Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(60)

The Milky Way shines cold and impossibly distant in a mostly clear sky, and eventually a sliver of moon rises as well. But still they fail to spot the four armed men who are walking the opposite direction and carrying shotguns, until Jack yells, “Drop it!”

Jack has his rifle leveled, and seeing this, every rifle in the squad snaps up. Even Petersen pulls his pistol. Had the Sicilian men been a bit more surprised the shooting might have started, but the men all keep their shotguns pointed cautiously down at the ground.

“Bandits,” Jack says tersely.

“Yeah,” Rio agrees, staring at four impassive Sicilian faces. “But they’re not looking for trouble with people who can shoot back.”

“Bona sira,” one of the Sicilians says in the local dialect.

“Evening,” Jack says.

“Amici,” Rio says. “Americans. Yankees.”

“Si, lu capisciu, signore, signorina.”

It sounds peaceable enough, and Rio orders her squad forward. The bandits are someone else’s problem, not hers.

After a while they reach a crossroads. Question is, is this the right crossroads?

Petersen speaks up for the first time. “Miss . . . um, Private Richlin? We could try contacting them.”

“What?”

“The plane. I thought you knew.” There’s a note of triumph in his tone. “That’s why I was sent along. The downed plane still has a functioning radio, although their signal is weak. That’s how we know where they are.”

No, no one has mentioned this fact to Rio, although it’s obvious once she thinks of it, which irritates her extremely. But there’s no point in resentment, so she says, “Okay, try to raise them.”

He swings the radio off his back onto the ground and squats before it. It’s a rectangular object, painted the inevitable olive drab. There are a few knobs on the top and a hand piece snugged into the side. Petersen fiddles with it then lifts the hand piece.

“AAC 5348, AAC 5348, this is Ditch Digger, do you copy?”

He repeats it half a dozen times, each time waiting, hearing nothing but static or garbled transmissions from other outfits on the same frequency. He fiddles with his dials and tries again.

“No dice,” Petersen says at last.

It was a waste of time, but it had been a good excuse to flop down and drink some water.

“Okay,” Rio says. “We’ll try again when we get to this lake.”

The lake in question is about a mile and a quarter long, half a mile wide. The downed plane is supposed to be on the near side, halfway up the lake. And it has supposedly set some of the trees afire, so they should either have a flame or at least the smell of smoke to guide them.

But the ground is getting rougher. Sicily in general is rock with only a scrape of topsoil, and here the topsoil is even more sparse, so the ground is at least half-naked rock. The path weaves through narrower and narrower ravines, with rock and gravel and scrub grass walls rising ever higher around them.

Perfect for an ambush.

Rio scans the heights around them constantly, but unless a Kraut stands up to allow himself to be conveniently silhouetted against the stars, there is little chance of spotting anyone. In fact it is so dark they can barely keep to the path let alone spot enemies.

But then the air changes. She smells the difference immediately: water. Moisture in the dry air. It can only be the lake, and indeed the path is now dropping away. On the downslope it is Rio’s thigh and the muscle at the front of her calves that take the most punishment.

Plus, she has to pee, but somehow calling a pee break does not seem like the most Cole-like thing to do. She runs through her memories. Has Sergeant Cole ever halted a patrol to take a leak? Not that she recalls. But still, she can’t be the only one who could use two minutes behind a boulder.

“We got some tree cover here,” she says. “Let’s take care of nature’s call.”

There follows an absurd rush as men and women disappear into the copse of trees.

One more thing to worry about: I am now the bathroom monitor.

In three minutes they are back on the move and soon see moonlight sparkling on water. Here the trees are thick enough to almost merit being called a wood.

There is indeed a smell of smoke—smoke and fuel. They fan out and wander south a bit, then turn back north and the smoke smell grows distinctly stronger. Then Cat points out that there is an unusual amount of fallen branches littering the ground. They gather around and stare down at the fallen foliage. Rio crushes pine needles, smells her fingers, and says, “It’s fresh. Can’t have been like this long.”

They follow north and now it is unmistakable that the tops of trees have been sheared off.

“The plane coming in, crashing,” Jack says. “It will have lopped off some treetops.”

At last they emerge into an open, grassy field, and there in the moonlight lies the wreckage of a plane. The fuselage is in two pieces, the nose and most of the fuselage, and a tail section broken off at an angle and lying fifty feet away. One wing is torn off at the roots and nowhere to be seen. The other wing with its two engines is still attached to the main section of fuselage, but it has been twisted like a piece of licorice, so both engines are pointed down at the ground, with props bent all the way back.

It is a B-17.

This comes as a shock. Rio had formed the picture of a downed fighter, an RAF Spitfire or American P-38. She had not imagined a bomber.