That's what it had come down to last time. Us or them, him or me-no different from 1916 except this was the next generation. A generation born after they'd fought in the war to end all wars. God, did it never end?

Gasping, spitting leaves from his mouth, he groped at the man's neck, found the clammy skin, felt the ropy, pulsing muscles. He had forgotten how rudimentary it was, once he'd gotten two hands around the man's throat, to choke and strangle someone. The German's kicking and splashing dwindled until Gaubert had crushed his windpipe.

In the headlights' glow, Gaubert got a better look at his victim. The chubby-faced soldier looked eighteen.

"Quick, catch them!" shouted Bruno.

Gaubert looked up. One of the bodies was about to float away; the other's arms flailed and splashed in the light. On the pinky finger of his clenched fist was a gold signet ring. Still alive. And then he floated away. Two of the other bodies had lodged against the tires. Gaubert looked back down at the German he'd killed, at his dead blue eyes open to the rain.

What had they done?

Gaubert struggled to his feet, blinking, wiping the rain from his eyes and scanning what he could see of the horizon to see whether another truck followed. Crackling static issued from the truck's radio, interrupted by the occasional German word-eerie in the rainy night.

"What do we do now?" Alain asked, panting. "This truck could be part of a convoy."

They had to move fast.

"Grab the rope holding the canvas and tie the bodies before they-"

"Non, throw them in the back," said Philbert. He was the thinker among them, a lanky wheat farmer. "We'll use the mill's timbers to leverage the truck. Shove it in the river. Sink it here, by the mill wheel-the deepest part."

What seemed feasible in theory-they only had to push the truck a short distance-took time. Time in the driving, relentless rain. The field around them had sunk into the overflowing river.

The men worked silently. Unspoken among them lay the knowledge they'd be shot if they were discovered. What choice did they have?

Gaubert prayed to God the fifth soldier who had been swept downstream drowned before anyone discovered him.

Gaubert, Alain, and Philbert wedged wood under the wheels, and Bruno started the engine. They made slow progress, laying plank by plank under the truck's wheels with Bruno in the driver's seat, shifting gears and gunning the accelerator. For every meter or so gained, the truck slipped back half a meter, sometimes even more, on the submerged sandbags.

Soaked, shaking, and frozen to the bone, Gaubert collapsed on his bad leg as he carried the last plank.

"You want to die here, fine. Not me." Alain's chest heaved as the truck hovered by the bank's edge. Silt eddies swirled below. "Get up, Gaubert. Think of what will happen if we don't submerge this."

Gaubert couldn't think of anything else.

"For an empty truck it's damn heavy," Gaubert gasped. Panicked by what they'd done, they hadn't thought to look inside the wooden boxes in the back of the truck, or check the contents. "What if there're arms or mortars in there? We should give them to the Maquis."

"You want to check, be my guest," said Alain. He talked big, but Gaubert had no desire to go scrounge in the back of the truck where they'd piled the four German bodies.

"He's right," said Bruno, the chicken farmer, his wet sweater plastered to his stocky frame. "They must have been guarding something they couldn't leave behind. Come on, Alain, you started this. Your big idea."

Philbert had climbed in the back. "Give me that crowbar, Alain. Hurry up."

Gaubert shook with cold; the damp and wet seeped into his bones. His bad leg had gone numb. At forty-five, he was the oldest among them. This bunch of hayseeds who'd never seen the trenches thought they knew everything.

Thinking of his wife and small son, Gaubert was filled with mounting dread over what they'd done-this spontaneous stupidity. At the possible German reprisals.

They'd be found out. Shot.

"Mon Dieu." Philbert shone a soldier's flashlight. "You won't believe it."

"Believe what?"

"Get the cart, Alain. Back it up to the truck's edge."

Lights bobbed on the opposite bank of the Occupied German side. The bridge's metal struts glistened in the light, beaded with rain. Rain and more rain. But the French sentry box was dark. Deserted.

