by Dean Koontz
"Still ten to go," Beame said.
Slade said, "Take my word for it. Before this is over, we're going to have to fight them."
One by one, the next ten Panzer tanks, fully prepared for battle, driven by some of the most dedicated and steely-nerved army technicians in the world, captained by officers who were among the best of the German military class, passed over the bridge without hesitation. A few of the tank commanders nodded at Dew. Most ignored him.
"Here come the trucks," Slade said as the trucks came into sight behind the last of the rumbling Panzers.
According to Maurice, there were thirty trucks, each carrying more than thirty men in addition to the driver and the officer up front. They were not nearly so large as the tanks. They would be able to streak through the bridge posts without any anxious moments, and each driver would have time to give Danny Dew a quick but thorough looking over.
The first truck hit the graded bridge approach at forty miles an hour, closing the gap between itself and the last tank which was already at the far side of the gorge. It bounced badly in the ruts; the soldiers in the back looked grim as they sat on metal benches and gripped the side slats to keep from falling to the floor. The truck jolted onto the bridge and growled away, followed closely by another and another and still another of the transports.
"This is too much," Kelly said. "Our luck will change."
It didn't. None of those drivers, turning glassy blue eyes on Danny Dew as they went by, saw anything amiss. Not just then, anyway. Perhaps later they would think of it. Five years from now, one of these dumb krauts would sit up in bed in the middle of the night and say to a startled wife: "That sentry was a Neger, for God's sake!" Now, though, all the trucks went past without incident.
Behind the last of the trucks, separated from the transports by fifty yards, was the first of the two motorcycles that wrapped up the procession. It passed with a noisy clatter. Immediately after it was by, Danny Dew stepped back and away from the edge of the bridge, rolled over the top of the riverbank and out of sight of the final cyclist. It was in this last sidecar that he would ride away- if he were really a German sentry.
Now came the worst part.
"This is the worst part," Slade said.
Usually, according to Maurice, the last cycle picked up the sentry. Now and again, however, if the sentry felt like a bit of relief from the windy ride of the sidecar, he would flag down one of the last transports and climb into the back of the truck. Kelly was hoping the man on the last cycle would go on if he saw no sentry waiting, sure that his man had joined the troops in the back of one of the transports. Also, since this was apparently a German camp, the cyclist wouldn't see how anything could have gone wrong. And he wouldn't take the time to stop and search for his man, because he wouldn't want to fall too far behind the main body of the convoy, not in a foreign country where-quite often-the peasants had been known to play some bloody tricks on their conquerors.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that they could not risk a shot now that they had gotten this far without being discovered. They couldn't kill the cyclist yet, if he became inquisitive. The last of the convoy was still in sight, the roar of the tanks far ahead. The night had gotten just still enough to allow a shot to carry to the men in the open backs of the last couple of transports still on the bridge.
The motorcycle slowed.
"He's stopping," Beame said. His voice sounded like that of a frog only partly turned back into a prince.
The motorcyclist slowed even more.
He looked them over as if they were on display and he was thinking of buying one of them. He scanned the bridge, searching for the sentry he was supposed to pick up, then he looked at them again, having come even with their jeep.
He was young, even younger than the soldier Sergeant Coombs had killed, with his helmet flat down in place and his body girdled up in black leather belts. He looked sharp, not easily fooled, like a farm kid who had found a new sophistication in his uniform and was trying to live down what he considered shamefully simple origins. A long-snouted machine pistol was holstered on his hip, and a completely unnecessary bandolier of ammunition wound around his chest.
He stopped his cycle altogether.
Thinking fast, Kelly grinned and waved him on, pointing after the convoy to indicate that the sentry had already left.
The rider hesitated.
"Go away," Beame whispered.
The cyclist finally lifted one hand off his bars to wave back, then accelerated and went on his way.
For about ten feet.
Then Lieutenant Slade shot him in the back of the head.
* * *
12
The cyclist fell into the handlebars, recoiled lifelessly, and began to slide sideways in a graceless heap.
