“Yes, yes,” Kelly said, impatiently.
“Very well.” Maurice went down the rope ladder and disappeared.
Kelly wiped a hand over his face and looked east along the bridge road. Rotenhausen's convoy was pouring into the far end of the town. Already, the first Panzer was halfway past the convent, less than a block from then: position and little more than a block from the bridge. Behind the first Panzer was another, and another — then two long-barreled Jagdpanthers, two heavily armored cars with 75 mm cannons, then a motorcycle with sidecar which was darting in and out of the convoy, working its way to the front where it belonged. Rotenhausen was starting slowly, but he would reach the bridge in less than two minutes.
Kelly saw that they would have to blow the span even if Bobo Remlock did not show up. If they took a chance and let Rotenhausen start across, and if Remlock showed up when some of the German tanks were already on the other side, there would be no way to avoid a battle that would level St. Ignatius — and kill everyone who pretended to live there.
He stooped low on the roof, trying not to be seen, and he placed both hands on the T-plunger.
“Already?” Lily asked.
He nodded.
“Just a minute, then.” She took a rifle from beneath her voluminous habit. “I thought we all ought to be armed, if it comes down to that.”
“You're going to fight tanks with rifles?” Kelly asked.
“Better than fighting them with rocks,” she said.
“I guess so.”
“I don't love you, Kelly.”
He kissed her, quickly. “I don't love you.”
To the east, the advance motorcycle escort weaved around the two leading tanks and shot out in front of the convoy with a loud growl. As Rotenhausen's Panzer churned by the last of the churchyard toward the A Street intersection, the motorcycle flashed past Kelly and the others, went over the bridge approach, and accelerated toward the west bank.
Over there, six German soldiers armed with automatic rifles stood guard over the farside approach. The cycle with its two Wehrmacht soldiers sped out of the bridge and blurred past them, roared toward the bend in the road — and braked suddenly when the first of General Bobo Remlock's tanks, a British Cromwell, hove into view, cruising at top speed.
“Here we go!” Danny Dew said, lying flat on his stomach and bringing his rifle up where he could use it.
Rotenhausen's Panzer, the first in the German convoy, was through the A-Street intersection and on the approach to the bridge when the general saw the enemy tank. The Panzer bit into the cracked macadam and held on, chugging to a stop at the brink of the bridge, at the corner of the village store. Looking over the edge of the roof, Kelly and the others could see the top of Adolph Rotenhausen's head just four feet below.
The rest of the German convoy slowed and stopped.
Even while Rotenhausen's tank was jerking to a standstill, Kelly looked westward again. Only a few seconds had passed since the cycle had taken the lead in the German line and zoomed across the bridge, though Kelly could have sworn it was more like two or three hours. Over there, the motorcycle was still bearing down on the cruising Cromwell and trying to come to a full stop on the wet pavement. Abruptly, the front wheel came up. The cycle rose like a dancing bear, then toppled onto its side. The monstrous, British-made tank slowed a bit, though not much, and ran right over the screaming Wehrmacht cyclists, grinding them into the mud.
Nathalie cried out.
“Sadistic bastard,” Lily hissed, staring at the Cromwell as if she could vaporize it with a look of pure hatred.
“One guess who's commanding the Cromwell,” Beame said.
“Old Blood and Guts,” Kelly said.
“Yeah. Big Tex.”
“The Last of the Two-Fisted Cowboys.”
“The Big Ball of Barbed Wire himself.”
“The Latter-Day Sam Houston,” Kelly said.
“Yeah. The Fighting General.”
“Old Shit for Brains,” Kelly said. “No doubt about it.” He could not understand how he could go on like this with Beame. He had never been so terrified in his life. And he had a great many other terrors to stack this one up against.
The six German riflemen on the far side turned and ran when the Cromwell crushed the cyclists and kept on coming. They were halfway back across the bridge now, every one of them a religious man no matter what his beliefs had been a few minutes ago.
Behind the Cromwell, other Allied tanks loomed out of the curtain of gray rain: several Shermans, two British M-10s, another Cromwell, an armored car with twin cannon… Some of these left the road and deployed southward, all turning to face across the ravine, mammoth guns trained on the village and on the part of the German convoy which they might be able to reach. The lead Cromwell and several other tanks remained on the road and stopped at the farside bridge approach, bottling it up.
“Massah Kelly,” Danny Dew said, “I do wish I was back in Georgia. Even dat sorrowful ol' place do seem better than this.”
It was an almost classic military problem. The Germans held the east bank of the river. The Allies held the west bank. And no one controlled the bridge between.
The showdown.
“If we get out of this,” Beame whispered to Kelly. “I'm not going to take any of Maurice's guff. I'm going to ask Nathalie to marry me.”
“He'll eat you alive,” Kelly said.
“Once, he would have. Not now.”
“Good luck.”
“I won't need it,” Beame said. “I know what I want now. Just so I live to have it.”
The wind gusted across the roof, stirred the nuns' habits, pummeled them with thousands of tiny, watery fists.
To the south of the bridge on the other side of the gorge, one of the dark-brown M-10s elevated its blackened cannon to full boost. Kelly watched this without fully grasping the implications of the movement. A second later, one shell slammed out across the river. Just one. None of the other tanks opened fire, and the M-10 did not immediately follow through with a second round. The long shot arced high over the river and fell squarely into the building which was next to the store on A Street. The blast was a gigantic gong, then a compact ball of fire, and finally a violent wave of force that flung Kelly, Beame, and the others flat on their faces, even though they had already been kneeling. The armed T-plunger tipped over without setting off the dynamite under the bridge.
The house which had taken the shell was chewed into toothpicks and spewed in all directions. The burning floor collapsed down into the hospital bunker where Tooley, Liverwright, Hagendorf, and Kowalski did not have a chance. They probably did not even have time to look up and see it tumbling in on them, Kelly thought. Just a great noise, heat, a flash of pain, and endless darkness.
“No,” Beame said. “No, no, no!” He stared in horror at the flames which licked up from the bottom of the hospital bunker. A jug of alcohol burst; blue flames spurted briefly skyward, dropped away.
Nathalie was crying, crossing herself, praying.
Lily was cursing the M-10 and giving it the same look of loathing she had directed against the Cromwell.
Major Kelly's first thoughts were insane. First, he decided that Hagendorf had at least been released from a world of chaos by the ultimate chaotic event. And Tooley would not have to witness any more violence. And Liverwright did not have to die slowly now; he was finished in an instant. And most insanely of all — Kowalski had been released from the compulsion to predict a future which he was powerless to change. It was even a bit funny… Kowalski had forecast every violent event which had plagued them — except his own demise. What good was it to see the future if you could not see and avoid the source of your own death? And if a genuine fortune-teller could not avoid his own grave, what chance did an ordinary, balding, middle-aged slob have of living to celebrate his next birthday?