Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

  Rio is unnerved by the helplessness of being trapped in the boat, nowhere to run to, nowhere to dig a fighting hole, no cover, no control. No one to shoot. Any random shell . . . Tilo Suarez is working his rosary; Pang is mouthing silent words that must surely be a prayer. Rio thinks a quick Take care of me, Lord, but is too restless and worried to focus on divine intervention.

  “Figures, fugging Nigras,” Geer mutters. “Going to get us killed.”

  Pang says, “Looks to me like the guy driving the boat is white.” This earns him a shrug from Geer.

  The rope is secured and drawn tight across a mere twenty feet of water. Looking over the side, Rio can see the sandbar just below the surface, revealed and then concealed by each passing wave, like a fan dancer teasing. They try pulling the stuck boat free, but a cleat breaks loose and the rope has to be reattached, and now the effort focuses on getting the trapped GIs to crawl along the rope.

  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 . . .”

  “Or what?” Rio is fascinated by the wound. It doesn’t hurt, but she is quite sure Frangie is right and that it will hurt later. There’ll be a big bruise and the shallow hole will take some time to heal.

  She glances up and sees the colored soldier, still sitting, portions of his face hanging down in tatters. There’s a meaty hole where his nose should be, a red and pink and white hole, with an eye to either side and a blood-filled mouth below. But Hansu Pang has pulled a poncho from Daddy D’s pack and is now spreading it over him.

  “Or,” Frangie is saying, “you could go back with the other wounded and be properly treated.”

  Rio stares blankly, not quite sure what’s being suggested until Jenou says, “She’s giving you a way out, honey. Take it!”

  Then Rio understands. She can avoid the landing, perhaps avoid several days or even weeks of battle. She can lie on a nice clean hospital ship bed with sheets and hot coffee and . . .

  Geer is looking askance at her, waiting, judging. Suarez looks worried. Even Sergeant Cole looks troubled.

  “No,” Rio says, shaking her head and frowning dismissively. “Do it now. Do it here.”

  “You’ll most likely feel this,” Frangie warns. She has her forceps in hand. With all the care she can manage in the vibrating, bucking, salt-spray-washed boat, she clamps the serrated teeth of the forceps onto a jagged protrusion on the metal slug. Rio winces. They are very definitely in range of small arms fire now, as if any further proof were needed, and bullets sing and buzz overhead.

  “Okay, on the count of three. One . . .” She pulls the bullet out like a cork from a bottle of wine. There’s some blood, but it’s oozing, not pumping.

  “Five minutes!” the coxswain yells down.

 
“What happened to counting to three?” Rio asks archly.

  “Misdirection,” Frangie says, but she’s not chatty. She’s quickly breaking out a suturing kit, not so very different from the standard sewing kit.

  “These won’t be pretty stitches,” Frangie says through gritted teeth. “No time for pretty.”

  “That’s a shame, her legs are her best feature,” Jenou says, and pats Rio’s helmet comfortingly.

  A part of Rio notes the fact that they’ve just seen a man’s face blown off and while they are shaken, they are not panicked. Maybe it’s the fatalism of veterans. Maybe it’s the fact that it was just a colored man who died.

  “Ow!” Rio yells as the needle goes in. This she feels, and she is incongruously transported back to the hotel room in Tunis, back to the moment when she crossed the line between girl and woman. There had been a similar sharp pain, a surprising pain, but one that did not cause her to pull back. She had been almost helpless beneath Strand, feeling the full weight of a man on her for the first time, feeling the discomfort as he accidentally pulled her hair with his arms straining beside her head, feeling involved yet distant in a way.

  He had wanted it. He had wanted sex, but yes, so had she, there was no point deceiving herself. She could have stopped it at any point. She had wanted to know it and understand it, but looking back now she did not feel that she had been somehow transformed. She was no longer a virgin, and my God, her entire life she’d been told how terribly important it was for her to remain a virgin, that magic word. But what did it matter, really?

