Even with all the ports open the air inside the cab writhed. Gun powder stung their eyes and throats. The crewmen’s faces were haunted. They stared out of ports and slits, leered, grimaced, mad, incredulous, exhausted, hungry, thirsty, deaf. Dennison saw the sun directly ahead as the prow wrenched upward ... Somewhere, sometime, he must do something about the sky, study it, understand its composition, figure out how it originated, whether it altered at night, how it was influenced by storms, changes in temperature. Only a week ago Al had died on one of the morning attacks: Landel had bellowed through the intercom: he had seen Al crash onto the floor: they had wanted to lug him outside, into the air, but he had died in Dennison’s arms, his head saturated with blood, a bullet in his brain. Yeah, Al had liked the sky. They had talked about it. He liked the sun. Al had wanted to buy a farm, have some horses and a cow. Horses not cars. He had talked about horses at camp: they had been buddies at Camp Manley. Yeah, they had put in days together, fishing at a nearby pond, hiking through Texas fields ... bluebonnets.... Dennison observed other tanks: M3’s and M4’s, on a side street, the machines parked one behind the other, the crews still inside. A signal Corps flag appeared in the doorway of a two story building. A Corps flag wagged on a roof. Dennison drove his bus into a treeless square, and stopped, settled deeper into his seat, and asked Landel for the canteen. As he drank, he read Landel’s scrawl: _Stay!_ In another section of Anadi, shells were gutting, lofting smoke, sand and dust. The canteen water sent a chill through Dennison; a fleck of London hovered behind his eyes, streets with trees, fog, people waiting for a double-decker, kids leaning over a bridge rail, Big Ben, the grey Thames flowing ... he thought of Al again: Al had been twenty-three, a graduate of Western Reserve: the bullet had torn his ... Landel checked the gas gauge. Okay, gasoline. Suddenly, they were off, a tank almost in front of Dennison, a tank toward the rear. At the first intersection, they separated, to mop up. A barricade had been erected on a street between low, white walls; there were trees to one side, delicate plumes of tamarisk, tamarisk in a row--trying to beat the desert and its heat. Again every window was shuttered, even second floor windows. Grey shutters. Mauled shutters. Paintless. Nobody was defending the barricade. The treads moaned over sandbags and piles of masonry. As Dennison topped the barricade a Nazi tank opened fire, firing head-on, a squad of infantrymen armed with Brens squeezed together behind it.