“It’s working!” he exclaimed to Scotti, who stood beside him. “They must be sending almost half the force off on this job. They don’t expect a thing from the flanks. Just think what a tiny bunch of parachute troops have been able to do, Lieutenant!”

Scotti agreed, but he smiled to himself at the irony of hearing a commander express happiness when his own troops were to be so greatly outnumbered.

“He’s not thinking of himself or his troops for a minute,” Scotti told himself. “He’s just thinking of the success of this operation to take the Wadizam Pass, no matter what it may cost. That’s a good soldier, all right.”

He watched as many of the trucks sped on out of sight.

“They’re going on to get the boys heading for the dam and the bridge,” he said. “And they’re sending plenty off on that job! The rest will come up after us. Well, we can hold off almost any force in this position for quite a few hours.”

Dick Donnelly and his twenty men had been making fast time toward the dam, down the slope of the crest they had crossed, and up the next parallel ridge. Dick looked frequently at his map to check position and glanced almost unconcernedly at the observation plane which returned occasionally to keep them under scrutiny.

“They’ve probably got a small force guarding the dam,” Dick told his men, “and we might as well get rid of them before the detachment from the main camp arrives to take care of us.”

He noted with satisfaction that the slopes surrounding the reservoir up ahead were covered with trees whereas the surrounding countryside was rather barren.

“Moisture from the reservoir,” he told himself. “Makes a regular oasis here in the hills, and those trees will give us good cover.”

As they entered the thicket of trees, Dick stopped his men, who gathered around him. He held the map so that all could see.

“Here’s where we are now,” he said, putting his finger on a point near the reservoir. “The dam is up ahead on the left a few hundred yards. We’ve been covered by this shoulder of the hill as we approached, so the guard there probably hasn’t seen us, but they’re likely to have radio and know we’re coming. They’ll all be centered at the dam itself, I’m sure. Lefty, you take these five men and head up the hill farther, then cut down to catch them on the flank just after we’ve gone straight in at them. And Bert, you take these three and circle down around to the left and come up on them from that side. But don’t go as far as the road leading from the Pass up to the dam. The Jerries will be rushing a few truckloads of reinforcements up the road to get us, and we’ve all got to stay on this side.”

“I get it, Sarge,” Bert said.

“Okay—me too,” added Lefty. These two corporals were men who were calm in an emergency and possessed plenty of initiative, as Dick well knew.

“This shouldn’t take more than about five minutes,” he went on. “And we haven’t got much more time than that. The minute it’s over, all the rest of us will switch up beyond the reservoir here where Lefty’s group is going down, but we must stick close to the shore. We’ll have cover, because the trees come right down to the edge. Okay—get going, boys. Wait for my first fire to draw them toward us. Then come in at the right moment.”

The ten men who remained with their sergeant watched the other groups trot silently off through the trees in different directions.

“We’ll give them about three minutes,” Dick said, “to circle around to position. Then we’ll go in straight for the dam. But keep behind the trees and rocks. No use losing any men on a little action like this.”

Dick looked at his watch as the others stood around him without a word. They held their sub-machine guns lightly in their arms, ready for immediate action. Dick noticed with satisfaction that they all seemed completely relaxed and at ease, even though a light of excitement and anticipation gleamed in their eyes.

“Okay—here we go,” he said casually, and started forward smartly. The men fanned out around him, moving upward through the trees. Dick led them up a slight shoulder of land which brought them to a level with the dam. And then they saw it.

It lay only about seventy-five yards ahead, a long wall of concrete, with water trickling slowly over a spillway at the far end. At the near end there was a rough wooden shack on top of the wall, and near it stood four German soldiers, anxiously scanning the surrounding trees.

“They must be mighty uncomfortable,” Dick said, “knowing we’re coming for them. Well, let’s not keep them in suspense. Open fire.”

The silence of the hills was shattered by the chattering roar of ten machine guns. Two of the Germans toppled from the wall to the rocky valley below. One darted into the shack, and one fell on top of the wall, wounded. He tried to drag himself to the shack but collapsed before he could make it. Then from the shack itself came an answering burst of machine-gun fire.

Dick heard bullets whistling through the air and the little snip-click sounds as they nicked branches and leaves. There was a short silence and then another burst from the shack, which was not answered by the Americans. They were busy making their way forward from tree to tree, getting within fifty yards of the shack.

“What about a couple of grenades, Dick?” Max Burckhardt asked. “I’ve got half a dozen in a bag here. Thought they might come in handy.”

“Maybe—” Dick said. “But not yet. Let ’em have it!”

Once more the American machine guns poured their hail of lead into the shack, followed by another burst from the woods to the right.

“That’ll be Lefty and his bunch,” Dick smiled. “And I guess the Nazis don’t like it.”

It was obvious they did not like it, nor the third burst from below them on the left. Bert’s group had joined the fray. The Germans had Americans on three sides and a large reservoir behind them. It did not take them long to make up their minds what to do. A white cloth tied to the end of a rifle was thrust through the little window of the shack.

“I guess they didn’t have many guys there,” Max said. “They sure gave up easy.”

Dick led his group forward to the edge of the woods and called from there, “All right, come out with your hands up—on to the wall of the dam.”

The door of the shack opened and three German soldiers marched out, throwing their guns to the ground and raising their hands as they did so. They stepped over the body of their companion who had tried to reach the shack but failed.

“Is that all?” Dick demanded, with a shout.

“Ya, ya—all, all!” one of the Germans called back.

“Funny—but I don’t believe him,” Dick muttered to Max. Then he called to the German again.

