Front Lines (33 page)

“Light 'em up, blow 'em up, be ready to run like scared rabbits.”

“Hero time,” Sergeant Cole says dryly.

Rainy Schulterman says, “It's awfully dark.” There's fear in her voice.

Yeah, it is, Headquarters. It sure is.

Lights crawl toward her across the black and featureless desert, out of the southeast, heading north. Both platoons are dug in facing east.

Lieutenant Helder is in command, but he's self-aware enough to know that this is not a job for a ninety-day wonder with no combat experience, so in effect, Sergeant Garaman is in command, with his counterpart, Sergeant Coffey from Third Platoon, as his second. Between the two platoons there are eight NCOs, not counting the female sergeant from headquarters. “Headquarters” is instructed to dig a hole well back and stay down.

Rio has had time to dig a decent hole, not deep enough to stand in, but she can squat on her knees. A hundred feet to her right, Jenou has her own foxhole. A hundred feet to her left and taking advantage of a few feet of elevation, Stick has the BAR ready.

Millican and Pang are a hundred yards out front,
practically on top of the presumed line of travel for the convoy. But even in the dark Rio can see that the convoy is not staying in line but spreading out across the desert.

“That's good and bad,” Cole opines. “Means they don't think they have mines here.”

“What's the bad part, Sarge?” Jenou asks.

Cole is walking the line, making sure everyone in the squad is tucked in, talking calmly, doing his best to project a confidence Rio knows he doesn't feel.

“The bad part is the bazooka teams could end up having bad guys behind them as well as in front.”

“Will they be okay?” Rio asks.

“Sure, Richlin,” Cole says, a little sarcastic and a lot worried. “Day at the beach. The other bad news is worse: our right is hanging in the air. Third Platoon's on the left, and that's a bit better because at least they've got some dry gullies on their left. Our right flank is you people, Castain, Richlin, Stick, and that's open ground.”

Day at the beach
is an unfortunate turn of phrase: Rio's most recent day at the beach ended with Kerwin's blood in the sand. She wipes unconsciously at the blood that has long since sweated off her hand.

“Sun will be up soon, in a couple hours,” Stick says.

“Not before they get here,” Sergeant Cole says. “We'll light 'em up with the flares. Then the bazookas and the mortar.” He squats beside Rio. “Richlin, their
commanding officer is either going to be in a half-track or a staff car. He's your target. If you can pick him out, you keep fire on him.”

Why me?

“Yes, sir,” Rio says.

Cole snorts a laugh, as he was supposed to. “How many times I have to tell you? I am not a sir. I work for a living.”

Rio, like every other soldier in the platoon, is secretly glad that Liefer is not here to direct this battle. Not that she wanted Liefer dead, not even a little, but in a desperate firefight she feels safer with cranky old Garaman and steady Cole, and Helder who's got enough sense to let them handle things.

The thought takes her back to that evening with her father on the porch.
It's the sergeants that keep their men alive, the good ones, anyway. You find a sergeant you trust and stick to him like glue.

There's a feeling of doom over her. A feeling that what is to come will be very bad, that this is a suicide mission, one for which they are wholly inadequate. She recalls her father's warning that generals sitting far from the battlefield will spend her life for nothing. Isn't that just what's happening here?

Headquarters' fault, the pushy little sergeant. No one asked her to drive out here and get them into this.

Cole has walked on, and now Jenou, in a stage whisper, says, “Rio? If I don't make it . . .”

“Shut up, you're going to make it,” Rio snaps.

Look for the officer. Keep fire on him.

Kill him.

“Yeah, well, if I don't, promise you'll marry Strand. And if you have a girl, name her after me. Jenou. It can be her middle name, that's okay.”

“If I have a girl I'm going to name her Jenou, all right, but I'll make her pronounce it with a hard
j
.”

There's no laugh in response, instead a long silence in which they can begin to hear the clank of half-track treads, not as insistently frightening as a tank, but not nothing either, and the grinding of truck gears.

