He took a deep breath. "Starvation, for one. That will be a very real threat, more than it has been so far. Poison gas, for another. The Nazis are experts at confining large groups of us to small spaces and killing us in that way. But neither starvation nor poison gas should worry our group of resistance fighters as much as another method of destruction." He waited to see if any of his pupils would realize what that weapon was. Suddenly, Irwin Mann's eyes widened.

"Fire," he breathed softly. Several men in the room gasped. Halek nodded at his student and smiled without pleasure.

"Exactly so. We are confined to a prison here in this section of Warsaw. Fire is our biggest enemy." "Is there nothing we can do?" asked Irwin. The Pole's smile became more genuine.

"There is always a counterstrategy."

Irwin Mann took a deep breath. "Then, Piotyr, let's talk about fire."

The strategy session began in earnest.

"Give me your hand." The boy refused. "Give me your hand and climb down. They'll kill you if you stay up here!" Sporadic gunfire crackled in the distance.

The boy looked at the open sewer cover and shook his head violently. "They are flooding the sewers, and filling them with gas, which they then ignite! We'll be burned alive!"

What the boy said was true. In 1940, the German conquerors of Poland had confined almost a half-million Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. By April of 1943, barely a tenth that number remained. Over 300,000 of them had been sent to death camps, and the rest had died of starvation and disease. The remaining 60,000 prisoners had realized they were doomed, and had fought back, despite the fact that they had only a handful of weapons.

Since April 19, the Warsaw Ghetto had been under attack by over 2,000 heavily armed German troops, in addition to many more Lithuanian militiamen, Polish police, and Polish fire fighters. After almost four weeks, only a few of the inhabitants remained alive. The Germans had systematically set the Ghetto on fire block by block, just as Piotyr Halek had predicted.

As Irwin and his few remaining compatriots had watched each potential refuge become an inferno, they realized that escape was their only hope, and that the sewers offered the only chance of that. The Germans had seen this as well, and were pumping the underground tunnels full of water and flammable poison gas.

Irwin Mann was running out of patience with the boy. "If you won't come with me, then take this," he said finally, thrusting the Luger into the boy's hand. "You have eight shots. Use them carefully. This is the safety," he said, pointing. "Push it down before you want to fi-" The boy ran off while he was still explaining, and Irwin watched with dismay as he saw him cast the weapon aside, letting it clatter on the stones.

Irwin Mann retrieved the pistol and thrust it into his pocket. He'll walk right into their arms he thought with disgust. He climbed into the sewer and pulled the cover back into place.

Blackness enveloped him. He had a few precious matches, but he did not intend to use them until he absolutely had to, and was sure he was not in the presence of flammable gas. Feeling around blindly, Irwin climbed down the iron steps set into the concrete and reached the bottom of the sewer. He heard the sound of a rat scurrying away from him, and he felt waves of both nausea and relief.

Rats made his skin crawl. For months he had seen them feeding on the corpses of those who had succumbed to the starvation conditions of the Warsaw Ghetto. The noises they made in the darkness here, however, gave him hope. The passageway was probably not choked with sewage, and that had been his far greatest fear.

The floor of the sewer was relatively clear, even dry in spots. We have had so little to dispose of he thought with black humor as he felt his way on hands and knees down the pipe. The utter darkness gave a surrealistic feeling to the entire process, and Irwin found that if he closed his eyes it was less disorienting than if he left them open. Breathing the dank air was unpleasant, but not as foul as he had expected. His spirits lifted slightly. Maybe I really am going to make it. As he slowly moved along in the blackness, his hands and knees protected with rags he had tied around them, Irwin asked himself once again if he had done the right thing.

They had always known they could not prevail, not ultimately, unless the Americans rescued them. After three weeks, the Warsaw inhabitants knew that was not going to happen in time. Their tiny armed resistance had surprised and astonished the Nazis at first, but the Germans came with more and more soldiers every day. The Jews had had less than twenty guns in all, and not a single skilled marksman among them. That surgeon did all right, though Irwin remembered with satisfaction. Killed at least twenty before the heavy machinegun fire demolished his final hiding place.

