Hanging on

I'm sure of it."
        "That's the kind of talk I like to hear!" Blade said. "Well… I'll be getting back to you in a couple of days, once this is over. Good luck, Kelly!"
        "Thank you, sir."
        Kelly put the microphone down. It brought him nothing but static now, a sound oddly like that you could hear when you held a seashell to your ear: distant, forlorn, empty, as lonely as old age. He switched it off.
        "Well," Slade said, "this puts a new light on the case, doesn't it?"
        Kelly said nothing.
        "We'll never finish the town before midnight tomorrow," Slade said, a titter barely muffled behind one hand. "We'll have to fight the krauts."
        "No," Kelly said. Fighting meant violence. Violence meant death. "We aren't taking any chances. We have to hang on, even if there isn't any hope, even if we dare not hope. I keep thinking… Hansel and Gretel may crawl into the oven, but they don't get burned, you know? And Jack only suffered bruises when he fell down the beanstalk. I don't know… All I do know is that we can't take any initiative. We just play our roles, no matter how crazy they get. So… Maurice will have to supply us with fifty more workers-a crew to cut up barn walls in and around Eisenhower and deliver them to us while the other hundred workers are committed solely to the job in the clearing. The new crew can start cutting walls tonight. We'll work later, until eleven or twelve, by lanterns. We have to play our parts."
        "This is disgusting!" Slade stamped his foot petulantly. "Cowardly! What will people think of us Stateside? What will history say? What will mother say?"
        Kelly left the stinking tent and went to see Maurice about the additional workmen.

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    8 / JULY 21
        
        At 2:00 in the morning, Lieutenant Slade quietly pushed back the tent flaps and stepped outside. He looked at the summer sky. The moon peeked from between fast-moving gray clouds that appeared to be packing into a single seamless bank as they rolled westward. The soft flicker of heat lightning pulsed behind the overcast. There would be no rain tonight. The air was warm, but not moist. The light wind was as dry as sand. However, when these clouds collided with those cold, moisture-laden thunderheads sailing in from the sea, rain would fall in bucketfuls. That would be farther west, toward the Atlantic. Tonight, in this part of France, the sky would remain overcast, but there would be no rain.
        Good, Slade thought. The deeper the darkness and the fewer the obstacles it otherwise imposed, the better weather it was for assassination.
        Slade looked up and down the twisting, cluttered tent row. No lights showed. No one moved. The silence was profound. In the darkness, even when a piece of the moon threw pale light into the clearing, the tents looked like concrete rather than canvas shelters; they resembled the sharply angled humps of an antitank defense perimeter.
        The men were sound asleep, except for those patrolling the bridge road a mile to the east and a mile to the west of the camp as an early warning system to guard against any surprise enemy movement on that highway.
        And except for Lieutenant Slade, of course. The assassin.
        Slade stepped quietly across the dusty footpath to the tents which faced his own, and squeezed between two of them without alerting the men who were sleeping inside. He walked away from the tents and the woods behind them, heading north toward the bridge. His ultimate destination was Major Kelly's tent, where he would cautiously peel open the flaps, take out his revolver, and blow the major's head off. However, in case someone had been watching him, some snooping son of a bitch peering out a crack between tent flaps, Slade walked in the opposite direction from Kelly's tent, until he was certain that the darkness would have finally concealed him from any unknown observer. Then he stopped and looked at the low sky, catching his breath, trying to still his booming heart.
        Now was the time.
        Slade unbuckled his trousers, and took his potato-sack mask out of his undershorts. He had kept it there ever since he had fashioned it eight days ago. He had developed a rather severe rash on his testicles and stomach from continuous abrasive contact with the burlap, but he did not care. All that mattered was that no one had yet seen the mask-and no one would see it in connection with Lieutenant