Hanging on

interfered with his judgment when he was putting down, even though he had to have the flares or not land at all. Besides, he said, the runway was behind German lines. Even if General Blade did have him by the short hairs, the pilot said, he had no right to send him and his plane and his crew behind German lines. He said this again and again, until Major Kelly went to great lengths to avoid him. The pilot had to shout about this to Major Kelly, because the general had forbidden him to tell anyone else that he had been behind enemy lines.
        "What do you want to be behind enemy lines for?" the pilot would shout at Kelly, his face red, his hands fisted in the pockets of his flight jacket.
        "I don't want to be here," Kelly would say.
        "But here you are."
        "On orders," Kelly would say.
        "That's your excuse," the pilot would say.
        There was really no reasoning with the pilot, because he was consumed with terror the entire time he was at the clearing.
        Now, by the south side of the HQ building, twelve enlisted men waited to unload the materials which would, when combined with sweat, remake the bridge. All of the enlisted men were as nervous as the pilot, but none of them was screaming. The first time the pilot had brought the big plane in, the enlisted men had screamed right along with him, bent double, faces bright with blood, mouths open wide, eyes watering, screaming and screaming. But Sergeant Coombs had been infuriated by this display of cowardice. He had punished them the following day with KP duty and a severe calisthenics session. Because they feared Sergeant Coombs more than they feared the Germans, the men were forced to express this nervousness in less obvious ways. They stood by the HQ building, in the shadows, snapping their fingers, popping their knuckles, grinding their teeth, slapping their sides, clicking their tongues. One of them was kicking the side of the corrugated tin wall as if he did not believe it were real, as if he were testing it. The enlisted men, more aware of their mortality than the officers, were always afraid that the krauts would catch the cargo plane on radar, would follow it and bomb the shit out of the runway and the camp. The Stukas were friendly. The Stukas, for some reason, only wanted the bridge. But a flight of German night planes couldn't be counted on to limit its objectives. So the enlisted men sweated out each landing and each takeoff, suffering from the same terminal disease that afflicted Beame: hope. They didn't understand that nothing improved, that it wasn't any use sweating out anything. Whatever would happen would happen. Then, when it did happen, that was the time to sweat.
        The cargo plane's engines grew even louder now, tantalizingly near, though the plane remained beyond the patch of open sky that the surrounding woods permitted them.
        "It's close," Slade said.
        Suddenly, the big aircraft was there. It came in so low over the pines that Kelly had difficulty separating it from the black trees. It carried only two running lights, one on each wing tip, and it seemed more like some gigantic bird of prey than like a machine.
        "Here comes the plane," Slade said, though everyone had already seen it. Nothing ever improved. Not even the lieutenant.
        "He isn't putting it down fast enough," Lieutenant Beame said. He thought: Christ, it's going to plow right through us, knock us down like three bowling pins at the end of an alley.
        The DC-3 slanted in fast, correcting.
        "Not enough," Kelly said.
        The pilot had not cut back. The props churned as thunderously as when the craft had slipped in over the trees.
        "What the hell's he doing?" Lieutenant Slade demanded.
        The big plane roared toward them, a prehistoric behemoth bellowing a mindless battle cry. Its tires were still off the rugged, oiled strip. The tiny running lights on its wings seemed, to Kelly, to swell until they were gigantic searchlights.
        "Run!" Beanie shouted. But he couldn't run. He could only stand there, hypnotized by the onrushing plane, blinking at the half-seen blur of the whirling props.
        The pilot gave up on it. The craft rose sharply, tilting dangerously toward the dark earth, swooped over the three men and the trees behind them, racketing away across the forest.
        "He's going to try again," Lieutenant Slade told them.
        Able to run now that it