Irwin himself had used his earlier technique of killing at close range in the first few days of the resistance. After that, the troops had come in much greater numbers and never alone, so he had shot them at longer range from positions of concealment.

The young fighter was bone-tired, but he continued to make his way down the dank passage in total darkness. After a period of time that Irwin couldn't judge, he came to a larger space. There was a bit of light filtering in from a grating above, and he realized he was at a junction of several sewer tunnels. He lay still on his stomach and held his breath, listening. Irwin believed that he wanted to angle off towards his right, but in his exhausted state, he had a sudden fear that he had become disoriented. He tried to ignore the beating of his heart, and listened for noises.

The distant sounds of battle came through the grating above, but down in the sewer it was impossible to judge the direction from which they came. A pair of rats scurried out of a tunnel to Irwin's left and ran across the larger space into a tunnel on the right. That settles it Irwin thought with relief. Rats don't run towards trouble. Irwin Mann heaved himself to his hands and knees and followed after the vermin.

The tunnel Irwin was in sloped upwards, and that was why the rodents had chosen it. The rats had run when they had first heard the sound of water, and their primal instincts drove them towards higher territory. It was the creatures' innate ability to survive that saved Irwin Mann's life along with their own. The water that the Germans were pumping in flowed to the lowest part of the sewer lines. As it did, it formed a barrier between the higher end where Irwin was, and the opposite end where the German soldiers were dropping their poison smoke candles. By the time the Germans had discovered that the sewers at the edge of the Ghetto were still clear and took steps to change that, Irwin Mann had passed under the walled boundary and had escaped into the Polish section of Warsaw.

"Keep pumping!" the Nazi officer commanded when he saw water bubbling out of a sewer grate onto the street sixty meters away. "The sewers are almost full." He imagined the wretched Jews underneath his feet, unable to breathe.

Suddenly he saw fingers push through the bars of the grating, and he stood near the opening, waiting to see if the man could raise the heavy cover. The soldier aimed his pistol at the sewer grate, ready to shoot if the man lifted it off. The drowning man slowly released his grip on the bars, and his fingers disappeared under the water. The German holstered his pistol and smiled with satisfaction. It was not as satisfying as watching them burn, but very good nonetheless.

"Shut off the water! No air remains!" the Nazi yelled to his men. He was walking back to them when the bullet struck the edge of his spinal cord just below the base of his neck. The shot did not kill him, but he was now paralyzed from the neck down. For the rest of his life, he would be fed, bathed, and clothed by others.

Isaac Epstein, former math teacher, gave a sigh of contentment and lay down his rifle. He did not bother to work the Mauser's bolt, for the gun was now empty and he had no more cartridges. Neither did he attempt to leave his place of hiding. His right ankle was broken, and he had inhaled enough burning gas that he knew he did not have long to live even if no soldiers came for him. Isaac Epstein lay back among the rubble and closed his eyes, waiting for the Germans to find him. Marksman he thought with pride. That's what that young man called me. A smile of satisfaction came across his tired face. A few moments later, his heart stopped beating. The smile remained.

The Nazi general surveyed the smoking ruins of what had been the Warsaw Ghetto. A bitter smile curled the corner of his mouth. He took the proffered field telephone from his aide and spoke into it.

"The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence," he said succinctly. "I shall have a casualty total by tomorrow morning, and you can expect my full report within forty-eight hours. Heil Hitler." He handed the instrument back to his aide and returned to his staff car.

Two kilometers to the east, Irwin Mann crouched in an alley. He had slept fitfully, always frightened of being discovered. His fears, while justified, were exaggerated. Huddled amongst refuse in the dim Warsaw morning, he was just another undernourished Pole with nowhere better to sleep. No one who saw him would have suspected he was a Jew who had escaped from the Ghetto, for that was unheard of.

Irwin assessed his situation. His clothes were in tatters and unspeakably dirty. They would have to be replaced. He himself was filthy, and he had not eaten for almost three days. On the positive side of the ledger, he still had a few zlotys in his pocket, as well as the Luger and a full magazine of cartridges. His body, though weak, was undamaged. / have come this far he thought with grim determination. / will not be defeated now. He stood up and stretched, working some of the stiffness out of his aching muscles. The air was thick with the smell of smoke, and Irwin turned to look at the blackened sky in the distance. Some ideas were coming to him. / am going to get through this he decided, and began planning his next move.

