Hanging On

by Dean Koontz

  The village extended two blocks to the west along the bridge road. The whole north side of the first block beyond the rectory was occupied by the massive convent and its board-fenced yard. Across the street from the convent, again commanding a full block, was the church and churchyard. Then, over beyond A Street and the river, there were a couple of houses and the village store.

  Kelly switched on his flashlight and walked north on B Street.

  "It looks so real, doesn't it?" Beame asked, awestricken.

  "Pray the krauts think so," Major Kelly said.

  "I thought you told me not to pray."

  "That's right," Kelly said. "I almost forgot."

  B Street ran only two blocks north-south, half the length of its sister, A Street. The northern block, above the bridge road, was faced with a sixty-foot barrackslike nunnery and a stone well on the east, and with the convent and convent yard fence on the west. Everything was nice and tidy.

  From B, they entered Y Street. This was the northernmost of the town's three east-west roads, parallel to the bridge road. It ran one block east, with nothing but two church-owned houses on each side, their outhouses, scattered elms. Across Y Street, facing the mouth of B, stood a fake two-story house in ill-repair.

  "Why didn't you give the streets French names?" Beame asked. "Won't the Germans think it's odd-naming streets after letters of the alphabet?"

  Kelly sighed, tugged at his collar. "The letters are for our benefit in a crisis. The krauts won't expect a town this small to have formal street names."

  Turning west, they followed Y Street towards the river. On their left was the convent. On the right, there was only open lawn until they reached a two-story fake house at the end of the block. This one was also poorly maintained. Actually, every two-story structure in the village was ugly and decaying-except for the rectory. They did not want Rotenhausen to take a fancy to some building which had no floors inside and no inner walls or furniture... The rectory had to outshine all the others, make a quick and obvious impression.

  The second block of Y ended at A Street, which was four blocks long and ran north-south. The first block contained a nunnery and two houses. Kelly shined the flashlight over these, then turned south.

  "One thing bothers me," Beame said.

  "What's that?"

  "Why hasn't the bridge been bombed since we put it up?"

  "Well... the Allies think they've already knocked it out with that B-17," Major Kelly said. "And the Stukas won't touch it now that they know the Wehrmacht wants to use it."

  Beame frowned. "If the German air force knows the Wehrmacht wants to use the bridge and is cooperating by not bombing us-won't it also have told the convoy to expect to find us here?"

  "Maybe not," Kelly said. "There's something strange about the Stuka attacks."

  "Strange, sir?"

  "Remember," Kelly said, "they never bombed us, just the bridge. And they always knew when we'd rebuilt it. I don't know what's going on here, but it isn't all jake."

  "Jake who?" Beame asked.

  "Jake nobody. Just jake."

  "He doesn't have a last name?" Beame asked, puzzled.

  "Jake is an expression," Major Kelly said. "I meant that everything about those Stukas is somehow not right. It's all false."

  "Oh," Beame said. "I see. It's not jake."

  "Just like General Blade isn't all jake," Kelly said. "At first, I thought he sent us here because he was senile. Lately, I've realized there's got to be more to it than that. I don't know what, though. I wish I did."

  The next block of A Street contained a stone well, a sixty-by-forty-foot school for the deaf and, on the east, the fourth wall of the convent yard fence which several workmen were still nailing in place.

  And then they reached the bridge road again. To the east was the church and rectory. One block to the west was the bridge. Only three structures fronted the bridge road on that last block: two houses and the church-owned store in which the products and handicrafts of the deaf-mutes were sold to tourists and those in nearby villages. The store was fully completed and stocked with quilts, canned goods, jewelry, clothing, carpentry, and other items which had been taken from Eisenhower and which would be foisted on the Germans as produce of the deaf-mutes if any krauts wandered into the place.

  The third block of A, the first south of the bridge road, was faced by two one-story houses on the west. Beneath the first of these was the hospital bunker in which Tooley, Kowalski, Liverwright, and Emil Hagendorf would pass the tense night. Hagendorf would pass the tense night as a prisoner. They had purchased a great deal of wine from Maurice to keep Hagendorf drunk and docile.

