Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(78)
Everyone is on their feet now, eyes straining, tentative, praying, shouting impotent threats, shaking irrelevant fists.
The plane is in view for several long minutes, but it does not return. Instead it arcs away to the east again, toward Sicily.
Sergeant Garaman is beside Cole, both men keeping their eyes on the retreating plane.
“Well, they’ve spotted us.”
“That they have.”
“Loot’s not turning back, I don’t suppose,” Cole said.
“I reckon not,” Garaman says. “Not and be called out as a weak sister.”
Rio scans until she spots the British captain’s boat. There is no sign it is turning from its course.
“One hell of a secret mission we got here,” Garaman says. “That Nazi bastard either sends a fighter back after us or radios ahead to the beach.”
“I’ll take a fight on the beach over getting sunk and shot up in the water,” Cole says sourly.
“Six of one.”
The British captain’s boat surges to the front of the pack, and with hand gestures he indicates that everyone is to follow him. He changes course, then gathers speed, back up to the craft’s maximum of nine knots, but not toward home, rather heading northwest toward a peninsula.
“What in hell is he about?” Kerwin wonders aloud.
Sergeant Cole answers. “He figures the Krauts have our course. Figures Jerry pilot radios back to Sicily, they get a plane up in the air in ten minutes, takes that plane maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes to get airborne and cover the hundred and fifty or so miles to where he can intercept our course. So we got half an hour, maybe a bit more, to see if we can’t throw him off the scent.”
“The sun goes down in ninety minutes, after that we’ll be hard to see. So . . .” Garaman shrugs. “He’s got at best thirty minutes on target to find us again.”
As it happens, if a second plane has been launched to locate and destroy them, they never see it. Eyes strain to catch any sight of a plane, and it is a very hard hour, an hour of nervous chatter and whispered prayers, but when darkness falls, the boats turn back south, moving again at safer speed, but now hours behind schedule.
“They’ll be waiting for us when we land,” Tilo says nervously.
“Could be,” Cole says, nodding in a sort of sideways, back-and-forth way that signals skepticism. “But there’s a lot of coastline. Lot of beach. They won’t know exactly.”
Rio looks around at her companions, her squad. Reliable Stick; obnoxious Luther; the funny and pugnacious Cat; big, friendly Kerwin; Tilo, looking startlingly young despite his tough city-boy airs; sullen, standoffish, and barely known Jillion Magraff; jaunty Jack. Hark Millican, looking sick and sad, as if he’s already been shot and he’s just waiting for someone to tell him to die; and the most recent addition, the presumed Japanese American Hansu Pang.
Jenou catches Rio’s eye and winks.
Jack catches her eye and just holds her gaze, sharing some emotion that neither of them can hope to name.
Rio breaks eye contact to look at Sergeant Cole. He’s showing nothing. He does his three-stage move where he shifts his cold cigar from side to middle to the other side of his mouth. It reminds Rio of a horse chewing on its bit.
Rio wants to hide behind Cole. She wants to grab Jenou and say, “This is all a stupid mistake; we have to go home now.”
She wants to be with Stafford.
No, far better, she wants to be with Strand, because he’s not here in this boat. She never should have spent time with Stafford.
Jack. His name is Jack, and you know it.
Those emotions—shameful, lustful, conflicted, unfaithful emotions—just add to the weight that bears down on her soul. She feels it that way, as a weight. A heaviness that crushes her heart and extends, leaden, to her limbs.
The flotilla has turned toward a shore invisible in the darkness. No one has to tell them they’re going in, they can all feel it in the air. The heaviness in Rio’s soul grows more oppressive. She closes her eyes and prays.
The prospect of imminent combat should erase all other concerns, it should leave Rio free of all doubts, all second-guessing, but of course it doesn’t. She will carry all of it with her. The picture of Strand in her pocket, the image of Jack belting out “Rule, Britannia,” the imagined images of Rachel, her lungs filling with salt water. The Stamp Man.
The sea grows more agitated; short, steep waves that slap loudly at the sides and fire fountains of spray into the air. The boat rolls, side to side, triggering a new wave of nausea. The latest card game folds up, and now, as they near the target, the coxswain calls for all cigarettes to be put out.
“Fugging German gunners see that light, and we all get blowed to hell.”
Rio has been cold, miserable, sick, and scared for twenty-four hours now, and is in no way prepared to fight. She hasn’t even started, and she’s already exhausted. She has an overpowering desire to check her rifle to make sure, doubly sure, triply sure, that it works, and she repeatedly touches the pockets of her ammo belt, reassuring herself that she has a full load. Despite the wet everywhere else, her mouth is dry.
She does a deep-knee bend then stands up, shakes out her hands, stamps her feet to get some feeling back in her numb toes. The other boats are strung out ahead and behind, all running along in almost total darkness now under a sky playing peek-a-boo with patches of cloud beneath a jeweler’s display case of diamonds. There is a single bunkered light on the stern of the lead boat with all the others following it.