"We have found no survivors, Herr General, and but a handful of weapons," said the young soldier as he clicked his heels together and saluted. The General acknowledged the soldier and nodded.

"These swine had no chance against us. It is appalling that they even resisted." He did not say what was actually on his mind. A ragged band of Jews with a few guns and no military training whatsoever had managed to hold off the best efforts of the German Army. This fact went counter to everything the General had ever known about Jews. He briefly wondered how they had accomplished this feat and who had been leading them, then pushed the disturbing thoughts out of his mind and returned to more immediate tasks.

The general's unease was well-founded, and the Warsaw ghetto resistance would be a valuable history lesson for anyone who studied it. With less than twenty weapons, a starving band of resisters had held off the German Army for twenty-seven days and nights before being defeated.

When the German Army had conquered the entire country of Poland in 1939, it had taken them sixteen days.

June 6, 1944 Max Collins fixed his eyes on the small, distant square. He turned his head slightly to the right and spat into the dust in the corner. They'll be there soon. Collins saw a slight movement in the distance. He reached into his breast pocket and withdraw the small monocular he carried. After a long look and a quick breath, he put it away. They're here. Now he had his job to do.

The glider descent had gone seriously awry. The pilot had tried to center the fuselage between the two trees to clip both wings off and slow the craft down, but he had been too far to one side. The glider had spun to the left and overturned. Collins had come to in the grass, wet with his own vomit and another's blood. Not until he had seen the tattered wings had he remembered where he was. He hadn't been able to determine how long he had been unconscious, but it was long enough that there seemed to be no reason for great haste. The wreckage had been extensive. The jeep had broken its moorings and caused most of the damage. Impact with the ground had done the rest. Max had found no other survivors. The green, padded canvas case had made it safely, though. He had found it cushioned between two still-warm corpses, and had gently retrieved it. It, too, was stained with blood.

At least the landing went undetected, Sergeant Collins had thought as he had trudged off in the darkness towards the town with the case under his arm.

He had immediately realized that the bell tower was the best choice. It surveyed most of the town, but was well away from the heart of the village. Max Collins had quickly found the proper entrance at the back of the church and settled himself in a corner of the elevated, open-sided structure. Then, as always, he had slept. There was nothing more sensible to do before sunrise.

Dawn had broken, and now it was time. Max gently slid the rifle from its drop case and slowly surveyed it for damage. None was visible. The rifle was mute testimony to the Army's willingness to bend the rules to further its own interests. It was a Springfield, and it had been issued, but there ended its likeness to the standard weapon. Collins had spent hours of his time, while the others played poker, removing the barreled action from the stock, coating it with a mix of lampblack and oil, replacing it, and removing it again. From the black marks on the bare wood, he had seen the high spots where metal rested on wood. Through tedious scraping and repetition of the entire process, he had achieved near-complete contact of the action with the stock. The wood under the barrel was relieved to let the barrel vibrate when the gun was fired, in accordance to its natural frequency. The rifle, as Max was fond of saying, shot like it had eyes.

His efforts, however, had not stopped there. The outside of the stock had been treated to twelve coats of marine spar varnish, insuring that it would not warp when the humidity changed. A change of a thousandth of an inch could move the bullet's point of impact half a foot at a hundred yards, and it was not possible to sight the gun in anew every time the weather changed. The rifle's most flagrant departure from regulations was the 2 1/2 power Lyman Alaskan scope, anchored to a bridge mount Max had persuaded a machinist to make for him. The magnification it offered was less important than the fact that sights and target were now in the same plane of vision, and therefore always both in focus.

General Gavin himself had seen Max shooting this rig for group at three hundred yards, as he did every few days when circumstances permitted. The general had taken time to examine the group-five shots in four and an eighth inches, about average for the gun-looked at the headstamp on the fired brass, which said 'National Match', meaning it was authorized for use only by military marksmanship teams, and had said, "Carry on, Sergeant." After that, Max Collins had quit worrying about what officers might do if they saw his rifle.

