Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(115)

But two hours later, as Frangie sits scrunched in a corner catching a catnap, it does end, at least for most of the men around her.

The first explosion wakes her.

The rattle of gunfire propels her to her feet.

“What’s happening?”

“War,” the Doctor-Major says sourly.

The rear door is still open. Frangie shoots a terrified glance at the Doctor-Major and at the door, now an eerie red rectangle in the light of the flares.

“No,” the Doctor-Major snaps, grabbing her by the back of the neck. “There will be more wounded, and I cannot—”

A noise, several rapid sounds like a knife being stabbed into a tin can, and red holes appear in the side of the ambulance and spray blood across Frangie’s chest and arm.

It is a sheer panic reflex that sends her stumbling out through the open door to land hard on the sand.

In a shocked instant she takes it all in: a burning vehicle up ahead, shouts, a storm of rifle and machine gun fire coming from the left, the zing of bullets flying in search of soft targets.

She begins to stand up but thinks better of it and lies flat, her belly in the dirt. Tracer rounds pierce the ambulance again and again, like flaming arrows. The men on the stretchers twitch and jerk, try to stand and fall, collapse, roll out of the back of the ambulance to crawl or lie still on the cold ground.

She sees the Doctor-Major twist, slap at a hole in his buttock made by a .30 caliber round, then drop to his knees as more rounds pierce him again and again.

Frangie rolls away, rolls and rolls like some game she would have played in the park with Obal, frantically aware of the half-track rushing toward her with a roar and a grinding of gears, a bear maddened by bee stings, desperate to escape the deadly fire that pursues it.

It careens past, the tracks missing her by inches.

She comes to rest, hugging the sand as the battle rages on ahead of her, drawing slowly away as the column continues to try and escape. She remains flat as a platoon of German soldiers race past, rushing to flank the attackers.

The ambulance rolls on for a bit, slower, slower, and finally comes to rest. A tire is burning, billowing toxic black smoke that rises to obscure the stars.

In the east the faint gray dawn is a signal of more terrible sights to come.





37

RIO RICHLIN—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA

The grenade lands at the lip of what had been Jenou’s foxhole. It lies there looking like a small steel pineapple, two seconds gone, two more, tick-tock.

The nearest German sees it, reaches for it, picks it up, starts to throw it back. The explosion amputates his arm at the elbow and shreds his helmet and face.

The German stands there, already dead but not yet fallen, frozen in the flare light, looking as if some gigantic tiger with claws of steel has ripped the side of his face.

Rio stands, staring. Her rifle leans against the inside of her foxhole, forgotten. She is looking at a monster. There is a terrible curiosity, a can’t-look-away horror blended with denial because such things simply did not exist, her mind will not accept it, and a second German soldier farther back roars hatred and raises his machine pistol toward her, the deadly barrel spitting bullets.

And . . . empty.

She hears the metal-on-metal click of an empty chamber and the soldier throws his machine pistol aside in rage, draws a dagger from a sheath strapped to his leg, and runs at her.

He is a big man, brown eyed. She notices that because so many of the Germans have blue eyes, but no, these are brown. He is missing two teeth, which makes his snarl seem almost comical. His uniform is filthy, streaked with mud and coated with a thick layer of dust. His hands are big, thick fingers gripping the hilt, big boots slamming the sand, propelling him forward, roaring, always roaring, like a beast.

“Richlin! Down!”

The voice is far away and means nothing.

In three steps she will—

Down, down, down!

Where has that voice come from? Is it a voice at all? For a fleeting split second she thinks it’s her father, and then, a sudden, urgent spasm, like a lightning strike, and she drops to her knees as Jack fires. She feels the breeze of his bullets.

The big German staggers forward, carried by momentum. He swings the knife and Rio feels something like a punch in the arm, and then is buried beneath the German’s body.

She is on her back, squashed down into her shallow foxhole, crushed by two hundred pounds of dead man exhaling his final breath into her ear.

Something snaps. Rio hears it as a snap, feels it as a twig breaking, and all at once she is pushing and punching and screaming foul curses and blasphemies, while all around her the guns blaze on. A second grenade goes off, and at last she breaks free and pushes herself up, drags her rifle from beneath the dead man, and starts firing again, screaming all the while, screaming, “Die, you fugging bastards!”

She fires until her clip pops.

Then . . . silence.

“Hold your fire, hold your fire!” Cole’s voice.

A single shot followed by a louder Cole, yelling, “Goddammit, I said hold your fugging fire!”

Morning has come.

A white flag has appeared.

Rio stands with her rifle in her hand, legs still pinned by the dead man at her feet.

The man with the face ripped apart by Rio’s grenade slides slowly down into Jenou’s foxhole.

“Are you okay?”

Rio’s hearing is half gone, her comprehension gone further still. The world around her seems to vibrate. The light is unreal.