“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.
Major Kelly was standing beside Dew, his arm in a sling. The bullet wound was not serious, merely a crease; but it pained him too much to allow him to wield the hammer himself. “Again!” he shouted.
“Yes, Massah,” Dew said. He swung the hammer a second time. One of the casing seams popped open.
“I don't understand why you have to destroy it,” Lily said, looking mournfully at the shortwave set.
“Neither do I,” Beame said. He was standing next to Nathalie and Maurice, though The Frog was glaring fiercely at him.
“I don't ever want to talk to Blade again,” Kelly said. “Even if I gave the radio to Maurice, Blade would have a way of reaching me.”
“Mon ami—” Maurice began.
“Again, Danny!” Kelly said.
Dew raised the sledgehammer. His hard black muscles rippled. He put his strength into the swing and broke the glass in the front of the radio. The blow echoed in the large, one-room convent building, whispered for a long time in the rafters overhead.
“But you have to talk to Blade,” a handsome young soldier said, stepping up between Lily and Private Angelli. “He's your commanding officer.”
Kelly could not remember ever having seen this young man, which was odd, since he prided himself in knowing all his men by their first names. “He isn't my commanding officer any longer,” Kelly said.
Lily stamped one foot, a gesture that made her breasts jiggle in the velvet cups of her dancer's costume. “Kelly, I won't let you—”
“Danny, hit it again!”
Dew struck the radio another vicious blow. It crashed off the stand onto the floor.
“You simply can't fire your commanding officer,” Vito Angelli said. He was standing beside one of the French girls who had been dressed like a nun. His arm was around her waist, one hand circling up to cup her full right breast. He no longer seemed to be such a one-woman man. Or, more accurately, a one-pervert man. Nurse Pullit was nowhere in sight. “You can't choose your commanding officers,” Angelli insisted.
“Well, from now on that's exactly what I'm going to do,” Kelly said. “I don't want another one like Blade. I don't think he ever did care about us the way a general is supposed to care for his men. He's been using us.”
Lily frowned at him. “Using us?”
Kelly nodded. “I've been putting bits and pieces together… You know we've thought there was a traitor in the camp. The Stukas always knew when the bridge was rebuilt, always returned to bomb it the day after it was completed. Someone had to tell them it was ready. I think that someone was General Blade.”
“Bullshit!” Coombs said. He, too, was standing with a French girl. She was rather ugly.
Lily looked at Kelly as if he had gone mad. “That's ridiculous! Blade—”
“It makes sense to me,” Kelly said. Perspiration trickled down his forehead and ran to the end of his nose, but he ignored it. “Keep in mind that Blade had his entire career staked on us. No one else thought this bridge was of any strategic importance. Blade said so himself. Yet he disagreed with the other generals. He secretly sent a whole unit of Army engineers behind German lines in order to keep the bridge open. What do you think would have happened to Blade if the bridge were never bombed, if we just sat here without anything to do?”
Lily thought about it. They all thought about it. She said, “He wouldn't be up for any promotions when his superiors found out about it.”
“Exactly,” Kelly said. “Once he sent us here, he had to establish proof that the Germans considered the bridge strategically important. And what better way than to get them to bomb it repeatedly?”
“Now, wait a minute, sir,” the handsome young soldier said. “General Blade can't order Stukas to do his own dirty work!”
“That's right,” Beame said. “He can't control the German army!”
Kelly frowned. “There are bits and pieces that maybe fit… For example, Beame told me that General Blade probably dabbles in the black market. When we were in Britain, I heard the same thing about Bobo Remlock. That sounds terribly coincidental, doesn't it — that both our nemeses should be in the black market?”
“Hell,” Angelli said, “probably every one of our generals is in it.”
“Another thing,” Kelly said, ignoring Angelli. “I've also heard that some of our officers are not against profiting from deals made with officers on the other side.”