The '44 Vintage

thinking?' he said slowly.

Audley nodded. 'I shouldn't be at all surprised. I think you people have a word for it, too, don't you?'

'We do—several words. 'Framed' is one—and 'suckers' is another. And I guess that both apply to us, by God!' Winston swung back towards the Frenchman. 'You saw the bodies, Doc—you actually saw them?'

'Yes.'

'Did you examine them?' said Audley.

De Courcy frowned. 'Why should I examine them? They were dead.'

'Yeah, I'll bet they were,' said Winston. 'The way they died they'd be very dead.'

'The way they died?' For the first time there was doubt in De Courcy's voice.

'That's right. They were hit by six point-five Brownings belonging to one trigger-happy P-51 pilot. And we didn't have a thing to do with it, except to get the hell out of the way of the same thing.'

Audley nodded. 'That's exactly the way it happened, Doctor. We were strafed on the road—we were in two captured German vehicles, and the Mustangs took us for the real thing. But we got off the road in time, and they didn't.' He turned to Butler. 'Would you ask Hauptmann Grafenberg to join us, Corporal, please.'

Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage

Butler peered into the darkness of the hayloft, but before he could speak, he saw a movement in the aisle between the banks of hay on each side of the opening.

'Sir—'

'I have heard, Corporal.' The German stepped forward towards the doormat, pulling at his crumpled uniform with one hand in a hopeless attempt to straighten it and brushing with the other at the hay which festooned it.

'Good morning, Hauptmann,' said Audley politely. 'Doctor, I'd like you to meet Hauptmann Grafenberg of the German Army.'

The young German blinked at the light and stiffened to attention. If anything he looked even worse than the day before, thought Butler, as though he had spent the night with things even nastier than the blood-bloated flies which plagued Audley's dreams.

'Hauptmann, I'd be very grateful if ... you'd be so good as to tell the doctor what happened to us on the road yesterday afternoon,' said Audley.

The German looked down at the Frenchman. 'It is not necessary—I have heard what has been said . . .

and it is the truth.' He swallowed awkwardly, as though the words were painful. 'Except—it is not correct that I ... that the Herr Lieutenant released me. It was to him that I surrendered.'

Winston leaned forward again, stabbing a finger at De Courcy. 'Which means that someone has been lying through his teeth about us, Doc—because the driver who was with us when the P-51s hit us, he ran like a jack rabbit. So they know what happened as well as we do.'

Dr. de Courcy's eyes narrowed. 'But . . . why should they lie about you, Sergeant—if they knew so much?'

'Hell, Doc—that doesn't take much figuring. They knew we were coming and they were waiting for us.

So they scooped us up, but then we gave them the slip. So now they want whoever's got us to turn us in.'

Winston straightened up. 'like two plus two equals four—right, Lieutenant?'

Butler followed the sergeant's look to Audley, and was surprised to see how pale the subaltern's face was; it was paler than it ought to be after the German's testimony and the sergeant's triumphant mathematical assertion —paler even than thirty-six hours of strain and danger had already made it when I've been really almost happy for the first time since I landed in Normandy.

So there was something the sergeant had missed . . . something that made two plus two equals four the wrong answer.

Price, Anthony - [David Audley 08] - The '44 Vintage

And then it hit him like a gut-punch: from the moment that the major had shouted 'Hande hoch, Tommy'

out of the hedge at him two plus two had never equalled four.

He studied the Frenchman's face critically for the first time. Apart from that narrow look about the eyes it was entirely without expression —as empty as the woods had seemed where the French had ambushed the German vehicles. No fear, no anger, no belief, no disbelief, no surprise.

Two plus two equals five.

'Permission to speak to the doctor, sir,' he said.

'What the hell?' Winston regarded him curiously. But the American Army had no discipline, of course.

'Corporal?' Audley's glance was hardly less curious. 'All right—go ahead.'

'Thank you, sir.' Butler dismissed them both from his mind and concentrated on the Frenchman.

'M'sieur Boucard has explained the situation to you, sir, I expect?'

Now the Frenchman was studying him for the first time also, and seeing him as a soldier with a gun in his hands—a dirty, dishevelled British Tommy with a bandaged head, a person of no account, Butler thought gleefully.

But then, of course, he couldn't know what Butler knew—

All depended on MacDonald, and that officer, who by valour and conduct in war had won his way from the rank of a private soldier to the command of a brigade, was equal to the emergency—