  On the other side of the block was the churchyard. It was dark and quiet. Kelly could see half a dozen rounded tombstones and the vague outlines of others lying in the deeper shadows. Altogether, Maurice had provided forty-five grave markers which he had borrowed from church and family plots in and around Eisenhower. These had all been set in fresh concrete, over nonexistent graves. More than anything else that had been done, these gave the town a past, an illusion of age and endurance. When Kelly directed the flashlight beam in among them, the sandstone and granite markers gleamed and rose up in chalky skirts from the pools of blue-black shadows on the ground.

  The final block of A Street, the southwest corner of the town, held platform houses, sheds, and outhouses. Kelly played his light back there, and he suddenly thought that he and Beame seemed like two watchmen examining a movie lot on their late rounds. They went no farther south.

  Z Street was the third east-west lane, south of and parallel to the bridge road and the northernmost Y Street. Z was two blocks long, like Y. On its south side rose a school for normal and deaf-mute children, a stone well, several platform houses built together over what had once been the unit's main bunker. On the north side of Z, the churchyard occupied the first block. The second block contained an open-air shrine to the Virgin Mary, complete with statue and encircling flagstone walkway. Then came three single-story dwellings, all shabby, all with broken-down porches, one with a slightly sagging roof.

  "I've been thinking about Blade," Beame said, stopping in the middle of the street. "About his not being all jake. Do you think his being involved in the black market has anything to do with our being sent here?"

  Kelly stopped and turned. "Blade's in the black market? How do you know?"

  "I don't know," the lieutenant said. "But when we were in Britain waiting for D-Day, I heard rumors. I got friendly with junior officers on Blade's staff."

  "And they said he dealt in the black market?"

  "Implied. They implied it."

  Kelly thought about that a moment, then shrugged. "I didn't think Blade was smart enough to play that game. But even if he is, what could that have to do with our being sent here?"

  "Nothing, I guess. It was just a thought."

  They turned from Z into B Street, into the only block they had not yet inspected. On their left was the churchyard and church. On the right was a one-story house with a ratty front lawn, a fence running eastward, and then the rectory and the rectory lawn.

  "Back to Square One," Kelly said.

  Kelly was impressed with himself and his men, even if all of this had been for nothing, even if they were doomed. In little more than four days, they had constructed the shells of twenty-five single-story and three two-story houses. They had built one two-story house complete: the rectory. The thirty-foot convent walls had been nailed up, as had the high board fence that surrounded that whole block, and the convent's entrance foyer had been fully finished to provide a place for the German general to pay his respects if he should take it in his head to do so. The shells of two large schools and two nunneries had been thrown up. The church had been built in full, except for the bell tower, which had no stairs or bell... and except for the pews which had been borrowed from a country church near Eisenhower. The forty-by-twenty-foot town store had been finished inside and out. They had built another house which Hagendorf had b
ulldozed to the ground. In addition, they had put up three stone wells, eighteen sheds, twenty-eight outhouses... There were three stables tucked near the woods, horses in each. In some ways, of course, the town was atypical of a French country village. There were no barns in sight, for one thing. And there were no structures made completely of stone. But this was, after all, supposed to be mainly a Catholic retreat, a church facility; the Germans could not expect it to look like just any other town. All in all, the accomplishment was enormous, and the patina of reality just thick enough to hoax the Germans. Though, naturally, the Germans would not be hoaxed. They would see through it sometime before dawn. They would kill everyone. Even though he knew he was dead, Major Kelly, alias Father Picard, was impressed with himself and his men.

  "It's perfect," Beame said.

  "So long as no one goes inside an unfinished building. If anyone does-"

  He stopped in midsentence as a sixteen-year-old French boy, Maurice's nephew, roared out of the night on a stolen German motorcycle. The boy came down the bridge road from the east, past the fake houses, his hair streaming in the wind. He had been standing watch on the road, and now there was no doubt what he was shouting above the cycle's chattering engine. "They come! Germans! They come!"

