Hanging on

at top speed.
        "Here we go!" Danny Dew said, lying flat on his stomach and bringing his rifle up where he could use it.
        Rotenhausen's Panzer, the first in the German convoy, was through the A-Street intersection and on the approach to the bridge when the general saw the enemy tank. The Panzer bit into the cracked macadam and held on, chugging to a stop at the brink of the bridge, at the corner of the village store. Looking over the edge of the roof, Kelly and the others could see the top of Adolph Rotenhausen's head just four feet below.
        The rest of the German convoy slowed and stopped.
        Even while Rotenhausen's tank was jerking to a standstill, Kelly looked westward again. Only a few seconds had passed since the cycle had taken the lead in the German line and zoomed across the bridge, though Kelly could have sworn it was more like two or three hours. Over there, the motorcycle was still bearing down on the cruising Cromwell and trying to come to a full stop on the wet pavement. Abruptly, the front wheel came up. The cycle rose like a dancing bear, then toppled onto its side. The monstrous, British-made tank slowed a bit, though not much, and ran right over the screaming Wehrmacht cyclists, grinding them into the mud.
        Nathalie cried out.
        "Sadistic bastard," Lily hissed, staring at the Cromwell as if she could vaporize it with a look of pure hatred.
        "One guess who's commanding the Cromwell," Beame said.
        "Old Blood and Guts," Kelly said.
        "Yeah. Big Tex."
        "The Last of the Two-Fisted Cowboys."
        "The Big Ball of Barbed Wire himself."
        "The Latter-Day Sam Houston," Kelly said.
        "Yeah. The Fighting General."
        "Old Shit for Brains," Kelly said. "No doubt about it." He could not understand how he could go on like this with Beame. He had never been so terrified in his life. And he had a great many other terrors to stack this one up against.
        The six German riflemen on the far side turned and ran when the Cromwell crushed the cyclists and kept on coming. They were halfway back across the bridge now, every one of them a religious man no matter what his beliefs had been a few minutes ago.
        Behind the Cromwell, other Allied tanks loomed out of the curtain of gray rain: several Shermans, two British M-10s, another Cromwell, an armored car with twin cannon… Some of these left the road and deployed southward, all turning to face across the ravine, mammoth guns trained on the village and on the part of the German convoy which they might be able to reach. The lead Cromwell and several other tanks remained on the road and stopped at the farside bridge approach, bottling it up.
        "Massah Kelly," Danny Dew said, "I do wish I was back in Georgia. Even dat sorrowful ol' place do seem better than this."
        It was an almost classic military problem. The Germans held the east bank of the river. The Allies held the west bank. And no one controlled the bridge between.
        The showdown.
        "If we get out of this," Beame whispered to Kelly. "I'm not going to take any of Maurice's guff. I'm going to ask Nathalie to marry me."
        "He'll eat you alive," Kelly said.
        "Once, he would have. Not now."
        "Good luck."
        "I won't need it," Beame said. "I know what I want now. Just so I live to have it."
        The wind gusted across the roof, stirred the nuns' habits, pummeled them with thousands of tiny, watery fists.
        To the south of the bridge on the other side of the gorge, one of the dark-brown M-10s elevated its blackened cannon to full boost. Kelly watched this without fully grasping the implications of the movement. A second later, one shell slammed out across the river. Just one. None of the other tanks opened fire, and the M-10 did not immediately follow through with a second round. The long shot arced high over the river and fell squarely into the building which was next to the store on A Street. The blast was a gigantic gong, then a compact ball of fire, and finally a violent wave of force that flung Kelly, Beame, and the others flat on their faces, even though they had already been kneeling. The armed T-plunger tipped over without setting off the dynamite under the bridge.
        The house which had taken the shell was chewed into toothpicks and spewed in all directions. The burning floor collapsed down into the hospital bunker where Tooley,