by Dean Koontz
Only one road entered the clearing. It came from the northeast, a rudely paved lane that dropped out of the foothills and slanted gradually into the flat land around the river. From where they sat, they could see for more than a mile along that road, to the top of one of the hills where it fell away, out of sight. In the darkness, the lane was studded with what appeared to be an endless stream of headlights. The first of these vehicles was no more than a quarter of a mile away from them, just entering the flat land a thousand yards ahead of the big Panzers. In a couple of minutes, it would be here. Soon after, the mammoth tanks would pass them close enough to be touched. Already, at a few minutes past eleven o'clock, fully an hour ahead of when Maurice had said to expect them, the heavy pounding of tank-tread trembled the earth. The roar of the massive engines, still so distant, was beginning to make conversation almost impossible.
Still, Lieutenant Slade managed to talk. He said, "You know we can't hope to fool them, anyway. Kraut uniforms and an armored kraut jeep don't make us krauts. They'll spot us right off."
He looked behind them at the silent, dark buildings. All of the American-made machinery was drawn back in among the trees behind the main bunker, out of sight. A row of German transports, holed and rickety but sound enough to the eye, in the dark, flanked the machinery shed. None of the other men in the unit was visible, though they were hidden everywhere, armed and ready to fight if this ruse should fail and the night should end in violence.
But they were acting like cowards, the lot of them, Slade thought. They were unwilling to face the enemy directly, and they actually would not do so unless they had no other choice. What would their girl friends say about them if they could see them now? What would Slade's own mother say? Slade's mother was a very patriotic woman, an Army wife, and an avid collector of war stories, both fictional and factual. Slade's mother believed in heroism. Her husband had been a hero as had been her father and her grandfather. Slade's mother insisted, when he was first sent to Europe, that Slade become a hero himself, even if he had to be wounded or die in the process. To be wounded was preferable to dying, of course, because if he died he could not beguile her with stories about Over There. It would be just terrible if Slade's mother's friends had sons who became heroes, while Slade remained undistinguished in battle. How humiliating that would be for Slade's mother. After all, she had done so much for him, and he could hardly pay her back with humiliation and degradation. And he could hardly let himself be killed before he had a chance to tell her a couple of good stories about heroism. So, if he had to die fighting the goddamned krauts, why couldn't he die in his own uniform? How would his mother ever explain this to her friends? She could bear it, she told him, if he died in some heroic way-but how could she bear the news that he had died in a jerry uniform? And a jerry private's uniform! She wouldn't be able to handle it. She'd crack up.
"The least we can do," The Snot said, making a final effort to sway them over to his point of view, "is blow up the bridge so the Panzers can't make it to the front."
Neither Kelly nor Beame replied. Kelly merely nodded up the road where, abruptly, a motorcycle and its sidecar were silhouetted against the oncoming convoy lights. They were not yet to the clearing, but coming fast.
The Snot took out his revolver and checked to be certain it was loaded. How would his mother ever explain to her friends about her son in a German uniform and trying to kill the enemy with an unloaded gun? It was loaded. The Snot hoped he would have to use it.
The cyclist stopped his machine twenty feet from the bridge, and both the German soldiers stared at Kelly, Beame, and Slade. They were fair-skinned and young, athletic men who looked too hard and knowledgeable for their age. They did not seem to be suspicious, merely curious.
Kelly smiled and waved. The noise of the oncoming tanks was too loud for his voice to carry across the hundred yards to the soldiers.
The man in the sidecar got out. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, black with black leather straps, polished. He was more than six feet tall, further elevated by the well-heeled boots, his pot helmet worn back off his forehead in a relaxed fashion. He bent close to the cyclist and said something which made the other man laugh.
Good, Kelly thought, they're laughing.
Suspicious men don't laugh, Beame thought, relieved.
Are they laughing at me? Slade wondered.
The cyclist changed gears and drove away, across the bridge, leaving his companion alone.
