Read Online Hanging on by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

American-made machinery was drawn back in among the trees behind the main bunker, out of sight. A row of German transports, holed and rickety but sound enough to the eye, in the dark, flanked the machinery shed. None of the other men in the unit was visible, though they were hidden everywhere, armed and ready to fight if this ruse should fail and the night should end in violence.
        But they were acting like cowards, the lot of them, Slade thought. They were unwilling to face the enemy directly, and they actually would not do so unless they had no other choice. What would their girl friends say about them if they could see them now? What would Slade's own mother say? Slade's mother was a very patriotic woman, an Army wife, and an avid collector of war stories, both fictional and factual. Slade's mother believed in heroism. Her husband had been a hero as had been her father and her grandfather. Slade's mother insisted, when he was first sent to Europe, that Slade become a hero himself, even if he had to be wounded or die in the process. To be wounded was preferable to dying, of course, because if he died he could not beguile her with stories about Over There. It would be just terrible if Slade's mother's friends had sons who became heroes, while Slade remained undistinguished in battle. How humiliating that would be for Slade's mother. After all, she had done so much for him, and he could hardly pay her back with humiliation and degradation. And he could hardly let himself be killed before he had a chance to tell her a couple of good stories about heroism. So, if he had to die fighting the goddamned krauts, why couldn't he die in his own uniform? How would his mother ever explain this to her friends? She could bear it, she told him, if he died in some heroic way-but how could she bear the news that he had died in a jerry uniform? And a jerry private's uniform! She wouldn't be able to handle it. She'd crack up.
        "The least we can do," The Snot said, making a final effort to sway them over to his point of view, "is blow up the bridge so the Panzers can't make it to the front."
        Neither Kelly nor Beame replied. Kelly merely nodded up the road where, abruptly, a motorcycle and its sidecar were silhouetted against the oncoming convoy lights. They were not yet to the clearing, but coming fast.
        The Snot took out his revolver and checked to be certain it was loaded. How would his mother ever explain to her friends about her son in a German uniform and trying to kill the enemy with an unloaded gun? It was loaded. The Snot hoped he would have to use it.
        The cyclist stopped his machine twenty feet from the bridge, and both the German soldiers stared at Kelly, Beame, and Slade. They were fair-skinned and young, athletic men who looked too hard and knowledgeable for their age. They did not seem to be suspicious, merely curious.
        Kelly smiled and waved. The noise of the oncoming tanks was too loud for his voice to carry across the hundred yards to the soldiers.
        The man in the sidecar got out. A rifle was slung over his shoulder, black with black leather straps, polished. He was more than six feet tall, further elevated by the well-heeled boots, his pot helmet worn back off his forehead in a relaxed fashion. He bent close to the cyclist and said something which made the other man laugh.
        Good, Kelly thought, they're laughing.
        Suspicious men don't laugh, Beame thought, relieved.
        Are they laughing at me? Slade wondered.
        The cyclist changed gears and drove away, across the bridge, leaving his companion alone.
        It was German routine to station a sentry at the approach to a bridge before the Panzers began to cross it, and it was also German routine for the sentry to inspect the nearside bridge for concealed explosives prior to taking up his post. This man didn't bother with that, apparently because he thought the bridge was already under German