Hanging on

important it is to my mission here?"
        "Quelque chose."
        "It is not a trifle," Kelly said.
        Maurice pulled at his greasy nose and sighed, "Coűte que coűte-it will not save your lives."
        Major Kelly watched the little frog carefully, and he finally decided he had to trust him. He couldn't risk ignoring the bastard, in case he really did have something vital to say. Maurice was just the sort to let them die in order to teach them a lesson.
        "So?" Maurice asked.
        "All right. You can have the damn thing. But not until you've told me what you came to tell me."
        "I must have the backhoe first," Maurice insisted.
        The Frenchman jammed both hands into his baggy trouser pockets and looked at the earth, suddenly so still that he appeared to have turned into a column of stone. The illusion was so convincing that Major Kelly felt a solid hammer blow to Maurice's head would crack him into thousands of shards. Kelly had to fight off an urge to go looking for a construction mallet. He knew Maurice would stand this way until he got what he wanted or was refused it outright. And, in the meantime, death was bearing down on them in some form the major couldn't guess.
        Kelly sighed. "Okay."
        "Excuse me?"
        "You can have The Cat."
        Maurice smiled. "You won't regret this."
        "I better not," Kelly said, trying to sound fierce.
        Maurice turned toward a copse of pines that stood two hundred yards along the riverbank, waved both hands in some prearranged signal. Two young men stepped out of the shadows under the trees and started walking toward Kelly and the frog. "A couple of village boys," Maurice explained. "They will take the backhoe away."
        "They know how to drive it?"
        "Yes."
        The boys, both between sixteen and twenty, went directly to The Cat and began exploring it, until they felt secure. They both climbed aboard and turned to look at Maurice.
        He ordered them to start it.
        They did, let it idle.
        "I suppose you'll want gasoline, too," Kelly said.
        "Cela va sans dire," Maurice said, grinning.
        "Beame," Kelly said, "bring five ten-gallon cans of gasoline from the camp stores and lash them to The Cat."
        "Yes, sir," Beame said. He was unhappy with the order.
        "He's a good boy," Maurice said, watching Beame hurry off toward the machinery shed.
        Kelly didn't answer that. "Maurice," he said, "you are not an ordinary man. You are something else, you are-"
        "Dégagé?" Maurice asked.
        Struggling with his college French, Major Kelly looked for an epithet he wanted. "Chevalier d'industrie."
        Maurice actually bristled. He stood stiffly, face twisted, his greasy hair trying to stand straight up on his neck, his eyes blazing. "You call me a swindler?"
        Realizing he had gone too far, reminding himself that he had never been very good at maintaining discipline, the major said, "That was not how I meant it. I meant-'One who lives by his wits.' "
        Maurice unbristled. "Thank you, Major," he said. "I am honored to be so considered by a man I respect as much as I respect you."
        As Beame delivered the cans of gasoline to the two young men on the backhoe, Kelly said, "Now, what information has cost me so dearly?"
        Maurice was suddenly nervous. "A Panzer unit is moving towards the front, complete with an armored supply convoy and approximately a thousand infantrymen."
        Major Kelly wiped at his nose. Looking at Maurice, he had begun to feel that his own nose was bedecked with bright pearls of grease. His nose was dry. That was a relief. "I don't really see that this is worth a backhoe, Maurice."
        "The Panzers are coming on this road," Maurice said.
        "This road?" Kelly looked southward, across the river, unwilling to accept the possibility that he would have to blow up his own bridge to keep the German tanks from crossing over to the camp.
        "You did not hear me right," Maurice said, as if reading the other man's thoughts. "The Panzers are coming to the front. They will be coming up behind you, from the northeast, from this side."
        Kelly turned away from the river and looked across the clearing to the trees, the single break in them where the dusty road came through. No military traffic had yet used this road, not since they had been here. They were in the backlands, in