Walk in Hell

Taking his silence for consent, Ke

He was right. Ke

"Wait for what?" Cinci

"When the sulfuric acid eats through the copper, it mixes with the picric acid, right?" Ke

"I see what you're talkin' about, Mr. Ke

"Depends on how thick the copper disk is," Conroy answered. "Anywhere from an hour or so to a couple of weeks. We got all kinds. You don't need to worry about that."

"Good," Cinci

Conroy and Ke

Cinci

Ke

"I see that, Mistuh Ke

Tom Ke

"I got you," Cinci

Conroy and Ke

The rucksack was small, but surprisingly heavy-lead was like that. Cinci

That evening, working in the sink after Elizabeth had gone to bed, Cinci

He didn't like having the bombs in his pocket when he went to work the next morning. If a stopper came loose, he figured he'd like it even less. Nodding in a friendly way to Lieutenant Straubing came hard.

Along with the other drivers, he rattled south, and stopped to drop his cargo-small-arms ammunition, from what was stenciled on the crates-a little past one in the afternoon. While laborers unloaded the trucks, he ate his lunch and wandered around. Planting a couple of bombs was as easy as Ke

Night had fallen by the time he got back to Covington. "See you tomorrow, Cinci

"Yes, suh." Cinci

He made up a couple of more bombs that evening, and planted them the next day. That evening, Conroy waved to him as he walked past-word of the first fire he'd set must have already got back to the storekeeper. Glad you're happy, Cinci

Twelve days later, Conroy's store burned to the ground.

Jonathan Moss' thumb stabbed the firing button. The tracers his machine gun spat helped him guide the line of fire across the fuselage of the British biplane whose pilot hadn't spied him coming till too late. The flier slumped over his controls, dead or unconscious. His aeroplane spun down, down, down. Moss followed it down, on the off chance the limey was shamming. He wasn't. The aeroplane crashed into the battered ground of no-man's-land and began to burn.

Moss pulled up sharply. Down there in the trenches, men in khaki were blazing away at him. He didn't take them for granted, not any more. They'd brought him down once. He wanted to give them as little chance of doing it again as he could.

A couple of bullets punched through the fabric covering his single-decker's wings. The sound brought remembered fear, in a way it hadn't when the Englishman put some rounds through there. No aeroplane had ever knocked him out of the sky, which meant he could make himself believe no aeroplane could knock him out of the sky. He couldn't pretend, even to himself, that the infantry, which had got lucky once, might not get lucky again.

Small arms still aimed his way. Looking back in the rearview mirror mounted on the edge of the cockpit, he saw muzzle flashes bright as the sun. But his altimeter was winding steadily. By the time he passed twenty-five hundred feet, which didn't take long, he was pretty safe.