Hanging on

“Yes, sir.”

“How's my favorite major?”

Kelly frowned. “I don't know, sir. How is he?”

“Who is this?” General Blade asked, suddenly suspicious.

“This is Major Kelly,” Major Kelly said.

“Well, then… how's my favorite major?” Blade asked again.

Kelly hesitated. “Is that a riddle, sir?”

“Is what a riddle?”

Kelly decided that if it were not a riddle, it was a joke. He was expected to repeat the straight line, and then Blade would give him the punch line. He sighed and said, “How is your favorite major, sir?”

“That's what I asked you,” General Blade said, somewhat gruffly.

Kelly wiped at his face with one palsied hand. “Sir, I'm confused. I don't know anyone under your command except my own men. I don't know your favorite major and I can't—”

“You're beginning to confuse me,” General Blade said. “Let's just talk about the Panzers, okay?”

Swallowing hard, Kelly nodded at the microphone.

“Okay?” Blade asked.

Kelly nodded.

“Kelly?”

Kelly nodded vigorously.

“Is that okay? Kelly, are you there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you come up with any plans to use against them?” the General asked.

Kelly suddenly realized that the General did not know about the fake town. He had called three nights ago, a few hours before Maurice came to the major with this plan for hoaxing the Germans, and he had not called back since. “We have a plan,” Kelly admitted. But he knew there was no way to explain the fake village to Blade, not in a few minutes and not over the radio and not when they were both confused. So he lied. “Same as before. We'll masquerade as Germans.”

“I suggested that a few nights ago,” Blade said.

“We're taking your advice, sir.” Blade had apparently forgotten all of the faults with the masquerade plan, which Kelly had detailed in their last conversation. Syphilitic old men probably could not retain anything when their brains had finally decayed to the consistency of cold oatmeal.

“Well,” Blade said, “what I called to tell you won't come as bad news — not now that you're prepared for the krauts.” He took a sip of coffee or blood. “Kelly, you won't have to sit on pins and needles for three more days, waiting for the Panzers. Our original information was faulty. They left the staging area at Stuttgart two days early. So they'll reach you around midnight on the twenty-first, two days earlier than we thought.”

Kowalski had been right again.

“Tomorrow night, sir?”

“That's right, Kelly.”

For the next few minutes, they talked about Panzers. The general described the size and quality of the force, though nothing had changed in that regard since he had described it a few nights ago. They were still dead. Doomed. Mincemeat.

“Will you be able to handle them?” Blade asked.

“Sure.” All he wanted now was to get Blade off the air, stop wasting time.

“I hope so,” the general said. “I don't want my favorite major to be hurt.”

Kelly could not understand what in the hell the general's favorite major had to do with any of this. Who was this bastard Blade loved so much? Then Kelly decided that the average syphilitic old man could not always be expected to make sense. “Nothing will happen to him, sir. Your favorite major will come through this war unscathed. I'm sure of it.”

“That's the kind of talk I like to hear!” Blade said. “Well… I'll be getting back to you in a couple of days, once this is over. Good luck, Kelly!”

“Thank you, sir.”

Kelly put the microphone down. It brought him nothing but static now, a sound oddly like that you could hear when you held a seashell to your ear: distant, forlorn, empty, as lonely as old age. He switched it off.

“Well,” Slade said, “this puts a new light on the case, doesn't it?”

Kelly said nothing.

“We'll never finish the town before midnight tomorrow,” Slade said, a titter barely muffled behind one hand. “We'll have to fight the krauts.”

“No,” Kelly said. Fighting meant violence. Violence meant death. “We aren't taking any chances. We have to hang on, even if there isn't any hope, even if we dare not hope. I keep thinking… Hansel and Gretel may crawl into the oven, but they don't get burned, you know? And Jack only suffered bruises when he fell down the beanstalk. I don't know… All I do know is that we can't take any initiative. We just play our roles, no matter how crazy they get. So… Maurice will have to supply us with fifty more workers — a crew to cut up barn walls in and around Eisenhower and deliver them to us while the other hundred workers are committed solely to the job in the clearing. The new crew can start cutting walls tonight. We'll work later, until eleven or twelve, by lanterns. We have to play our parts.”

“This is disgusting!” Slade stamped his foot petulantly. “Cowardly! What will people think of us Stateside? What will history say? What will mother say?”

Kelly left the stinking tent and went to see Maurice about the additional workmen.

8 / JULY 21

At 2:00 in the morning, Lieutenant Slade quietly pushed back the tent flaps and stepped outside. He looked at the summer sky. The moon peeked from between fast-moving gray clouds that appeared to be packing into a single seamless bank as they rolled westward. The soft flicker of heat lightning pulsed behind the overcast. There would be no rain tonight. The air was warm, but not moist. The light wind was as dry as sand. However, when these clouds collided with those cold, moisture-laden thunderheads sailing in from the sea, rain would fall in bucketfuls. That would be farther west, toward the Atlantic. Tonight, in this part of France, the sky would remain overcast, but there would be no rain.

Good, Slade thought. The deeper the darkness and the fewer the obstacles it otherwise imposed, the better weather it was for assassination.

Slade looked up and down the twisting, cluttered tent row. No lights showed. No one moved. The silence was profound. In the darkness, even when a piece of the moon threw pale light into the clearing, the tents looked like concrete rather than canvas shelters; they resembled the sharply angled humps of an antitank defense perimeter.

The men were sound asleep, except for those patrolling the bridge road a mile to the east and a mile to the west of the camp as an early warning system to guard against any surprise enemy movement on that highway.

And except for Lieutenant Slade, of course. The assassin.

Slade stepped quietly across the dusty footpath to the tents which faced his own, and squeezed between two of them without alerting the men who were sleeping inside. He walked away from the tents and the woods behind them, heading north toward the bridge. His ultimate destination was Major Kelly's tent, where he would cautiously peel open the flaps, take out his revolver, and blow the major's head off. However, in case someone had been watching him, some snooping son of a bitch peering out a crack between tent flaps, Slade walked in the opposite direction from Kelly's tent, until he was certain that the darkness would have finally concealed him from any unknown observer. Then he stopped and looked at the low sky, catching his breath, trying to still his booming heart.

Now was the time.