“I'm scared,” Jenou says in the voice of a much younger self.

“We're all scared.”

“Yeah, but I'm too cute to die,” Jenou says. “And, uh, I'm sorry I got us into this. It's just . . .” She shakes her head. “My home isn't like yours, honey. I needed to get away.”

Rio has long sensed something dark about Jenou's family, but though they have talked of many things, shared many things, Jenou has seldom spoken about her parents other than to dismiss them as a pair of drunks. Jenou has built a wall around whatever her secret is.

Someday I'll get her to tell me,
Rio thinks.
If there's a someday.

“You didn't twist my arm, Jen.”

“Goddammit, Rio. This was not what I had in mind.”

“FUBAR,” Rio says.

Jenou manages a short laugh. “How did we ever get by without that word in civilian life?”

“Folks weren't shooting at us.”

“You're my best friend, Rio. I would not have made it without you. Not back home, not in basic.”

Rio feels emotion rising in her. There's a lump in her throat. But this is not the time. This is not the time for emotion.

“You'd have been fine,” Rio says curtly. She wants now to focus on the job ahead. On enfilade and defilade. On windage and elevation. Not feelings, not even friendship.

Waiting in her hole in the Tunisian desert, with German trucks and half-tracks, Kraut soldiers and their machine guns that fired fifteen hundred rounds per minute, twenty-five lead slugs every second, each one traveling at 2,461 feet per second, Rio does not want to remember home. She is here.

Here.

“I don't want you to die, Rio. You're all I've got,” Jenou says.

“Everyone's scared,” Rio snaps. Then, desperate to
ease the tension, she adds, “Everyone except Stick.”

Stick, in his hole to their left, says, “Well, I haven't pissed myself yet, but the day is young.”

The lights crawl. The sound of engines grows. The head of the column is even with them now, somewhere between a hundred feet and a mile off, distances still impossible to judge well in the inky black.

Blow up the supply column, and run like hell before the tanks get here for the rendezvous.

Stars are visible now, as scattered high cumulus clear just enough to let starlight edge the clouds in silver. If only the moon had not set. Rio suddenly craves the reassurance of the moon.

She prays for survival, for courage. For a drink of water in a mouth as dry as the sand.

A shout!

Flares shoot up into the sky, long, red, smoky trails that zig and zag as they climb.

And . . . burst!

Eerie red light reveals a half-track, a line of trucks—six, eight—a staff car, another half-track, and lagging a little behind, still almost invisible in darkness, an ambulance.

Hark Millican's bazooka fires.
Fwooosh!

It hits the lead half-track dead center. The explosion ejects German soldiers like popcorn.

Find the officer!

If their commander was in the lead half-track, he's either dead or definitely distracted, because fire is raging up through the vehicle. And now Stick opens up and there's fire all down the line, M1s and carbines and BARs.

“Two fifty yards!” Sergeant Cole shouts above the sudden eruption of shattering noise.

With trembling fingers Rio clicks the wheel on her rifle. No wind.

The staff car. She sees it, sees three indistinct shapes, sees that the driver has gunned the engine. She sees the light of the flares is dying, more are launched, and already the Germans are shooting back, aiming blind, but firing at where they guess the flares came from. Soon they'll sight on the sources of tracer fire, but the Germans are in the open and the Americans are in holes.

A second bazooka round from the other platoon and the hollow sound of the sole mortar and Rio lines her sights up on the staff car.

Bang!

No way to tell if she missed or where the bullet fell.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Jenou is blasting away now on Rio's right, Sticklin's BAR rattles out a stream of bullets, red tracers rising across the sand as he finds his range and pours lead into one of the tanker trucks.

We light them up and open up,
Cole said earlier.

Rio has lost sight of the staff car. She pushes her helmet back to get a better view, rises in her hole; where the hell is it?

There! Racing to get out in front of the burning half-track.

Rio fires after it. It's a tracer round, and she can see it hit but can't tell whether it hit steel or flesh.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Clang!

Empty clip. She pulls another from her belt and slams it home.
Bang! Bang!

