Hanging on

smoke-sheathed trees on the far side of the gorge. The structure tossed away I-beams like a frantic lover throwing off clothes. Long steel planks zoomed above the blanket of smoke, then shot down again, smashing branches to the ground, splitting the dry, baked earth.

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

Kelly ran back up to the surface, screaming.

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

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

“Arrogant sons of bitches!” Kelly shouted.

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

The holes in the smoke closed again.

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

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

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

“The bridge piers?”

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

“Too bad,” Major Kelly said.

“Sir?”

It was Major Kelly's duty, as directed by General Blade, to see that this bridge, which spanned a small river and a larger gorge for some nine hundred feet, be kept open. The bridge was presently behind German lines, despite the great advances the Allies had made since Normandy. No one had yet seen any Germans around here,