Dean R. Koontz - Hanging On

Dean Koontz – Hanging on

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MAJOR KELLY

WAS GOING BANANAS

Sgt. Hagendorf had climbed into a coffin and refused to come out, declaring

himself already dead.'

Pvt. Angelli had fallen in love with nurse Pullit, which would have been all right

had nurse Pullit been a woman.

Lily, the roadshow stripper the USO had left behind, had taken to vocalizing

her solo orgasms and was slowly driving the men mad.

And Lt. Slade had made up his mind to assas-sinate his commanding officer.

Major Kelly had always known that

war was hell—but this one was

definitely something else!

“Earthy . . . hilarious ... M*A*S*Hian novel . . . most entertaining!”

—Oregon Journal

HANGING

ON

Dean R. Koontz

A DELL BOOK

Published by

DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.

1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza

New York, New York 10017

and Pan American Copyright Conventions.

For information, address

M. Evans and Company, Inc., New York, N.Y. 10017.

Dell ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

Reprinted by arrangement with

M. Evans and Company, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

First Dell printing—February 1976

For David Williams,

who made author-editor arguments all unnecessary

by being in the right every step of the way.

PART ONE

The First Panzers

July 10/JuIy 14 1944

1

Major Kelly was in the latrine, sitting down, his pants around his ankles, when the Stuka dive bombers

struck. With good weather, Kelly used the last stall in the narrow, clapboard building, because it was the

only cubicle not covered by a roof and was, therefore, considerably less offensive than any of the others.

Now, in the late after-noon sunshine, a fresh breeze pouring in over the top, the stall was actually

pleasant, a precious retreat from the men, the war, the bridge. Content, patient with his bodily processes,

he sat there watching a fat brown spider weave its web in the corner behind the door hinge. The spider,

he felt, was an omen; it survived, even flourished, midst stench and decay; and if he, Kelly, only spun his

webs as well as the spider did, were as tenacious, he would flourish too, would make it through this

damn war in one piece, One live piece. He had no desire to make it through the war in one dead piece.

And that meant spinning tight webs around himself. Shallow philosophy, perhaps, but shallow philosophy

was Major Kelly's one great weakness, because it was the only thing that offered hope. Now,

mesmerized by the spider, he did not hear the Stukas until they were almost over the latrine. When he did

hear them, he looked up, shocked, in time to see them sweep by in perfect for-mation, framed by the

four walls of the stall, shining pret-tily in the sunlight.

As usual, the trio of stubby dive bombers came without the proper Messerschmitt escort, flaunting

their invulner-ability. They came from the east, buzzing in low over the trees, climbing as they reached the

center of the open en-campment, getting altitude for a murderous run on the bridge.

The planes passed over in an instant, no longer framed in the open roof of the last stall. A turbulent

wind fol-lowed them, as did a thunderclap that shook the latrine walls.

Kelly knew he was as safe in the latrine as anywhere else in camp, for the Stukas never attacked

anything but the bridge. They never bombed the cheap tin-walled bun-ker that was shelved into the soft

ground near the tree line, and they ignored the heavy machinery building as well as all the construction

equipment parked behind it. They ignored the headquarters which was half corrugated sheet tin and half

clapboard and would have made a dandy target; and they were oblivious of the hospital bunker cut into

the hillside near the river—and of the latrines behind HQ. All they cared about was pulverizing the damn

bridge. They passed over it again and again, spitting black eggs from their bellies, flames blossoming

beneath them, until the bridge was down. Then they bombed it some more. They transformed the steel

beams into twisted, smoldering lumps of slag, unrecognizable and unusable. Then they bombed it some

more. It was almost as if the three pilots had been severely traumatized by the bridge during their

childhoods, as if each of them had a personal stake in this business, some old grudge to settle.

If he avoided the bridge, then, he would be safe. Intel-lectually, he was quite aware of this; however,

emotion-ally, Major Kelly was certain that each Stuka attack was directed against him, personally, and

that it was only good luck that the pilots got the bridge instead. Somewhere deep in Nazi Germany, some

fine old school chum of his had risen to a position of influence and power, some old chum who knew just

where Kelly was, and he was running these Stuka flights to have him wiped out as fitting retribu-tion for

some slight or other that Kelly had done the old chum years and years ago. That was it. That had to be it.

Yet, as often as he considered his school days back in the States, Major Kelly could not recall a single

old chum of German extraction who might have returned to the father-land for the war. He still would not

give up on the theory, because it was the only one which made sense; he could not conceive of a war, or

any battle in it, that was waged on a purely impersonal basis. At one time, he was sure, Churchill, Stalin,

and Roosevelt must have snubbed Hitler at a cocktail party, thereby generating this whole mess.

