Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(41)

The rest of the platoon is just reaching the beach. Rio follows them, eyes squinting beneath an anxious brow. She can just make out a man she thinks may be Lieutenant Vanderpool, and is that Sergeant Alvarez beside him?

The rope is stretched, drawn taut by the engines now in low-gear reverse. A tall young private is bold enough to give it a try. For the first few feet he does fine, hands clasping, legs wrapped around the rope, face upside down and looking toward Rio. Then the swell pushes the boats closer, the rope slackens, and the soldier is dunked in the foam.

He pulls his way up, hand over hand, legs wrapped tight around the rope, and in a few seconds he is hauled aboard, spitting seawater and coughing. The second person across is a stocky sergeant, followed by a short young woman who moves with surprising agility.

“Hey,” Rio says. “Don’t I know you?”

Frangie Marr squeegees water from her face and blinks, clearing her vision. “Why, if it isn’t Rio Richlin.”

“Fancy meeting in a place like this,” Rio says, and laughs, oddly delighted. “Jenou! It’s Private Marr.”

“What on earth?” Jenou says, and grins at Frangie. There is something reassuring about the chance meeting, a feeling that providence must be looking down kindly on them.

That warm feeling does not last. A fourth black soldier is coming across when the distant mortarman gets lucky.

BAM!

Ka-whoosh!

The round lands with eerie precision, right in the middle of the stranded boat. It goes through the deck, hits the sandbar beneath, and blows up. The stranded craft goes up in a jet of water, reduced to sticks and slabs of twirling plywood. Bodies fly up and outward. The man on the rope is whipped upward, loses his grip, and flies up only to fall in the deluge of water and shattered hull.

Sergeant Walter Green stares in horror. He grips the railing with both hands like a man ready to jump into the water. The surviving craft guns its engines and backs away, churning sand and water into tan foam, scraping loudly over the remains of the destroyed boat.

A body pops up from below, faceup, dead but with no evidence of trauma. Frangie reaches toward him, but of course there is no possibility of touching, let alone helping, him.

They take three tight turns around the scene and are able to pull one more injured man into the boat before finally racing away as more shells zero in on them. Blood turns their wake pink.

Frangie is on her knees in six inches of water on the bottom of the boat, kneeling over the injured man they pulled aboard. He’s having some kind of spasm, his whole body twitching and jerking.

Frangie pulls a wrapped roll of gauze from her pouch and tries to pry the man’s teeth apart. “I need help here!”

Rio is nearest so she drops down beside Frangie, sees what she needs, and manages with some effort to open the man’s mouth. It is clenched so hard his teeth are likely to crack. Rio gets his jaw open just enough to let Frangie shove the gauze in and give the man something to bite down on.

“I’m going to check you over, Daddy D,” Frangie says. “Richlin, can you hold his ankles down?”

Rio does, and the man’s spasm lessens by degrees.

“I don’t see any blood,” Frangie reports. “No blood, no broken bones. Most likely a concussion, unless . . .” She frowns. “Daddy D, you hear me? If you hear me, nod or blink or something.”

There’s a tight nod.

“Are you epileptic?”

There’s a long pause, then finally, reluctantly, a nod.

“You can’t be fighting a war with epilepsy, Dad, what are you thinking?” Frangie scolds. “Sergeant Green, Dad’s got to go back to the transport.”

Rio glances at Walter, who nods, but he’s distracted, scanning ahead for other elements of his platoon as they close the distance to shore, a grim hopelessness in his eyes. She sees that his hands are trembling, watches as he closes them into tight fists, opens them again with the tremor gone.

They prop a calmed Daddy D against the side of the boat. There’s nothing to be done about his sitting in water. And then the front of Daddy D’s face explodes. Tilo yelps in fear and falls back. Rio and Frangie both recoil in shock. A random machine gun round has passed through the thin side of the boat and through the colored soldier’s face. Rio does not immediately notice that the largely spent round has gone into her own left thigh. In fact, Frangie sees it before she does.

“You’re hit!”

“No, I’m . . . Hey! What the . . .” Rio pulls at the hole and the reddening cloth of her uniform trousers. Frangie pushes Rio’s hands out of the way, snaps, “Let me do my job,” has scissors out and quickly cuts an X in Rio’s pants leg, exposing the wound. It looks nothing like what a machine gun wound should be. There is a simple hole but so shallow that the dull gray tail end of the slug is still visible.

Sergeant Cole and Jenou both come closer.

“Jesus, Rio, you’re hit!” Jenou cries.

“I don’t even feel it!”

“You will,” Frangie says grimly. “But you were lucky. Luckier than Daddy D, foolish man covering up epilepsy, rest in peace. And him with children too, poor babies.” Without a pause Frangie returns to Rio’s wound, saying, “I’m not seeing much blood, so I think I can pull it out without risking a major bleed.” Then, with a significant look, adds, “Or . . .”