Hanging on

have to keep the lieutenant in the jeep, out of trouble.

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

“There!” Beame exclaimed, pointing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Luck,” Major Kelly said.

“God's on our side,” Slade said.

“Here comes another,” Beame said.

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

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

“Here it comes,” Kelly said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly beat even harder.

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

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

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

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

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

“So big,” Beame said.

Kelly squeezed the wheel.

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

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

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

The steel tread clattered up the incline.

“He's seen Dew,” Kelly said.

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

“I don't believe it!”

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

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