He went quickly up the ladder to the roof, stepped onto the slippery pine planks. Kelly was immediately in front of him, running across the roof. Slade pointed his.45-caliber revolver and pulled the trigger.
3
Major Kelly was surprised that the revolver had made so little noise. Then he realized that the Panzer engines and the echoes of the exploding shell had blanketed the shot. And
Slade sighted in on him, holding the big gun in both hands as he lined up the second shot.
Looking into the muzzle, Kelly tried to think of brass beds.
“Major!” Beame shouted.
Before Kelly could tell the lieutenant that he was too late, Beame tackled Slade from the side. The two lieutenants went down hard enough to shake the hastily laid roof, and rolled over and over as they punched at each other. The gun clattered away from them.
“Little Snot!” Lily cried, and threw herself into the melee.
Suddenly, Kelly remembered the M-10 tank which had been preparing to fire a third round. He got off his knees and staggered over to the T-plunger. He turned it over, set it upright. Without checking to see if both copper wires were still wound to their terminals, he jammed the crossbar down.
The gorge filled with two simultaneous
The bridge wrenched sideways on its moorings, steel squealing like pigs at the heading block. The anchor plates on both the nearside and the farside approaches buckled and popped loose. They flew into the air and rolled end for end, catching the morning sunlight. Then they fell like leaden birds back to the earth. One of the piers gave way.
The concrete had been shattered by the dynamite, and now the pieces separated and fell away in different directions. They made big splashes in the river.
The bulk of the bridge shifted lazily westward toward the remaining pier, overpressured that weakened pillar, and broke it down into a dozen irregular slabs.
Beame knelt at Kelly's right side. “She's going down!” he cried, oblivious of his split and bloody lip.
Lily knelt on the left. “You okay?”
Kelly was holding his wounded arm. “Fine. Slade?”
“Knocked him out,” Lily said.
“Look!” Beame said.
Four of the German riflemen were still on the bridge, only a few steps from the safety of the St. Ignatius shore. They had been thrown to the deck with tremendous force when the dynamite blew. As they struggled to their feet, dazed and bloody, their uniforms ripped and their pot helmets dented, the second pier crumbled. The bridge sluggishly parted company with the gorge walls and its anchors. Two of the four Germans, not yet recovered from the first blow, were pitched out into space as the long structure rolled like a mean horse. The remaining pair clung to the twisted steel beams and rode the bridge to its final resting place.
They did not have a chance.
The bridge dropped.
It bounced on the rocks below and broke up like a ship might, slewing sideways in the river, every part of it strained against every other part. Rivets popped from their fittings, deadly bullets that whined off the superstructure. Twenty-foot beams snapped loose, jumped up. They quivered momentarily in the gray rain. Lazily, they fell back into the body of the ruined span.
This was a slower death than the bridge had ever before suffered, but it expired just as completely, settling into a mass of useless materials.
“Christ, what a show,” Danny Dew said.
Nathalie knelt beside Beame and put her arms around him, held tight to him. He kissed her cheek, leaving bloody lip prints.
Gradually, silence returned.
And after a moment of silence, Kelly became aware of the Panzer noise and the drumming rain.
On opposite sides of the gorge, the Allies and the Germans stared across the void at one another and wondered what in the name of God they were to do now.
4
Dreadfully weary, Major Kelly walked around the village store, one hand against the wall to balance himself. Wet, muddy, bloody, he came out on the bridge road where the German convoy stretched eastward as far as he could see. He went looking for General Adolph Rotenhausen.
The general was standing in the hatch of his Panzer. He was fearlessly eyeballing General Bobo Remlock, who was standing up in his Cromwell turret nine hundred feet across the ravine. “Father Picard!” Rotenhausen cried when he saw Kelly standing ankle-deep in a mud puddle beside the tank. “This is a dangerous place right now. Go back to your church and—”
“No,” Kelly said. He slopped through the mud, put one foot in the huge mud-clogged tread gears, and clambered up until he stood on the tank fender. “I am worried about my people, my village.”
“There is nothing you can do now,” Rotenhausen said. “You should have done something sooner. You should have stopped the partisans from blowing up the bridge.”
“I knew nothing of that,” Kelly said. “And I guarantee you, General, that no partisans take shelter in St. Ignatius. They must have come up the river from some other town.”
Rotenhausen turned his aristocratic face to the sky. The rain stung it, rolled off his white cheeks onto his glistening slicker. “It doesn't matter whether I believe you or not. The deed is done.”
Kelly wiped nervously at his face. When would Bobo Remlock get tired of sitting over there and lob another shell at them?
“There is no other bridge in the area wide enough to accommodate your Panzers,” Kelly said, just as he and Maurice had planned for him to say. Right now, on the west bank, Maurice was imparting this same information to
Bobo Remlock. “But ten miles to the north, near the base of the mountains, there is a place where the gorge becomes shallower and the river broadens. You could get over to the west if you went up there.”
Rotenhausen perked up for a moment, then squinted suspiciously at Kelly. “Why do you tell me this?”
“I don't want my village destroyed,” Kelly said. “Already, several of my people have died. And I have been injured myself.”
For a long moment, Rotenhausen looked across the mist-bottomed gorge at the Cromwells, Shermans, and M-10s. Then, as the tanks on that side began to pull back, turn, and start north, the German made his decision. “I must get this convoy turned around,” he told Kelly. “We'll reach that ford before they do, Father Picard.”
“Good luck,” Kelly said, jumping down from the tank. Holding his wounded arm, he walked over to the village store and leaned against the wall and watched the tanks move out.
5
Danny Dew raised the sledgehammer over his head and brought it down on top of the shortwave radio. The metal casing bent, but nothing broke.
