Hanging on Read online

  “Beame, if you had no bridge to keep rebuilding here, more than two hundred miles behind German lines, if no one bombed this bridge so that you could repair it, what the hell would you do with yourself?”

  Beame scratched bis nose, looked around at the clearing, the encircling trees, the smoking gorge. “I don't know, sir. What would I do?”

  “You'd go mad,” Major Kelly said. He looked at the sky, which was very blue; and he looked at the cantilevered bridge, which was very demolished. He said, “Thank Christ for Stukas.”

  3

  Lieutenant Richard Slade, darker and chubbier than Lieutenant Beame and looking somewhat like a choirboy with a vicious streak, was called The Snot by everyone in the unit except Sergeant Coombs. Slade did not know this, and he would have been enraged if he had heard the nickname. He was a young man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. Now, he came trotting out from HQ to tell Kelly that General Blade was going to call through in fifteen minutes. “The General's aide just placed the alert call in code,” Slade said.

  Kelly tried to keep his torn trousers out of sight. “That's not supposed to be until tonight.” He dreaded talking to the general.

  “Nevertheless, he'll be on in… about twelve minutes now. I suggest you be there, sir.” He pushed his thick, brown hair back from his forehead and surveyed the bridge below. “I imagine we'll be requiring supplies again.”

  “I imagine so,” Kelly said. He wanted to punch Slade in the mouth. Even when Lieutenant Slade used the correct form of address, he imbued the obligatory “sir” with a sarcasm that infuriated the major.

  Slade said, “Sir, you'd better make a supplies list before he calls, so you can read it quickly — and so you won't forget anything.”

  Major Kelly gritted his teeth so hard he almost broke his jawbone. “I know how to handle this, Lieutenant Slade.”

  “I was only making a helpful suggestion.” The lieutenant sounded hurt, though Kelly knew he wasn't. You couldn't hurt Slade, because Slade had a huge, rubber ego that bounced your insults right back at you, quick as a wink.

  “Dismissed,” Kelly said, though he knew he wasn't a good enough disciplinarian to make the word mean anything. He was tall, lean, well muscled, and hard-looking. He had very black eyebrows and what he fancied was a piercing gaze, and he should have been able to keep a man like Slade in line. But he couldn't. Probably, that was because Slade realized how terror-stricken he was. Being terror-stricken made him less like an officer and more like an enlisted man.

  “Will the Major entertain another suggestion?” Slade asked.

  Why the hell did he have to talk that way? Entertain, for Christ's sake! Entertain!

  “What is it, Lieutenant?” Kelly attempted to be abrupt, icy, and harsh. That wasn't one of his better roles, however, and Slade seemed to think he was only being stupid.

  “We rebuilt the bridge after the British bombed it, and the Stukas showed up to destroy it again,” Slade said. He was one for repeating what everyone already knew, as if the fact gained some deep clarity that only his voice could impart to it. “When the Stukas went, we built the bridge a second time. The second flight of Stukas came and knocked the bridge down again. Yesterday, we completed repair of the bridge, and now the third flight of Stukas wiped it out.” He looked at Kelly and Beame, waiting for some reaction. He seemed unaware of the fumes that rose from the gorge, and he was the only man present who was dressed in immaculate fatigues.

  “So?” Kelly said at last, realizing they would remain there through the night and the following day and even beyond that if he did not prod the lieutenant.

  “I believe we have an informer in our midst.”

  Kelly looked incredulous, but not too incredulous, since Slade just might be right. “Who do you suspect, Slade?”

  “Maurice,” the lieutenant said, triumphant, grinning, The Snot.

  Maurice was the mayor of the only nearby French village, a hamlet of four hundred souls, so small it hadn't been on any of their maps when they were first dropped here behind German lines, following the successful landing at Normandy. For the most part, the townspeople were farmers and laborers; Maurice owned the only grocery and the hardware store, a third of the town's businesses which lined the single main street. Maurice was perhaps sixty years old, drank too much, bathed too little, and bragged that his eldest son was in Brittany working in the FFI—Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur—and had renamed his town Eisenhower once the Normandy invasion had acquainted him with that word.