Now, caught in the latrine at the start of the attack, Major Kelly stood and jerked up his trousers,

catching them on an exposed nailhead and ripping out half the backside. He slammed through the dusty

latrine door into the open area at the south side of the machinery shed. He was just in time to see the

Stukas, four hundred yards up-river, arc high over the bridge and punch out their first ebony bombs.

Turning, the seat of his pants flapping, he ran for the bunker by the trees, screaming at the top of his

lungs.

Behind, the first bombs hit the bridge. A hot, orange flower blossomed, opened rapidly, ripened,

blackened into an ugly ball of thick smoke. The explosion crashed across the encampment with a real

physical presence, hammer-ing at Kelly's back.

“No!” he shouted. He stumbled, almost fell. If he fell, he was finished.

More bombs plowed into the steel floor of the bridge, shredded the plating squares, and hurled

thousands of sharp, deadly slivers into the smoke-darkened sky. These jagged fragments fell back to

earth with a wind-cutting hum that was audible even above the shriek of the Stukas and the shattering

explosions of more bombs.

He reached the steps in the earth and went down to the bunker door, grabbed the handle in both

hands, and wrenched at it. The door did not open. He tried again, with no more success than before,

then fell against it and pounded with one fist. “Hey, in there! Hey!”

The Stukas, circling back from the bridge, came in low over the bunker, engines screaming. They

established a sympathetic vibration in his bones. His teeth chattered like castenets. Shuddering violently,

he felt himself throwing off his strength, letting the weakness well up. Then the Stukas were gone, leaving

behind them a smell of scorched metal and overheated machine oil.

Major Kelly realized, as the Stukas shot out across the trees to make their second approach on the

bridge, that no one inside the bunker was going to open up and let him in, even though he was their

commanding officer and had al-ways been nice to them. He knew just what they were thinking. They

were thinking that if they opened the door, one of the Stukas would put a two-hundred-pound bomb

right through it, killing them all. Perhaps that was a para-noid fear, but Major Kelly could understand it;

he was at least as paranoid as any of the men hiding down in the bunker.

The Stukas, which had grown almost inaudible at the nadir of their swing-around, now closed in

again, their engines winding up from a low whistle through a shrill keening into an enraged scream that

made Major Kelly's hair stand right on end.

Kelly ran up the bunker steps to the surface and, screaming again, plunged past the back of the

machinery building, past the latrine, and along the riverbank toward the hospital bunker. His legs pumped

so hard and so high that he seemed in grave danger of hitting himself in the chest with his own knees.

The Stukas thundered in, lower than before, shattering the air and making the earth under him

reverberate.

Kelly knew he was running toward the bridge, and he hated to do that, but the hospital bunker was a

hundred and fifty yards closer to the span than the latrines had been, offering the only other underground

shelter in the camp. He reached the hospital steps just as the first Stuka let go with its second load of

bombs.

The entire length of the bridge jumped up from its moorings, twisted sickeningly against the backdrop

of smoke-sheathed trees on the far side of the gorge. The structure tossed away I-beams like a frantic

lover throw-ing off clothes. Long steel planks zoomed above the blan-ket of smoke, then shot down

again, smashing branches to the ground, splitting the dry, baked earth.

Kelly looked away, ran down the hospital steps, and tried the door just as the second Stuka let go

with its pay-load. The bridge gave some more, but the hospital door wouldn't give at all.

Kelly ran back up to the surface, screaming.

The last plane swooped over the gorge. Flames gushed up in its wake, and smoldering pieces of

metal rained down around the major, bouncing on his shoes, and leav-ing scars where they hit.

The Stukas, peeling off at the apex of their bombing climb, turned over on their backs and flew

upside down toward the trees, to lead into a third approach.

“Arrogant sons of bitches!” Kelly shouted.

Then he realized he shouldn't antagonize the Stuka pilots, and he shut up. Was it possible that any of

them had heard him above the roar of their own planes and above the noise of bridge sections settling

violently into the gorge? Unlikely. In fact, impossible. However, you didn't stay alive in this war by taking

chances. It was al-ways possible that one or more of the pilots could read lips and that, flying upside

down with a perfect view of him, they had discovered the nature of the epithet which he had so

thoughtlessly flung at them.

Suddenly, with the planes gone over the trees, he was alone, standing in a low pall of black smoke

that rose like flood waters out of the gorge and spread rapidly across the entire camp. Choking, wiping at

teary eyes, he began to run again—then stopped cold as he saw that there was nowhere to run to.