  Strand, too, had suggested an escape, just as Frangie was doing now: Escape through wound? Escape through pregnancy? Was it some kind of omen that two people had now offered her a way out? Was God trying to tell her something?

  Probably not, God, Rio thinks, abashed at the tension between thoughts of an all-seeing divinity and the forbidden thing she had done with Strand.

  Anyway, God wouldn’t kill her for fornicating. Would He?

  I have a bullet hole in my leg, I’m three minutes from the beach, and I’m worried God will strike me down for fornication.

  Steady, girl. Steady.

  “Okay, I’m doing three more stitches,” Frangie Marr says. “Go ahead and yell if you want.”

  “Richlin yell and admit she’s human?” Cat teases.

  Three more sutures follow and Rio almost does yelp in pain, but now she can’t, can she? She can’t without seeming to playact, to be someone the others didn’t think she is.

  I’m playing a role now. I’m an actor playing the role of warrior.

  She looks around at the boat, at the scared, wet, shocked faces and realizes, Oh, they’re playing too: pretending nonchalance and doing an unconvincing job of it.

  We’re all scared to death and pretending to be brave.

  The first time—her first landing on a hostile beach—she had wondered whether she was brave. She had imagined losing control of herself, throwing down her rifle and fleeing. She had imagined the shame of it.

  Were they all thinking the same thing? Were they all terrified of a bullet like the one that had blown open the Negro’s face, but more terrified still of the shame of running away?

  “It’s too wet for tape,” Frangie says. “I’m going to wrap gauze around your leg and tie it off. It’ll probably slip if you run around much. Try to keep dirt out of it. Check in with one of your own medics as soon as possible.”

  “All right, people,” Sergeant Cole says. “Saddle up, you know the drill. Keep your weapons high and dry, keep your heads down. We rally on Lieutenant Vanderpool, he’s a hundred yards down on our left.”

  The experienced soldiers have used condoms to cover the business end of their rifles, more to keep sand out than water.

  Walter says, “We’ll hang back until your people are clear, Cole. Best I can tell what’s left of my boys are way off to the south. Good luck.”

  Cole glances at the poncho covering Daddy D. “Sorry about your men.”

  “It’s war,” Walter says, but there’s a quiver in his voice.

  “Ain’t it just,” Cole agrees sourly.

  “Jasper, you ride back out with Daddy D,” Green orders. “I want him cared for, best they can.”

  Jasper is too shaken up to argue. Almost his entire squad is dead. Rio thinks, He’s got no one to shame him into bravery now.

  Rio tests her leg. It works. She ritually checks her M1, checks the straps on her pack, checks her belt, and slaps her palm on the front of her helmet to get it seated just right. Then, an afterthought: she looks ahead at the beach, still two minutes away. She estimates. She has time.

  “Jen! Get my knife out of my pack for me.”

  “What?”

  “Just get it!”

  The knife, the koummya, and its scabbard emerge. Rio has attached rawhide strips to act as a belt and quickly straps it to her uninjured right thigh, as high up as it will ride without bumping into her dangling canteen. She twists her belt slightly and tests her reach, dropping her hand several times to find the hilt.

  When she looks up she intercepts a strange, cold look from Jenou. But there’s no time to ask for an explanation, and anyway Jenou shakes her head in feigned amusement, killing the moment.

  Jenou wants me to take the easy way out, Rio thinks. She doesn’t understand. First Strand and now Jenou willing her to grab any excuse to go.

  Neither of them understands.

  The boat is in close, but the hull has not yet scraped sand. The coxswain drops the ramp, which splashes into the water, and the men and women of Second Squad go pelting out. Tilo, Pang, and Cat are in the lead, and the three of them fall from view, dropping straight down into eight feet of water.

  “Goddammit!” Cole roars. “We’re too far out!”

  The coxswain throws the boat into reverse and starts to raise the ramp again. Cole strips off his pack, tosses his Thompson to Jack, and readies to jump in after his men. Rio is right behind him, tearing off her pack and tossing her rifle to Jillion, and, somewhat to her surprise, Geer is diving in as well. Geer has had the presence of mind to grab a rope.

