed off the stand onto the floor.

“You simply can't fire your commanding officer,” Vito Angelli said. He was standing beside one of the French girls who had been dressed like a nun. His arm was around her waist, one hand circling up to cup her full right breast. He no longer seemed to be such a one-woman man. Or, more accurately, a one-pervert man. Nurse Pullit was nowhere in sight. “You can't choose your commanding officers,” Angelli insisted.

“Well, from now on that's exactly what I'm going to do,” Kelly said. “I don't want another one like Blade. I don't think he ever did care about us the way a general is supposed to care for his men. He's been using us.”

Lily frowned at him. “Using us?”

Kelly nodded. “I've been putting bits and pieces together… You know we've thought there was a traitor in the camp. The Stukas always knew when the bridge was rebuilt, always returned to bomb it the day after it was completed. Someone had to tell them it was ready. I think that someone was General Blade.”

“Bullshit!” Coombs said. He, too, was standing with a French girl. She was rather ugly.

Lily looked at Kelly as if he had gone mad. “That's ridiculous! Blade—”

“It makes sense to me,” Kelly said. Perspiration trickled down his forehead and ran to the end of his nose, but he ignored it. “Keep in mind that Blade had his entire career staked on us. No one else thought this bridge was of any strategic importance. Blade said so himself. Yet he disagreed with the other generals. He secretly sent a whole unit of Army engineers behind German lines in order to keep the bridge open. What do you think would have happened to Blade if the bridge were never bombed, if we just sat here without anything to do?”

Lily thought about it. They all thought about it. She said, “He wouldn't be up for any promotions when his superiors found out about it.”

“Exactly,” Kelly said. “Once he sent us here, he had to establish proof that the Germans considered the bridge strategically important. And what better way than to get them to bomb it repeatedly?”

“Now, wait a minute, sir,” the handsome young soldier said. “General Blade can't order Stukas to do his own dirty work!”

“That's right,” Beame said. “He can't control the German army!”

Kelly frowned. “There are bits and pieces that maybe fit… For example, Beame told me that General Blade probably dabbles in the black market. When we were in Britain, I heard the same thing about Bobo Remlock. That sounds terribly coincidental, doesn't it — that both our nemeses should be in the black market?”

“Hell,” Angelli said, “probably every one of our generals is in it.”

“Another thing,” Kelly said, ignoring Angelli. “I've also heard that some of our officers are not against profiting from deals made with officers on the other side.”

“With Germans?” Lily asked.

“I've heard that, too,” Angelli said. “Hell, Eisenhower's investigative staff brought charges against two high-ranking officers while we were in Britain. But what does this sort of thing have to do with us?” He fondled the French girl's breast, and she giggled.

“Plenty,” Kelly said. “If American and German officers fly to neutral territory to swap black market goods… Well, suppose Blade gave a German air force officer a planeload of whiskey at one of these neutral ports — and didn't take any material goods in return. Suppose, instead, he asked his German opposite to see to the bombing of this bridge and help him establish his reputation among the Allied brass? Blade could inform this German officer each time the bridge was rebuilt—”

“You think Blade would engineer and go through with a wild scheme like this just to get a promotion?” Lily asked, incredulous.

“Either that, or he's syphilitic.”

“Bullshit,” Coombs said.

“This is paranoid,” Lily said. “The world isn't as Machiavellian as you're making it out to be.”

“Look,” Beame said, “Blade's an idiot, but he can't be the kind of manipulator you're trying to say he is.”

“I wonder…” Kelly said.

“Look,” Lily said, “maybe the radio will still work.”

“Hit it again, Dew!” Dew obliged. “If we don't destroy it, Blade will call us again tonight. He'll send in the DC-3 loaded with supplies, and he'll order us to rebuild the bridge. And as soon as the bridge is up, he'll call his German friend, get it bombed into rubble. You know… it's also possible that Blade somehow arranged for Rotenhausen's convoy to take this route, to come this roundabout back way just so the bridge would appear to have strategic importance and—”

“You can't know any of this!” Lily shouted. “This isn't some fantasy we're involved in. This is real. This is life!”

“Wrong,” Kelly said. “It's all a fairy tale, grand in color—”

“Bullshit,” Coombs said. His ugly French girl friend giggled and said, “Boolsheet.”

“Kelly,” Lily said, “if you destroy the radio, no one will know we're here. Blade will think we're dead. We won't get out of this place until the war is finished.”

“I don't care,” Kelly said. “Just so we get out alive.”

“Well, I care!” Lily said. “I have a career to think of!” She turned and walked toward the front of the convent, her firm ass swinging in a blue velvet dancer's costume, her long legs scissoring gorgeously.

Major Kelly was tempted to run after her, grab her, peel her out of that skimpy suit, and desecrate this holy convent with unspeakable acts of carnal lust. But it was more important to oversee the destruction of the radio…

“If you completely demolish this set,” Maurice said, “you're going to have to find something else with which to pay me.”