  Slade, seeing the disbelief in their faces, said, “I know that's an unpopular notion. I know how much everyone here likes Maurice and how much everyone thinks Maurice has done for us. But you'll remember that I have never fully trusted him, and you'll admit that he has the best opportunity to report to the Germans.”

  “Surely there isn't a radio in Eisenhower,” Kelly said. “And he would need one to make reports… ”

  “Perhaps it was dropped to them by a German night plane,” Slade said. He always had an answer, which was another reason why everyone hated him.

  Kelly wiped the soot off his face, looked at the blackened palm of his hand, wiped his hand on the seat of his pants, and jumped when his fingers slid over his own bare ass. Embarrassed, he said, “I can't picture that.” He wondered if there were long black finger marks on his behind.

  Slade wasn't done. “Why is it that the Stukas have never given our position to any element of the German army? Why haven't they sent ground troops after us, to wipe us out? Why is it that the Stukas bomb the bridge but not our positions? The machines, all our supplies, stand unharmed so we can rebuild the bridge again. Could it be the Krauts are playing some sort of game with us?”

  “What would their purpose be?” Kelly asked.

  Slade frowned. “I haven't worked that out yet, but I will.” He looked at his watch, snapped his head up so suddenly he'd have lost his toupee, if he were wearing one, and turned back toward HQ. “General Blade will be coming through in less than four minutes.” He trotted away.

  Beame, who wasn't given to swearing that much, said, “That fucking little creep gives me the fucking horrors.”

  “Let's go talk to the general,” Major Kelly said.

  4

  The big wireless transmitter was a malevolent, hulking monster that always intimidated Major Kelly. It hummed like a swarm of bees, singing some monotonous and evil melody that echoed ghostily behind every voice that came and went over its open channel. Perhaps, if he spoke to someone other than General Blade on the set, it would not seem so monstrous. If he could talk to Betty Grable or Veronica Lake or to his mom, it might seem, instead, like a big old shaggy dog of a radio. But there was only General Blade.

  Once they had exchanged call signs, General Blade said, “Blade calling Slade for Kelly.” Then he laughed. Finished laughing, he said, “Slade? Blade. This is the Blade and Slade Show, and our first performer today is Major Walter Kelly.”

  “I can't take it again,” Lieutenant Beame said, bolting for the door. It slammed noisily behind him.

  “General Blade calling, sir,” Lieutenant Slade said. He looked quite serious. He never seemed to see anything odd in the General's insane patter.

  Maybe Slade had syph too. Maybe he was already rotten in the center of his brain, crumbling and almost dead.

  Kelly sat down in the single metal chair that decorated the radio room, looked around at the rough board walls, the dust, the spider webs, the board floor. The chair was cold against his bare behind, but it wasn't the sole cause of the shivers that coursed through him. He lifted the table mike and said, “They bombed the bridge again, General.”

  “They bombed what?” General Blade asked.

  In a number of ways, Kelly thought, Blade and Slade were similar. The lieutenant was always telling you what you already knew, while Blade was always asking you to repeat what he had already heard. Perhaps Lieutenant Slade was the bastard son of General Blade; perhaps both of them had contracted VD from the same woman: Blade's mistress and Slade's mother.

  “They bombed the bridge, sir,” Kelly repeated.

  “How?” Blade asked.

  “With three airplanes and several bombs,” Major Kelly said.

  “Three airplanes, Kelly?”

  Kelly said, “They appeared to be airplanes, sir, yes. They had wings and flew. I'm pretty certain they were airplanes, sir.”

  “Was that sarcasm, Kelly?” the general croaked through the hulking monster on the table before Kelly.

  “No, sir. They were all Stukas, sir.”

  After a long silence, when Kelly was about to ask if he had died in the middle of the Blade and Slade Show, the general said, “If there were three planes, but none of them attacked your buildings, and all of them dropped on the bridge, doesn't that tell you something interesting?”

  “Maybe they like us and don't want to hurt us, sir.”

  The general was silent even longer this time. When he spoke, he spoke gently, as if to a child. “One of their own people is there with you — an informer.”

  Kelly looked at Slade who smiled and vigorously nodded his thin, pointed head. Keep it up, Kelly thought. Keep shaking your head, and maybe it'll fall off. Maybe the syph will have rotted through your neck, and your head will fall off, so grin and shake your head.

