"I don't think we'll be needing the amputation saw," Dempster said, "but it's nice to know it's there if something goes wrong." He sat down at the desk and took Geoff's cast in his hand. He was now dead serious, Geoff saw, and that alarmed him more than the bantering had.

Dempster, one by one, manipulated Geoff's fingers.

"If that causes pain, speak up," he said.

It felt strange, but there was no pain.

"No pain?" Dempster asked.

"And if the Jackson TWX is to be believed, this somewhat sloppy cast has been in place for ten days?"

"Yes," Geoff said. "The doctor said it would be on there for ten days to two weeks."

"The most recent medical literature with which I am familiar," Master Sergeant Dempster said, "suggests that in a healthy young male, keeping a cast in place and thus immobilizing the bones of the hand is contraindicated once the bones have had a week to ten days. Atrophy of muscle tissues sets in. Stiffness in joints develops. It is therefore my decision to free you of this filthy cast, Craig." He pulled the surgical tools toward him and took out what looked like a tool to build model airplanes.

"You sure you know what you're doing, Dempster?" the lieutenant asked.

"You weren't listening when I said the army says I can do everything but brain surgery," Dempster said.

"The kid only needs one hand anyway," one of the sergeants said.

Dempster put the tool, a sharp little saw on a stainless-steel handle, to Geoff's cast and began to saw. He was surprisingly gentle, Geoff thought. He wished that he had been in a position to demand the services of a physician, not an enlisted medic; but under the circumstances, he had not dared that.

Very quickly, the cast was sawed in half, so that the portion over the fingers could be pulled off the fingers. Then the part of the cast that circled the heel of the hand was sawed and snapped and taken off.

His hand, Geoff thought, looked awful. The skin was white and unhealthy-looking. Master Sergeant Dempster again gently manipulated the fingers. There was no pain. He pushed a heavy glass bottle, once an inkwell and now full of paper clips, to Geoff.

"Pick that up," he ordered.

Geoff picked it up.

Master Sergeant Dempster stood up and bowed.

"My very first solo patient," he said. "I am overwhelmed with the emotion of it all."

"To hell with your emotions; is his hand going to be all right?" Lieutenant Martin asked.

"I prescribe exercise," Dempster said. "Get a ball and squeeze it, Craig. Not your own, you understand. The kind they hit with racquets. And you may consider yourself medically excused from doing push-ups until further notice."

Geoff looked at Lieutenant Martin, who smiled at him and shrugged.

"If it starts to hurt, Craig," he said, "go on sick call."

"Oh, ye of little faith'!" Master Sergeant Dempster said. Then he turned to Craig. "Would you like to have the cast? As a souvenir?"

"No, thank you," Geoff said quickly. It would be a souvenir of the Fort Jackson stockade.

"In this case, I'll take it. I will send it off to the baby-shoe people and have it bronzed."

"You have made his day, Craig," Lieutenant Martin said, laughing.

"May I go now, sir?"

"Yes, sure."

"Do foolish things, Craig," one of the sergeants said. "Take chances. Get hit by a truck. Fall in the shower. Dempster will be waiting."

PFC Karl-Heinz Wagner staggered under the weight of both duffel bags, but refused to let Geoff try to carry his.

When they got to the orderly room, a corporal led them to a barracks. There were only six bunks on the entire floor. Three of them were made up.

"Where can we get sheets and blankets?" Wagner asked.

"You don't like the ones I put on those bunks with my very own hands?" the corporal replied.

This was not going to be like Fort Jackson, Geoff decided. This place was almost like the real world.

Karl-Heinz Wagner went immediately to work unpacking his duffel bag. The clothing he took from it was hardly mussed at all. He hung it carefully in a wall locker, and put his already folded underwear and his already-rolled socks in the footlocker. Geoff watched, wondering if he was just the Compleat PFC or someone afflicted with compulsive neatness.