Max folded the blood-stained case and laid it on the ledge as a rest. He was risking being seen with the forend and barrel of his rifle exposed, but in the early dawn he'd take the gamble. Through the telescope he saw the two sentries. Collins was using a three-dot reticle, and the smallest dot, the one lowest on the vertical crosshair, covered two minutes-of-angle. Two inches at one hundred yards. With that fact, you could use the reticle to calculate range if you knew the dimensions of the object you were looking at. He centered the dot on the German's face. The man's face was more than covered by the spot. He moved the rifle slightly, so that the dot reticle was next to the man's head. He decided that the dot was twice the width of the soldier's face. One minute-of-angle to cover his head.

Max Collins let out a long breath. His pale eyes narrowed as he laid the rifle and case back on the floor of the tower. Before he had enlisted, Max had been an illustrator, and like any decent artist, he knew anatomy well enough to teach it. Cheekbone to cheekbone, the widest spot on the head, on an average man was five and three-quarter inches. Five hundred seventy-five yards.

He didn't like it at all. Trying to get closer would be risking discovery as well as eliminating his alreadyslim chances for escape. He picked up a small chunk of concrete and started to scratch in the dust.

At five hundred seventy-five yards, the rifle would put five shots into an eight-inch circle under ideal conditions. About the size of a man's head, he thought. At five hundred yards, point of impact is thirty-one inches low, and at six hundred yards, sixty inches low. Fifty-five inches low then. The air is cool and misty; denser than usual. More resistance. More drop. His gut said two percent more air resistance. That translated to an additional four percent drop below line of sight. Another two inches. Hold fifty-seven inches high, then. The problem of windage remained.

Max looked down at the crude diagram he had scratched on the stones. It was an oval with a vertical line bisecting it. There was another line perpendicular to the vertical about three feet above the oval, and below this he had scratched '57'.

He turned and spat more dust out of his mouth. He felt not even a whisper of wind on his cheek from where he sat in the high, open tower. Two hundred yards out, though, something's making that smoke from the chimney drift to the left and away. Over almost six hundred yards, the wind could easily be blowing in more than one direction. He closed his eyes and sat motionless for a few moments. Too many variables.

Max opened his eyes and looked for more smoke. He found another chimney in operation this early in the morning. It was in line with the target area, but quite a bit past it. As close as he could tell, its smoke was drifting in the same direction as the other's. Well, that's something. He looked again at the smoke. A drift of about ten miles per hour. No, a bit less than that. More than five, though. Call it seven. But it was not a seven-mile-per-hour crosswind. He looked again, resisting the natural impulse to squint. Damn near fortyfive degrees. Another break. Crosswind component seventy-one percent, times seven miles per hour and we're back to a five mile per hour breeze drifting the bullet left. With the 172 grain military match boattail, at 2800 feet per second at the muzzle, ten inches drift at 500 yards. Fifteen inches at 600.

A private had once asked him what the trick was to figuring out the various drops and wind drifts in different winds, when a ballistics table was not at hand.

"Ever hear of those guys can take two three-digit numbers and give you the product straight off?" Max had replied.

"Yes, sir, I believe I have. But I don't know how they do it, either."

"Same simple trick I use. Pure rote memorization." Like Ad Topperwein and John Browning, Max Collins was part of the gun culture.

Max lifted the stone again, cushioning it against his callused fingers. Along the horizontal scratch, about ten inches to the right of the vertical mark, he made an "x". Between this mark and the vertical line he scratched the number 14. Now, as long as the conditions remained the same, there was just the waiting. He pulled the monocular out of his pocket once more and put it to his eye, watching the square.

Max looked down at his drawing. Not much else to do now but wait, and watch the conditions.

Bingo! Max said silently when a figure appeared in the monocular. No I.D. training needed to pick this one out he told himself. The way the German moved and the way the others reacted to him was all the proof Max needed. How many stars would he have if he'd been born a few thousand miles farther west? No matter. They can give him a hero's funeral.

