Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(83)

Didn’t.

It’s a sickening, grinding thing inside her, a weight, like she’s swallowed a cannonball. She feels a poison spread through her body, a sapping weariness. It will swallow her up if she lets it. It will grow and consume her, she knows that, and she fights it down, fights it down like a seasick person straining not to puke.

He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, and he’s lying there chewed up like a . . .

Tilo Suarez has joined Kerwin Cassel in whatever place dead soldiers go to. Maybe heaven. Maybe hell. Maybe oblivion. Tilo would have wanted none of those choices. Tilo would only have wanted to go home.

He’s dead, just like Cassel, but with one terrible difference: she was leading the patrol.

Tilo’s death is on her.





27

RIO RICHLIN—A VILLAGE IN ITALY

Jenou says, “What about we make our own path?”

“What?” Rio snaps at her. It’s getting harder to ignore a growing distance between them, a cordial, polite, but definite distance.

No time to worry about that, there is a war on.

I lost Suarez.

Jenou’s eyes flare and she almost turns sullen, but she shakes her head and says, “Listen, maybe this is stupid, but instead of crawling down the street in the open, why don’t we go through the walls between all these buildings?”

“Because they’re walls?” Cat says.

“We blow a hole in ’em with grenades,” Jenou says. “Look at the angle: Krauts can’t see through walls, right? All these buildings have connecting walls, so we can push through them while still being covered by the exterior walls facing the street.”

“Huh,” Stick says thoughtfully.

Rio, already regretting snapping at Jenou, says, “Could work.”

It’s not Jen’s fault Suarez is dead.

“Probably six, seven walls,” Beebee estimates. He’s holding up well aside from having dropped his rifle and almost shooting a major when the gun went off. That incident of course led to a lot of teasing but also a more general acceptance of him as part of the platoon. Any enlisted man who can make an officer leap into a chow line steam table full of bacon is an instant hero.

“Okay,” Stick says. “Here’s how we do it. Richlin, Castain, and Preeling—maybe you’ll find a toilet, Preeling—blow out the walls. But we synchronize our watches, then every time you toss a grenade, we throw one here too, maybe the Krauts only count that as one and they don’t figure out what we’re doing. Get set up, send Preeling back, and let us know. Then Preeling fires two quick rounds as a signal, count twenty seconds exactly, then bang-bang. Got it?”

They had it.

Rio, Jenou, and Cat crawl to the nearest doorway on their right. Easier said than done, given that rubble practically chokes the doorway in question. A mortar round lands on the burning tank, turning the charcoal body to fine ash. Once inside they find a barbershop with a single swivel chair, shattered jars of pomade and perfume and hair dyes that fill the narrow room with a sweet chemical stink. The wall they need to blow up is fronted by built-in cabinetry and a long mirror.

“That’s a complication,” Jenou says.

They are able to stand, the three of them, now that they are no longer in the line of fire. Rio has the feeling this may be the first time in three days she’s stood all the way up. Cat rushes to the back of the shop and yells back, “My God, there’s toilet paper!”

“Take whatever you don’t use!” Jenou says. There is a chronic shortage of toilet paper.

Rio and Jenou, side by side, stare at their reflections in the barber’s mirror: two young women, uniformed, covered in dust, faces white with sweat-streaked plaster dust, helmets low on their foreheads, rifle and carbine respectively propped on hips, and in Rio’s case a big knife strapped to her thigh.

Jenou sighs. “I remember when I used to be sexy.”

Rio nods and sighs. “Dear Strand: this is a picture of me at work.”

Cat’s back in three minutes, by which time Rio and Jenou have broken the mirror with blows from their rifle butts—great fun—and have begun to yank the cabinet free of the wall.

“Okay,” Rio says. “Ready, Cat?”

Cat runs back to the doorway, aims her rifle up in the air, squeezes off two shots.

Rio stares fixedly at her watch. “Cat, Jen, back to the bathroom.”

“Oh, I don’t think you want to go in there,” Cat warns.

“Fourteen seconds,” Rio says.

“Come on,” Jenou says, grabs Cat by the arm and pulls her along, saying, “It’s okay, Cat, we know your shit stinks.”

“Not yours, though,” Cat says.

“Of course not,” Jenou says. “Mine couldn’t.”

Suarez has not yet been dead an hour and already the teasing, the mordant GI sense of humor, is back. Days of mourning for Kerwin Cassel; an hour for Suarez. In another month or two will anyone even pause to take note of a new death?

Rio has a grenade in hand. She pulls the pin. The fuse doesn’t light until she releases the clip and she counts the seconds down. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.

On five she releases the clip, hears the fuse pop, rolls the grenade against the base of the wall, and leaps to join her friends in an admittedly fragrant bathroom.