  Rio jumps feetfirst and plows down until the soles of her boots land on shifting sand. She opens her eyes underwater and spots Tilo, suddenly brilliantly lit by a star shell exploding high above them. He’s desperately trying to get his pack off his back. His eyes are wide with terror. Bubbles escape from his mouth.

  Rio kicks and glides toward him, drawing her koummya as she goes. Tilo nearly brains her with a panicky fist, but she slips past him, glides around behind, grabs his pack with one hand, and inserts the koummya between Tilo’s shoulder blade and the strap. One quick slice cuts through, and Tilo is able to shrug off the rest as Rio gets beneath him and pushes his head up into the air.

  It’s not so hard, Rio thinks. Long as you don’t panic. Salt water stings the wound on her thigh.

  Tilo manages to remove his own belt. He can swim well enough at least to keep afloat once unburdened. Rio surfaces, gasping for air, and gets a bellyful of salt water instead. She gags and coughs and looks wildly around to see that the boat is now forty feet away. The remaining soldiers are yelling a blue streak at the coxswain. Cole is bobbing a few feet away with Cat in the crook of his arm. Cat is sputtering and trying to yell, but white foam rolls over them both.

  “Geer!” Rio shouts. “Geer!”

  There’s a porpoise-like eruption and Geer appears. He has an unconscious Hansu Pang in his arms and is fighting to keep him afloat. Tilo, now mostly recovered, swims to his aid, and between them they pass the rope around Pang, who is larger and heavier than he looks, and haul him like a fish toward the beach. The sand rises beneath them, allowing their boots to first touch and push off, and then to walk, fighting the retreating waves and allowing incoming waves to help to push them toward the shore.

  It’s like moving through molasses, as if the Mediterranean, having once tasted them, is reluctant to spit them out. Finally, Rio collapses face-first on the beach. She
hugs the sand, gasping for air and retching up seawater.

  Geer is astride Pang, pushing down on his chest, forcing water from his lungs. Suddenly Pang coughs back to life and Geer stands and steps back, as if now wishing to deny any connection to the weakly stirring GI.

  Frangie Marr is running beside Walter Green, a hundred yards down the beach where the landing craft has finally beached. The boat is already turning back toward the transport.

  And with that a badly shaken Second Squad, Fifth Platoon, is ashore on Sicily, minus a good portion of its ammo, some of its weapons, and way too much of its food.

  But alive.

  13

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—ABOARD HMS TOPAZ, TYRRHENIAN SEA

  The first dive was just a test dive. As were the next three. Lieutenant Commander Alger and his officers are keeping the crew at the peak of training.

  Cisco has spent most of a week drugged and lashed into his hammock. From time to time he’s been allowed up on deck to blink blearily at the sun before being led on wobbly legs back to his opium dreams.

  This is certainly a unique way to contribute to the war effort.

  It is also troubling at a moral level. The medic has confirmed that laudanum can become addicting. He doesn’t think it will happen in a week’s time, but he admits he knows very little. He’s not a doctor in any real sense of the word, just a medic, whose job is to deal with the various crushing and pinching and scalding and chemical inhalation injuries caused by the regular operation of the Topaz.

  So between them, Rainy and the medical officer may be turning a gangster into a drug addict. For the war effort.

  Lieutenant Commander Alger summons Rainy to the bridge.

  “Sergeant, I thought you might like to know that we are just south of Capri, twenty-four miles from our target.”

  She’s been expecting this. She nods.

  “We are far closer to the Italian coast than we should like under normal circumstances. I’m rather hoping that Jerry’s eye is focused on the fighting in Sicily and that he has few planes or boats to spare looking for subs. It’s night and the moon has set, so I’ll stay on the surface just a bit longer before submerging. We will pop up near the beach, get you and your . . . charge . . . ashore, submerge again, and creep away. I’d say that you should be ready to go in half an hour.”