Hanging On

by Dean Koontz

  "No," Beame said. "No, no, no!" He stared in horror at the flames which licked up from the bottom of the hospital bunker. A jug of alcohol burst; blue flames spurted briefly skyward, dropped away.

  Nathalie was crying, crossing herself, praying.

  Lily was cursing the M-10 and giving it the same look of loathing she had directed against the Cromwell.

  Major Kelly's first thoughts were insane. First, he decided that Hagendorf had at least been released from a world of chaos by the ultimate chaotic event. And Tooley would not have to witness any more violence. And Liverwright did not have to die slowly now; he was finished in an instant. And most insanely of all-Kowalski had been released from the compulsion to predict a future which he was powerless to change. It was even a bit funny... Kowalski had forecast every violent event which had plagued them-except his own demise. What good was it to see the future if you could not see and avoid the source of your own death? And if a genuine fortune-teller could not avoid his own grave, what chance did an ordinary, balding, middle-aged slob have of living to celebrate his next birthday?

  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.

  "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."

&
nbsp; "With Germans?" Lily asked.

  "I've heard that, too," Angelli said. "Hell, Eisenhower's investigative staff brought charges against two high-ranking officers while we were in Britain. But what does this sort of thing have to do with us?" He fondled the French girl's breast, and she giggled.

  "Plenty," Kelly said. "If American and German officers fly to neutral territory to swap black market goods... Well, suppose Blade gave a German air force officer a planeload of whiskey at one of these neutral ports-and didn't take any material goods in return. Suppose, instead, he asked his German opposite to see to the bombing of this bridge and help him establish his reputation among the Allied brass? Blade could inform this German officer each time the bridge was rebuilt-"

  "You think Blade would engineer and go through with a wild scheme like this just to get a promotion?" Lily asked, incredulous.

  "Either that, or he's syphilitic."

  "Bullshit," Coombs said.

  "This is paranoid," Lily said. "The world isn't as Machiavellian as you're making it out to be."

  "Look," Beame said, "Blade's an idiot, but he can't be the kind of manipulator you're trying to say he is."

  "I wonder..." Kelly said.

  "Look," Lily said, "maybe the radio will still work."

  "Hit it again, Dew!" Dew obliged. "If we don't destroy it, Blade will call us again tonight. He'll send in the DC-3 loaded with supplies, and he'll order us to rebuild the bridge. And as soon as the bridge is up, he'll call his German friend, get it bombed into rubble. You know... it's also possible that Blade somehow arranged for Rotenhausen's convoy to take this route, to come this roundabout back way just so the bridge would appear to have strategic importance and-"