Hanging on

centipedes over him.
        "Kowalski, sir?"
        Kelly looked dumbly at the pacifist. "What about Kowalski?"
        "Is that who you came to see, sir?"
        Kelly frowned. "No, Tooley. I came to see you."
        "Me?" Tooley was genuinely surprised and pleased. "Well, this is nice of you, sir. I can't offer much in the way of entertainment, but-"
        "Tooley," Kelly said, lowering his voice even further, his words hissing like sandpaper along the concrete ceiling, deadened by the dirt walls, rattling on the corrugated tin, "you're the only one I can trust. I know you wouldn't turn informer and leak information to the krauts, because you don't want to see either side win."
        "Through force," Tooley amended. "I want us to win, but I don't really believe in force."
        "Exactly," Kelly said. "But someone has been leaking information to the krauts, and we have to find out who he is."
        Tooley nodded soberly. "You think this informer might have come to me, since I'm an avowed pacifist-might have thought of me as material for a second subversive in the camp."
        "That's it."
        "He hasn't," Tooley said. "But if he does, I'll let you know right away, sir."
        "Thanks, Tooley," Major Kelly said. "I knew I could depend on you, no matter what everyone says about you."
        Tooley frowned. "What does everyone say about me?"
        "That you're a chickenshit pacifist."
        "I'm a pacifist all right. But where do they get the other part of it, do you think?"
        "I wouldn't know." Kelly said. He got up, scanning the ceiling for centipedes, pulling his collar tight around his neck. "Anyway, keep your eyes open for any unusual- incidents."
        "Yes, sir."
        Kowalski suddenly dirtied his pants.

----

    7
        
        Crickets worked busily in the darkness, telegraphing shrill messages across the flat, open runway area toward the trees which thrust up on all sides. The crickets, Major Kelly was sure, were working for the Germans.
        The sky was overcast. The clouds seemed like a roof, lighted from behind by dim moonlight, low and even, stretched across the land between the walls of the forest. Occasionally, heat lightning played along the soft edges of the clouds like the flash of cannon fire.
        At the eastern end of the runway which Danny Dew had gouged out with his big D-7 dozer, Major Kelly, Beame, and Slade waited for the DC-3 cargo plane. They stood close together, breathing like horses that had been run the mile in little more than a minute and a half. They stared toward the far end of the open strip, at the tops of the black trees, heads pushed a bit forward as they tried to catch the first rumble of the plane's engines.
        A frog croaked nearby, startling Beame who jumped forward and collided with Kelly, nearly knocking the bigger man down.
        "A frog," Slade said. But he didn't sound sure of himself.
        The frogs, Major Kelly thought, were in league with the crickets, who were telegraphing messages to the Germans.
        Abruptly, silencing the crickets, the sound of the plane's engines came in over the trees, low and steady and growing.
        "Move!" Major Kelly said.
        To the left and right, enlisted men struck matches, bent down and lighted tiny blue flares at each corner of the runway. They looked like overgrown altar boys at some alien worship. At the far end of the crude strip, another pair of men did the same, briefly lighted by an intense blue glow before they stepped back into the shadows under the trees. Now the pilot had a means of gauging the length and width of the runway. This really wasn't much for the pilot to judge by; he might as well have tried an audio landing with the sputtering of the flares as his only points of reference.
        By the same token, the four blue lights weren't much for a random patrol of German night bombers to beam in on, either.
        The pilot, Major Kelly knew, would already have begun to scream. He always began to scream when he started losing altitude a mile out over the trees to the west. When he came in sight of the blue flares, he would scream even louder. He said their permanent runway wasn't much better than the temporary affair he had first landed on. He said it was too short, too uneven, and too narrow. He said it wasn't macadamized, that the oil-and-sand surface was extremely treacherous. He said the four blue flares hurt his eyes and