Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(102)

“Love isn’t a thing you do or don’t do, Rio. Love is everything, and it swallows you whole or it’s not love.”

Is he seriously flirting with her? Here? Now? With both of them side by side in a freezing hog wallow?

She forces a small laugh and twists away from him, pressing her back against him, feeling his warmth on her numb backside. “And how do you know so much about love, Jack Stafford?”

He lays his free arm over her and wraps it chastely around her belly. “I just do,” he whispers to the curve of her neck. “I just do.”





33

RIO RICHLIN—MONTE CASSINO, ITALY

The first crossing is accomplished only by a small American force, which is then stranded when the main force falls back in disorder, and is then killed or captured by the Germans.

Rio has missed this particular tragedy by the time she and Jack make it back to the platoon.

“What. The. Hell,” Geer says on seeing them stumbling through the rain. Geer is in a deep hole with Pang. The two of them are standing in eighteen inches of water. Pang is patiently bailing with his helmet while Geer is shoving mud into a sort of dike meant to keep water from simply flowing unimpeded into their foxhole.

“We thought you two were dead or captured,” Pang says, and grins.

Jenou and Cat are in a second hole—there are foxholes of various depth and complexity dug all along the sector, many of them having started as shell craters. Cat has managed to find a few sticks and has used them to give some angle to her shelter half, creating a sort of sagging, pitched roof so rain runs off onto the ground . . . before draining right back into the hole.

Jenou climbs sloppily out of their hole and runs to Rio. She runs with arms outstretched and Rio goes to receive her hug, but at the last minute Jenou passes Rio and embraces Jack.

“We missed you!”

“Oh, very funny,” Rio mutters.

Jenou relents and throws an arm around her friend and says in a low voice, “Goddamn, Rio, you scared the hell out of me.” Then in a yell, “Stick! We picked up a couple of replacements!”

Stick appears, a sodden, mud-covered, and exhausted man. But he has energy enough to smile and clap both Jack and Rio on the back. “Where have you clowns been?”

“We spent the night in a minefield,” Rio explains.

“Might have been better off staying there. We’re getting ready to make another push.”

“Everything okay?” Rio says it with an emphasis Stick understands to mean, Has anyone else been wounded or bought the farm?

“You saw Magraff?” Stick asks in a low voice.

Rio and Jack nod.

“We thought it was her and the two of you. Although Castain kept saying you’d just lit out for Berlin to shoot old Adolf all by yourselves. Damn, you have no idea how good the two of you look! Now, dig a hole.”

“It’s just like the parable of the Prodigal Son,” Jack says. “Except for the part about digging a hole.”

“The Krauts haven’t forgotten we’re here,” Stick says gloomily. “They hit us every few—”

He stops because the whine of falling shells is suddenly audible and with a soggy BOOM! a section of mud erupts.

Stick runs for his hole, Jack dives in with Geer and Pang, and Rio slides down into the soupy filth with Jenou and Cat.

“They better not blow off my roof!” Cat warns loudly, as if the Germans can hear, and as if they’d take heed.

The barrage lasts only a few terrifying minutes. A man from another squad is hit while trying to use the latrine. They hear his screams mixed with cursing. “I was just trying to take a shit, you Kraut bastards!”

When the shelling stops, Rio asks, “I don’t suppose there’s any chow?”

“They set up a field mess back past where we picked up the boats, but it got blown to hell,” Jenou says. “Beebee’s got a little fire going, don’t even ask me how.” She rises cautiously, lifts a corner of Cat’s rain cover, and nods in the direction of a scrap of canvas showing above the lip of a crater.

“Guess I’ll see if he’s got any coffee on,” Rio says. “Then I guess I’ll dig a hole.”

“You’re welcome to join us in our warm, comfortable, dry establishment,” Cat says. “So long as you dig out that end and help us bail.”

Rio slithers up out of the hole, not an easy maneuver, and runs to the crater where Beebee has managed to set up a tidy lean-to atop a flat rock that’s been exposed at the bottom of the crater. It’s not dry, nothing is dry, but he has managed to get a small hidden fire going and has a pot of coffee brewing over an empty can filled with sand and gasoline.

Beebee looks up and says, “Hah! That’s five bucks Geer owes me. He bet you were captured. Coffee?”

He pours a few inches into her canteen cup, and she drinks it with reverence—the first warm thing she’s felt in twenty-four hours, aside from Jack.

“First one’s free,” Beebee says. “A refill costs three smokes.”

Rio carries her steaming cup back to Jenou’s hole and proffers a sip to her and Cat. For the next hour she digs out the right side of the hole, then bails for a while.

“Now it’s just like the Plaza Hotel,” Cat says contentedly.

“The very finest of mud-filled holes anywhere,” Jenou agrees.