Hanging on Read Free Page A

his teeth so hard he almost broke his jawbone. "I know how to handle this, Lieutenant Slade."
        "I was only making a helpful suggestion." The lieutenant sounded hurt, though Kelly knew he wasn't. You couldn't hurt Slade, because Slade had a huge, rubber ego that bounced your insults right back at you, quick as a wink.
        "Dismissed," Kelly said, though he knew he wasn't a good enough disciplinarian to make the word mean anything. He was tall, lean, well muscled, and hard-looking. He had very black eyebrows and what he fancied was a piercing gaze, and he should have been able to keep a man like Slade in line. But he couldn't. Probably, that was because Slade realized how terror-stricken he was. Being terror-stricken made him less like an officer and more like an enlisted man.
        "Will the Major entertain another suggestion?" Slade asked.
        Why the hell did he have to talk that way? Entertain, for Christ's sake! Entertain!
        "What is it, Lieutenant?" Kelly attempted to be abrupt, icy, and harsh. That wasn't one of his better roles, however, and Slade seemed to think he was only being stupid.
        "We rebuilt the bridge after the British bombed it, and the Stukas showed up to destroy it again," Slade said. He was one for repeating what everyone already knew, as if the fact gained some deep clarity that only his voice could impart to it. "When the Stukas went, we built the bridge a second time. The second flight of Stukas came and knocked the bridge down again. Yesterday, we completed repair of the bridge, and now the third flight of Stukas wiped it out." He looked at Kelly and Beame, waiting for some reaction. He seemed unaware of the fumes that rose from the gorge, and he was the only man present who was dressed in immaculate fatigues.
        "So?" Kelly said at last, realizing they would remain there through the night and the following day and even beyond that if he did not prod the lieutenant.
        "I believe we have an informer in our midst."
        Kelly looked incredulous, but not too incredulous, since Slade just might be right. "Who do you suspect, Slade?"
        "Maurice," the lieutenant said, triumphant, grinning, The Snot.
        Maurice was the mayor of the only nearby French village, a hamlet of four hundred souls, so small it hadn't been on any of their maps when they were first dropped here behind German lines, following the successful landing at Normandy. For the most part, the townspeople were farmers and laborers; Maurice owned the only grocery and the hardware store, a third of the town's businesses which lined the single main street. Maurice was perhaps sixty years old, drank too much, bathed too little, and bragged that his eldest son was in Brittany working in the FFI-Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur-and had renamed his town Eisenhower once the Normandy invasion had acquainted him with that word.
        Slade, seeing the disbelief in their faces, said, "I know that's an unpopular notion. I know how much everyone here likes Maurice and how much everyone thinks Maurice has done for us. But you'll remember that I have never fully trusted him, and you'll admit that he has the best opportunity to report to the Germans."
        "Surely there isn't a radio in Eisenhower," Kelly said. "And he would need one to make reports…"
        "Perhaps it was dropped to them by a German night plane," Slade said. He always had an answer, which was another reason why everyone hated him.
        Kelly wiped the soot off his face, looked at the blackened palm of his hand, wiped his hand on the seat of his pants, and jumped when his fingers slid over his own bare ass. Embarrassed, he said, "I can't picture that." He wondered if there were long black finger marks on his behind.
        Slade wasn't done. "Why is it that the Stukas have never given our position to any element of the German army? Why haven't they sent ground troops after us, to wipe us out? Why is it that the