Hanging on

mud, reluctantly nodded at the bootleg bottle of Jack Daniels that stood out in plain sight. When Maurice smiled for an answer, Kelly poured him a drink in a battered tin cup. Maurice tossed this off in one swallow.
        "What can I do for you, Maurice?" Kelly asked, wiping his muddy left hand on a damp towel.
        Maurice ignored the major's strange cap. "You have hurt your hand!" He pointed at the bandage under the mud on Kelly's left hand.
        "It's nothing. A minor knife wound."
        Maurice pushed his glass forward, brushed a fat mosquito off his forehead, and raised his greasy white eyebrows in surprise. "Hand-to-hand combat, Major? I've had no report of Germans in the area, not in our backwater!"
        "No Germans," Kelly agreed.
        Maurice accepted a second slug of whiskey as graciously as if it had been freely offered, but he did not drink it. He was perplexed, trying to figure out where his complex information-gathering network could have failed. "Then how do you say-mutiny?"
        "No mutiny," Kelly said.
        "Who cut you, then, bon ami?"
        Kelly recalled the interrogation of Lily Kain when he had run himself through, and he couldn't see how he could explain that. "I stabbed myself."
        "Suicide!" Maurice said, clutching his chest. "You musn't think it!"
        "Not suicide," Kelly said. "If I'd wanted to kill myself, I wouldn't have used a knife-and I wouldn't have stabbed my hand, Maurice."
        "Where would you have stabbed?" Maurice asked, leaning forward. He was clearly interested.
        "Perhaps my neck," Kelly said.
        "Ah. Yes. Quick."
        But Kelly didn't want to talk about the knife wound any more. He couldn't explain it and, besides, the longer they sat there the more conspicuous his headful of mud seemed to become. Hoping to get rid of the Frenchman quickly, he said, "What brings you here tonight, eh?"
        "Trouble," the old man said.
        The hard, young sharks with him nodded gloomily like a couple of mutes accidentally signed on for a Greek chorus.
        Kelly sipped his whiskey. It tasted awful. It didn't really taste awful, he knew, but his subjective sense of taste had been badly thrown off by Maurice's sudden and unwelcome appearance.
        Maurice said, "When my friends face trouble, I face it with them."
        "And I'm facing trouble?"
        Maurice nodded gravely. "You, your men, bad trouble."
        Because he was feeling perverse, because the drying mud made his scalp itch, because he felt foolish, and chiefly because he didn't think even Maurice could get him out of the coming debacle, Kelly didn't respond as Maurice expected. "No trouble here," he said.
        "You toy with me," Maurice said.
        "No. No trouble."
        "Credat Judaeus Apella."
        "It's true."
        Maurice tossed off his whiskey. "You know as well as I that a major Nazi Panzer division is corning. It's far larger than the one we hoaxed."
        "True enough," Kelly said. He squashed a mosquito that was burrowing in the mud on his head, poured himself more whiskey even if it did taste horrible.
        "And you don't call this trouble?"
        The sharks raised their eyebrows, looked at each other for Kelly's benefit.
        "No," Kelly said. "You call it trouble when there's a chance of your escaping it. Words like trouble, danger, risk-all imply safe options. There is no way out of this. Therefore, it is no longer trouble; it is merely fate. We have a bad case of fate, but no trouble."
        "There is one flaw in your reasoning," Maurice said. He was smug as he poured a third glass of whiskey, his heavy lips tight, as if he had just sampled a fine vintage wine or had delivered a particularly special bon mot.
        Kelly watched the greasy frog carefully. What was in Maurice's crafty mind? What did the old man have to gain here, now? "What's the flaw?"
        "There is a way out," Maurice said.
        "Can't be."
        "Is."
        "Can't be."
        "Is."
        "Tell me about it," Kelly said, tossing back his whiskey. "Better yet, I'll tell you about it, because you've got to be thinking some of the same things I've thought myself. First, you're going to suggest that my men and I take our machines and withdraw into the woods, hide out for the duration of the Germans' crossing. But that won't work. Even if we could eliminate every sign of the camp, we couldn't get the big