Kelly began to cry.
He did not know if he were crying for the dead men or for himself. It did not matter very much.
Angelli and Pullit were also crying, comforting each other, hugging. Kelly did not bother to go over and separate them.
Without warning, the second shell from the M-10 plowed into the side of the gorge just short of the village store. The earth leaped up like a bronco under the buildings. Inside the store, canned goods and other merchandise fell from the shelves in a series of tinny explosions.
“Hey!” Beame said. “Hey, they're after us — not the Germans! They must think that we're up here spotting for the kraut artillery!”
“Nuns, spotting for the kraut artillery?” Kelly asked.
But he saw the M-10's cannon elevate a couple of degrees more and line up a new trajectory. The third shot would get them as surely as the first had accidentally slaughtered Tooley, Liverwright, Hagendorf, and Kowalski.
“Jesus Fucking Christ!” Kelly screamed, surely loud enough to be heard over the Panzer engines in the street below. He shoved clumsily to his feet and. turned toward the T-plunger, took a single step, and was knocked to his knees by a tiny snapping sound off to his right. He looked down at his arm and saw blood running over his clerical suit. He had been shot.
But by whom?
Then he saw Lieutenant Slade coming onto the roof.
2
All night long, Lieutenant Slade had prowled the fake town looking for Major Kelly. When he had first lost the bastard after following him and Tooley from the convent to the west side of A Street, Slade had been sure he would pick up the trail in no time. But minutes and then hours passed, and Kelly was nowhere to be found. And the longer
Slade took to find him, the less chance there was that the coup could be pulled off and the Germans defeated by clever commando tactics.
Where was Kelly hiding?
Slade raced from one end of St. Ignatius to the other, looked in all the buildings, did everything but pry under the rocks. He never thought to look down in the gorge, out in the middle of the river, or up under the bridge, because he could not have conceived of Major Kelly doing anything as dangerous and brave as wiring the bridge with explosives.
Then, just minutes ago, he had been standing in the sacristy doorway at the back of the small church, staring out at the graveyard and trying to think if he had forgotten to look anywhere. To his great surprise, Kelly had come bounding down one of the aisles between the tombstones, wearing a muddy clerical suit. He had crossed A Street and gone up to the roof of the village store, leaving a convenient rope ladder dangling behind him.
Slade knew there was no longer any chance of killing Kelly and organizing the men into commando groups. He was going to have to settle for just the first half of his plan. Perhaps, after he had murdered the major and the Panzers had gone, he could shape the men into killer squads and prepare them to do battle with any other German force that happened through this way.
After Maurice Jobert came down from the store roof and disappeared into the ravine, Slade hurried across the churchyard and over to the west side of A Street. He reached the back of the village store just as a shell slammed into the hospital bunker on his left. He was thrown to the ground, knocked to the verge of unconciousness.
When he finally got to his feet, he stared across the gorge and saw the Allied tanks for the first time. He did not understand how they could have arrived at this most propitious moment, but he did not stop to wonder about them. If the Allies were going to recapture this part of France today, it was more important than ever that he kill Major Kelly. When the liberation was completed, Slade wanted to be able to prove to the conquering troops and to all the American people and not least of all to his mother that he had done everything within his power to wreck Major Kelly's cowardly plans.
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 then he realized that it did not matter if the krauts heard the shot — because whether or not they heard it, he was dead.
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 cracks! and then a pair of duller but more fundamental whumps! that chattered back from the low sky.
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.