Hanging on

“Work?” Kelly asked. “Never. Oh, this and a few other things I have planned might get them to sign their credit contracts. But that won't mean very much in the end. We're all going to die. We just have to go through this charade now to keep the fairy tale moving. You know?”

“Don't start with that fairy tale shit,” Lily said.

“Can't help it. Puts things in perspective. Keeps me alive.”

A can opener of lightning took the lid off the night, and thunder rumbled like an escaping vacuum. Rain bounced on the steps, spattered on their faces, ran into the hospital bunker behind them.

Kelly smiled, happy that the men were now almost certain to sign their contracts. Then he frowned, depressed by the realization that he had been forced into becoming a somewhat ruthless manipulator of people.

Well… anything to hang on.

5 / JULY 19

Shortly after dawn, two men came to see Major Kelly in his quarters. They were both wet, shivering, pale, water-wrinkled, and defeated even though the rain had stopped falling half an hour ago. Kelly was slipping into clean, dry fatigues when they rapped on his blanket wall. “Help you fellows?” he asked, peering around a woolen corner. He smiled warmly.

Two minutes later, only seventeen men had refused to sign the credit contracts.

It's working! Kelly thought, when they had gone. But then he remembered that the Panzers would arrive in little more than four and a half days. Right now, he should be engaged in the serious planning which was essential to the early stages of the construction of the fake village. The bridge was up, the preliminary work done, and now he ought to be plunging into the main project. Instead, be was wasting time and energy trying to trick the holdouts into signing their damned confessions. If he was achieving his lesser goal, he was also losing the chance to attain the greater one. He might eventually get every man to sign his contract — but by then he would have wasted so much time that they could never build the village before the Germans arrived…

Nevertheless, he was the first in line for breakfast at the mess hall, because he wanted to have a front row seat for the morning's carefully planned drama. “Looks delicious,” Kelly told Sergeant Tuttle when the cook ladled hot cereal into his mess tin.

Tuttle leaned across the steaming kettle. “I don't like doing this,” he whispered.

“We need Maurice's help,” Kelly whispered back at him. “Without it, we all die. These bastards have to be made to sign.”

“I know,” Tuttle said, looking back at the line of impatient men.

“Two more came across. Kasabian and Pike. You can treat them like you normally would,” Kelly said.

“But the others—”

“You know what to do with the others.”

Kelly got the rest of his breakfast and sat down at one of the crude tables. He toyed with his cereal, but his attention was riveted on the men in the breakfast line who had not cooperated in the matter of the credit contracts.

Private Armento was the tenth man in line, first of the troublemakers to reach Tuttle. The cook looked over Armento's shoulder, silently pleading with Kelly. The major turned his thumbs down. Reluctantly, Tuttle “misjudged” the position of Armento's plate and poured a ladle of hot cereal all over his hands.

Quite a lot of commotion followed.

Then, Private Aaron Lange, another holdout who was immediately behind Armento, got the hot-cereal treatment when he held out his tin. When he and Armento finished dancing around the room and blowing on their reddened fingers, they came over to Major Kelly and signed their credit contracts.

“I'm glad you men have finally seen where your best interests lie,” Kelly told them, putting their contracts with the others that had been signed.

All morning, one by one, the holdouts began to see the same light which Armento and Lange had seen. Private Garnett put his signature on his contract after he tripped and fell with his second full mess tin. He had also tripped and fallen with the first. Private John Flounders signed up when, after waiting in the serving line for twenty minutes, he discovered that, curiously, Sergeant Tuttle ran out of hot cereal just before Flounders was to be given his. When the morning's work assignments were read and Private Paul Akers learned he had been assigned to that detail which would shovel out the old latrine ditch and carry the stinking contents into the woods, Akers came around to Kelly's way of thinking. Private Vinney, who was also assigned to the latrine job, lasted for less than five minutes before throwing away his shovel and signing up. And three other men stayed with it until they were accidentally bumped into that vile trench by two workmen who were trying to jostle past them with a heavy length of pine planking…

At 9:15 that same morning, Kelly went over to the hospital bunker and waved the completed forms at Lily Kain. “When they ask for their tents back, you can tell them we found a crate of bandage materials that we'd overlooked. Tell them we won't have to cut up their tents after all.”

“They signed?” she asked.

“All but Slade.”

“But will Maurice be willing to overlook Slade?”

“Sure,” Kelly said. “If I sign a second confession and guarantee to pay Slade's two hundred bucks, why should Maurice be upset?”

“You'd do that?” she asked.

“Do I have any choice?”

“I guess not.” She brightened, smiled, puffed out her wonderful chest. “Well! Now that this is settled, everything should run pretty smoothly.”

“No,” Kelly said. “This is only a reprieve. We have Maurice's help now, but that won't matter. Something worse will come up. We'll be delayed a few more minutes or hours. We can never get this finished in time. We're all doomed.”

In the next two hours, the race against time was begun in earnest. All over camp, projects were launched. Thanks to Angelli's ability to cross all language barriers, the Americans and the French worked fairly well together. Ditch-like foundations for the walls of the fake buildings were marked and cut. A few outhouses, were framed and erected. In the midst of all this, Danny Dew roared around the clearing on his virility symbol, scraping out the streets which Hagendorf had surveyed yesterday.

The demolition of the HQ building was quick and dangerous. Headquarters had to come down, because it was obviously a temporary structure and military in origin. It would not have fooled the Germans for a minute. Therefore, after breakfast, the shortwave radio and the furniture were moved out of HQ, and a crew of workmen dismantled the corrugated metal roof. An hour later, the roof was gone, and the walls began to fall, slamming the earth like a series of angrily closed doors, casting up obfuscating clouds of dust. Armed with hammers and pry-bars, goaded on by Major Kelly—'Faster, faster, faster, for Christ's sake!' — Maurice's laborers swarmed over the thin partitions. They separated metal from wood, tore one plank from the next, stacked the materials where they could later be used in the construction of the village.

The Frenchmen, Kelly thought, were like Eskimos stripping the carcass of a huge old walrus, leaving behind them nothing of value.

It was a pleasant thought, and he was still thinking it when Tooley came running over from the machinery shed waving his arms and shouting. “Major Kelly! Major Kelly, why did you put Hagendorf in the box, sir?”

“Hagendorf?” Kelly knew it was a bad idea to ask for an explanation. He sensed another crisis that would waste precious minutes. But he also knew that if he ran away, Tooley would only run after him. “Hagendorf? In the box?”

“Yes, sir. In the box, sir.”

“What box?”

“In the machinery shed, sir. Don't you remember which box you put him in?”