Milton Wolff-El Lobo to the Spaniards on both sides-had led the Abraham Lincoln Battalion since Robert Merriman was lost the spring before. He'd kept them in the line no matter what Sanjurjo's goons threw at them. He wasn't just their heart; he was also a big part of their backbone.

And he was badly hurt. Fragments had shredded his left calf and thigh and laid open the left side of his chest. "Jesus," Chaim muttered. His stomach tried to turn over. He wouldn't let it.

"What do we do?" Carroll sounded as lost and horrified as Chaim felt. If you saw your father like that…"What can we do?"

"Try and patch him up. Try and get him back to the docs. Maybe they can pour some blood into him," Chaim answered. Republican doctors could do more with transfusions than just about anybody. That was one of the few places where the Republic worked well-if the crack mobile unit was anywhere within a few kilometers, anyhow.

They used their wound dressings. They used strips of cloth from their uniforms and from those of the dead men, who didn't care any more. One of the corpses had a miraculously unbroken syringe in a belt pouch. Chaim jabbed Wolff with it-it was the only painkiller he was likely to get.

Wolff was a big man-six-two, easy-which only made things worse. Manhandling him over to a communications trench that went back was no fun for Chaim or Mike Carroll or the wounded Abe Lincoln officer. Hauling him across bare, broken ground and praying the snipers didn't get lucky would have been even worse…Chaim supposed.

They were heading back instead of sideways when Wolff stopped screaming and asked, "Will I die?" He sounded amazingly calm. The morphine must have hit him all at once.

"I don't think so, Milt," Chaim answered, and hoped he wasn't lying. "We'll get you patched up."

"You bet," Mike agreed.

A Red Cross flag flew over an aid tent. In his bad Spanish, Chaim asked, "Is the blood truck close?"

"?Quien sabe?" a harried-looking male nurse answered. He sounded like a fruit, but that was the least of Chaim's worries. And he did gasp when he found out who the wounded Abe Lincoln was. "?El Lobo??Madre de Dios!" He crossed himself.

By the way people went dashing out of the aid tent, Chaim got the idea they'd track down the blood truck as fast as they could. He wondered whether they would have done the same if he came in wounded. Actually, he didn't wonder: he knew damn well they wouldn't.

And he had a hard time getting pissed off about it. He was just a soldado. He had his uses, but their were plenty more like him. Milton Wolff was El Lobo. If he stayed out of action long, the Lincolns wouldn't be the same. And, while the rest of the world might have forgotten the Spanish Civil War, it remained brutally real to the people who went on fighting it. HANS-ULRICH RUDEL WAS GETTING SICK of huddling in muddy slit trenches. This one was in western Belgium. It was two in the morning, and British bombers were overhead again. By the roar of their engines, they weren't very far overhead, either. RAF Whitleys and Hampdens couldn't fly very high no matter how much their pilots might wish they could.

And, at night, it hardly mattered. Luftwaffe night fighters found enemy planes more by luck than any other way. When German bombers struck England under cover of darkness, the RAF's night fighters had the same problem.

Bombs whistled down. Some of them landed close enough for the bursts to make Rudel's ears hurt. Blast could do horrible things to you even when fragments and flame didn't. He buried his face against the trench wall. He'd come out looking like the end man in a minstrel show, but he didn't care. As long as he came out.

More explosions, and the rending crash of something metal going to smithereens all at once. "Goddamn flying suitcases!" somebody a couple of meters away said.

"Ja!" Hans-Ulrich nodded, smelling mold and damp. Hampdens were a lot like Luftwaffe bombers, though more slab-sided than any of them-hence the nickname. Whitleys were bigger, slower, and clumsier, but carried more bombs. They could take a lot of punishment…and needed to, because they got it. Rudel wouldn't have wanted to fly one in the daytime. The British had tried that, but not for long.

Well, the Luftwaffe wasn't sending Stukas over England any more, either. Some things cost more than they were worth. Even biplane Gladiators were dangerous to the German dive-bombers. As for Hurricanes and the newer Spitfires…!

The real trouble was, Hurricanes and Spitfires chewed up Bf-110s almost as easily as they mulched Stukas. Bf-109s held their own against the top RAF fighters, but they had short range and couldn't linger long over England. And, when they had to escort the 110s as well as the bombers, they couldn't mix it up with the enemy the way they should.

From everything Rudel had heard, nobody in the Luftwaffe higher-ups had dreamt the 110 would show such weaknesses. War gave all kinds of surprises-including the nasty ones.

A few more bombs fell. Then things eased off; the drone of enemy engines faded in the west. Hans-Ulrich spat to get the taste of loam out of his mouth. "Well," he said brightly, "that was fun."

Several people in the trench told him what he could do with his fun. Somebody who knew his classics quoted Goethe's Gotz von Berlichen: "Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lechen." Even if it was poetry, Lick my ass got the point across.

He climbed out of the trench. Something was burning: a Stuka in a half-blasted revetment. The orange flames sent a dim, flickering light across the airstrip. "Got to put that out," a flyer said. "If the damned Englishmen see it, they're liable to come back."

Groundcrew men started playing a hose in the Ju-87. That would take a while to do any good. Gasoline and oil liked to keep burning. And the ammo in the Stuka's machine guns started cooking off. The popping seemed absurdly cheerful. "Hope none of those rounds hits anybody," Hans-Ulrich said.

"Jesus Maria!" somebody said-a Catholic, by the oath. "That'd be all we need."

Somebody else was exhausted, relentlessly pragmatic, or both: "Only thing I hope is, I can get back to sleep."

"Amen!" the Catholic said. Sure enough, he sounded like a Bavarian.

The burning dive-bomber gave just enough light to let Hans-Ulrich have an easy time going back to his tent. He lay down on the cot-and then remembered his face was muddy. If he hadn't been a minister's son, he might have quoted Gotz von Berlichen himself. Being one, he knew that thinking the words was as bad as saying them. He sometimes swore in the heat of action, but never in cold blood-and he always regretted it afterwards.

When he got up and came out the next morning, the fellow in the next tent greeted him with, "Who's the nigger?"

"Funny, Manfred. Fun-ny," Hans-Ulrich said. "You should take it to the movies."

"Go drink some milk, preacher's son," Manfred jeered. "You'll feel better."

Hans-Ulrich's hands balled into fists. He took a step toward the other flyer. "Enough, both of you," a more senior officer said. "Do you want to get tossed in the clink? Save that Scheisse for the enemy, hear me?"

Reluctantly, Manfred nodded. Even more reluctantly, so did Hans-Ulrich. He was sick of being the white crow in the squadron. He couldn't even say that: somebody would have told him he was the white crow because he drank so much milk.

If he'd changed his ways and drunk schnapps, everybody would have liked him. The notion didn't cross his mind.

Other people razzed him about his dirty face, but not so viciously as Manfred had. Some other pilots and rear gunners had also got muddy, though none quite so muddy as Rudel. While they ate, a grunting bulldozer repaired damage to the airstrip.

German bombers-Spades and Flying Pencils-droned past overhead, bound for England. Bf-109s would protect the Heinkels and Dorniers from RAF fighters, and they could protect themselves better than Stukas. All the same, Hans-Ulrich wondered how much longer the Luftwaffe would go over the enemy island by day. Nighttime bombing was less accurate, but also much less expensive.