Hanging on

and heavy beams.

Hagendorf was laughing like hell. A splinter had caught him on the left cheek bad enough to let a steady stream of blood course down his face and drip off his chin. Otherwise, he appeared unscathed.

Major Kelly did not know if he had been hurt himself, and he did not look to see. “Emil, you'll kill yourself!” he screamed.

“You killed me already!” the surveyor yelled. “You and your chaos!”

“You'll kill me!”

“Jump.”

“Emil, we need this machine.”

“And I need a sense of order!”

The dozer slammed straight into an outhouse. It started to climb the board wall, but then the building went down. Kelly was almost flung out of his niche. The dozer dropped squarely back onto its tread, rattling his teeth. With his left hand, he got a tighter grip on the roll-bar, squeezing it so hard that his knucklebones looked as if they would pop through his skin. The narrow outhouse crumpled into useless pieces as they drove over it.

Hagendorf angled sharply toward the river.

Toward the ravine.

He pushed down on the accelerator.

“No!” Kelly screamed.

The major let go of the roll-bar and threw himself at the chief surveyor, tore Hagendorf's right hand from the steering wheel, punched and gouged the pudgy man until he had climbed atop him. Hagendorf was sitting on the driver's chair, facing front; and Kelly was sitting on Hagendorf, facing the other way, looking directly into the smaller man's bloodshot eyes. The major used his elbow to chop at Hagendorf s left arm until the surveyor finally let go of the wheel altogether.

Unguided, the D-7 roared toward the ravine, straight for the steepest part of the bank.

Kelly hated to be brutal, but he knew the situation called for extreme measures. He punched Hagendorfs face again and again. Blood streamed out of the smaller man's nose.

Hagendorf kept trying to reach around the major and grab the untended steering wheel. He did not trade blow for blow, but concentrated only on regaining control of the bulldozer.

“Give up, dammit!” Kelly shouted.

The chief surveyor would not give up. Even though Kelly had him pinned to the seat, he struggled forward, blinking back tears and blowing bloody bubbles out of both nostrils.

Behind him, Kelly knew, the ravine was drawing closer. Any moment, they might plunge over the edge…

He punched Hagendorf in the mouth. And again. The pudgy man's lips split open. In an impossible, curious slow motion, a single tooth slid out of Hagendorfs mouth, rolled over his ruined lower lip. It came to rest on his round chin, pasted there by a sticky film of blood.

“Please, Emil! Please, give up!”

Hagendorf shook his head. No.

The dozer jolted over something. For a second, Kelly was sure they had plummeted over the ravine wall. Then the dozer rumbled on.

The major struck Hagendorf again, battering him around the ears now. And, at last, the chief surveyor slumped back against the brace behind the seat, unconscious.

Thank God. Thank you, Emil.

Kelly reached behind and grabbed the wheel. Using that to steady himself, he managed to turn around and — at the same time — keep the unconscious man from sliding off the dozer. When he had the wheel in both hands, he used his buttocks to pin the surveyor in place, then looked up.

The ravine was no more than ten yards away.

He stomped on the brake pedal.

Trying to rear up, the bulldozer lurched like a wounded horse in a bad cowboy movie and almost threw them off.

Kelly held on for both of them. He wheeled the machine away from the gorge and braked again.

They came to a shuddering, clanking halt parallel to the drop-off, two feet from the edge of the precipice. Below, the river gushed between its banks, dark and somewhat evil now that the angle of the sun denied it light.

Kelly looked once at the foaming water and the jagged rocks, looked once at the twenty-four inches of earth which separated him from death — then promptly turned his attention elsewhere. He looked back the way they had come, saw the ruined platform house and the demolished outhouse. Both would have to be rebuilt… Neither was a particularly difficult piece of work, yet he felt this was the last setback they could endure. Each minute counted — but thanks to Emil Hagendorfs wild ride, each minute would not count for enough.

Kelly looked at his watch. Almost seven o'clock. The Germans would be here in five hours. Maybe sooner.

It could not be done.

Nevertheless, you had to pretend you were going to hang on, even if you were a character in a fairy tale about death. If you stopped pretending, you were sure to die.

He climbed down from the dozer, already composing a list of jobs that might be speeded up in order to obtain workers for the rebuilding of the two structures which Hagendorf had knocked down.

“My big D!” Danny Dew shouted, running toward the dozer. “My big D was hurt!”

Major Kelly ignored Dew. He walked back toward the platform house which Emil Hagendorf had driven through. It was a jumble of broken beams and splintered boards.

Two dozen of his own men and forty or fifty Frenchmen had gathered at the wreckage and were spiritedly discussing Hagendorf's wild ride. Now, they crowded around Kelly, jabbering excitedly.

The major gave them the cold eye, then the tight lips, then the very serious frown — all to no avail. Finally, he just screamed at the top of his voice, “Shut up! Shut up!” When the laughing and jabbering ceased, he said, “What in the name of God are you idiots doing here? Why aren't you working? Why are you wasting time? What are you laughing about? This is serious!” He felt as if his insides were all rising into his skull and would soon explode out of the top of his head. And he was almost looking forward to that. “We have less than five goddamned hours! Move your asses! I'll kill any son of a bitch who isn't back to work in one minute!”

There must have been something particularly ferocious in his voice. Although he was known as a man with no talent for discipline, the workers stared at him for a brief moment, then turned and ran.

Too soon, the sunset came in a glorious splash of orange and red. The red deepened into purple.

Night fell. Kelly could almost hear the crash.

It was 9:30 before any workers were available for the reconstruction of the platform house and the outhouse which Hagendorf had knocked down. Even then, Kelly could find only four of his own men and six Frenchmen who had finished their other chores.

By ten o'clock, the damaged platform was patched enough to support the crude framework for the one-story house. Twenty minutes later, that frame was in place, except for the roof beams.

“We'll make it!” Lyle Fark told Kelly.

“No, we won't.”

“We only need another hour, at most. We'll be done half an hour before the Germans arrive — plenty of time left to change into our French clothes and hide these fatigues.”

“What if the Panzers get here early?” Major Kelly asked.

While Fark and the other men hammered more frantically than ever, Kelly rounded up eleven more workers who had completed their job assignments. They were weary, sore, stiff, bruised, and full of complaints. Nevertheless, they worked on the reconstruction of the damaged building.

The road to the east remained deserted. But the Panzers could not be more than a few miles away.

Occasionally, Major Kelly imagined that he could hear the great machines and the clattering steel treads… “Faster! Faster, faster!” he urged whenever the ghostly tanks rumbled in the back of his mind. “Faster!”

But it was a command his men had heard too often in the last few days. It no longer registered with them,