Hanging on

dawn.”

He and Tooley located the T-plunger, a coil of wire, and a wooden case full of carefully packed dynamite which was wrapped in airtight plastic to keep the sticks from sweating. They lugged the stuff toward the door, anxious to get on with things.

“Major, wait!” Nathalie Jobert said, clutching his hand as he reached for the doorknob. “What about David?”

Kelly looked into her lovely black eyes and smiled. “He's fine. I'll keep him right beside me, safe and sound.”

“Will you tell him I said—” She looked away, wiped at her pert nose with the back of one slender hand.

“Yes?”

“Tell him that I—”

“That you love him?” Kelly asked.

She blushed and nodded.

“I'll tell him,” the major said. He leaned over and kissed her cool forehead below her winged white hood. “Now I have to go.”

She raised his hand and kissed it, just as the lights went out. “You're a wonderful man.” Then she was gone.

But Lily was there to detain him another minute when he opened the back door and stepped into the convent yard. She came outside with him and, while Tooley crossed the yard, threw both arms around him. “I don't love you,” she said, kissing him.

Kelly put down the T-plunger and the wire. He embraced her, crushed her against him, inhaled the vaguely musky odor that always clung to her. “And I don't love you.”

“I don't love you at all,” Lily said. “Not even a teensy little bit.”

“You make me so happy, Lily.”

“Do you love me even a teensy little bit?” she asked, looking up into his face.

“No. You mean nothing whatsoever to me.”

Lily shivered. “That's marvelous, darling.”

“Yes, it is, darling.”

“Kiss me again.”

Kissing her, he lost control and slid his hands down her back and cupped her round buttocks and began to knead her firm flesh through the black gown. Abruptly, he pulled away from her. “I have to get moving. We have to get the explosives planted under the bridge.”

Lily sighed. “Don't worry about anything, Kelly. As long as neither one of us loves the other even a teensy little bit, we'll be okay.”

“You're right,” he said.

He picked up the plunger and wire and left her. He crossed the convent yard, cracked the secret gate, and cautiously checked on the sentries at the nearby intersections. When both the Germans were facing away from him, he went out into St. Ignatius. Tooley followed him, carrying the box of dynamite.

Lieutenant Slade had just taken shelter at the base of an elm tree when he saw a gate open in the back of the convent fence. A second later, Major Kelly and that chicken-shit pacifist, Tooley, came out and pushed the gate shut and ran silently across Y Street, taking shelter by the side of the house just as the sentries turned to face that block. Both men had their arms full. But full of what?

Major Kelly led the pacifist westward, dodging from shadow to shadow, and Slade followed them. At the intersection of Y Street and A Street, they knelt beside the nunnery and waited for the sentry to face away from them.

Slade crept as close to them as he could, but was unable to tell what they were carrying.

What was this? What was Kelly doing out of the rectory? What cowardly, yellow-bellied plot were they involved in now?

The sentry turned his back.

Kelly and Tooley went across the road, lugging the mysterious objects. They took just enough time so that Slade was unable to follow them until the sentry had made one more circuit. When he got over there, they were gone.

Which was too bad. After all, now was the time. Slade had finished his reconnaissance. All that was left was to murder Major Kelly, preferably in silence. Knife him in the back… And then take a commando team into the rectory to slit the throats of the German officers. Soon, they would all be real heroes.

Smiling at the darkness, the lieutenant crept southward, trying to find where Major Kelly had gone.

5

Maurice opened the bunker door and ushered them into the eerily lightless room, closed the door, and switched on a flashlight. He shone the beam on the plunger and the wire, then on the dynamite which Tooley set gently on the floor. “It looks like enough,” he said.

“More than enough,” Kelly said. “The bridge will drop like a rock down a well.”

Shining the flashlight deeper into the bunker, Maurice said, “Everyone is here, all the men you requested.”

Danny Dew, Vito Angelli, Sergeant Coombs, and Lieutenant Beame sat on the hospital cots, eyes gleaming with reflected light.

“You've heard the whole story?” he asked the three newcomers whom Beame had fetched during his absence.

“We heard,” Danny said. “What a bitch of a night.”

“I think we should use the dynamite on the krauts,” Sergeants Coombs said. “Not on our own bridge.”

Major Kelly had only one weapon he could use on Coombs. He used it. “I'm a major, and you're a sergeant. We'll do things my way.”

Coombs scowled, grudgingly nodded agreement. In a pinch, he was a book man, a rule man, a regulations man, who would obey even a poor disciplinarian like Major Kelly.

“And what is your way?” Danny Dew asked, getting up from his cot and pacing in and out of the soft light

“There will be seven of us,” Kelly said. “Danny, Vito, Beame, Sergeant Coombs, Tooley, Maurice, and me.” As quickly as possible, he told them how they would do the job. “Any questions?”

Danny Dew smacked his lips. “Yas, massah. Dumb ol' Danny have a question, suh. You really think we's gonna be able to do all this without makin' a noise them guards up on the bridge would hear?”

Kelly shrugged. “We can try to be perfectly quiet That's all I can say. We can try.”

“We can do it,” Beame said, optimistic despite the way their situation had deteriorated.

“That reminds me,” Kelly said. “One other thing. The SS is guarding the bridge. There won't be Wehrmacht privates above us, but about four or five of those black-uniformed crackpots. So you better be twice as quiet.”

“Next,” Danny Dew said, “he's going to tell us we have to pull off this operation blindfolded.”

Maurice switched off the flashlight

The darkness was so deep it seemed to pull at their eyes.

Kelly opened the door the whole way. For a while, they stood there, letting the lesser darkness of the night creep in. When their eyes adjusted, Danny Dew picked up the plunger and the wire. Tooley hefted the case of dynamite and held it close against his massive chest. Major Kelly led the way out of the hospital bunker, and they followed. Liverwright, who was dying, closed the door behind them.