  Someone screamed in terror.

  Only after the scream died away did Kelly realize it was his own. Get hold of yourself, he thought. It's a fairy tale. Face up to your role. There isn't anything else for you to do.

  * * *

  11

  The German convoy's advance motorcycle escort shot out of the trees to the east, doing better than forty miles an hour, heading straight for Major Kelly and the people behind him. It slewed to the right in a puff of dust and gravel, turned broadside in the road, and came to a tire-scorching stop in a cloud of blue smoke. The young Wehrmacht soldier driving the cycle and the second man in the sidecar looked stupidly at each other, brows beetled under their pot helmets. They slowly examined the houses and the crowd of French villagers, priests, and nuns which filled the lane only twenty feet ahead.

  Kelly almost began to pray, cracked his knuckles instead.

  A few of Kelly's people waved. Most remained still and silent, uncommitted to this violent presence.

  The soldier in the sidecar pulled a map from between his legs, unfolded it in the light of a hand torch which the driver held for him. A few lanterns burned by the church and rectory, but not enough to help the two Germans. The soldier traced their route with one thick finger on the map, talking to the cyclist as he did so. The driver nodded impatiently and pointed to the crowd in front of them as if to say that the senses could not be denied and the map, therefore, must be all wrong. There was a town by the river, despite what the cartographers had drawn.

  We're dead, Kelly thought. One of them will be unable to believe the map makers were wrong. That's the German way. Believe the printed word before you believe what the eye shows...

  Suddenly, behind the motorcycle, dwarfing it and the houses on the north side of the bridge road, a Panzer jerked forward from the deep forest shadows like a prehistoric sawtoothed reptile smashing its way out of an egg. The wicked black muzzle hole came first, a round mouth in the vaguely illuminated neck of the barrel, a death-spitting orifice that riveted every man's eye. Then came the churning treads, great clattering, banging bands of pitted, bluntly bladed steel that ripped up the broken macadam roadbed and tossed it out behind in fist-sized chunks. Heavy, downsloped tread fenders, thickly coated with mud, shielded most of the tracks from sight but did nothing to soften the terrifying sound of them. The brutally insistent parallel treads snapped and crunched the ground beneath them as a beast might grind up a man's fragile bones in its teeth. Abruptly, the entire tank hove into view: an armadillolike bow with a dragon's middle and stern, scaly and muddy, covered with curious protuberances, green-gray, scarred. The side-hung head lamps had been fitted with blackout caps, permitting only a thin slot of light to lance out from the bottom half of the lenses; the effect was that of a dragon with its eyes slitted while cautiously stalking prey.

  Behind the first behemoth came a second. It broke through the trees, growling close at the tail of the leader, eyes slitted too, adding to the cacophony of tread and engines.

  As Kelly's eyes adjusted to the scene, he could make out a long line of narrow, blackout headlights stretching to the top of the eastward rise and out of sight. We're all dead, Kelly thought. Mashed. Crushed. All destroyed.

  The first Panzer slowed down. Its whirling tracks stuttered noisily. The heavy-duty engines screamed down the musical scale and settled into a deep-throated, unmusical rumble as the tank halted with much shuddering and rattling behind the two soldiers on the motorcycle. Thin white smoke rose lazily from the well-meshed gears inside the tread band, drifted eastward.

  Behind the first tank, the second tank stopped as well, rocking back and forth for a few seconds as its frame worked against its tracks. Along the sloping highway, out to the undefined crest of the dark hillside, the rest of the convoy came to a standstill.

  Major Kelly, or Father Picard as he must now be, was out in front of the other villagers by a full yard. He looked up at the shelved front of the Panzer and wondered what in hell he was doing here. They were all dead. Crushed. Mashed. And worse. Why in the name of the God he didn't believe in-why had they not run away?

  And then he remembered why. They were behind German lines. There was nowhere for them to run.

