Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(113)

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.





36

FRANGIE MARR—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA

Frangie changes every bandage. She sews up a split finger, irrigates an eye crusted shut with blood, and manages to do it despite rude thrusting fingers and groping hands.

The column is driving on relentlessly, no longer on anything resembling a road but pushing out into open desert. The overcast skies keep Allied air power from spotting them, but there are many nervous glances skyward from wounded and healthy soldiers alike.

Eventually she is given a can of tinned meat and crackers. It’s what the German soldiers are eating, and grumbling as they do so. The grumbling is not comprehensible, but is nevertheless familiar to Frangie. Soldiers complain; German, American, every kind of soldier.