It was German routine to station a sentry at the approach to a bridge before the Panzers began to cross it, and it was also German routine for the sentry to inspect the nearside bridge for concealed explosives prior to taking up his post. This man didn't bother with that, apparently because he thought the bridge was already under German control. Instead, he walked across the road, onto the grass, coming directly toward the jeep where Kelly, Beanie, and Slade sat. Great. He wanted to chat.
"Go away," Beame said, under his breath.
But the sentry did not go away. He came on, smiling, waiting until he got close enough to speak over the thunder of the Panzers that were rushing down on them. He was even larger than he'd first appeared, a husky young brute who would know how to take care of himself in almost any situation. He was handsome in a robotlike sense, his face all hard lines, his hair yellow-white, eyes gleaming blue-green like the eyes of a deer, a perfect specimen of the Master Race. His teeth were even and white.
Behind the sentry, Sergeant Coombs rose from the slope by the bridge. Bent over almost double, he ran lightly over the grass, just out of the bright lights of the approaching tanks. Sergeant Coombs was not handsome, tall, or athletic. He was not blond, blue-eyed, or possessed of good teeth. Nevertheless, Major Kelly was certain which would die tonight. Not Coombs. Never Coombs.
The German, intent on reaching the men in the jeep, didn't hear the sergeant coming.
"No," Beame said.
Sergeant Coombs drove the knife into the soldier's back, slipped it in between two ribs, and thrust it brutally upwards, probing for the heart.
The soldier screamed.
Even with the Panzers so near, Kelly heard the cry.
Coombs pulled the blade out and watched the German go down on his knees. He had not hit the heart. The soldier was alive and trying to shrug his rifle off his shoulder. He jerked about clumsily, gasping desperately for breath, much too slow to save himself. His face had gone even whiter, his eyes round and blank.
Coombs stepped forward and put his knee in the middle of the soldier's back, encircled his neck with one burly arm, jerked his head up. The German's face turned involuntarily toward the sky, exposing a vulnerable white throat. Kelly thought he could see the pulse beating rapidly in the kid's taut jugular. Then Coombs's big right hand moved. The blade gleamed for an instant, and the strained flesh parted quickly and deeply, ear to ear. For a brief moment, the smooth, grinning second mouth fell open in a leer-then filled up with blood which looked more black than red in that dim light. Filling, the wound then gushed.
The soldier let go of the rifle and reached up to touch the spurting wound. His fingers hooked into the gash, blood spilling down his hand, and then let go with the sudden realization of what they had touched.
"Go away," Beame said again. But this time he was not sure to whom he spoke: to the dead soldier, to Coombs, to himself, or not to any person, but to a thing, a power?
The soldier was trying to walk on his knees. He was bleeding like a pig at the slaughter, already dead but unwilling to give up. He waddled forward a foot or two, dragging Coombs with him, his head still upturned, his glazed eyes seeking his killer. Then, abruptly, he fell forward on his face, his head half off his shoulders.
* * *
11
Sergeant Coombs, the only man not frozen into immobility by the murder, slid his bloody hands under the German's armpits and dragged him backwards to the riverbank, over the edge and down under the shadowed bridgeworks. The scorched grass where the brief struggle had taken p
lace was marred by two long, parallel tracks which had been cut by the dead man's boot heels. And there was blood, of course. Pools of it. Still, the trail was unremarkable. The blood looked like oil, machine oil or maybe grease. No one would notice.
Kelly turned and looked back along the road, as much to get his eyes off the blood and his thoughts off the dead soldier as to see what was happening behind them.
The first of the convoy vehicles lumbered like stolid elephants through the archway of giant pines. They lurched, hesitated, then came on, engines grinding like thousands of badly cast gears: grrrrr-rrr-rrrrr. And then they were in the C-shaped clearing where the camp lay. From now on, anything could happen. In seconds, the Panzers' headlights high on the knobbed turrets would sweep across the bridge: up the slight incline of the approach, over the framing beams, onto the deck... And they would reveal the lack of a sentry. When that happened, the jerries would have to know that something was wrong. They would slow down. They would stop.