"Forget it. There's activity across the river by the bridge . . ."

Gaubert's words died as he looked inside. Philbert's beam illuminated a small wood crate with leather handles, marked with a swastika. Inside were gold bars stamped with serial numbers and the word Reichsbank.

"Looks like fifteen or so crates like this," Philbert said. "Lend me a hand."

Scraping, then a loud thunk as Philbert heaved one of the small crates into the cart. Then another.

"Back the cart closer, Alain. They're damn heavy."

Gaubert climbed down and helped Alain grab the reins to back the horses up. Then he climbed into the cart bed and the four men worked in pairs, hefting and stacking the heavy little crates by the leather handles. Ignoring the bodies. When they were done, they jumped out, splashing in the swirling mud.

"Now," said Alain, "the truck goes down the bank into the river."

Gaubert ground his teeth. Remembered. "We've got to strip the bodies."

"Too late, we don't have time-"

"At least take off the uniform insignia."

"He's right," Bruno said, climbing back into the truck. He took over the unpleasant work of stripping away the murdered Germans' identification.

Finally, on the count of three, all four of them shoved the truck, grunting and cursing in the sheeting rain. Gaubert's leg, frozen and numb, caught in the sucking mud. At last the truck slid down and sank with a trail of bubbles below the surface.

"We should have dumped the gold in the river," Gaubert said, peeling off his sopping jacket, his shirt. Alain had driven the team and cart to Gaubert's barn, where the four men now stood. The silver light of incipient dawn peeped in through the barn's single, high window. "You're crazy, we can't keep this here."

"Just for now, Gaubert," said Alain. He seized a shovel and cleared a space by the hay rack, where he began to dig. There was gold lust in his narrow eyes.

The rain had erased the cart tracks, at least. Yet it would only be a matter of time until the truck was discovered missing. Until the fifth German washed up somewhere.

"What if that truck across the river was searching for them?" said Gaubert. "Or they saw us?"

He imagined his wife, Fanny, a widow, and five-year-old Gaby fatherless, hungry . . .

"Alors, we wouldn't be here in that case," said Philbert, who'd stripped off his overalls, grabbed a shovel, and was pitching in. "Who's to tell them, eh? We keep this between us. D'accord? A pact of silence."

"What if-?"

"If anyone outside our village knows, there will be reprisals, comprends? We can't share this. We've risked our lives."

"More like committed spontaneous idiocy," said Gaubert. "We can't eat gold bars."

"Not now. Not for a while. But wait till this hell of a war ends," Philbert said. "For now we contact your old comrade, the jeweler in Saint-Felice."

Baret, a man he'd fought with at Ypres. Baret had been gassed and lost his arm. "He's not much of a jeweler these days, in case you hadn't noticed. He works on his brother's farm."

"Why don't we have Minou melt part down into smaller bits we can use?" said Bruno.

The village blacksmith, who had the intelligence of a ten-year-old.

"And let Minou in on it?" said Alain.

Gaubert heard the greed in their voices. And only a few hours earlier, they had killed with their bare hands. "We don't do anything now," he said. "We wait, see if there's any reaction."

As if he hadn't heard Gaubert, Alain said, "Why should we offer Minou a cut when he didn't even-"

"Worry about that later," Philbert broke in. "Remember, flogging gold bars will lead right back to us."

"They'd never search the church," said Gaubert. "Let's move them there. I don't like it here on my land."

"Damn it, it's just for now," Alain said. "We can't move them again until it's dark."

Reluctant, he agreed. In the dim November dawn, they could do little without attracting attention.

"I wonder why the truck wasn't part of a convoy," Bruno said. "Seems strange."

Philbert scowled. "Not even the Boches are stupid enough to move gold in one truck without protection."

A German troop truck carrying fifteen crates full of gold bars vanished in a rainstorm. How could it be that no one knew or cared? Those broken German words Gaubert remembered hearing-lost, train, bridge-ran through his head.