“I will,” Kelly said. “Dew, hit it again.”

Forty blows later, Dew dropped the hammer. Everyone had wandered away except the handsome young soldier whose name Kelly could not recall. The three of them stood in silence for a moment, as if mourning the departed shortwave set.

“Major,” the handsome soldier said, “I just came from a duty shift at the jail, watching over Lieutenant Slade. Lyle Fark took my place and… ”

“And?” Kelly asked.

The young soldier cleared his throat. “Well, Slade's demanding a trial, sir. He won't let up about it. Keeps wanting to know when he can have a trial. He says that a good court-martial will prove he was right all along. He expects to get medals, he says. But there has to be a trial first, you see. He's impossible to work around, sir. Fark asked me if you could give him, a tentative trial date he can use to shut Slade up.”

“Tell him after the war,” Kelly said.

“That's all?”

“That's all. Just sometime after the war.”

“He's really anxious to get those medals,” the soldier said. “He isn't going to like your answer, but I'll tell him anyway.” He left the convent by the back door.

“Gee,” Kelly said, staring after him, “I always thought I knew everyone in the unit by sight and name. But I can't place that one.”

“You're kidding,” Danny Dew said. “That's Pullit.”

“Pullit? Where's his nurse's uniform?”

“He doesn't need it anymore,” Dew said. “At least, not for the moment, not until the pressure builds up again.”

“The uniform — all of that was Pullit's way of hanging on,” Kelly said, a man to whom a spiritual revelation had just come.

“I guess so,” Danny Dew said.

Dew left by the back door, while Kelly went out and joined Lily Kain on the convent stoop. She was looking at St. Ignatius, at the quaint church and the rectory, the pleasant streets still damp with the morning's shower.

Kelly put one arm around her waist. “Pretty, isn't it?”

“It doesn't look half bad.”

Overhead, the clouds were breaking up. Scattered pieces of blue sky shone down on the town.

“Well!” Kelly said, pointing east along the bridge road. “Look up there!”

Lieutenant Beame and Nathalie Jobert were walking hand-in-hand toward the edge of town. When they reached the trees, they ducked furtively into the undergrowth, out of sight.

“Good for them,” Lily said. She leaned against Kelly and clasped his buttocks in one of her quick hands.

“I'm glad Dave's finally grown up,” Kelly said.

“Who?”

“Dave. Dave Beame.”

Lily tilted her head and smiled at him. She wrinkled her pug nose and ran all her freckles together into one brown spot. “I never heard you call him by his first name before.”

Kelly shrugged. “Well, maybe it's safe enough for things like that now. Maybe first names are okay again.” He turned her around until she was facing him, encircled her with his arms. She came against him, warm and pliant, hugged him back. “I even feel safe enough to tell you I was wrong before.” He slid his good hand down her back and cupped her buttocks. “I do love you, I think.”

“Me too,” Lily said. “At least for a little while.” She kissed him, licked inside of his mouth. “Say, how would you like to go back into this convent here and—”

“Desecrate it with acts of unspeakable carnal lust?”

Lily grinned. “Yeah.” She opened the door for him. “Let's chase out all these religious spirits and have us. a nice den of iniquity.”

Kelly let go of her, stepped back, and appraised her with one frank look. “You know, everything might really be all right. And you know what I was just thinking when we were looking at the town? I think we could have a real village here, if we wanted. We could finish the insides of these houses. We could anchor them down, put basements under them. Dig some real wells.”

“Whoa!” Lily said, still holding the convent door open. “Before you get wrapped up in that fantasy, remember that Maurice owns all of St. Ignatius. He also owns your tools, machines, supplies — and everyone's next paycheck.”

“Yes,” Kelly said. “But Maurice can be taken too.” He glanced up the bridge road to the place where Beame and Nathalie had disappeared into the trees. “I'll have to speak to Dave about the kind of dowry he should demand from Maurice, when he marries Nathalie. He ought to get a good piece of money. A bulldozer. Maybe even a budding little town… ”

Lily laughed and grabbed his hand. “Spinning fairy tales again. I thought you wouldn't need those anymore.”

“I thought so too,” Kelly said. He looked back at St. Ignatius. And he began to realize that when the war ended he would still have to fight to hang on, to survive. It was not just the insane generals like Blade and the chaos of war which made hanging on his greatest, most time-consuming enterprise. It was life. The hanging on never ended. At times, the effort required to hang on was less than on other occasions; but the degree of difficulty was the only thing that changed.

“Come on,” Lily said.

Numb, he followed her into the convent. The door closed behind them.

In the dark foyer, she pulled off her dancer's costume and moved up against him, kissed him, nibbled at his ear.

“Life is a fairy tale, Lily, grand in color but modest in design. It really, really is.”

“Ahhhh,” she said, “shut up and put it to me.”