Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(104)

“Now!”

And Cole’s platoon rushes down the bank, and they start yelling, yelling to keep their courage up, piling pell-mell toward the bridge to get it over with, a headlong rush to destruction. But now they have a bit of luck, as an American mortar lands a lucky shot and knocks out the nearest machine gun nest.

Rio runs, staggers as the bridge moves beneath her, rights herself, and runs, with Jenou just ahead and Pang behind. A second machine gun sends a line of tracers arcing toward them, but it’s farther away and by some miracle the squad reaches the opposite shore, where they flop down, panting.

The next squad isn’t so lucky. Rio sees two of their people knocked like bowling pins into the churning water.

Allied artillery has opened up well beyond the river, hitting the Germans in the rear, doing nothing to stop the small arms fire but playing hell with the Kraut mortars, which, nevertheless, keep firing. Beebee cries out in pain as a piece of hot shrapnel scrapes a quarter inch of flesh from his thigh.

“We gotta push in!” Cole yells.

Stick says, “Come on,” and they are up and clambering hand over hand up a slippery slope, smoke suddenly everywhere, smoke torn by renewed rain. Ahead there must be a German position, a dark lump revealed only by the light of tracer rounds.

Rio is on her belly now, almost swimming through the mud, legs pistoning, elbows digging, her rifle in the crooks of those elbows.

“Smoke!” Stick shouts, and Jack and Jenou both throw smoke grenades toward the presumed but invisible machine gun. The smoke billows, blinding Rio at least as much as it must be blinding the Germans, but she crawls on until stopped by a soft but heavy obstacle.

Her face is inches from a corpse, bloated and reeking of feces and decay. A corpse in American uniform.

She crawls around it and already the smoke is dissipating, but there’s Jenou on her right, on hands and knees, her carbine slung over her back. The Germans have spotted her, and Rio sees the little splashes of bullets landing all around her friend.

Rio fumbles for a smoke grenade of her own and throws it as Stick yells, “More smoke!”

And this time, as soon as the smoke pours forth, Rio jumps to her feet and runs, hunched over, trips—another body—rolls away, gets up again, and runs. Jack is ahead of her with Pang and now, in a tear in the smoke, she sees plain as day the muzzle protruding from beneath a log roof piled high with dirt.

The opening is narrow, tough to get a grenade in, so she drops to one knee, aims, and fires off a whole clip at that muzzle.

Pang slams into the bunker, just to the right of the hole. In a desperate voice he cries, “Fire in the hole!” and twists to almost gently roll a grenade inside.

It’s an incendiary and explodes in a shower of white phosphorous, so the firing hole is suddenly a brilliant greenish-white gash of mouth. Rio tries to push a fresh clip in her M1, but it jams from grit amid the mud.

A German soldier, screaming, pushes out through the firing hole. He’s been hit by the white phosphorous, which burns without regard to water, burns like acid through the German’s uniform.

Rio sees his face. A fright mask of agony as the chemical eats into his body in a dozen places. He sees her. He looks at her, pleading and crying something in a begging voice.

He wants me to shoot him.

Geer shoots the burning man in the neck, turns a savage grin to Rio, and shouts, “My turn!”

Rio climbs to her feet and follows Geer forward, a dark shape wreathed in smoke and rain and darkness.

Suddenly Geer falls into the earth, and Rio realizes there’s a trench ahead. Geer is bellowing and guns are blazing and Rio raises her rifle, remembers it’s jammed, and stares helplessly as Geer faces three German soldiers, the four of them blazing away at close quarters. Jenou is standing at the lip of the trench behind the three Krauts, and she fires carbine rounds pop-pop-pop-pop! into their backs and necks and heads. Geer, miraculously unhurt, clambers up out of the trench raging at the top of his lungs. Jenou jumps the trench, Rio just behind her, Pang and Stick off to the right.

They’ve broken through the first line of defenses, but there’s no one coming up from behind to strengthen them. Now the Krauts are to their left and right as well as ahead, and the air is practically a solid object, a ceiling of lead as the squad hugs the ground, shaking, and Geer continues to rave, “I’m comin’ to kill you! I’m comin’ to kill you!”

For long minutes they are paralyzed there, unable to so much as lift their heads. Then Sergeant Cole is trudging up from the river, leading two squads, all firing into the darkness over Rio’s head.

But it’s no good, it’s no good, the Germans are too strong, too dug in, too determined. Cole yells, “Fall back!” and then twists wildly and drops to his knees.

Rio yells, “Cole!” while crawling to him, and then pushes him down as tracers arc toward him. “Where are you hit?” she demands.

“Leg. My goddamned leg.”

Blood pours from his calf, the red stain joining rainwater as Rio tears the fabric away from the bullet hole. She practically faints from relief.

“Through the meat!” she tells Cole. “You’ll live.”

“Tell Stick to fall back,” Cole says through gritted teeth.

“We are,” Rio assures him. “Come on, you can crawl.”

And they do crawl. Back to the riverbank, not onto the bridge that is clogged with dead and wounded, but pulling themselves along through the water by gripping the sagging hand rope.