Read Hanging on for Free Online

had been run the mile in little more than a minute and a half. They stared toward the far end of the open strip, at the tops of the black trees, heads pushed a bit forward as they tried to catch the first rumble of the plane's engines.
        A frog croaked nearby, startling Beame who jumped forward and collided with Kelly, nearly knocking the bigger man down.
        "A frog," Slade said. But he didn't sound sure of himself.
        The frogs, Major Kelly thought, were in league with the crickets, who were telegraphing messages to the Germans.
        Abruptly, silencing the crickets, the sound of the plane's engines came in over the trees, low and steady and growing.
        "Move!" Major Kelly said.
        To the left and right, enlisted men struck matches, bent down and lighted tiny blue flares at each corner of the runway. They looked like overgrown altar boys at some alien worship. At the far end of the crude strip, another pair of men did the same, briefly lighted by an intense blue glow before they stepped back into the shadows under the trees. Now the pilot had a means of gauging the length and width of the runway. This really wasn't much for the pilot to judge by; he might as well have tried an audio landing with the sputtering of the flares as his only points of reference.
        By the same token, the four blue lights weren't much for a random patrol of German night bombers to beam in on, either.
        The pilot, Major Kelly knew, would already have begun to scream. He always began to scream when he started losing altitude a mile out over the trees to the west. When he came in sight of the blue flares, he would scream even louder. He said their permanent runway wasn't much better than the temporary affair he had first landed on. He said it was too short, too uneven, and too narrow. He said it wasn't macadamized, that the oil-and-sand surface was extremely treacherous. He said the four blue flares hurt his eyes and interfered with his judgment when he was putting down, even though he had to have the flares or not land at all. Besides, he said, the runway was behind German lines. Even if General Blade did have him by the short hairs, the pilot said, he had no right to send him and his plane and his crew behind German lines. He said this again and again, until Major Kelly went to great lengths to avoid him. The pilot had to shout about this to Major Kelly, because the general had forbidden him to tell anyone else that he had been behind enemy lines.
        "What do you want to be behind enemy lines for?" the pilot would shout at Kelly, his face red, his hands fisted in the pockets of his flight jacket.
        "I don't want to be here," Kelly would say.
        "But here you are."
        "On orders," Kelly would say.
        "That's your excuse," the pilot would say.
        There was really no reasoning with the pilot, because he was consumed with terror the entire time he was at the clearing.
        Now, by the south side of the HQ building, twelve enlisted men waited to unload the materials which would, when combined with sweat, remake the bridge. All of the enlisted men were as nervous as the pilot, but none of them was screaming. The first time the pilot had brought the big plane in, the enlisted men had screamed right along with him, bent double, faces bright with blood, mouths open wide, eyes watering, screaming and screaming. But Sergeant Coombs had been infuriated by this display of cowardice. He had punished them the following day with KP duty and a severe calisthenics session. Because they feared Sergeant Coombs more than they feared the Germans, the men were forced to express this nervousness in less obvious ways. They stood by the HQ building, in the shadows, snapping their fingers, popping their knuckles, grinding their teeth, slapping their sides, clicking their tongues. One of them was kicking the side of the corrugated tin wall as if he did not believe it were real, as if he