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the jeep skidded to a halt.
    “Back up,” Woody said. Fossano did. Woody pointed. “Bingo!” he said.
    In the middle of a small clearing a few yards off the obviously seldom-traveled road a neat white wooden cross had been pounded into the ground. And next to it lay a large bundle wrapped in a solid brown tarpaulin.
    The two men got out. They walked up to the bundle. Woody was puzzled. Who the hell had put up the cross? The whimsical informer on the phone? “Give me a hand,” he said grimly. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
    Fossano looked dubiously at the tarpaulin-wrapped bundle. They were supposed to be looking for some dead guy, weren’t they? Uneasily he shifted his feet. He glanced at Woody. He tried in vain to find the agent’s insignia of rank on his uniform. There was none. Only two officer’s US emblems on his collar tabs. Nothing else.
    “Say—eh . . .” He paused. “What is your rank?”
    Woody looked at him. “I’ll give you the official spiel, corporal,” he said evenly. “The SOP answer given by any CIC agent to anyone who wants to know—from corporal to colonel!”
    He glared at the soldier. “It goes like this: My rank is confidential, but at this moment I am not outranked.” He jutted his face close to the corporal. “And that sure as hell goes for right now,” he snapped. “So hop to it!”
    “Yes—eh, Sir,” Fossano stammered.
    Together they unwrapped the bundle.
    The sight that met them turned their stomachs.
    The soldier had been dead two or three days, Woody thought. He was an American, dressed in field uniform except for his boots, which for some unknown reason had been removed. The cause of death was easily established. A deep cut on the left side of the man’s neck had severed the jugular vein. His uniform was blackish-red with dried blood. A rope was tied around his left arm.
    But it was the man’s face that held the eyes of the two men riveted in horror and revulsion.
    It wasn’t there!
    Someone had carefully and methodically obliterated it. Beaten it to a sickening, unrecognizable mass. There were absolutely no features left, nothing which by the wildest stretch of imagination could be called a face. The nose was flattened. All the teeth knocked out. The eyes two sunken pits of crusted gore.
    For a moment the two men stood staring at the gruesome sight, fighting to control the sour bile that rose in their throats. Finally Fossano turned away, his face ashen.
    “The bastards,” he muttered, shaken.
    “Let’s—let’s find out who he is,” Woody said, his voice sounding tight in his throat.
    Systematically, struggling to overcome their queasiness, they searched the mangled body. When they had finished Woody knew with grim realization why the victim had no face. Someone had desperately wanted to conceal the identity of the mutilated corpse: it had been stripped of all identification—dog-tags, wallet, papers; the uniform pockets were all empty; and the soldier’s unit shoulder patch had been ripped from his shirt-sleeve. That was also why the boots were missing, Woody realized. The soldier’s serial number must have been stamped or inked into the leather.
    Woody stood up. He rubbed his hands along the sides of his pants, rubbed and rubbed—unaware of doing it. Something was nagging at him. Something didn’t fit . . .
    He looked around. The little clearing was littered with trash. Straws from bottle sleeves, US Army ration wrappings, a few rags which appeared to have been torn from a woman’s dress, a broken wine bottle, two pieces of blue chalk, a torn page from a newspaper. Woody picked it up. It was from an Ohio tabloid dated March 15, 1945.
    He turned to Fossano. “Pick up everything you can find,” he told him. “Pile it up over there. We’ll make a list of it.”
    “What for?” Fossano demurred.
    “Just do it!” Woody snapped. He didn’t explain. Perhaps it was a little farfetched to expect the refuse to contain some kind of clue. But—shit!