Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(97)

“Yes, ma’am,” Cole snaps. “Where would you like us to stop running?”

“I’ll have your stripes if I hear one more goddamned word from you!” Liefer yells, and points down the road, back in the direction they came from, back to the rear. Her driver guns the engine, spins into a dusty turn, and roars away, showing them all the line of retreat.

“I guess that’s the other reason officers need jeeps,” Luther says. “Female officers, at least.”

Cole snaps, “Private Richlin has one confirmed kill, Geer, and another probable. What do you have?”

One confirmed kill. One probable.

Geer stares daggers at Richlin, and Suarez occupies himself lighting a smoke. Jack is there as well, and he frowns at Rio as if just noticing something about her face that troubles him.

They run and they walk and they run some more, putting all their PT to a use none of them expected. Finally, after hours, they manage to outrun the sounds of the fight. Or else the fight is lost and the Tommies are wiped out. Rio doesn’t know which.

She walks fast; Jenou at her side now, a strange echo of times walking together around the square in Gedwell Falls, or halfheartedly running the track at school. Rio and Jenou, two high school girls out for a stroll, but with slung rifles and pounds of ammo and gear, and mortal dread in their hearts.

“I never wanted to be in the fighting,” Jenou says, her teeth chattering either from cold or fear. “I lost my helmet. I’m supposed to be at a desk. Now we’re going to have to surrender and spend the rest of the war in a POW camp.”

“Surrender?” Rio tries the word out and doesn’t like it at all, but maybe Jenou is right. They’re licked, aren’t they? They’ve been sent packing. Where are the American lines, even? None of them really knows where they themselves are right now, aside from it being a miserable place in a country they’d never even heard of before arriving here.

They keep moving, moving, always away from the German tanks, which they can no longer hear, fleeing an enemy that is farther and farther behind them. Fleeing to . . . where? Where is safety?

“We just have to get back to our lines,” Rio says.

“We have to get back to Gedwell Falls,” Jenou says savagely.

“You shot one of them?” Tilo Suarez asked Rio.

She shrugs.

“She killed one for sure,” Hark Millican says. “I saw him drop. Sarge saw it too. Mighta been two. Maybe.”

“Probably just tripped,” Rio says through gritted teeth.

“Like hell,” Millican says. “You shot him. You shot him good.”

Confirmed kill.

Rio accelerates her pace, wanting to get away from him. She feels panicky, more panicky than when she was running away from actual enemy fire.

“I probably got me one or two,” Luther says. He’s angry as well as scared. Scared of the Germans, angry that Rio has a confirmed kill and he does not. “Maybe more, I mean, I was shooting like crazy, but the smoke and all . . .”

Something is buzzing. Jillion Magraff and Cole yell at the same time. “Plane!”

And there it is, a plane, coming in low. Hopefully it will make short work of the tanks and save the Tommies, who sure weren’t going to be saved by Fifth Platoon.

“Scatter!” Cole yells.

A few seconds pass before it dawns on Rio that no, this is not Strand Braxton flying out of the clouds to rescue her, nor any friendly pilot.

She glances left, right, no holes, no shelter. She starts to run, sees that Jenou is frozen, runs back to grab her friend’s shoulder, a handful of uniform, pulls her along, and the two of them plunge off the road, run a few steps, and hit the dirt.

The Stuka—unmistakable once it is close enough—fires its twin wing-mounted machine guns and rips up a quarter of a mile of dirt road like some devil-possessed backhoe, and the plane roars by overhead, the black-and-white crosses and the swastika on the tail all too visible.

The Stuka flies on, and Rio sees two bombs detach from the undercarriage.

Out of sight, but in the area where they last saw the commandos, the bombs explode, a single massive earth-shaking detonation.

“Move out!” Cole yells. “He may come back around!”

But the German plane has lost interest in them and now circles to rain more machine gun fire on the commandos. The Americans leap up out of the dirt and start walking fast again, glancing over their shoulders every few steps to see if the plane is coming back.

But it isn’t the Stuka chasing them now, it’s the tanks, that terrible clank-clank-clank distant but audible. The tanks were slowed by the determined resistance of the British commandos, but the bombs have taken care of that.

They run and when exhausted slow to a walk and then, hearing the distant clank-clank-clank, start moving again. Some packs are shed by the road, abandoned to buy more speed. Ammo is dropped, even rifles.

They run and walk for five miles, and there at last is Liefer and her jeep again, and beyond her three dusty trucks. The Americans pile gratefully into the trucks and join what will turn out to be a much larger rout.

The Germans had been squeezed between Field Marshal Montgomery’s fabled Eighth Army and the cocky-but-green American forces to the west and, by all logic, should have either given up or run for the nearest beach to seek a desperate escape. Instead, they have attacked, pushing west against the Americans and north toward Tunis.