Hanging on

to assume that you could be the kraut agent. There's no way I can actually find out for sure, short of torturing you, and that is impractical. Therefore, I want to say this, Dew: if you are a kraut agent, and if you don't tell me now and let me find out on my own, later, I will have you executed without trial."
        Dew smiled. "Ain't nothin' in my ole head, Massah Kelly."
        "Christ," Kelly said. "If you insist on doing that bit, can't you at least get it right? Not 'head'-'haid'!"
        "Ain't nothin' in my ole haid, Massah Kelly!"
        Kelly toyed with his dagger awhile. "Execution without trial," he said again. "But that isn't all, Dew. Before I have you killed, I'll assign you to the radio room where you will be tied to a chair and forced to listen to every one of General Blade's calls."
        Danny Dew stopped smiling.
        "Furthermore," Major Kelly said, warming to the routine again, "I will order the shortwave channels kept open at periodic intervals so that you will have to listen to other transmissions of other officers like General Blade, wherever and whenever we can locate them."
        Danny Dew looked distinctly ill. He had taken his hands from behind his head and clasped them between his knees. He was hunched forward as if he were going to be sick on the floor.
        "And when you're screamingly insane, then we'll kill you." Kelly waved the dagger to emphasize the point. "Now, are you the damned traitor, the kraut informer?"
        "No, sir!" Dew said.
        Kelly smiled. He softened his tone of voice and tried to look sincere. "Actually, I wouldn't turn you in, even if I learned you were a traitor. You understand that? I wouldn't interfere with your work. It's just that I want to know, you see. I'd promise not to get in the way of your traitoring, so long as you stopped trying to fool me. Do you get my meaning?"
        "Yes, sir. But I'm not the traitor."
        Kelly sighed. "Dismissed."
        Shaken, wondering if he were still under suspicion, Danny Dew got up and left the interrogation room.
        Lieutenant Slade brought in the next man, who wasn't a man at all. It was Lily Kain. She was wearing a skimpy, sequined dancer's costume out of which her jugs might pop at any moment. She sashayed across the interrogation room and sat down in the chair in front of Major Kelly, crossed her gorgeous legs, and folded her hands in her lap. She grinned at Kelly and licked her lips and winked.
        "First," Kelly said, "you've got to understand that this is serious business, Miss Kain!" To forcefully underline this statement, the major raised the dagger and, as he finished the sentence, drove the wicked point of it into the top of his plank table-desk. He also drove the point of it through the edge of his left hand. "That's okay," he said. He smiled at Lily and Slade to let them see how okay it was. "This is all a fairy tale anyway, a figment of some Aesop's imagination. None of it is real." However, the blood was real enough.

----

    8
        
        When General Blade called at nine o'clock that night, he listened to Kelly's report on the B-17 attack, then got right to the bad news. "The German high command has ordered those Panzers and all attendant companies westward. According to our sources, Kelly, they'll be coming your way."
        Although he had been expecting this for days, Kelly was speechless. His hands shook. He felt cold and weary. "When, sir?"
        "They'll be moving out from a staging area near Stuttgart the day after tomorrow, taking as direct a land route as possible. Twice they'll leave the regular highways for shorter secondary roads that will take them through the back country where Allied reconnaissance won't be likely to spot them. That's maybe a-hundred-eighty miles from your position, as the crow flies-two hundred and sixty miles by road. Considering the size of this deployment, they'll be lucky to make your camp in four or five days. So you'll have guests in about a week, Kelly."
        The major brushed nervously at his face. "How many guests, sir?"
        "Not easy to say," Blade said. "According to our sources inside Germany, this isn't a neat division. It's an amalgam of broken Panzer brigades that escaped the disaster in Russia-and some of the new tanks fresh from Hitler's underground factories near München. There will also be a detail of SS overseers to watch that the Wehrmacht fights according to Hitler's orders.