Max folded the canvas case in half and laid it on the ledge. He put the rifle on top of it, pointing towards the distant square. Through the scope he could see the man standing in perfect profile, giving orders. The American centered the crosshairs on the general's head, and then released the rifle. It rocked on its canvas rest and pointed ten yards left of where he wanted to hit. He cradled the rifle once more until it pointed where he wanted, this time pressing the weapon firmly into the rest before releasing it. The crosshairs shifted only a few feet, and in a vertical direction. When the rest was trying to hold the gun in a different spot than the shooter was, the gun would never shoot where it was supposed to.

He put his shoulder to the flat steel buttplate and grasped the smooth grip with his right hand. The left thumb and forefinger pressed the sides of the buttstock, urging it to the exact spot. Collins placed the officer's throat equidistant between the man's heel and the center dot of the reticle. Then he moved the dot over two head-widths. Too far. Ease it back some. Fourteen inches? Collins willed his head closer to the eyepiece, straining for that last bit of definition with which to measure the fourteen inch space. He was glad that he never failed to fire a fouling shot with commercial, non-corrosive ammo after cleaning his rifle. The first shot from a clean, dry bore never went into the same place as subsequent ones. Let's stick this one in his ear.

Urged on by the gradually increasing pressure of his index finger, the sear released and the rifle bucked, taking him just a little by surprise. A good letoff he instantly realized as the steel eyepiece at the back of the scope met his forehead and left a crescent-shaped gash on top of a half-dozen tiny white scars of the same shape. Crowded it too close again he thought with the small part of his brain that wasn't filled with more important issues.

As the blast rang off the ceiling of the bell tower, Max Collins' flushed all the concerns of the last three hours from his mind, and replaced them with an entirely new set. He had fired the only shot he was going to get. He had to get down and away immediately. And for one absurd, sickening moment, he had the irrational fear that he had found the wrong town, and the rest of the 82nd Airborne was miles away, about to storm the real Ste. Mere Eglise. He dismissed this nightmarish thought and scrambled down the ladder.

The barometric pressure had been a bit higher than Max had estimated, and the range thirty yards farther. The bullet struck several inches lower than Collins' calculations had predicted. The general had been standing in profile at attention addressing his men, and the bullet struck him on the point of his shoulder. It deflected off the underlying bone and assumed a banana shape, as engineers a generation before had designed it to do. Yawing slightly, the slug ranged upwards, exited out the trapezius muscle, and immediately slammed sideways into the German's neck. The tumbling bullet severed the General's spine, leaving his head attached only by a few muscles in the left front of his neck, before burying itself in a door frame thirty meters beyond.

The quick commands stopped in mid-sentence with a noise that sounded like a leather bag bursting. Several enlisted men were sprayed with the dead officer's blood as he fell on his chest, struck down as if by a thunderbolt. His face bounced off the granite cobblestones with a sickening sound, breaking off both the front teeth. The force of the impact twisted the head around so that the corpse's face stared sightlessly to the side. One-and-a-quarter seconds later came the distant roar of the rifle.

By the time the German soldiers realized what had happened, Max Collins was at ground level, exiting the church. By the time the shocked Major realized that he was now the senior officer and began issuing commands, Max was halfway to the relative safety of the woods. There, he knew he stood a chance of holding his own by silently removing his pursuers one at a time. I can stay alive at least for a day or two, and by that time it will all be decided, one way or the other.

As he continued his methodical-frantic escape, the Sergeant's thoughts returned to that one fact which might comfort a gentler man in civilian life, but which stuck in his mind infuriatingly now: I may never know for sure.

May 16, 1945 "At ease, Lieutenant. You're being sent home, and there are a few things I've been wanting to say to you before you leave the base." The Colonel shuffled through some papers that were in front of him and selected a set of onionskin sheets that were stapled together.

"Your flight training methods have been...unorthodox. And they have been unorthodox, I'm told, since the day you started teaching here."

Walter Bowman said nothing. It's never wise to answer a ranking officer's question until after he's actually asked it, Walter silently reminded himself.