  On the rectory steps, Lieutenant Beame looked from the tanks to the convent where Nathalie was standing in a nun's habit. He was suddenly, incredibly terrified of losing her. Why had he let Maurice put him off? Why hadn't he knocked that fat old frog on his ass and taken Nathalie? Why hadn't he reacted to Maurice like a man? This was the perfect woman. Nathalie was what he had always dreamed about-and more. They were perfect for each other both spiritually and, he was somehow certain, sexually. He wanted her more than he had ever wanted the other women of his dreams-Betty Grable, Veronica Lake, Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, Dorothy Lamour, Ann Sheridan, Rita Hayworth, Hedy Lamarr, Jane Russell, Esther Williams, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck, cute little Mary Astor, the Andrews Sisters whom he had wanted to assault all at the same time, Bonita Granville, Gene Tierney... Nathalie was more desirable than all of those women put together. And now he had lost her. His optimism had vanished in the face of the German power; and he felt certain that he would never see the sun rise.

  Standing on the convent steps in her nun's habit, Lily Kain reacted to the Panzers much as Beame had done. She imagined that she could smell death in the muggy night air. She wished Kelly could have found the time to put it to her today. Maybe the sight of these huge war machines would have been easier to take if she had had it put to her recently. Sighing, she raised both hands and waved at the Germans in order to keep from throwing up her nun's habit and diddling herself.

  The officer commanding the first Panzer, General Adolph Rotenhausen, clambered out of the hatch and down the side of his tank, stood for a moment on the muddy tread fender. He was a tall, whiplike man, not an ounce overweight. His face was square and harsh, though the features were in no way brutish. There was aristocracy in his heritage; it showed in his carriage and in his thin-lipped smile. His hair was cut close to his head, a white-blond cap that caught the light from the scattered lanterns and gleamed with it. He jumped from the fender and walked swiftly toward Major Kelly.

  PART FOUR

  Deception

  Midnight-Dawn/July 22,1944

  * * *

  1

  When he led them down to the front room after inspecting the second floor, General Rotenhausen stood with his back to the fireplace, his hands folded behind him even though there was no fire to warm them at this time of the year. Rotenhausen looked as if he desperately needed warmth. He was a bloodless man, as pale as linen. He smiled coldly at Major Kelly. There was no threat in his smile; it was just that Rotenhausen was incapable,
even in the best of times, of a smile that was not icy. "Well, Father Picard, you have a most pleasant home. It will serve splendidly as our overnight headquarters." His French was less than middling, but so far as Kelly was concerned his sentiment was absolutely perfect.

  Kelly smiled and nodded, twisted his black felt hat in both hands. He wondered if a French priest would treat a German general as an equal or as a superior. The point was academic, really, because he was too terrified to be anything but obsequious and subservient. "I am pleased you like it, sir," he said.

  "Standartenführer Beckmann and I will require the two largest upstairs rooms. My aides could be quartered in the small front room. And the Standartenführer's aides could sleep down here, in the bedroom by the kitchen." Rotenhausen turned to the black-uniformed SS colonel who sat on the bench sofa. He smiled, and this time he did put a threat into it. "Have you any objections to these arrangements, Standartenführer?"

  The SS officer was even more the Aryan ideal than General Rotenhausen. He was six-three, two hundred and thirty pounds. Like the slim Wehrmacht general, he was in perfect condition; however, unlike Rotenhausen, Beckmann was muscular. His legs were strong and sturdy and looked as if they had been poured into his black trousers and knee-length leather jackboots. His hips and waist were flat. The Standartenführer's neck was a thick, bullish stem of gristle, hard muscle, and raised veins. His face was a sharply featured square with a long brow, deep-set eyes, a Roman nose, and lips as thin as pencil lines. He was perhaps forty years old, but he was not touched by age in any way; he looked as fresh and young as one of his aides. And as nasty. His face was pale like Rotenhausen's face, but his eyes were a lighter blue, so sharp and clear they seemed transparent.