Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(103)

They are still joking around, Cat and Jenou, partly no doubt energized by Rio’s reappearance. But Rio sees something dark and dangerous in their eyes. She wonders if they see the same on her face.

“We’re going up again?” Rio asks.

Jenou nods. “Stick says the captain asked about pulling us off the line for a while, but no dice. We’re fighting this war alone.”

“The engineers have a Bailey bridge slung, so no boats this time, but we’ll be crossing in single fugging file,” Cat says. And then she mimes a machine gunner. “Bap-bap-bap-bap. Like ducks in a shooting gallery.”

Both Jenou and Cat are doing their best to put on a brave face, but Rio sees the signs of deep strain. No one has slept in at least thirty-six hours. Nor has there been a hot meal. Or a single instant of escape from the rain and the filth. And with all of that, the artillery, and Magraff’s death, and the assumed deaths of Rio and Jack, strain is understandable.

The squad is down to nine: Geer, Pang, Cat, Jenou, Beebee, Stick, Rio, Sergeant Cole, and Jack.

There comes the supersonic screech of artillery falling, and for ten minutes the three young women crouch in freezing water, keeping their heads down below the horizontal flight of jagged shrapnel. As long as a shell doesn’t land right beside them or drop right down into the hole they survive, but it’s like playing dice with life itself. The odds are against coming up snake eyes, but it is possible, all too possible.

When the shelling stops, Stick calls out from his hole to take roll.

“Just like school,” Jenou says, and yells, “Present!”

Then they are called to help unload an ammo truck, hauling wooden crates off the tailgate, humping them awkwardly to deposit them up and down the thin line formed by the platoon. They unload quickly, despite their weariness—no one wants to be standing next to an ammo truck when the German gunners spot it through the rain.

But with the job done, Rio is sick with exhaustion, both sleepy and bone-weary.

“Ammo,” Cat says.

“Yep,” Jenou says.

This big of a distribution of ammunition—loose .30 caliber for the M1 Garands and the BAR, shorter .30 caliber carbine rounds, grenades in fragmentation, smoke and incendiary models—signals an action is coming.

The three of them mechanically top off their rifle and carbine clips and stuff loose bullets and grenades in wherever possible. For once Rio is not worried about topping off her canteen. There is no shortage of water.

Now they have a nice, fresh ammo crate the size of a footstool, which they set atop the mud at the bottom of their hole. It clears the water by three inches and they decide to rotate, each getting an hour in turn to sit on it.

Rio goes second, and the instant her butt hits wood she’s asleep, her body jerking automatically when she starts to fall forward.

When Cat rouses her Rio sees Jenou leaning, one foot in the slurry, one foot bare. When Jenou pulls off her sock, Rio sees puffy white flesh coming off with it. Jenou’s big toe is swollen and she wonders aloud whether piercing it would release pus and lessen her pain. Or whether any puncture wound in these conditions is likely to lead to far worse infection.

An hour’s disturbed sleep has done little to clear Rio’s mind, rather it deepens her descent into a sort of dream state. Her thoughts are fragments of memory, images without narrative: her family, Strand, the induction center, Jack, a much younger Jenou, dry hills. It’s that last image that captures her attention, and for a while in imagination she is hiking up a hill covered in desiccated, yellowed grass, set off by a small stand of trees. The sky is blue. A red-tailed hawk rides the wind, looking for an unwary mouse. A biplane floats overhead, and there’s Strand waving down at Rio as she rides a black-and-white cow to the top of the hill.

Rio jerks awake. “What?”

She has slumped right down into the slurry, and Jenou is shaking her shoulder.

“Time,” Jenou says.

Darkness has fallen. The rain is a slow drizzle, almost a mist now, as if the sky is down to the last of its moisture. Rio crawls up out of the hole and to her left and right more soldiers rise from the mud, like a parody of creation: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground . . .

But not dust, mud.

The squad forms up on Stick, and the platoon as a whole forms up to either side of Cole, who is beside Lieutenant Stone. Rio hasn’t seen the lieutenant in a while, and he does not look good. His earlier restless energy seems to have been sucked right out of him. Beyond them in the dark the rest of the division is on the move. They slog forward, a long line of men and women, silent but for the squelch of their boots, back to the river.

The engineers have managed to set up two narrow pontoon bridges. The Germans haven’t blown them up, which is ominous, for it can only mean the Germans are waiting until they have living targets.

“Okay,” Cole says. “We’re second across, behind First Platoon.”

“Can’t believe Stone didn’t volunteer us,” Cat says.

“He’s growing up fast,” Stick says, and it’s almost enough to make Rio smile. Dain Sticklin, who started in basic with her and Jenou, is now the wise sergeant.

First Platoon steps onto the swaying, unsteady bridge, holding the guide rope, which is very little help. The German gunners wait patiently until the lead element is almost across, and then the fire comes pouring down, knocking GIs left and right into the water, where they flounder and cling and try to swim, or float away, dead.