When they stopped, everyone would die.
If a couple of shells were fired at the jeep, Major Kelly thought, he and Beame and Slade would be so much jelly decorated with steel slivers and sparkling bits of glass. Pretty but not functional. The only way to hang on was to stay functional.
Kelly looked anxiously at the point along the ravine where Coombs had disappeared with the corpse. What was taking them so long down there?
"Maybe I could take up guard by the bridge," Beame suggested.
Kelly shook his head. "You're dressed as an oberleutnant, and they'd wonder what you were doing at a private's post."
"We can't just sit here-"
"We have to just sit here," Kelly said.
Beame said, "Slade's dressed as a private. He could take up the sentry's post without making the krauts suspicious."
Major Kelly wiped a film of perspiration from his face and thought about that: was there any chance of Slade getting killed? If there were, he'd send The Snot out right now. At least something good would come of this crisis. Thinking about it, though, he realized Slade would fumble his role and expose them. He'd have to keep the lieutenant in the jeep, out of trouble.
Where were the men under the bridge? This was their job. They'd had time to strip the German soldier, time for one of them-
"There!" Beame exclaimed, pointing.
Danny Dew, the dozer operator, climbed over the edge of the riverbank, dressed in the dead man's uniform. It was a perfect fit, and the rent made by Sergeant Coombs's knife was not visible. Indeed, Danny Dew looked as if he had been born in that uniform, as if he had goose-stepped out of his mother's womb, had saluted the doctor with a stiff arm, and had run the nurse through with his bayonet. He was a marvelous German soldier, muscular and stiff, his head held straight and proud, eyes cold and malevolent as he took up his position by the bridge. The only problem, so far as Major Kelly could see, was that Danny Dew was a Negro, a colored person, so dark that he hinted of blue.
Ordinarily, a Negro wouldn't be assigned to a white unit in the American Army, because there were separate colored regiments. The Army practiced rigid but quiet segregation. The only reason that Danny Dew was in Major Kelly's unit was because he was a damn fine D-7 operator -and the only one available for immediate and quiet transfer to beef up their unit for this crazy mission behind German lines.
"Maybe he was the only one of Coombs's men who'd fit into that uniform," Beame said.
As the first tank lights splashed across them, Major Kelly looked at Danny Dew's shining black face, his wide white grin. He groaned aloud. He bashed his head against the steering wheel, over and over. That felt so good he didn't want to stop. It made him pleasantly dizzy and caused a sweet, melodic buzzing in his ears which drowned out the roar of the tanks.
"Danny Dew certainly doesn't look Aryan," Lieutenant Slade said, telling everyone what was already known.
At the bridge, Danny Dew stood stiffly beside the eastern bridge frame, the rifle held across his chest.
"Here comes the first of them," Slade said.
Everyone had already seen the first vehicle. Even Major Kelly had stopped bashing his head on the steering wheel long enough to look at the first vehicle.
An armored car led the procession, traveling nearly as fast as the motorcycle. Its head lamps struck Danny Dew like a spotlight zeroing in on a star stage performer. The car passed him, jolted across the first floor beam, lights bobbling wildly, and kept on going across the bridge. At the other end, it slammed down onto the roadbed again and disappeared around the bend two hundred yards beyond the river, hidden from them now by a rise in the land and the thickening forest. It had never even slowed down.
"Luck," Major Kelly said.
"God's on our side," Slade said.
"Here comes another," Beame said.
The second armored car was coming fast, though not nearly so fast as the one before it. This driver seemed less sure of himself than his predecessor had been; he was hunched over the wheel, fighting the ruts and the hump in the center of the pavement where the lane had hoved up like a hog's back. He would be too busy with the unresponsive steering of the cumbersome vehicle to take much notice of Dew. However, the five other Germans with him would have more time to look around.
They glanced at Kelly, Beame and Slade as they went by, then looked ahead at Danny Dew.