Geoff opened his duffel bag and shook everything he owned out on the floor. Everything he owned needed laundering or dry cleaning. The lieutenant had said there was a PX tailor shop. One of the great privileges the trainees of Company "C" had been promised, after they finished basic training and had begun advanced individual training, was access to the laundry and dry cleaners. Until that time they would wash their own clothing. Geoff took from the bag a set of fatigues, his field jacket, and a pair of combat boots, and hung them in the wall locker. Next he took a set of underwear and a pair of wool cushion-sole socks from the bag and laid these on the bunk. Then he found a towel and his toilet kit and sat them on his footlocker. Then he stuffed everything else back in the bag. In the morning he would put everything else into the care of the PX tailor shop.

He took a shower. It was the first time that his left armpit had been washed in eleven days; it reeked accordingly. What few showers he had had in the past ten days he'd taken with his right hand held high over his head.

The shower was a delightful experience with what seemed to be unlimited hot water. When he went back to his bunk, wearing his damp towel around his waist, Karl-Heinz Wagner was already in his bunk, lying in what Geoff thought was a military manner. He was on his back, the blankets were drawn up to his chin, and he was supporting his head on both hands. "I take bath in morning," Karl-Heinz offered. "Shave in shower. Saves time."

"You really eat this stuff up, don't you?" Geoff asked.

"I am a soldier," Karl-Heinz Wagner said simply.

"You're German, aren't you?" Geoff asked, slightly hesitant that it was a question he should not have asked.

"Dresdener," Karl-Heinz said. "I was born and schooled in Dresden."

Dresden, Geoff recalled, was in East Germany.

"How did you get here?" Geoff asked curiously.

Karl-Heinz turned his head enough to look at him.

"Is only one way to get out," he said matter-of-factly, his tone implying that he thought everyone should know that. "Over the wall."

Geoff had seen the newsreels of the Berlin Wall, and an image came to his mind's eye of an East German hanging dead from a fence of barbed wire, blood dripping from multiple bullet wounds.

"Wasn't that risky?"

"Yes, it was risky," Karl-Heinz said.

"How did you do it?"

Karl-Heinz moved his head again to look at Geoff, and Geoff knew he was making up his mind whether or not to tell him.

"They are always improving wall," he said. "They take down weak section and put up strong section. When they do this, they take up mines and move big barriers out of way. I find out where they do this. I go to motor pool and tell them to load truck with cement bags."

"I don't understand that," Geoff said.

"I go to motor pool and tell them to load truck with cement bags," Karl-Heinz repeated. "Great big Czech truck, Skoda, like American six-by-six, but with diesel motor."

"How did you get them to do that?"

"Oh," Karl-Heinz said, as if for the first time understanding Geoff's confusion. "I was Oberleumant of Pioneers. Same as first lieutenant. In DDR army, when Oberleutnant says load truck, soldiers load truck."

"Then what?"

"Then I take guns away from them," Karl-Heinz said. "And I tell them what I am going to do, and ask if anybody wants to go with us...

"Ursula was with you?"

"I got to take her with me," Karl-Heinz said. "She's my sister. We don't have nobody else."

"Oh," Geoff said softly.

"So nobody wants to go with us. What they do, for the soldiers, is make sure the ones close to the wall have families. So I lock them up and drive truck myself." Where was Ursula?"

"In back of truck. Bullets won't go through cement."

"And you crashed through the wall?"

"Ja," Karl-Heinz said simply. "We was lucky. We made it."

"And now you joined the American army as a private?"

"Ja," Karl-Heinz said.

"There was nothing else you could have done?" Geoff asked. "I am soldier," Karl-Heinz said. "Since I am fifteen, I am soldier. My father was soldier, killed in Russia. A soldier is what we do."

"But as a private?" Geoff wondered aloud.

"When I finish this school, I am sergeant," Karl-Heinz said. The surprise was evident on Geoff's face. "You didn't know that?" Karl-Heinz asked. "When you finish training, they make you sergeant?"

"No," Geoff said. That was the first time he had heard that.

"Then I am sergeant," Karl-Heinz said. "When I am soldier two years, I can apply to be citizen. When I am citizen, I go to officer school. I will be officer again."

"You volunteered for Special Forces so you could get a quick promotion?" Geoff said.

"That's nice, but not the reason. I come Special Forces so I can kill Communists."

