collapsed into the gorge with an almost practiced grace.
Slade was standing on top of the hospital bunker, holding his service revolver in both hands and shooting at the bomber. Kelly had lost his own gun somewhere, but he didn't feel like hunting it just now. He watched Slade fire all his chambers at the plane, to no effect.
While the lieutenant was reloading, the B-17 climbed skyward to join its escort, and the four United States Air Force planes streaked westward, out of sight, back toward the safety of Allied territory.
Up near the HQ building where the bombs had torn away a large piece of the riverbank, someone was screaming. It was a monotonous scream, rising and falling and rising and falling again in a predictable pattern. Kelly walked that way, though he didn't want to. He passed a smoking crater that smelled like rotten eggs, passed the charred wall of the rec room which was still smoldering a little, and he came to three men who were lying on the ground midst pieces of bomb casings, fragments of limestone, and clods of earth.
He knelt beside the first. Private Hoskins. “You okay?”
Hoskins's eyes fluttered, opened. He looked at Kelly, got it sorted out remarkably fast, reached out for support and sat up. He was twenty-eight years old, a small-town boy from upper New York State — but right now Hoskins looked a hundred, and as if he had seen everything bad there was to see. His nose was bleeding across his lips, wet ribbons of some gay disguise. Most of his clothes had been torn off by the blast. Otherwise, he seemed to be in good shape.
“Can you walk?” Kelly asked.
“I think so.”
Kelly helped him to his feet. “Go see Pullit and Kain.”
Hoskins, the gambler, nodded. He walked off toward the hospital bunker, weaving a bit, as if a pair of roulette wheels were strapped to his shoulders.
The second man lying on the ground was Private Osgood from Nashville, Tennessee. Kelly did not know him well. He would never know him well. Osgood was dead, pierced by twenty or more pieces of shrapnel, bleeding from the face and neck and chest, from the stomach and the legs, a voodoo doll that had gotten into the hands of a witch with a real grudge to settle.
Kelly walked closer to the ravine where the third man lay on his side, holding his stomach with both hands. It was Private Peter Danielson, Petey for short. He was the unit's foremost drinker and hell raiser. Kelly had reprimanded him on three separate occasions when Danielson had pissed in Sergeant Coombs's office window, all over Coombs's desk and papers.
“Petey?” Kelly asked, kneeling beside the man.
Danielson's scream died into a low sobbing, and he focused his watery eyes on the major.
“Where are you hurt?” Kelly asked.
Danielson tried to speak. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth and dribbled down his chin, thick as syrup.
“Your stomach, Petey?”
Danielson blinked and slowly nodded his head. He jerked as his bladder gave out and his trousers darkened with urine. Tears came to his eyes, fat and clear; they ran down his round cheeks and mixed with the blood on his chin.
“Can I look?” Kelly asked.
Danielson shuddered and managed to speak. “Nothing to see. Okay.” His teeth and tongue were bright with blood.
“If I could look, maybe I could keep it from hurting,” Kelly said.
Danielson started to scream again, that same monotonous ululation. His mouth was wide open, all red inside, and bloody foam bubbled at both nostrils.
Slade had come up beside Kelly while the major was talking to Petey Danielson. “What's wrong with him?”
Kelly didn't answer him. He took hold of the screaming man's hands, which were cold. He was prepared to pry Danielson's hands away from his stomach, but the wounded man surrendered with surprising weakness. Then, with nothing to hold in its place, his stomach fell away from him. It just bulged out through his shredded shirt in a shapeless, awful mass. Undigested food, blood, intestines, feces, and the walls of his stomach flopped onto the ground in a slithering, glistening mass.
Danielson screamed and screamed.
“Christ,” Slade said.
Major Kelly looked at Danielson's insides, trying to pretend them out of the way, trying to pretend Danielson back to health. He couldn't do it. He stood up, trying not to be sick. He turned to Slade in the jerky way of an automaton in a big department-store Christmas display, and he took the loaded revolver out of Slade's hand.
Danielson was curled up on himself now, trying to stuff his ruined intestines back through the neat slit the shrapnel had made in him. He was screaming and crying and apologizing to someone.
Major Kelly aimed the revolver at Danielson's chest but found that he was shaking too badly to make a good shot. He planted his feet farther apart and gripped the gun with both hands as he had seen Slade doing when the B-17 was over them. He shot Danielson four times in the chest, until the man was dead.
He gave the gun back to Slade.
He walked away, holding his hands over his ears, trying to block, out Petey Danielson's scream which he imagined he could still hear like a siren cutting across the smoking campsite.
In his quarters, Kelly put on new shorts and a dirty pair of khaki slacks. He took his bottle of Jack Daniels out of the pasteboard trunk and took several long pulls straight from the neck. Although he wouldn't have believed he could be functional so soon, though he wouldn't have thought he could push Danielson out of his mind so quickly, Kelly was ready to listen to Lieutenant Beame half an hour later when Beame came in to report on the condition of the bridge.
“Both piers are undamaged,” Beame said. “But we'll have to repair the entire floor and superstructure. All in all, not so bad.”
“We'll have to get on it right away,” Kelly said. “The Panzers must be on the way.”
Beame didn't understand.
Kelly said, “We were hit by one of our own bombers. That means the Panzer division is on its way west and the brass wants to deny it the use of this bridge.”
Beame didn't like that. “No. It can't be.”
“There's no other reason for them to risk a B-17 and its escort on such a limited target. We're all doomed.”
7
The HQ building had not been damaged, except for the fallen wall. In a few hours, even that was in place and all was as it had been in that corner of the camp. The radio room was undisturbed, and the wireless hummed menacingly.
Major Kelly wanted to call the general to order supplies and ask about the big Panzer division, but he could not do that. The wireless communications link between the camp and Blade was decidedly one-way; only the general could initiate a conversation. So far, this had been fine with Kelly. Now, however, once the men had been set to cleaning up the debris and there was nothing to do, the major's mind dwelt on too many unpleasant possibilities which a single call to the general could have confirmed or negated. Probably confirmed. The worst would happen. The B-17 had bombed the bridge because the Panzers were on their way. Still, until he got word for sure on tonight's Blade and Slade Show, Kelly would have to occupy his time in some manner that would take his mind off these other things. He decided he might as well return to the problem of the camp informer. Operation Traitor Hunt would keep him busy and, perhaps, gain him some respect from Slade and Coombs.
He sat behind a plank table-desk just inside the door of the mess hall, toying with a dagger. For the first time since they'd been dropped behind enemy lines, he was wearing his uniform. He felt it was only proper, while carrying on an interrogation, to wear his uniform and to toy with the dagger, thereby instilling a combination of