Caught with his pants down in the latrine, he hadn't gotten to either of the bunkers in time to be let in with

the other men. Unaccustomed to battle, the technicians and laborers in Kelly's unit of Army engineers had

developed only one useful talent for battle conditions: running. Any man in the unit could make it from one

end of the camp to the other and into the bunkers so fast he'd have won a medal at any Olympic track

event. Unless, of course, he was confronted with some obstacle—like pants around his ankles, an

exposed nail that ripped out the seat of his pants, or the latrine door. Which was what had hap-pened to

Kelly to slow him down. And now he was here alone, waiting for the Stukas, doomed.

The smoke rose around him in black columns, rolled menacingly over the C-shaped clearing in which

the camp stood, obscuring the HQ building and the machinery shed and the latrines, closing out life and

bringing in death. He knew it. I feel it coming, he thought. He was doomed. He sneezed as the smoke

tickled inside his nostrils, and he wished to hell the Stukas would come back and get it over with. Why

were they making him wait so long for it? All they had to do was drop a couple of bombs anywhere

nearby, and it would be over. The sooner they did it the better, because he didn't like standing there in

that smoke, sneezing and coughing and his mouth full of an oily taste. He was miserable. He wasn't a

fighter. He was an engineer. He had hung on as long as he could reasonably hope to; the war had finally

defeated him, had foiled his every stratagem, destroyed his every scheme for survival, and he was ready

to face up to the awful truth. So where were the Stukas?

As the smoke gradually cleared, leaving only the gorge clouded in ugly vapor, Major Kelly

understood that the Stukas weren't coming back. They had done all they need-ed to do in their first two

passes. He wasn't doomed after all, or even injured. He could have remained in the latrine, watching the

spider, and saved himself all this effort. But that wasn't the way to hang on, to stay alive. That was taking

chances, and only madmen took chances. To stay alive, you moved constantly this way and that,

searching for an edge. And now that the Stukas were gone, so was Major Kelly's pessimism. He would

come out of this in one piece, one live piece, and then he would find General Blade—the man who had

dropped their unit two hundred and fifty miles behind German lines—and he would kill the son of a bitch.

2

“This is a fairy tale, grand in color but modest in design,” Major Kelly said. He stood on the burned grass

at the edge of the ruins, a fine gray ash filming his shoes and trousers, his big hands and his shirt, and even

his face. Sweat ran down his forehead, streaking the ashes, and fell into his eyes. The acrid fumes that

rose from the broken bridge and stirred around his feet added an eerie and in-human touch to his shallow

philosophy. Continuing in the same vein, he said, “None of this is real, Sergeant Coombs. It's all a fairy

tale of death; you and I are merely the figments of some Aesop's imagination.”

Major Kelly, a dreamer who always hoped to find a whore in every nice girl he met, was given to

such fanciful extrapolations rather more often than would have pleased General Blade if that august

commanding officer had known.

Sergeant Coombs, short and stumpy, forty-five years old and a career man, was not given to fanciful

extrapolation, not even in his dreams. He said, “Bullshit!” and walked away.

Major Kelly watched his noncom plod—Sergeant Coombs did not walk like ordinary men—back

toward HQ, wondering what he ought to say. Though he was clever at formulating odd bits of

philosophy, Kelly had no talent whatsoever for discipline. Sergeant Coombs, canny for all his stumpiness,

understood this and took advantage of the major. At last, when the noncom was at the door of the

corrugated shed and would shortly be out of reach, Major Kelly shouted, “Bullshit to you, too,

Coombs!”

Coombs jerked as if he had been shot, swiftly recovered his composure, opened the shed door, and

stepped grandly out of sight.

Below Kelly, in the ravine, the bridge lay in a chaotic heap. Too much smoke obscured the structure

for him to get a good look at it; however, as a vagrant breeze oc-casionally opened holes in the fumes, he

did get a few brief glimpses. He didn't like what he saw. Everywhere he saw destruction. That was a

word that usually was used in conjunction with another word Major Kelly liked even less: death; death

and destruction. Although no one had died on or under the bridge, Major Kelly was deeply dis-turbed

by what the suddenly made and just as suddenly closed holes in the smoke revealed. The bottom of the

ravine was strewn with chunks of concrete and jagged lumps of stone, all scorched black and still

radiating wa-vering lines of heat. Trees had been shattered by the ex-plosions and by hurtling lengths of

steel. Most of these had not caught fire, but their leaves were blackened and limp, little wrinkled lumps

like thousands of huddled bats clinging to the branches. The bridge beams rose out of the rubble at crazy

angles, ends broken, twisted by the ex-plosions and by the intense heat, looking like nothing so much as

the ribs of some prehistoric monster, the weath-ered bones of a behemoth.