Unguided now, the heavy motorcycle jolted out of a shallow rain furrow and swung erratically toward the bridge abutment. It was made more stable by the sidecar than it would have been with only its own two wheels, but still its single head lamp made crazy, jiggling patterns on the night.
As the dead soldier tipped into the sidecar which the bridge sentry would have occupied, Slade's second shot took him through the shoulder and passed straight into the gasoline tank under him. There was a flat, contained explosion hardly louder than either of the shots. Flames engulfed the machine and the dead man as the whole bright bundle crashed headlong into the concrete bridge support.
Major Kelly stood up in the jeep and drew his own gun, as did Lieutenant Beame. Slade, standing up in the back seat, already had his pistol out, of course, and he was jabbering about his success in nailing the kraut. Neither Kelly nor Beame said anything. They watched the retreating trucks, waiting for one of them to pull up and disgorge German infantrymen. Then it would be all over. At least, Major Kelly thought, Slade would get it. The whole thing might be worth dying for if Slade were killed too.
The last of the transports had already come down on the roadway on the far side of the gorge and was making for the bend which would put it out of sight. The first motorcycle was close behind it. Surely, either the two soldiers in the motorcycle or the men sitting in the last of the open-end trucks would see the fire, begin to wonder...
But the Germans kept moving away, rounded the bend, were gone. A minute went by. Two minutes. Five. When the Germans had not returned in ten minutes, Major Kelly knew they never would. By the time they saw the last motorcyclist was missing, they wouldn't know where to look for him. Amazing.
Lieutenant Slade watched the smoldering motorcycle and the shapeless body sprawled within it. He smiled. "One more jerry that won't be shooting up American boys."
"Why?" Beame asked.
"Because he's dead," Slade said, perplexed by the question.
"Why did you kill him?" Beame amplified.
"What would my mother have said if I'd let them all go?" Slade asked.
"Who?"
"My mother!"
"How would your mother ever find out, if you had let him go?"
"She has connections, sources," Slade said, looking down at himself. "You'd be surprised at my mother's sources." He tugged at the hem of his jacket. "I shouldn't have had to wear this silly uniform. Look at my hips. My hips look ridiculous in this uniform." He looked at the dead German in the middle of the road, a black lump in a wreath of gray smoke. "His uniform fit him well enough."
* * *
13
The sentry's corpse was startlingly white. It lay on its back by the edge of the river, one hand on the middle of its chest as if it were feeling for its own heartbeat. The skin was snowy, unnaturally white, almost phosphorescent. The body hair was too light to be seen. The dead man looked like a big, molded doll, all of painted rubber: long rubber legs, rubber arms, a thick rubber penis now horribly limp and curled over two rubber, felt-furred testicles. In the light of Kelly's torch, there were only two spots of color -the incredible blue eyes, and the red-black blood on the upper torso which had poured out when Coomb
s had slit the sentry's throat.
That could be me, Kelly thought. Someday, it will be.
He turned away, shifting the beam of his torch, and came upon Danny Dew who was standing directly under the bridge. Leaving the corpse behind, trying to forget it, he went over to the Negro. "That was amazing," he said.
"What?" Danny Dew asked. He was stripping out of the German uniform. His powerful black body gleamed with perspiration; droplets of sweat clung to the tightly curled black hairs on his chest, like jewels sewn into his skin. He looked like an oiled harem guard. Except that he wasn't a eunuch.
"That none of the Germans noticed you weren't- weren't Aryan," Kelly said. "That was fantastic."
Danny Dew laughed, showing lots of white teeth. Were they really white, Major Kelly wondered, or were they only bright by comparison with Dew's dark face? That was one of the great mysteries that had haunted white Americans for as long as Major Kelly could remember. His mother had always said their teeth were not clean and white, but only appeared to be, because the rest of them was "painted so dark." Major Kelly remembered hours spent in discussions of Negro dental conditions, the family gathered around the kitchen table like a group of psychic gypsies discussing the netherworld. Even this near, even though Danny Dew was a close companion and had been for months, Major Kelly could not be sure about his teeth.
