Hanging on

strike alone and less efficiently-they would fall into line. A commando team would slip into the rectory and slit the officers' throats while they slept. Next, they would quietly remove all the sentries. And next… well, anything could happen then. But whatever happened, they would be real heroes.
        "We'll fool them," Beame insisted. He pointed at the sink, pumps, and cabinets. "Who'd ever suspect this was all thrown together in four days?"
        Father Picard, nee Major Walter Kelly, shrugged. He walked over to the kitchen hallway. "I'm giving the town one last inspection. Want to come?" He hoped Beame did not want to come, for the lieutenant's optimism made him uneasy.
        "Sure," Beame said.
        "It's almost eleven-thirty. The Germans will be here soon. Let's go."
        Beame extinguished the kerosene lamp on the table by the front door.
        Outside, they crossed the porch, went down the four steps to the brief lawn, which, much abused during the construction, was the least convincing thing about the rectory. The night was muggy and overcast. The crickets were silent.
        The rectory stood on the corner of the bridge road and B Street. B Street was one of the two north-south lanes Danny Dew had made with his D-7 dozer, and it was the farthest east of the two. A Street, sister to B, also paralleled the river but was one block closer to the bridge. The two-lane bridge road had become their main street, and diagonally across it from the rectory stood the enormous, three-story, weathered gray convent. To the west side of the house, across the narrow B Street, was the quaint little town church.
        Kelly and Beame stood in the middle of the bridge road and looked east toward the break in the trees where the tanks would pass within the hour. The village continued one block in that direction. On the north side as one looked eastward, there were four single-story houses with meager lawns between them, church-owned homes for deaf-mutes. All of the houses were the same inside-hollow, gutted, phony-but differentiated externally by minor details: the size of the porches, condition of the paint, shape of the windows. Though the houses were the same in their dimensions, and though all of their windows were made lightless by identical sets of blackout blinds, they did look like separately conceived and constructed dwellings. On the south side of the block, there was only the rectory, rectory lawn, and an outhouse tucked in between two big elms.
        The village extended two blocks to the west along the bridge road. The whole north side of the first block beyond the rectory was occupied by the massive convent and its board-fenced yard. Across the street from the convent, again commanding a full block, was the church and churchyard. Then, over beyond A Street and the river, there were a couple of houses and the village store.
        Kelly switched on his flashlight and walked north on B Street.
        "It looks so real, doesn't it?" Beame asked, awestricken.
        "Pray the krauts think so," Major Kelly said.
        "I thought you told me not to pray."
        "That's right," Kelly said. "I almost forgot."
        B Street ran only two blocks north-south, half the length of its sister, A Street. The northern block, above the bridge road, was faced with a sixty-foot barrackslike nunnery and a stone well on the east, and with the convent and convent yard fence on the west. Everything was nice and tidy.
        From B, they entered Y Street. This was the northernmost of the town's three east-west roads, parallel to the bridge road. It ran one block east, with nothing but two church-owned houses on each side, their outhouses, scattered elms. Across Y Street, facing the mouth of B, stood a fake two-story house in ill-repair.
        "Why didn't you give the streets French names?" Beame asked. "Won't the Germans think it's odd-naming streets after letters of the alphabet?"
        Kelly sighed, tugged at his collar. "The letters are for our benefit in a crisis. The krauts won't expect a town this small to have formal street names."
        Turning west, they followed Y Street towards the river. On their left was the convent. On the right, there was only open lawn until they reached a two-story fake house at the end of the block. This one was also poorly maintained. Actually, every two-story structure in the village was ugly and decaying-except for the rectory. They did not want