Hanging on

undistinguished in battle. How humiliating that would be for Slade's mother. After all, she had done so much for him, and he could hardly pay her back with humiliation and degradation. And he could hardly let himself be killed before he had a chance to tell her a couple of good stories about heroism. So, if he had to die fighting the goddamned krauts, why couldn't he die in his own uniform? How would his mother ever explain this to her friends? She could bear it, she told him, if he died in some heroic way — but how could she bear the news that he had died in a jerry uniform? And a jerry private's uniform! She wouldn't be able to handle it. She'd crack up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good, Kelly thought, they're laughing.

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

Are they laughing at me? Slade wondered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Beame said.

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

The soldier screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

11

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

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

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

When they stopped, everyone would die.

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

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

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

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

“We can't just sit here—”

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

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

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