Hanging on

here?”

“You never can tell,” Blade said. That meant no.

“Sir, what can we do?”

“I've given considerable thought to your problem,” Blade said. “Is it possible to use the ruse you employed with the first Panzer unit?”

“No,” Kelly said, though it pained him to say it. “That was a small force that passed in half an hour. But this division, this big convoy is going to stay the night. We'd never make them believe we were Germans, sir, especially when none of us speaks the language.” He felt hollow inside, eaten out by termites. In a moment, he'd fall down in a heap of dust. “Is it possible for us to be airlifted out of here, sir?”

“No,” Blade said. “That bridge must be kept open after the Panzers are across, so our own people can use it if the front suddenly breaks eastward.”

“If we're dead, we can't keep it open, sir.” This seemed like an inescapable truth to Kelly, an argument so sound it would knock Blade off his chair.

It didn't knock him off his chair. “I have faith in your ingenuity, Kelly,” General Blade said. “I'm sure you'll pull through this with some clever plan or other.” He cleared his throat, or perhaps he snarled at someone in his office, and he said, “Now, what supplies do you need? I think I can have them flown into you before dawn.”

Five minutes later, the Blade and Slade Show was over.

Shortly before midnight, Major Kelly sat in his quarters and put mud on his head. His heart really wasn't in the treatment tonight. If they were all going to be killed a week from now, what did it matter if he was bald or hairy? Nevertheless, he smoothed the muck all over his head. By worrying about his hair, perhaps he was making a rebuff to death. Perhaps, in this simple ceremony, he was actually taking a courageous stand. Or maybe he just didn't have the guts to face up to what was coming.

He was interrupted in the midst of these unpleasant thoughts and in the middle of his pate ministrations by Maurice and two tough-looking French kids who were about sixteen years old and deadly as sharks. His hair slicked back and glimmering in the dull light, his face shiny, grease beaded in the folds around his nose, wearing his customary baggy pants and dirty checkered shirt, smiling that dangerous smile that meant he smelled a profit, Maurice sat down on the end of Kelly's cot and said, “Bon soir!”

Kelly, sitting at his table-desk with a headful of mud, reluctantly nodded at the bootleg bottle of Jack Daniels that stood out in plain sight. When Maurice smiled for an answer, Kelly poured him a drink in a battered tin cup. Maurice tossed this off in one swallow.

“What can I do for you, Maurice?” Kelly asked, wiping his muddy left hand on a damp towel.

Maurice ignored the major's strange cap. “You have hurt your hand!” He pointed at the bandage under the mud on Kelly's left hand.

“It's nothing. A minor knife wound.”

Maurice pushed his glass forward, brushed a fat mosquito off his forehead, and raised his greasy white eyebrows in surprise. “Hand-to-hand combat, Major? I've had no report of Germans in the area, not in our backwater!”

“No Germans,” Kelly agreed.

Maurice accepted a second slug of whiskey as graciously as if it had been freely offered, but he did not drink it. He was perplexed, trying to figure out where his complex information-gathering network could have failed. “Then how do you say — mutiny?”

“No mutiny,” Kelly said.

“Who cut you, then, bon ami?”

Kelly recalled the interrogation of Lily Kain when he had run himself through, and he couldn't see how he could explain that. “I stabbed myself.”

“Suicide!” Maurice said, clutching his chest. “You musn't think it!”

“Not suicide,” Kelly said. “If I'd wanted to kill myself, I wouldn't have used a knife — and I wouldn't have stabbed my hand, Maurice.”

“Where would you have stabbed?” Maurice asked, leaning forward. He was clearly interested.

“Perhaps my neck,” Kelly said.

“Ah. Yes. Quick.”

But Kelly didn't want to talk about the knife wound any more. He couldn't explain it and, besides, the longer they sat there the more conspicuous his headful of mud seemed to become. Hoping to get rid of the Frenchman quickly, he said, “What brings you here tonight, eh?”

“Trouble,” the old man said.

The hard, young sharks with him nodded gloomily like a couple of mutes accidentally signed on for a Greek chorus.

Kelly sipped his whiskey. It tasted awful. It didn't really taste awful, he knew, but his subjective sense of taste had been badly thrown off by Maurice's sudden and unwelcome appearance.

Maurice said, “When my friends face trouble, I face it with them.”

“And I'm facing trouble?”

Maurice nodded gravely. “You, your men, bad trouble.”

Because he was feeling perverse, because the drying mud made his scalp itch, because he felt foolish, and chiefly because he didn't think even Maurice could get him out of the coming debacle, Kelly didn't respond as Maurice expected. “No trouble here,” he said.

“You toy with me,” Maurice said.

“No. No trouble.”

“Credat Judaeus Apella.”

“It's true.”

Maurice tossed off his whiskey. “You know as well as I that a major Nazi Panzer division is corning. It's far larger than the one we hoaxed.”

“True enough,” Kelly said. He squashed a mosquito that was burrowing in the mud on his head, poured himself more whiskey even if it did taste horrible.

“And you don't call this trouble?”

The sharks raised their eyebrows, looked at each other for Kelly's benefit.

“No,” Kelly said. “You call it trouble when there's a chance of your escaping it. Words like trouble, danger, risk — all imply safe options. There is no way out of this. Therefore, it is no longer trouble; it is merely fate. We have a bad case of fate, but no trouble.”

“There is one flaw in your reasoning,” Maurice said. He was smug as he poured a third glass of whiskey, his heavy lips tight, as if he had just sampled a fine vintage wine or had delivered a particularly special bon mot.

Kelly watched the greasy frog carefully. What was in Maurice's crafty mind? What did the old man have to gain here, now? “What's the flaw?”

“There is a way out,” Maurice said.

“Can't be.”

“Is.”

“Can't be.”

“Is.”

“Tell me about it,” Kelly said, tossing back his whiskey. “Better yet, I'll tell you about it, because you've got to be thinking some of the same things I've thought myself. First, you're going to suggest that my men and I take our machines and withdraw into the woods, hide out for the duration of the Germans' crossing. But that won't work. Even if we could eliminate every sign of the camp, we couldn't get the big machines deep enough into the woods to hide them. Someone would stumble upon them; we'd be found out and killed in an hour. You might also suggest my men and I level the camp and move into Eisenhower where we could hide until the Panzers are by. That won't work either. Moving the machines would churn up the road through your village and leave us wide open to any other German patrols on another route. Besides, and most importantly, the Nazis are bound to run at least a minimal search of your town. There is no way we could conceal seventy-odd men and all these big machines against even a cursory inspection. Lastly, you might think we could hide out in the woods and abandon our machines to be destroyed by the Germans. But if we did that, General Blade would abandon us, and then