something to tell you.”
Kelly sat up on his cot, felt the canvas shift under him and the spindly frame twist with his weight. He smacked his lips. “What time is it?”
“Four in the morning.”
“What morning?” Kelly asked.
“I know you just got to sleep,” Tooley said. “So did I. But this is important. Kowalski just sat up in bed and warned me about another raid. He was shouting so loud he woke me.”
Kelly tried to think who Kowalski was, but he couldn't get his mind functioning. The room was too hot. His undershorts were pasted to him with sweat, and even the cot canvas was damp and slippery. “Another air attack?”
“Yes, sir,” Tooley said. “His exact words were: 'Rising sun, bombs in the trees, bridge kaput.' “ Tooley shifted as his haunches stiffened, wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Did you hear me, sir?”
Major Kelly remembered who Kowalski was. He said, “Tooley, the Germans haven't had time to learn that the bridge is back up. And if they're judging by our past record, they won't come around again for a couple of days. No informer in this unit could have passed the word to the krauts in so short a time.”
“Sir—”
Kelly kept his eyes closed, trying not to wake up any more than he had to. Besides, he was afraid that if he opened his eyes again, Tooley would flick on the flashlight and shatter his corneas. “Don't pay any attention to a bag of shit like Kowalski. Look, the rising sun is the symbol of Japan, not Germany. I don't think the Japs could have diverted a bomber to the middle of Europe just to attack our little bridge, eh? Not likely, eh? Eh? Look, Tooley, what you do, you go back to the hospital and go to sleep. And if Kowalski starts blabbing again, you smother him with a pillow.”
“But Major Kelly, I—”
“That's an order,” Kelly said.
He listened as, reluctantly, Tooley got up and lifted the blanket and went away. Then he lay there, trying to imagine that the heat was not heat at all, but a snug blanket draped across him and that he was twelve and back home and sleeping in his attic room and that it was winter and snow was falling and his blanket kept him warm, very warm, against the cold… In a few minutes, he fell asleep as the frogs and crickets, cavorting in the snow, croaked and chirruped secret messages all the way around the world to Germany.
In the morning as dawn lined the horizons, after the frogs had gone to bed and the crickets had been silenced by the growing dew, in the first orange rays of the elevating sun, Major Kelly was awakened by the shrieking approach of a bomber. A big one. Coming in low.
Kelly leaped out of bed, wearing only his damp shorts and an expression of admirably controlled terror in the face of a familiar intolerable persecution. He grabbed his service revolver from the top of the pasteboard trunk and plunged through the khaki-colored Army blanket and out the door of the HQ building.
The day was far too bright, even at dawn. The sunlight put a flat glare across the mist that lay over the camp and made the French countryside seem like a stage setting under the brutal beams of a score of huge kliegs. He raised an arm to shield his eyes, and he saw the plane. It was a B-17, highlighted by the new sun. It swooped over the camp, straight for the bridge.
“One of ours!” Slade shouted. He had stumbled out of the HQ building in the major's wake and now stood at his left side. He was, as usual, a vocal repeater of visual events.
“Why didn't I listen to Kowalski?” Kelly asked.
Slade gave him a curious look.
The B-17 let go at the bridge with two bombs that slid straight for the span's deck like Indian arrows for cavalry targets. All of this was out of place, unfitted to the peaceful morning, the slightly chilled air, and the sun like an open oven door in a country kitchen. Still, as the big plane turned up on the other side of the gorge, the bridge leaped up in a spray of steel, wood, cable, and concrete. A flash of light made the day seem less bright by comparison, and the roar of the explosion brought the sky falling down. The twisted beams, miraculous in flight, glittered prettily and fell back in a chiming heap. The flash of the explosion gave way to smoke which rolled out of the gorge and devoured the edge of the camp.
“Our own plane,” Kelly said. He was numb.
The B-17 came back, loosed six bombs. Two fell over the northeast edge of the woods, two over the open space between the main bunker and the HQ, and two over the bridge approach.
When Kelly saw the second two released, he shouted, “Christ! He's after everything!” He put his head down and ran for the hospital bunker, though he knew it was useless.
The two bombs released over the woods angled down and slammed into the earth directly between the main bunker and the HQ. The blast made Kelly scream. He glanced sideways as he ran, saw a wall of earth rising skyward and pouring across the space between the buildings like a brown wave of lava.
The second pair of bombs, which had been dropped over this now devastated area, exploded in twin balls of searing, white flame at the southwest corner of the HQ building, not far from where Kelly and Slade had been standing. Flames spewed out in all directions. The earth convulsed, showering heavy clumps of ground in all directions. Aflame, the west wall of HQ buckled inwards, then popped out again and tore loose of the other three partitions. It fell to the earth with a sound like a slammed door. The three standing walls shuddered violently.
The two bombs let loose over the bridge approach sailed toward the center of the span. They passed either side of it and exploded below, in the ravine. More flames. The ground near the gorge heaved and rolled and settled reluctantly.
Dazed men streamed out of the rec room which now had only three walls. They had been awakened by the attack, startled to see their room open around them like a packing crate, and they had yet to figure out exactly what was going on.
Major Kelly reached the head of the hospital steps and looked up at the B-17 which was circling around for another run at the camp. Far above it, in the morning sky, a trio of Allied fighter planes which acted as its escort went around in lazy little circles, waiting for big brother to finish and come back to them.
Slade hurried up, panting. His face was flushed, but he looked more excited than frightened. “What can we do?”
Kelly ran down the steps and tried the bunker door. Locked. He really hadn't expected anything else.
The B-17 came back. It roared in lower than before and let go at the HQ building again.
The missiles overshot and blew a huge chunk out of the riverbank. Shrapnel and dirt cascaded over six or seven men who had run the wrong way after coming out of the rec room.
Major Kelly thought he heard someone screaming in pain, but he could not be sure.
“We have to
Major Kelly watched the bomber circle again. The damn pilot wasn't done with them. Any pilot with a grain of sense would have cut out by now; this asshole had to be some patriotic, gung-ho promotion seeker with no real sense of his own mortality.
Slade grabbed the major's arm. “Listen to me! We have to stop them, for Christ's sake!”
Kelly pushed the lieutenant away and shouted at the men who were still too dazed to get away from the HQ building. “Over here! Run, you idiots! Move! Run! Get away from there!”
Slade grabbed him again, using both hands this time and digging in hard with his fingers, molding a grip in Kelly's bare arm as if the major were made of clay. “What are you going to do? You cowardly son of a bitch, what are you going to do?”
Kelly drew back his free arm and struck Slade across the face, harder than he had ever hit a man before. When the lieutenant fell back, stunned, Kelly grabbed him with a fierceness far worse than Slade's bad been a moment ago. Kelly's eyes were so wide open they appeared on the verge of falling out; his mouth was a twisted, thin-lipped hole in his face; his nostrils flared like those of an animal. “What
Kelly rolled to the bottom of the hospital bunker steps and smacked his head against the bunker door. Cursing, he crawled back to the top to see what had been hit.
The bridge. It made a tortured, metallic squeal the same pitch as the squeal inside Kelly's head and