“Okay, then pick up that machine pistol of yours and fire a few bursts into the shack!”

The German looked bewildered and called back that he did not understand.

“You tell him, Max,” Dick said. “Then he can’t pretend he doesn’t know what I mean.”

Max called out the order in German, and the soldiers on the wall almost jumped to hear their own language spoken to them so perfectly.

The first soldier, a corporal, picked up the machine pistol and started to aim it into the shack, but did not pull the trigger. As he hesitated, Max commanded him again to fire into the shack or get a burst of fire from the Americans.

The German soldier looked at the gun in his hands, then at the shack and then at the Americans. Suddenly he fell to the ground, hiding behind his dead comrade and pouring a fusilade at the Americans. At the same moment, two more guns were thrust through the shack window and joined the attack. Dick and his men were quick to get behind trees, despite their surprise. Dick heard a cry of pain from one of his men, but did not take time at that moment to look.

He and his men were answering the rapid crossfire of the Germans, when they saw two dark objects lobbed through the air from the woods on the right. Then there was a roar, a blinding flash followed at once by another, a cloud of black smoke—and silence, as the booming sound echoed among the hills.

As the smoke cleared away, Dick saw that the two grenades tossed by Lefty and his men had done a thorough job. The shack was a pile of lumber, and some of it had toppled to the ground below the dam wall. The Germans who had hidden in the shack during the fake surrender were no more—and neither were their companions alive. Dick and his men advanced on the run, arriving at the dam as Bert’s group rushed up from the left. Lefty’s men stayed where they were, waiting for the others to join them.

A quick inspection showed that the enemy detail at the dam had been wiped out. And then they heard the sound of motors. First they looked into the sky, but saw no planes.

“Trucks!” Dick said. “On the road below. Come on!”

Even before they moved, they heard the report of rifles from the woods below them. They needed no further warning to make them duck and scurry off the dam into the trees at the right. Skirting close to the shore, they soon ran into Lefty and his group.

“Come on,” Dick said. “Over that hump of rock ahead of us. Get positions just over the crest.”

The men darted forward, scrambling up over the little hill that came down to the water’s edge. Dropping down on the other side, they found cover quickly and faced back in the direction from which the enemy must be coming. They saw that their little hill was a point of land projecting into the waters of the reservoir. It was a good spot Dick had chosen—hard to get at from the direction of the dam itself and not much easier from above, for the hill curved around like a natural fort and the land above was somewhat bare of trees because of the rocky soil. The Germans would have to expose themselves badly if they came from that direction.

Dick looked behind him at the reservoir to see if the lay of the land were the way he had figured it from the map, and he smiled with satisfaction. Opposite the point of land on which they had taken up positions was another point, and only about twenty-five feet of water separated the two. Beyond the two points, the artificial lake opened out broadly.

“They won’t come at us from the other side,” Dick figured. “The land is too steep to come up that way, and anyway, they’d come directly at us, figuring that they had us encircled with the water behind us.”

Then he remembered the cry of pain from one of his men and turned back.

“Say—somebody got a slug back there in the woods,” he said. “Who was it?”

“Me, Sarge,” said Private Latham, a wiry little fellow who knew more jokes than anyone in the group and so was a favorite among the men. “But it just nicked me in the left hand. Doesn’t hurt now.”

“Let me see,” Dick said, stepping to Latham’s side. He saw at once that the bullet had gone through the palm of the hand. Quickly he got out his first-aid kit, dumped some sulfa powder into the wound, bound it up with a bandage.

“Not my gun hand, anyway,” Latham said. “I can still shoot.”

At that moment they heard the first attack from the Germans. The Americans in position answered with a short burst of fire, knowing that it would pin the approaching Germans down to rocks and protecting trees.

“Got to work fast now, boys,” Dick said, as he finished putting away his first-aid kit. “For about five minutes they’ll try coming at us directly. Then they’ll send out a bunch to come down on us from above. But we can stop them before they get to that bare stretch. Then they’ll try crossfire from those two positions, and when that doesn’t work, they’ll begin tossing grenades and maybe get a few light mortars into action. That’s when we’ll really get it, and if possible we’ll want to get away before then.”

“Get away?” Max Burckhardt exclaimed. “How do you figure?”

“Wait and see,” Dick grinned, knowing that Max and the others had quickly figured out that they were pretty well trapped, and that they hadn’t the ghost of a chance to get away alive. “But first I’ve got to find out what’s going on back in the Pass. If they want us to hold this crowd here as long as possible, we’ll just have to do it.”

The corporal with a walkie-talkie pack on his back had already pulled up his aerial and turned on his radio.

“See if you can get Tony,” Dick said, and the radioman nodded.

“Got ’im,” he said in a moment, but his words were almost drowned by the sound of another exchange of bursts between the Germans and the Americans. Dick crept to the ridge beside his men and looked at the woods below. The Germans were really pinned down effectively about a hundred feet away, and the little hill gave complete protection to the Americans. He slid back down beside the radioman.

“He says Nellie went to town about fifteen minutes ago,” the radioman said.

“Swell!” Dick exclaimed. “That means the Rangers attacked and the battle is on. What else?”

“Nice tea-party at the Smith’s,” the radioman went on.

“Good fight at the ledge where we landed,” Dick translated.

“Tony winds up with the order ‘Show me the way to go home,’” the radioman concluded, and Dick knew that he and his group were free to make their getaway if they could. The battle back at the Pass had progressed far enough so that he did not need to try holding the force at the dam any longer.