The holes in the smoke closed again.

Lieutenant David Beame, second in command of the unit, thrust head and shoulders above the black

vapors, as if the stuff were solid and he had broken through with some effort. He spied Kelly and

scrambled up the slope, stumbling and falling, cursing, finally gaining the fresh air at the top. He was

covered with grime, his face an even black except for white rings around his eyes where he had

repeatedly rubbed with his handkerchief. He looked like a vaudeville comedian in blackface, Kelly

thought. Wisps of smoke trailed after Beame, soiled ribbons that the breeze caught and twined together

and carried away.

“Well, Dave,” Kelly said, “what's it like down there?” He really didn't want to know, but it was his

place to ask.

“Not so bad as before,” Beame said. He was only twen-ty-six, twelve years younger than Kelly, and

he looked like a college student when he was cleaned up. Blond hair, blue eyes, and downy cheeks. He

could never understand that it was always as bad as before, that nothing ever im-proved.

“The bridge piers?”

“Nearside pier is down. I couldn't even locate the struts through the anchorage and down to the pile.

All gone. Farside pier's okay, bridge cap in place and the bearings sound. In fact, the farside cantilever

arm isn't even bent. The suspended span is gone, of course, but we still have a third of the bridge up.”

“Too bad,” Major Kelly said.

“Sir?”

It was Major Kelly's duty, as directed by General Blade, to see that this bridge, which spanned a

small river and a larger gorge for some nine hundred feet, be kept open. The bridge was presently behind

German lines, despite the great advances the Allies had made since Normandy. No one had yet seen any

Germans around here, except those in the Stuka dive bombers which had knocked out the damned

bridge three times after Kelly's men had rebuilt it. The first time, in its initial existence, the bridge had been

destroyed by the British. Now that Allied armored units hoped to cross the gorge at this point, whenever

the German Panzer divisions had been turned back and finally overwhelmed, it must be maintained. At

least, General Blade thought it must. This was one of his private contingency plans, a pet project. Kelly

thought that General Blade had lost his mind, perhaps because of chronic syphilis, and that they were all

going to die before any Allied armored units could ever use the bridge. Though Kelly believed these

things with a deep and abiding pessimism, he also believed in getting along with his superiors, in not

taking chances, in hanging on. Though they were all going to die, there was a slim chance he would last

out the war and go home and never have to look at a bridge again. Because this slender thread of hope

was there, Major Kelly didn't tell the general what he feared.

Beame, wiping at the grime on his face, still waiting for some sort of explanation, coughed.

“What I meant,” Kelly said, “was that I wished they'd taken out the entire bridge.”

“Sir?”

“Beame, what is your civilian profession?”

“Civil engineer, sir.”

“Beame, if you had no bridge to keep rebuilding here, more than two hundred miles behind German

lines, if no one bombed this bridge so that you could repair it, what the hell would you do with yourself?”

Beame scratched bis nose, looked around at the clear-ing, the encircling trees, the smoking gorge. “I

don't know, sir. What would I do?”

“You'd go mad,” Major Kelly said. He looked at the sky, which was very blue; and he looked at the

cantilevered bridge, which was very demolished. He said, “Thank Christ for Stukas.”

3

Lieutenant Richard Slade, darker and chubbier than Lieu-tenant Beame and looking somewhat like a

choirboy with a vicious streak, was called The Snot by everyone in the unit except Sergeant Coombs.

Slade did not know this, and he would have been enraged if he had heard the nickname. He was a young

man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. Now, he came trotting out from HQ to tell Kelly that

Gen-eral Blade was going to call through in fifteen minutes. “The General's aide just placed the alert call

in code,” Slade said.

Kelly tried to keep his torn trousers out of sight. “That's not supposed to be until tonight.” He

dreaded talking to the general.

“Nevertheless, he'll be on in . . . about twelve minutes now. I suggest you be there, sir.” He pushed

his thick, brown hair back from his forehead and surveyed the bridge below. “I imagine we'll be requiring

supplies again.”

“I imagine so,” Kelly said. He wanted to punch Slade in the mouth. Even when Lieutenant Slade used

the cor-rect form of address, he imbued the obligatory “sir” with a sarcasm that infuriated the major.

Slade said, “Sir, you'd better make a supplies list before he calls, so you can read it quickly—and so

you won't forget anything.”

Major Kelly gritted 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 lieuten-ant 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 any-thing. 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 be-cause 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, how-ever, 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 im-maculate 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.

Dean R. Koontz - Hanging On

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