Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(112)

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.