  To the microphone, Kelly said, “Informer?”

  “How else do you explain their attacking only the bridge? How do you explain their not sending in a ground force to deal with you?” But the general really didn't want any military strategy from Kelly, or any cheap philosophy either. He went on before the major could answer: “Do you fully understand that the whole idea of keeping this bridge open is mine, Kelly? When it proves to have been a wise move, I'll be rewarded for it. But by God, until it does pay off, I have my neck stretched under the ax. Do you think it was easy for me to get you and your men, the construction equipment and materials, flown two hundred and fifty miles behind German lines?”

  “No, sir,” Kelly said. He remembered that ordeal quite well, even these four long weeks later: the parachute drop, clearing the brush and marking the temporary runway for the first plane full of heavy equipment, the hard work, the tight schedule, the terror. Mostly the terror.

  Blade said, “Do you think it's a simple matter to keep this whole maneuver hidden from the more petty officers back here at command, from men who would like nothing better than to pull me down into the mire and climb over me on their way to the top?”

  “I can see that it isn't easy for you, sir.”

  “Damn straight!” The general cleared his throat and paused to take a drink of something. Probably blood.

  Choke on it, you pig, Kelly thought

  The general didn't choke. He said, “I want a list of your requirements, to augment whatever's salvageable there. The stuff will be flown in after midnight tonight. I want the bridge back up, no matter what the cost!”

  Kelly read off his hastily scribbled list, then said, “Sir, how's the front moving?”

  “Gaining ground everywhere!” Blade said.

  “Are we still two hundred and thirty miles behind enemy lines, sir?” The last time he had talked to Blade, the front had advanced about twenty miles in their direction.

  “Only two hundred miles now,” Blade assured him. “In a couple of weeks, you'll be on the right side of the fence.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now, let me have Slade.”

  The lieutenant took over the chair, pulling it close to the scarred table on which the radio stood. “Uh… Slade here, sir.”

  “This is Blade, Slade.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Major Kelly stood behind Slade, watching, hypnotized by the horrible routine he had witnessed countless times these past four weeks.

  “Slade, Blade signing off. Another edition of the Blade and Slade Show is over.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Christ!” Major Kelly said, bolting for the door.

  5

  The hospital bunker was an abominable hospital in every respect, but the worst thing about it was the stink, the rich blanket of revolting odors that permeated the place and could not be chased out. The hospital had no windows, being a bunker, and no fresh air. Even with the door wide open, the place constantly stank of burnt flesh, decay, sweat, vomit, and antiseptics. Lily Kain, who nursed the sick and the wounded, said you got used to the smell after a while and didn't even notice it any more. But that notion had no appeal for Major Kelly; he wanted to be aware, always, of the smell of death and corruption. If the hospital ever started to smell nice to him, he knew, his number would be up.

  Immediately inside the bunker, a battered table and two rickety chairs stood to one side, the nurses' station. Beyond, ten cots stood in shabby imitation of a genuine hospital ward, five along each wall, a thin gray blanket folded on each, meager comfort against the chill in the subterranean room which gave little evidence of the bright summer day aboveground.

  Three low-wattage bulbs strung on a single frayed cord for the length of the rectangular room, powered by the small camp generator, did little to dispel the gloom. The walls seemed draped in a heavy purple fabric of shadows, and the corners were all pitch black. Kelly glanced quickly at those corners when he came in, and he felt as if inhuman creatures lurked there, waiting and licking their scaly lips, and watching with big, demonic eyes.

  Cockroaches and fat centipedes scurried along the earthen floor and clung to the rough ceiling, moving in and out of pools of light, silent, cold, many-legged.

  Only two patients resided in the hospital bunker when Major Kelly arrived there fresh from bolting the radio room. One of these was Liverwright, who had been wounded in one of the previous bombings, six days ago. He had been bathing in the river when the Stukas made their first pass, and he had taken a three-inch sliver of steel deep in his right thigh. The second patient was Kowalski, the zombie.

  Three people attended the patients, though none of them had medical training. General Blade had not been able to kidnap a doctor or a medic for them, as yet.