"I gather that you have felt cheated that you ended up here nursemaiding cadets through flight training for the duration of the entire war." The Colonel was staring at him with intense scrutiny. "It must grate on you that you'll likely never find out whether or not you really have what it takes to be a fighter pilot when the targets are shooting back with live ammo."

You got that one right Bowman thought. His lips compressed at the stinging words, but he remained silent. The Colonel had accurately assessed the inner frustration he had felt for much of the past two years.

"I don't know how you would have done overseas. My inclination is that a man who doesn't think an inverted spin five hundred feet from the ground is anything too hard to handle would probably be able to keep his wits about him in the face of tracer fire and flak. But maybe not, and not knowing is something that every soldier who never sees combat has to live with." He looked at the paper in his hand. "I had my adjutant look into a few things for me. Things that involve you," he said pointedly. "Would you care to tell me, Lieutenant, how many cadets you have trained on this air base?"

Lieutenant Bowman spoke for the first time. "I don't know exactly, Colonel. I've been here three years. I'd say it must be over a hundred, sir."

The colonel stared at the stapled pieces of paper. "You have trained four hundred thirty-seven airmen, Lieutenant. That is slightly more than twice as many as the next busiest flight instructor on this base. I suspect you have a better estimate of the number of your students who have been injured or killed on this facility?"

"None, sir."

"That's right. And the number of your students who have washed out of the flight program?" "David Hearnes and Paul Warner," Bowman said without hesitation.

"Correct," replied the Colonel, although he had not known the two cadets names and was startled that the Lieutenant remembered them. "And the number of aircraft your students have damaged?" "Three, sir."

"Three aircraft that, according to my records, were each repaired and returned to service within forty-eight hours. Not totally demolished. Not like..." he scanned the pages until he found what he was looking for. "...six of Lieutenant Harrison's eighty-three students managed to do." He put the sheets back on his desk and once again looked the young man in the eye.

"Lieutenant Bowman, after reviewing these figures, I did some more research. Or, more accurately, I told my adjutant to go do some more research for me. I asked him to find out how many of the airmen who have been trained on our base have seen combat, who their instructors were, and which of them have been shot down or killed while in their airplanes. The information I asked for is incomplete, but two facts have clearly emerged. Lieutenant, the percentage of your students who have seen air combat is higher than that of any other instructor at Pensacola. The percentage of your students who have been shot down is the lowest of any instructor here." He let his words sink in for a few moments before continuing.

"There is another thing that I think you should know. When Chief Jenkins, arrived on this base as our oldest seaman, I did not want him. He had been given the choice of prison or the Navy, and I damn well thought prison would have been much more suitable. I was wrong. And I was wrong, I now believe, because of you, Lieutenant." Bowman raised an eyebrow reflexively, but said nothing. The Colonel inhaled and chose his next words carefully.

"You have an ability, Lieutenant, to cause others to put forth their best possible work. To inspire them to levels of achievement neither they nor their superiors would have thought them capable. Our greatest military leaders exhibit that ability on the battlefield. I believe you have it as a teacher.

"I am telling you this for two reasons. First, although it is none of my business, I think you should give serious thought to pursuing a teaching career as a civilian. I frankly doubt that there will be the need for your flight instruction skills in a postwar setting; as we'll likely have more than enough trained pilots for all the aviation jobs available. I also think you would be rather bored ferrying cargo for some commercial venture. But your ability with students is not limited to future aviators, and I hope you'll continue to use your teaching gifts with others.

"Secondly, I'd like to make you Pensacola's new chief flight instructor and director of flight training, if you're interested in staying on for a while. I don't know if any of your methods can be implemented on a base-wide basis, but I'm willing to listen to your suggestions. If you do decide to stay here, I want a written proposal as to how you would recommend flight training here be improved." The colonel saw that Bowman did not know if he was supposed to reply. "Take a few days to think it over. Come by my office on Monday morning.

"Oh, and that reminds me. I'm authorizing a four-day leave for you, effective immediately. It has come to my attention that there is an aircraft on this base which meets none of the Navy's stringent regulations for training aircraft. You are familiar with the plane I am talking about?"