The staff car is still moving, but it tips into a ditch or depression and rolls partway onto its side.

Ba-woosh!

A tanker truck explodes, spraying flaming fuel. It looks like a deadly flower blooming at accelerated speed. Rio hears screams. A man is on fire, running, a torch in the dark. The burning gasoline outlines the staff car. She sees a helmet.

Bang! Bang!

A mortar round stops a second tanker. It does not explode, but it's not moving either, and out of the corner of her eye Rio sees the driver leaping from the truck.

Everywhere are shouts and cries, both sides yelling versions of
kill them
and
help me
and cursing, but they are small sounds in contrast with the steady staccato of rifle
fire and the intermittent roar of the BAR.

The second half-track is making a move toward the front. It goes around to the east side of the column, visible now only in the gaps between trucks.

“I got movement here!” It's Jenou, the dangling end of their too-short line.

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, rifle and machine pistol fire erupts, fast but disciplined fire, veteran troops for whom this is not their first ambush. They are trying to flank the line, crossing the T that will let them roll up the line, foxhole by foxhole, while the Americans can't shoot for fear of killing their own people.

A scream. More fire.

“Suarez, Preeling, Stafford!” Sergeant Cole shouts. “On our right, on our right! Castain, Richlin, drop back behind Stick. Stick, you open up soon as they're clear!”

Jenou pops up out of her foxhole and runs past. She's forgotten her rifle.

Rio has been ordered back, but she knows she's not in Stick's line of fire, and she thinks she sees a head that is adorned not by a helmet but by a peaked cap. She aims.

The BAR, Suarez, Preeling, and Jack open up on the advancing Germans, but the fire coming back the other way is just as intense.

Rio cannot look at that, cannot waste the time to look
at the Germans now just a hundred yards away, she has a target.

Bang! Bang!
Two shots, the first one carefully aimed, the second sloppier, but a peaked cap flies off the distant head.

Now, Rio twists to face the advancing Germans. There must be twenty of them, twenty against five while the remainder of the squad continue to fire on the column.

Rio aims, fires, aims, fires. Germans fall but they keep coming, heads low, firing from the hip, running straight into the BAR and rifle fire, and Rio thinks,
They're better than we are. My God, look at them!

Another clip gone and the reload jams. She feels frantically, pushing, pulling, banging with the heel of her hand until the clip slides free. She reloads carefully this time, carefully, but the butternut uniforms are right there, right there.
Bang! Bang! Bang!

Something fast dings her helmet. Something else plucks at her collar.

She keeps firing, firing, and reloading, and now the Germans are hesitating, two drop into Jenou's abandoned foxhole, but the German fire still comes fast and accurate, and there's nothing to be done now but to keep shooting back.

The battlefield is silent.

The sound of her own heart.

The sound of her breath.

The silent impact of the rifle butt on her shoulder as she fires round after round, reloads, fires.

Off to her left another tanker truck explodes.

Have we done enough? Can we run away now?

Suddenly Rio is shaking, her entire body, every muscle so weak she can't stay up, she slumps into her hole, drawing her helmet down out of the line of fire as the BAR's tracers arc overhead to seemingly bounce back as German bullets.

Rio is praying aloud now, praying gibberish interspersed with the kind of curses that once would have made her blush, stars in the sky above, God up there somewhere, three clips left, three clips, twenty-four bullets.

And three grenades.

There's a tunnel in space, a warping of the fabric of reality between Rio and the Germans. She sees nothing but the end of that tunnel, nothing else exists. Just that space directly before her, just the enemy.

The location of Jenou's foxhole is clear in her mind. She unhooks a grenade and crooks her finger through the pin.

She pulls the pin. Her hand, tight now, strong in a kind of spasm, holding down the lever.

Release it. Release it and throw. Release it and throw, Rio, do it.

Rio releases the lever, which cartwheels away as the fuse pops and now just four seconds. She does not throw. One. Two. And . . . she stands up, head just inches below the BAR fire, and throws.