“This is my own private venture,” he said, “this blowing up of the road. I’ll endanger my own life in it, but nobody else’s. The dam is the important thing. You stay here with Slade and Max until it is all over, then head back for the cave fast.”
Max had reappeared just before Dick left. After three-quarters of an hour hunting some fugitive in the woods, he led his sentries back to the dam. And he was fuming. He let forth a stream of abuse that would have made the real Colonel Klage envious. He blamed everything that had gone wrong in the war on those sentries, threatened to have them up for punishment the next day.
He gave a final order for them all to stay on the dam wall the rest of the night, and to keep their eyes constantly on the other side of the lake. Then he stalked away. The sentries were lined up like wooden Indians, facing the other direction. They couldn’t have seen as far as the main road anyway, to see that Max just ducked across it into the woods above, but they didn’t even dare try to see.
Max was proud and happy. “I ran the legs off those guys,” he said. “And it did me good to hit a couple of them, too. They like to go around doing that kind of thing to people who can’t hit back. I wonder how they liked a taste of their own medicine.”
Dick told Max what a fine job he had done, but the big soldier just said, “I guess I’ll go in for acting after I get out of the Army. It’s fun.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ZERO HOUR
Tony Avella was nearing the end of his long vigil in the top of the bell tower. He was feeling restless, cramped, and uneasy. He kept telling himself that this radio job was just as important as any of the rest of it, but it did not make him feel any better about having to spend almost a whole week in that cramped space, hot in the day, cold at night, with a stone floor beneath him. Most of the time he had nothing whatever to do, and he had covered the floor with scratches playing tick-tack-toe with himself.
But now the end was approaching. It had been some time since he’d heard about the latest plans, but he knew that the dam was scheduled to go up at exactly five-thirty A.M. And he thought that Dick was going to try to get around to the northwest road to blow it up at the same time.
“At any rate, I’ve got box seats for the whole affair,” he told himself. “I’ll be able to see both explosions from here. But I can’t wait around very long after that.”