Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(73)

“Well, hello there, pretty girl,” he says. “Are you trying to learn Italian? The language of love? Because I could help with that. My folks were right out of Pontassieve. Capisci?”

Rainy stares at him and says nothing, which unsettles the sailor a bit.

“So,” he says. “What’s your name, babe?”

“Mussolini,” she says.

“Ah, you’ve got a sense of humor. I like a girl with a sense of humor, likes a laugh. Where you headed?”

Rainy points toward the front of the ship. “South,” she says.

Which is when the sailor realizes he’s getting nowhere, and walks on.

Several hours later, deep in the night, Rio wakes suddenly.

“Oh my God, did I . . . ?”

From the bunk below comes Jenou’s voice. “You did. But hopefully he’s too drunk to remember.”





22

RIO RICHLIN—OUTSIDE TUNIS, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“All right, Second Squad, gear up.” Sergeant Cole speaks around the cold cigar in the corner of his mouth. He’s broad rather than tall, with a potato of a nose, a wide mouth with gapped teeth more or less always clenching a cigar, which is seldom lit. He’ll be bald at an early age; his dishwater-colored hair is already beginning the retreat. He is not loud or overbearing as some sergeants are, but he has the gift of authority, despite the fact that he is quick to break out a grin. Where Sergeant Mackie was stern with a tight-wrapped and seldom-glimpsed sense of humor, Sergeant Cole is a man who is prepared to be amused by life.

GIs being GIs, Cole’s announcement is met with the usual grumbling and the busting of chops.

“Aw, man. Haven’t even had any hot chow.”

“More hurry up and wait, probably.”

“What happened to mail call? That’s what I want to know. I was supposed to get some cookies from my aunt,” says Jenou.

“Anyone got a spare bootlace? I’ve already knotted this thing twice.”

“Sarge,” Cat says, “Private Castain can’t fight without cookies.”

“My boots still ain’t dried out,” Kerwin complains. “Be a hell of a thing fighting in wet boots in a damn desert.”

“I’d sell my soul for a cup of hot coffee and real milk in it.”

“You ain’t got a soul, none of us do. The army wanted you to have a soul, they’d of issued one.”

Rio digs the butt of her rifle into the mud, wraps her hands around the barrel, and heaves herself up off the relatively dry rock she’s sitting on. Then she kicks the thick mud from her boots and shakes the mud from the butt of her weapon.

Shouldn’t really be mud, should there, she thinks, this being a desert? Humid Georgia to a steamy Queen Mary to waterlogged England to the storms of the trip south, by rights shouldn’t she have come at last to a dry place?

She swings her pack up off the ground, shoulders into it, and shifts around until it feels as right as it is going to get. The weight of it bites, and she has to lean forward a little to stay upright.

They do not form neat lines as they march; in fact, it’s not what the drill instructors back at Camp Maron would even call marching, it’s more of an amble, a stroll. They are soldiers in theory, but in reality they are still just civilians wearing uniforms.

Rio stays close to Jenou, who is on about her usual whine: “What happened to females being given typewriters and rich, handsome lieutenants, that’s what I want to know.”

“Yes, well I requested something in the technical field, something of great significance but with only the bare minimum of danger,” Jack says in his poshest English accent. “Imagine my surprise when the army failed to fulfill my every wish.”

He says this to Rio. Everyone hears, of course, but he says it to her, especially the last part. My every wish.

“No one gets everything they want,” Rio says, keeping her voice bland, implying nothing—at least nothing that anyone else will understand. Except Jenou, of course, because Jenou was there when the incident occurred, a week ago.

“So true,” Jack says ruefully, smiling his simultaneously cheeky and abashed smile. “But it never hurts to dream big.”

It was his smile that first got to Rio, all the way back at Camp Maron. The accent hadn’t hurt either. But this is not the time and not the place. Memories of a drunken moment—a shameful moment, really, given the place Strand Braxton holds in her heart—are out of place here and now.

The transport never happened. There was no kiss.

And anyway, I was drunk, so it doesn’t count.

But Rio grins anyway. It’s good to have an excuse to smile, no matter how much effort it takes when your insides are churning and your imagination is painting lurid pictures of amputations and cries of pain. The grin freezes in place. She’s clenching her jaw, and now consciously unclenches it.

Imagination is not your friend in war, Rio knows. It’s too easy to imagine yourself dead: shot or torn to shreds by bomb shrapnel. Or mauled but left alive to suffer another thirty years of misery, like the Stamp Man.

And why is she here? Why exactly is she here on this desert-front beach in a country she’s barely heard of? It is decidedly not for the purpose of flirting with Jack Stafford, especially when Strand’s picture is in her inner pocket, wrapped in waterproof oilcloth alongside the picture of her parents and her sister.