He means that, Geoff realized. He is dead serious. He wants to kill people. It gave him a little chill.

"Why you come Special Forces?" Karl-Heinz asked.

"That's quite a story," Geoff said after a pause.

"You don't want to talk about it," Karl-Heinz said. "Okay. I go to sleep now."

He rolled over on his side.

Geoff looked at the back of his neck.

Jesus H. Christ! he thought. I am actually in a bunk beside a man who used to be an officer in the East German army, who escaped with his sister by crashing through the Berlin Wall in a stolen truck, and whose announced purpose in life is to kill Communists.

It took Geoff longer to go to sleep than he thought it would. And then he dreamed. Ursula was rubbing her breast against his face again. The difference in his dream from what had happened in the airplane was that she was naked. And she moved her breast so that he could get the nipple in his mouth. When he kissed it, he woke up in his bunk with the accumulated seminal fluid of two months abstinence in his shorts.

He got up and took another shower, and as he walked back to his bunk, past the sleeping PFC Karl-Heinz Wagner, he had two thoughts: Karl-Heinz Wagner was the first friend he had made in the army; and PFC Karl-Heinz Wagner would not hesitate to slit his throat if he tried to do awake what he had done to Ursula in his dream.

(Four) Room C-232 The Holiday Inn Durham, North Carolina 2230 Hours. 11 December 1961 Lieutenant Thomas Ellis was asleep on his back, with his mouth open and his legs spread, and this triggered in Dianne Eaglebury several emotions she had not previously experienced. One of them was anger: How dare he fall asleep!

Another was sort of a detached anatomical curiosity. His thing looked about as long as his thumb and about as threatening. Yet, five minutes, three minutes (how long had it been?) before, it had been at least four times that size and as stiff as a board. And in her.

The first time had not hurt her nearly as much as she had been led to believe it would, and it had produced in her physical and emotional reactions that she had heard a lot about.

She was now a woman, she thought: no longer a virgin.

My God! What was I thinking of?

She was not only a woman; she was a somewhat lewd and shameless woman who had decided to ask this boy to make love to her in the middle of the afternoon, in the bright sunlight, without so much as a sip of alcohol to blame it on.

It was worse than that. She had decided that she was going to let him be The First One while he was still acting The Perfect Gentleman. He was not displaying the slightest hint that he would like to get her into a horizontal position, rip off her clothes and do wicked and forbidden things to her innocent body. She had, in other words, none too subtly let him know what she wanted.

She had touched his hand, and his arm, and let her breasts rub against his arm, and looked into his eyes, and done everything but take off her clothes and throw him a bump and grind.

And, God forgive me, that was thrilling!

She corrected herself. Maybe it hadn't been a bump and a grind, but she had certainly rubbed her middle against his middle and kept it there even after his thing had grown stiff.

They had been dancing. Old-fashioned dancing in a new place on Jefferson Avenue that played old big-band records and records of Frank Sinatra singing romantic songs, and where it was so dark, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

Going there had been her idea. After they'd had dinner.

He smelled like a man. She had never before paid any particular attention to how a boy a man smelled, unless he was sweaty and needed a shower. But when he put his arms around her and she felt his hand on her back, she had smelled him. She couldn't describe the smell, but it did things to her. It made her want to put her face in his neck and smell more of him. It made her want to rest against him, to feel the hardness of his chest against her own softness.

They hadn't had anything to drink in the Stardust Ballroom. Tom said he was sort of on duty and didn't want Colonel What's-his-name to smell alcohol on his breath if "something happened." She hadn't wanted anything to drink because she understood that she was crazy enough as it was on Coca-Cola.

And they'd only stayed for one Coke. Two dances. The first dance was the one when she hadn't pulled her middle away from his stiff thing in maidenly modesty. And in the second dance she had removed any question of the first time being innocent by rubbing her middle against his the minute he put his arms around her.

They went out and got in his Jaguar, and he turned to her and looked at her. And kissed her. And she had her tongue in his mouth the minute their lips touched. And pressed herself against him as hard as she could.

And he hadn't said a word while he drove her to his motel.