  Lily Kain, the only woman with the unit, was cutting gauze into neat bandage squares when Kelly arrived, her scissors making crisp snipping sounds in the heavy air. Because of the heat aboveground, and because she apparently had reptilian blood, she was wearing one of her skimpy, sequined dancer's costumes, out of which her ass cheeks bulged. She had the kind of ass cheeks that bulged well: pale, firm, beautifully formed, without the hint of a droop. Indeed, everything about Lily Kain was perfectly formed, all five-feet-six of her. She had thick black hair and wide-set black eyes and a freckle-spotted face, little upturned nose, full lips — a wet-dream face. Her breasts were big and incredibly uptilted; they threatened to spill out of her dancer's costume. Her waist was tiny, and her hips almost fleshless, legs long and flawless. She gave Kelly a fierce hard-on.

  “Watch your jugs,” Kelly said, grabbing her sequined backside. “Watch your jugs, or they'll fall out of your suit.”

  “You watch them,” she said. Her voice was cool, almost a whisper, but with force enough to let a man know she had her own resources. “You're better at watching them than I am.”

  “How are they?”

  “My jugs?”

  “No,” he said. “I know your jugs are fine. How are the men? Anybody hurt in today's raid?”

  “Everyone made it to the bunkers in time,” she said. Her pretty face was dotted with sweat, but it hid no deception. She didn't know about Major Kelly's being caught with his pants down in the latrine, and he was not about to tell her. She stopped folding gauze and cocked her right eyebrow. Lily had a way of cocking her right eyebrow that made you think she was going to shoot you with her nose. “I'm worried about Liverwright. Six days, and he can't seem to heal. He may get blood poisoning yet.”

  “No negativism,” Kelly ordered. “This is, after all, just a fairy tale, a fable. We're all figments of some Aesop's imagination, bound to his will.”

  “I'd like to reduce Blade to a figment of my imagination, then cut his balls off,” Lily Kain said. Lily Kain, though freckled and pug-nosed and inordinately pretty, was not your average, reserved, quiet American girl.

  “I just finished the Blade and Slade Show,” he told her. “Supplies will be coming in tonight.”

  “Parachute — or a landing?” she asked. She looked pitiful, lost and delicate and needful of comforting. Major Kelly wanted to comfort her. He wanted to pat her hand and console her and say, “Now, now.” He also wanted to rip her skimpy sequined costume off and split her right there, but he managed to restrain himself.

  “They'll land,” he said. “The shipment's too heavy for a parachute drop this time.”

  This pleased Lily Kain. Every time a transport landed, she hoped she could persuade the pilot to take her back to Allied territory. After all, she didn't belong here. Everyone knew that. If anyone forgot it, even for a moment, Lily reminded him.

  “I don't belong here,” she reminded Kelly.

  And she didn't belong here, if the truth were known, the only woman in a unit of Army engineers, two hundred miles behind German lines, dressed in a sequined costume out of which her jugs might pop at any moment. General Blade was responsible, in part, for her being there. Though unable to supply the unit with a doctor or a medic, General Blade had managed to divert a USO troop across the front to the unit by the bridge. Certain air corridors were open, not well patrolled by the Germans, and such a thing could be done without too much risk. Still, there was the matter of diverting the troop from somewhere else, from a place where they were expected, and no one could understand how General Blade had managed that. When Major Kelly had observed that obtaining a medic ought to be a cinch after such a coup, the general had accused Kelly of a lack of appreciation for his hard work in getting the USO people there, and had pouted and refused to speak to the major for nearly a week. Anyway, the troop had given them a great show, as such shows went — a juggler, a bad comedian, two singing sisters with buck teeth who called themselves Irma and Imogene, a magician, a mimic whose every imitation sounded like Fred Allen (partly because the mimic himself sounded like Fred Allen), and a dancer — and they'd accepted the unit's invitation to supper and drinks afterward. They had not been aware that they were behind German lines, but they'd been nervous enough to drink heavily. Lily Kain boozed like a man and passed out like one, too. Singing “Over There,” the troop boarded the special plane from General Blade's headquarters, leaving much later than they had anticipated. Only after they had gone for an hour did Kelly, Danny Dew, and Lieutenant Beame bring Lily Kain out from the latrine stall where they had hidden her when she passed out.