Hanging on

Nurse Pullit. As a result, his French work crew stood idle. And the men waiting to finish the siding job on the school were also put behind schedule.

Kelly ran the whole way to the hospital, cursing Angelli's neuroses and his romantic Italian blood. When he came through the bunker door, he saw the lovebirds pressed into the corner on his right. They were giggling. Vito was trying to unhook Nurse Pullit's bra through the thin, silky fabric of her uniform.

“Vito!”

Angelli jumped back and dropped his hands from Pullit, looked as shamefaced as a small boy caught at the cookie jar. Nurse Pullit blushed and made a show of straightening the rumpled white dress.

“You come with me,” Kelly said, turning and stalking out of the bunker. When he had Angelli outside, marching him back to the school, he said, “This has got to stop.”

The private scratched the tattoo on his chest.

“The Panzers are coming, Angelli!” Kelly shouted, spraying spittle all over the private's face. “We've no time for this sort of thing!”

“I can't be away from her for more than a few minutes at a time,” Angelli said. “I can't bear it for longer.”

Kelly was enraged. “Pullit is not a woman! Get that through your head!”

“She's the kind of woman I always wanted to marry,” Angelli said, as if he had not heard the major. “She's witty, vivacious, and yet shy. I'd never be ashamed to introduce her as my wife.”

Kelly frowned. “Vito—”

“Don't get the idea I'm only interested in her mind and personality,” Vito said, nudging Kelly in the ribs as they walked toward the school. “She has fantastic legs, a nice round ass, beautiful big jugs—”

“That's just one of Lily's bras. Those aren't real jugs. Those—”

“And she has such a lovely face,” Angelli said. He sighed.

“Angelli,” Kelly said, with proper gravity, “you haven't—”

“I certainly haven't!” Angelli said, scandalized by the suggestion. “It isn't that I haven't wanted to. She does excite me. But she's a virgin, and I just could not take advantage… Well, I know you just caught me trying to take off her bra, but that wasn't anything serious. I wouldn't have pressured her into going the whole way. Mostly, we've just held hands. She's too innocent a woman for me to—”

Kelly put a new strength in his voice. “Nurse Pullit is not a woman. She—”

“She's almost a saint,” Angelli said. “I know, sir. She is not an ordinary woman. Not at all. She's a living saint!”

Kelly gave up on Angelli. There was no reasoning with the private just now. They reached the school building, which was still swaying in the wind, and Kelly said, “I'm not going to try to explain to you the truth about Pullit. I just want you to find the trouble with this building and get it fixed. Now! Fast, Angelli. And if you run back to the hospital before you're done, I'll shoot your balls off. You won't be any good to Pullit or anyone else, ever.” Wasting precious minutes…

The afternoon was both good and bad. Five new outhouses were built. But Sergeant Coombs got into a fight with a French worker. The roof and porch roof were added to the rectory. But a truck hauling prefabricated walls had engine trouble, and its shipment was delayed an hour. The church took shape, and the pews — borrowed from a chapel outside of Eisenhower — fit in perfectly. But Coombs got into a fight with another Frenchman and tipped over a mixer of precious concrete.

Major Kelly shrugged off the good reports and brooded about each scrap of bad news.

At six o'clock, as the afternoon gave way to evening, he was brooding about the concrete which Sergeant Coombs had spilled. He stood at the top of the convent steps, watching the workers swarm over the church and the rectory across the street. Men came to him with problems which he quickly solved. Occasionally, he looked eastward to see if Angelli was still guiding his French work crew.

He was watching Vito when Danny Dew drove the D-7 onto the bridge road and roared down through the center of town, throwing up a wake of yellow dust. Dew stopped in front of the convent. He left the dozer running, jumped off, and came up the steps two at a time.

“What's wrong?” Kelly asked.

If a black man could look pale and drawn, Danny Dew was pale and drawn. His eyes were wide, glazed with fear. “Major… there's a rumor going around… ” He was unable to put his fear into words.

“Danny? What's wrong?”

Dew leaned against the railing and shuddered, wiped the back of one hand across his mouth. “There's a rumor going around that you traded the D-7—for more help from Maurice.”

“Well,” Major Kelly lied, “it's only a rumor, Danny. I didn't do any such thing. I know what the dozer means to you.”

“I got to have the D-7,” Danny said. “Nobody can take that away from me, Kelly. I'd die. I'd wither up and die.”

Kelly patted Dew's shoulder. “I know, Danny. I wouldn't pull something like that. Besides, we need the dozer. I couldn't afford to give it away.” He was a bit surprised at how smoothly the lies came out, how sincere he sounded.

Danny began to regain control of himself. The shakes grew less severe, and some of the terror left his eyes. “You serious?”

“Danny, you know I would never—”

In the same instant, both men heard the change in the sound of the dozer's engine. It was no longer just idling. They turned as one and looked down the convent steps.

Emil Hagendorf sat in the driver's chair, holding down on the brake pedal while he pumped the accelerator. The big machine rocked and groaned beneath him. He laughed, waved at Kelly and Dew.

“Stop him!” Kelly shouted, leaping down the steps.

Emil let up on the brakes.

The bulldozer lurched forward. The steel track seemed to spin for a moment, kicking up dust and chunks of macadam.

Major Kelly jumped from the fourth step and landed feet-first on the wide band of tread. He waved his arms, trying desperately to maintain his balance. The dozer was moving even as he reached it, and he was dragged forward like a man on a horizontal escalator belt.

“Emil, stop!” he shouted.

Hagendorf looked over at him and laughed.

Kelly backpedaled, trying to keep from being tossed in front of the dozer and chewed into tiny pieces. His feet slipped on the knobbed tread as it flashed under his feet. He felt as if he were walking across a spinning sheet of ice in the center of a pitching sea.

Pulling the wheel hard to the right, Hagendorf took the dozer off the bridge road. Under the engine noise, there was no longer the clatter of steel meeting a paved surface.

Kelly did not look up to see where they were going. All of his attention was concentrated on the grinding, steel caterpillar belts. He stretched out, grabbed the roll-bar which rose behind Hagendorf, and pulled himself onto the dozer frame, away from the deadly tread.

“Welcome aboard!” Hagendorf shouted.

He was drunk.

Holding onto the roll-bar, Kelly wedged himself into the same meager niche he had occupied while inspecting the village with Danny Dew a couple of days ago. He bent down and screamed in the chief surveyor's ear. “Stop this thing, damn you!”

Hagendorf giggled. “Maybe that will stop us,” he said, taking one hand from the vibrating steering wheel long enough to point to something ahead of them.

Kelly followed the extended finger. “Hagendorf, no!”

An instant later, the dozer plowed into the side of one of the single-story platform houses. The place came apart like a paper construction. The wood broke, splintered, gave way. They surged through the wall. The platform cracked and came apart under them, fodder for the ferocious tread. They drove the whole way across the room as the roof dipped slowly toward them, then crashed out through the opposite wall in a shower of pine planking, nails,