Danny Dew said, "I pretended I was white."
"Pretended?"
"Well, I was the only one down here big enough to look good in that uniform, so I had to do something, didn't I? So I directed myself at those Jerrys, and I thought white."
"But you still looked colored."
"To you. I wasn't directing myself at you. Anyway, looks don't matter. It's all in how you think."
"Even if you were thinking white, you looked colored," Kelly insisted.
"If you can't accept it, forget it," Danny Dew said, tossing off the last of the German uniform and picking up his own pants. "But it's all in the head, Massah Kelly, all in de ole head."
Kelly leaned back against the hard edge of a bridge support and said, "I can't accept that, no. If all a man had to do to become someone different was to think himself different, there wouldn't be a war. Each of us could be a German, Japanese, Britisher... No one would want to fight anyone else any longer."
Danny Dew buckled his belt and pulled up his fly, struggled into his shirt which stuck to his sweat-slicked chest. "That's why I wish other people would start using their heads, like me," he told Kelly. "If everyone just pretended more, we could get out of this crappy place."
* * *
14
At four in the morning, only a few of the men in the camp were asleep. Six enlisted men were sitting in the woods immediately south of the camp, drinking cheap whiskey out of tin cups and singing songs over the graves of the two dead Germans. They weren't really mourning the dead men. But they couldn't just throw them in the ground and walk away. If the tables were turned, they would want someone to drink and sing over their graves, at the very least. They got very drunk, and they ran out of songs to sing.
In the shabby rec room of the HQ building, about twenty men sat on the benches and in the cafe chairs Maurice had provided for a price. They drank more cheap whiskey out of more tin cups. They didn't sing, though. They just sat there, drinking, not looking at each other, as if there were a religious service in progress.
Under the earth, in the main bunker, ten other men were playing poker at a pair of battered wooden tables. No one was enjoying the game, but no one wanted to call it off. If they called it off, there was nothing else to do but think. No one wanted to think.
Other men wandered about the camp, going nowhere, trying not to run into anyone. These were the ones who couldn't play poker. They had to think.
At four in the morning, Major Kelly was in the rec room. He was talking to General Blade, who had just put through an emergency call on the big wireless set. "You've got an emergency, Major," the general said.
Lieutenant Slade, standing at Kelly's shoulder, stiffened. Maybe he would get to be in a battle, after all.
"Sir?" Kelly said.
"A unit of Panzer tanks, armored cars and infantry trucks are on the way toward you. They ought to be crossing the bridge in a few hours."
"Twelve Panzers, sir?" Major Kelly asked.
General Blade was unsettled by the major's inside knowledge. "How could you know that?"
"They passed over the bridge three or four hours ago," Kelly told him. Then he told him the rest of it, except for the account of Slade's gun work. He wasn't trying to protect Slade, not at all. But he was afraid that, if he told Blade about the dead cyclist, the general would recommend Slade for a medal or something, and then The Snot would become unbearable.
"Well," General Blade said, "I'm glad to see you've got such good relationships with the locals-that you've cultivated them as informers."
"Yes, sir," Kelly said. He saw that Lieutenant Slade was fidgeting about, debating whether to insist that Kelly mention the backhoe which they had lost in the bargaining with Maurice. He was probably also trying to think how to let the general know about him killing the cyclist. Kelly placed a finger to his lips to warn Slade off.
Still, the lieutenant said, "Aren't you going to tell him about the backhoe?"
Slade was close enough to the microphone for it to pick up what he had said. General Blade had heard. "Backhoe?"
"You little shit," Kelly said.
"What was that?" the general asked.
"Not you, sir," Kelly said.
"What's this about a backhoe?"
"We lost it, sir," Slade said, loud enough to be heard.
"Lost it?" the General asked.
Major Kelly pulled his revolver from his holster and leveled it at the middle of Lieutenent Slade's face. "You know what this will do to your face?" Kelly asked.
