Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(93)
Rio runs, Cole just behind her, Suarez ahead, runs and up ahead some rocks and the other squad is up in there, squinting from beneath their helmets, aiming their rifles but not shooting yet, not wanting to hit Second Squad.
Rio pants and sweats though it is still cold, even with the sun coming up now in a clearing sky. She runs to catch up to her own long shadow.
Suddenly the rest of the platoon opens up, blazes away at the advancing Italians as Rio, Suarez, and the sergeant rush past them, but already Rio sees some breaking, pelting away from the advancing Panzers.
Rio falls into a bare scraped depression in the ground, each frantic breath painful in her raw throat. Her heart pounds like it will physically break her breastbone. Tilo Suarez drops beside her.
“Fugging tanks!” he yells.
“Unh,” she grunts in response.
“Never even got a chance to get off a shot,” he says, like he’s making an excuse, like he’s defending himself.
I shot at them.
Tilo says, “On us too fast. We’re going to have to pull back. Tanks.” He sounds panicked.
The Italians hang back a little now as the rest of both platoons fire into them. They hold back, letting the tanks run on ahead, but now there’s the German officer again in the staff car, yelling, berating them in harsh, German-accented Italian, clearly audible despite the cacophony of rifle fire. He waves a baton of some sort, a riding crop, waves it furiously, demanding the infantry advance.
But the Italians, the distant descendants of the greatest empire the world has ever known, do not seem in a hurry to get shot at in this particular place at this particular time.
Yet there’s no stopping the tanks. Someone from another squad fires a hasty bazooka round that does explode this time, but with all the apparent destructive effect of a cream puff thrown against a brick wall.
The tank fires back, and as the explosion fades Rio hears screams. She starts firing, somewhat wildly, not targeting, not picking out individual targets now, just shooting off the remaining rounds in her clip, which pops out with a musical clang. She cannot at that particular moment, cannot, just cannot coldly locate and target an enemy. She can manage to fire, she can make noise with her rifle, but she cannot right then take careful deadly aim and end another life.
She fumbles a clip from her belt and first tries to shove it in backward before turning it around and, with numb fingers, inserting it as she had done long ago in training, long ago, weeks ago, in the world of paper targets.
BANG! and ka-boom! A tank fires and punches a round into the dirt just thirty feet from Rio, pelting her with debris that rattles on her helmet and dusts her shoulders and clogs the air.
Cole yells, “Where’s the Loot? Where’s Liefer?”
If the lieutenant is around, no one knows where she is. But Platoon Sergeant Garaman comes running up just then and says, “Come on, Cole, we’re falling back.”
“Yeah,” Cole says, because there isn’t much else to say. It’s GIs versus tanks, and the bazookas aren’t doing a damned thing, so it’s fall back or die. “Fall back to where?”
Garaman shakes his head. “I’ll be damned if I know, Jedron.”
It is the first time Rio has ever heard anyone call Sergeant Cole by his first name. It’s a bad omen.
“Well, I guess we aren’t knocking out any goddamn Kraut radio,” Cole mutters as Garaman stumbles away, looking for the lieutenant.
All of Fifth Platoon is falling back. Running away. And seeing their backs, the emboldened Italians are hot on their heels and the tanks clank-clank-clank behind, the sound of doom.
Rio runs with Sergeant Cole, who, like a magnet passing through metal filings, draws the rest of Second Squad behind him. Panic threatens to take over, Rio can feel it, can feel the razor edge of her own panic. Her combat boots seem unnaturally loud scrambling across loose rock and sand, sometimes silent as she leaps small depressions, panting, panting, gasping for breath in a burning throat.
Ahead she sees a gun of some sort, like a howitzer but smaller. It has a vertical rectangle of steel plate pierced by about four feet of barrel. British commandos man it, four of them, judging by the shallow soup-bowl helmets crouching behind the gun. One of the commandos is improbably smoking a pipe.
“Get past that two-pounder, join up with the Tommies,” Cole yells.
Rio goes tearing past the two-pounder, runs on another twenty feet and sees that the commandos have dug in, and drops herself into a foxhole no more than eighteen inches deep and just wide enough for her to cower in.
But the commando sergeant in the hole isn’t having it. “You can bugger off, mate.” Then he looks at her and does a double take. “Sorry, miss. But you still aren’t taking my hole. Keep running, we’ll take care of Jerry.”
Rio hesitates, searches for Cole, and sees him in heated argument with the British captain, who keeps hacking at the air in a way that makes it clear he’d like the Americans to just keep on running.
Cole has no choice and yells for Fifth Platoon to fall back. He’s not the platoon sergeant, still less the lieutenant, but he’s there and seems to have some idea what he’s doing, so both American platoons gladly accept his order and now all of them, all the Americans, run away. Run down the road. One soldier throws away his rifle the better to run.
It is a rout. It is panic, outright panic now.
It is about to get worse.