Chilled to the bone, exhausted by having worked through the night, he stumbled into the kitchen. His Fanny looked up from the stove, rubbing her eyes. She wore her nightdress and Gaubert's thick wool socks. She smelled of sleep. Wisps of hair fell from her bun as he buried himself in her neck, her skin so warm he wanted to curl up beside her.

"You're as cold as ice," she said. She rubbed his frozen arms. "You're shaking."

He let Fanny sit him down by their large, open farmhouse fireplace. She wrapped a warmed brick in a blanket to thaw his numb leg. He was tired, so tired, and fear banged in his heart.

"We've got to talk, ma chere," he said.

"Papa, Papa." There was a tugging on his arm. "You're supposed to take me to school." His little son's big blue eyes stared into his. They were the same blue as those of the young soldier he'd strangled.

"Shh, Papa's tired," Fanny said.

"He's always tired." Gaby pouted. "Like a big bear."

Fanny grinned. "So mama bear will walk her little bear to school. We'll sniff for honey and berries."

Gaby's eyes gleamed. He loved to pretend.

Gaubert was asleep before they had left the room. He dreamed of river eels writhing around a gold treasure chest that turned into the soldier's blue eyes open to the rain.

"Wake up." Fanny was shaking him. "The Germans are shooting people in Givaray."

She handed him a bowl of steaming chicory, the ersatz substitute for coffee. How long had he been asleep? The weak afternoon light faded in the kitchen's corners.

"Why . . . ? I don't understand."

Her hands clasped his shoulder. Fear, he saw fear and sadness in her eyes. "The cheese maker, the priest's parents-they're rounding up anyone. They said they'll execute sixty more if no one confesses."

"Confessed to what?"

"Four Boches bodies. Soldiers. They found them in the water."

She told him how less than a kilometer away, across the river, four bloated bodies had washed up on the Givaray village bank.

Acid bile rose in his stomach. Why the hell hadn't they taken the extra step and stripped off the uniforms?

So the damn current had freed the bodies from the canvas. Would the Germans dredge the river and discover the truck? Would they realize the gold was missing? Outside the window there were gunshots in the pewter twilight. For a split second he was back in the trenches, the horror as fresh as it had been in 1916.

He tried to clear his head. People-innocent village people-were dying because of their impulsive tussle last night. They'd been so distracted by the gold that they hadn't taken the care they should have in hiding the bodies. What would happen when the fifth body washed up? It could turn up here, on the Chambly-sur-Cher bank.

Gaubert leapt up and pulled their suitcase from under the armoire. "Take Gaby and go stay with your aunt."

Fanny's eyes, a pale topaz color, widened in fear. "Why, Gaubert? Is there something you're not telling me?"

He shared everything with her, always had. But he couldn't share this.

"Saddle up the draft mare. Forget the roads-they're impassable," he said, throwing an armful of sweaters into the case. "Use the south fields."

"I'm not leaving you, Gaubert. Who will feed the cows?" Stubborn as always and he loved her for it. But not now.

"Fanny, our village could be next." He took her warm hands. Squeezed. "It's not safe here."

"What do you mean, next?"

If he told her anything, he'd put both Fanny and Gaby in danger.

"There's no time to argue. Take what you can and I'll bring the rest."

Fanny stared. He felt her gaze plumbing his soul. She knew him so well.

He shivered. "For Gaby's sake and yours, don't ask me any more. Please."

"You had something to do with those dead German soldiers, n'est-ce pas?"

"I'm telegraphing your aunt from the post office, right now, that you're coming."

Loud knocking came from the farmhouse's front door. He peeked through the lace kitchen curtains and saw Rouxel from the local Parti Populaire Francais, the fascist political party. A rumored collaborator.

Terror-stricken, Gaubert looked around. Threw the suitcase back in the armoire. "You have to leave now." He thrust her coat into her arms. "Through the barn. Quick."

"But Gaubert . . ." Tears glistened in her eyes.