"Here it comes," Kelly said.
The car hit a rut, bounced high, slewed sideways, and nearly went off the road. The driver fought, kept control, plunged through the entrance to the bridge and accelerated. In a few moments, he was gone, and still Dew stood at the bridge.
Beame closed his eyes and let his head fall forward with relief. He sucked cool night air into his lungs, then reluctantly raised his head and looked eastward, toward the convoy.
The third armored car came much more slowly than either of the first two. It carried four Germans in addition to the driver, and it weaved uncertainly from one side of the lane to the other. Battered, splattered with mud, it had obviously seen better days. The left rear fender sported a six-inch shell hole. The windshield was cracked and yellowed.
"Why's he coming so slow?" Slade asked.
"Is something wrong with him?" Beame asked. "I can't hear the sound of his engine with the tanks and all; is he breaking down?"
Kelly said nothing. He knew, if he opened his mouth, he would scream.
The armored car passed them, the engine making a peculiar grinding noise. An inordinate cloud of exhaust fumes trailed them. A minute later, they thumped over the bridge approach, slid through the entrance in what seemed to be slow motion, and went across without stopping.
Major Kelly still didn't feel good about Danny Dew standing out there pretending his eyes were blue and his hair yellow, because the Panzers were next. All twelve of them. In each of the Panzers, the captain of the tank stood in the hatch on the top of the turret, watching the way ahead, sometimes calling orders down to the driver in his forward cubbyhole. The driver, in each case, had only a slit to see through and was too busy with navigation to pay attention to a sentry. But the tank commander, topside, would have Danny Dew fixed in his sight for long, long seconds. A minute or more.
"We're all dead," Major Kelly said. He began beating his head against the steering wheel once more.
"You're beating your head against the steering wheel," Slade said.
Kelly beat even harder.
"No SS officer ever loses control like that," Slade said.
For once, Slade was right about something. Kelly stopped beating his head against the wheel and contented himself with gripping the wheel in both hands and trying to break it loose of the steering column.
"Better be careful about that," David Beame said, nodding at Kelly's whitened knuckles. "If you break it off, Maurice will assess you for it."
That was true enough. But he had to do something, and he couldn't very well climb into the back seat and pulp Lieutenant Slade's face, as he wanted to do. One of the tank commanders would
surely notice a scene like that and become too curious.
The first Panzer approached the bridge. One moment it was a black shape behind bright head lamps. Then it loomed out of the darkness, its great tread clattering on the Tarmac roadbed. It brought with it an odor of hot metal, oil, and dust.
"So big," Beame said.
Kelly squeezed the wheel.
The tank commander, a tall, fine-boned Aryan, stood in the turret, hatless, his shirt open at the throat revealing fine yellow hairs that gleamed in the reflection of the head lamps. He scanned the men in the jeep, peered menacingly at Major Kelly-but more at the much-feared SS death's-head on his cap than at Kelly's face-then looked imperiously away.
What were these men? Kelly wondered. Where did these legions of hard, fair-faced Aryan supermen come from? Surely, not all the German people were like these; they could not all be so icily handsome, so withdrawn and cold and lifeless. Was Hitler creating these in his basement, through some arcane magic?
The tank commander was watching Danny Dew. His hands were braced on opposite sides of the turret hatch, to keep him steady, and he was staring straight ahead at the sentry.
The steel tread clattered up the incline.
"He's seen Dew," Kelly said.
The long barrel of the tank's biggest gun nearly scraped the horizontal part of the entrance frame before the giant machine tipped onto the bridge floor and nosed down a bit. A moment later, it was roaring away, toward the far bank of the river. The tank commander had not seen anything out of the ordinary, after all.
"I don't believe it!"
Slade said, "He didn't even notice Danny Dew is a nigger."
The second tank ground toward the bridge. The commander nodded to Dew abstractedly as he guided his machine through the end posts and away toward the other shore. It reached the other side and soon disappeared around the bend.