Slade nodded, swallowed hard.
"I'll put one right up your nostril," Kelly promised.
"A backhoe?" General Blade asked. "Up my nostril? Kelly-"
"It's all right, sir," Kelly interrupted. "I was talking to Lieutenant Slade."
"What's going on there, Kelly?"
"Slade's drunk," Kelly said. "Too much celebrating after the Germans went by."
The General was surprised. "I didn't think he was that sort-to drink so much."
"It happens, occasionally," Kelly said.
Lieutenant Slade colored, opened his mouth to speak. Kelly thrust the revolver close to his face, shutting him up.
"One more thing, Major," General Blade said. "I've also been informed that the Nazi high command is considering switching a Panzer division from the Russian front and moving it westward within a week or so. That would mean a convoy of eighty tanks or so, supply trucks, truck-mounted 88 mm antiaircraft guns, quite a string. Naturally, if they are dispatched and use the route that'll take them over your bridge, they're going to camp there with you for the night. It would take half a day, anyway, to put that big a force across the bridge."
"Camp with us, sir?"
"If they come that route," Blade said.
"But, sir-"
"Don't worry about them," Blade said. "They'll probably never be dispatched, and even if they are they'll come west on some other highway."
Kelly nodded, then realized the general couldn't hear a nod. "Yes, sir. I won't worry, sir." He cleared his throat and said, "Sir, how is the front moving these days?"
"Better. Better. You're only a hundred and ninety miles behind lines now."
"But that's only ten miles less than-"
"I know how happy this makes you," General Blade interrupted. "Now, I have to be going, Kelly. I'm glad you squeaked past the first unit of Panzers, damn glad. I wanted you to know about the possibility of that big division being sent your way in a week or so; I wanted you to have time to plan for it, if it comes."
"Plan? Plan? How can I plan for-"
"It's probably never going to come near you," Blade said. "But you can'
t be too careful these days, the way things are. Good luck, Major. I will be in touch, and I'll expect you to keep that bridge open, sir!"
Major Kelly stared at the hissing microphone and returned it to Slade as if tranced by it. "Eighty tanks? Antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks? Infantry? Supplies? Staying overnight? Slade, we can't fool the Germans for an entire night!"
"Like the general said," Slade observed, "they'll probably never be sent, or if they are they won't come this route." Secretly, he wished they would come this route, so that there would be one great big fucking battle with lots of heroism and derring-do. To Kelly, because he knew it was what Kelly wanted to hear, he said, "We're in for a change of luck. I feel it."
Kelly frowned. For all the time he spent reading the Army field manual, Slade was as naive as everyone else. Didn't he know nothing ever improved, not a whit?
* * *
15
Things had to improve, Lieutenant Slade thought. The camp was in a very bad way: hiding, choosing to deceive the Germans rather than fight them openly. Major Kelly was a coward. Lieutenant Beame was a coward. All the men were cowards. Something had to change. Someone had to show the men that all was not lost; they could still accomplish something in this war. Someone had to take the reins and be tough with these sons of bitches, make them shape up, put a little guts in their bellies. So far as Slade could see, he was the only one to do it.
He would have to kill Major Kelly.
Once Kelly was dead, Lieutenant Beame would gladly abdicate his role as the new commander of the unit, and General Blade would put Slade in charge. Then, things would improve.
An hour after the general's call, Lieutenant Slade stood in his tiny blanket-partitioned quarters in the main HQ building, fashioning the mask he would wear when he killed Major Kelly. He couldn't very well kill him openly even if Kelly was a coward. Therefore, he had cut two holes for his eyes in the burlap potato sack which he had filched from the food stores down at the main bunker. He looked at the mask and wondered if he should cut a slit for his mouth. If he wanted to talk with the mask on, he would need a slit where his mouth was. Otherwise, his voice would be muffled. On the other hand, he didn't have anything to say to Major Kelly. He just wanted to kill him. He wasn't going to lecture him first. Okay. No other holes.