Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(26)

“Thanks,” Rainy says.

The vibration and engine noise make it necessary to concentrate in order to make out what’s being said, but Rainy has taken note of the flight times and the mention of coffee. She pulls her orders from her pocket. Three typewritten pages, though the last page is only a paragraph.

She reads it quickly. Reaches the end. Frowns.

She goes back and reads it more carefully, certain that she has missed something. Missed more than a few things, actually.

By the time she’s done with her second reading, her hands are trembling and her breath is short. This can’t possibly be all there is. She checks the envelope again in case she’s overlooked a sheet. Nothing.

She is ordered to appear at the airfield, to take the flight to the Azores, there to rendezvous with a Royal Navy submarine, which is to take her to Italy. She is to deliver Cisco to his uncle and receive in return a map of enemy emplacements around Salerno. She is to deliver the packet to a certain person working at the Swedish Embassy in Rome.

And then?

Her orders are silent about then.

She swallows past a rising lump in her throat and barely stops herself reading through one more time. Nothing about then. Nothing about where she is to go, what she is to do, how she is to escape.

She wants to throw up. Her face feels like it’s burning. Surely this can’t be it. Surely even an amateur would have a plan? But of course there is a plan for getting what Corelli wants, just no plan for keeping her alive and out of the hands of the Gestapo or Italian counterintelligence.

The Swede. He must have the next set of instructions, the ones explaining how she is not simply being forgotten in the middle of enemy territory.

The Swede. Sure. That’s it. He’ll help her.

But try as she might, she cannot make herself believe it, not all the way.

There’s a difference between taking risks and committing suicide.

The six hours and twenty minutes pass in relative silence. Cisco leans back and dozes, eyes half-shut. Rainy’s mind races in circles. This isn’t a plan, this is a sketch. This is espionage through rose-colored lenses. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if she were an officer more attention would have been paid to her survival.

I’m a nobody, a buck sergeant, a GI. Expendable, like any other GI.

The Newfoundland base is a bare, scraped place beside dark water. There are rows of Nissen huts, the British version of a Quonset hut, a scattering of tin-sided administrative buildings, and a hangar. A bulldozer with a snow blade attached lies parked between two huts, but while it is chilly for summer, there is no snow.

A jeep fetches the two passengers and hustles them away to thaw out around an iron stove in a Nissen hut equipped with the usual military lack of comfort.

“Can a man get a drink at least?” Cisco asks a Canadian airman, who looks him up and down before walking away without a word. Cisco intertwines his fingers and cracks his knuckles and says, “That fellow needs a good punch in the neck.”

Rainy feels sleepiness steal over her and spends the hour’s break savoring the warmth of the stove. Then it’s back aboard the plane, another takeoff, and a rapid ascent into low clouds. They burst through into hazy, declining sunlight beneath a higher, thinner layer of cover, and take a big, sloping, rightward turn to the south. This leg of the trip is to take eight hours, a very long time to sit on what amounts to a hard bench contemplating the line between duty to the mission and the duty to stay alive.

Gestapo. That is the word that keeps pushing its way into her thoughts. Geheime Staatspolizei, the secret state police, Hitler’s enforcers, his torturers. Beatings. Beatings at the very least. The breaking of bones, the crushing of fingers, the gouging of eyes, rape, and . . .

She sucks air, feeling panic add volatile fuel to her misgivings, panic that seems to crush the air from her lungs. She licks her lips and glances at Cisco to make sure he isn’t watching her, isn’t seeing the sick fear she has not yet suppressed.

Rainy slips off her seat belt and stands, urgently needing to move. She explores the bare cylinder of the plane’s fuselage, locating the chemical toilet and . . . and nothing else. She uses the facility, sitting perched on the tiny seat, bent forward, face in her hands.

Soldiers die every day. Soldiers are sacrificed every day. She is a soldier.

She heads forward to the open cockpit door and looks inside at a confusing array of dials and switches. The pilot is head-back and mouth open, fast asleep, while the copilot keeps his hands on the yoke. Peering through the windshield, Rainy sees taller, darker clouds ahead.

“Boomers. Thunderstorm,” the copilot says over his shoulder, indicating the clouds with a jerk of his chin.

The piles of cloud are red in the light of the plunging sun. Darkness looms in the east beyond. Rainy returns to her seat and straps in.

Thunderstorm it is, and the C-47 is not able to rise above it and has no slack in its fuel supply to try an end around.

A flash, like the world’s biggest camera flashbulb going off and . . .

Craaaack!

Boom!

A massive fist punches the C-47 in its aluminum spine and drives it down a stomach-churning five hundred feet.

“Shit!” Rainy yelps as she is thrown against her seat belt.

Cisco looks at her, amused, and yells, “Nice language coming from a lady.”

Boom-bum-bum-bum-BOOM!

The thunderclap is louder than anything Rainy has ever even imagined hearing. The physical blow that follows shivers the thin skin of the fuselage. She’s amazed the small porthole hasn’t blown out.