Front Lines

by Michael Grant

  “Millican! Get out of there! Move!” Cole yells. Millican jumps up, drops the bazooka, and hightails it after Magraff, but Pang snatches up the bazooka and run-hobbles away, trying to balance the long tube on one shoulder while pressing down on the ammo pouch to keep it from banging against his hip.

  BANG! The tank fires. That flat, metallic sound is followed instantly by a larger explosion as the shell blows apart the ground where Millican was just seconds before. Dust hides Hansu Pang from view.

  Is Pang hit?

  “Fall back!” Cole roars through cupped hands, but falling rock and dirt from the explosion and the shouts of the Italian infantry drown him out. “Put some fire on them!”

  It takes Rio several seconds to realize what he means. That he means that she should shoot. The sergeant is armed with a tommy gun, useless at this range: this is rifle work. This is M1 Garand work.

  Across the road the cloud of dust from the tank round blocks Sticklin’s view, which means there are only two rifles in a position to be fired. One is in Rio’s sweaty hands, the stock pressed to her cheek.

  She takes aim. They’ve taught her never to fire without picking a target. One individual target.

  One man.

  That one? The one to the left?

  Her finger is on the trigger. The safety is off. The rifle has a two-stage trigger. Pull first to take up slack. Then just the barest movement to fire. Five pounds of pressure on stage one. The same but a shorter pull for the actual firing.

  Her heart seems both too slow and too fast, like a car being run through the gears regardless of the engine.

  The first pull.

  Pull the trigger again and—

  “Shoot!” Sergeant Cole yells.

  Convulsively Rio pulls the trigger.

  The recoil punches her shoulder, but she’s used to that. She does not see where her shot goes—no way to be sure since she has not really aimed. Not really. Not like she did when she earned her Sharpshooter badge.

  Cole yells again. “Second Squad, fall back! Fall back!” and in a quieter tone, “Not you two.”

  The tanks are moving again, clank-clanking down the road, shifting through the gears. They’ll be here in thirty seconds. Their shells will arrive sooner.

  “Richlin! Suarez! Lay down some fugging fire,” Sergeant Cole yells.

  Now he’s firing his tommy gun, .45 caliber slugs in short bursts, a chug-a-chug-a-chug sound, but it’s nothing but a noisemaker at this distance.

  Shoot, Rio. Shoot.

  She aims. A man in a yellow-tan uniform. Two hundred yards away.

  He’s perfectly centered between the two curved uprights of the front sight, chest resting on the stubby center post, all contained within the circle of the rear sight.

  She draws a breath and lets it out as slowly as her racing metabolism will allow and—

  BAM!

  The familiar kick to her shoulder. The familiar cordite smell. The metallic clang as the spent brass spins through the air before dropping to the ground.

  The Italian soldier trips. He falls to one knee.

  He tripped. That’s all.

  The Italian drops his rifle. He clutches his thigh.

  My God, I hit him!

  “Keep it up, pour it on!”

  Chug-a-chug-a-chug-chug-a-chug-a-chug!

  Take aim.

  Choices. Three or four men in view. Which?

  You. The one with the mustache.

  Breathe in, out sloooow . . .

  BAM!

  A miss. She breathes a sigh of relief, only no, no, now the Italian is falling. Straight back. Like he’s falling in slow motion, an optical illusion that makes it seem that he’s shrinking not falling, until suddenly his knees buckle and his entire body crumples.

  A sob escapes her. She looks desperately to her right. Suarez is a ghost, pale, staring down the barrel of his rifle. Has he fired?

  Beyond him she sees the rest of Second Squad falling back, Hansu Pang alive still and hauling the bazooka, all of them are running low, holding their helmets with one hand, Millican alive too, Jenou with steel ammo boxes in each hand, struggling to run. The lead tank turns slightly and—

  BOOM!

  This round sails harmlessly over the squad’s heads to explode beyond them.

  “Keep it coming, Richlin!”

  Another target. Find the man. Find the one man who is going to die.

  No, I don’t want to, no, I don’t want to.

  Her body is a single tensed muscle, she’s hard as a board, her teeth will break if she clenches any harder.

  Tougher now. They’re running.

  The Italians know now they’re being fired on, they know they’re exposed and no matter what the Kraut officer yelled, they are ducking, running, cowering behind the tank, some preparing to return fire, most just trying to make themselves as small as possible.

  You.

  BAM!

  “Aaaahh!” Rio cries, and the sound is something animalistic, some terrible blend of terror and triumph.

  “Okay, Richlin, let’s go!” Cole grabs her shoulder, and she is aware in a distant, disconnected way that he’s had to repeat it a couple of times, so she rolls over, gets awkwardly to her knees, then jumps up to run with bullets whizzing by overhead.

  They run, the three of them, and ahead now she sees the rest of the squad. Jenou, still okay it seems, still hauling ammo though she’s lost her helmet and her short-cut blond hair is like a bird in panicked flight. The rear tank sends another round after them, blowing another hole in the desert, and lends speed to Rio’s legs.

  It is flat-out, undignified running, track and field, kicking divots in the dirt.

  Italian soldiers see them fleeing and now aim, aim at her, willing their bullets to find her, to blow a hole in her, to see her fall, to see her die. They’re shouting in their foreign tongue, angry, scared shouts, firing fast, bullets everywhere.

  Rio runs, Cole just behind her, Suarez ahead, runs and up ahead some rocks and the other squad is up in there, squinting from beneath their helmets, aiming their rifles but not shooting yet, not wanting to hit Second Squad.

  Rio pants and sweats though it is still cold, even with the sun coming up now in a clearing sky. She runs to catch up to her own long shadow.

  Suddenly the rest of the platoon opens up, blazes away at the advancing Italians as Rio, Suarez, and the sergeant rush past them, but already Rio sees some breaking, pelting away from the advancing Panzers.

  Rio falls into a bare scraped depression in the ground, each frantic breath painful in her raw throat. Her heart pounds like it will physically break her breastbone. Tilo Suarez drops beside her.

  “Fugging tanks!” he yells.

  “Unh,” she grunts in response.

  “Never even got a chance to get off a shot,” he says, like he’s making an excuse, like he’s defending himself.

  I shot at them.

  Tilo says, “On us too fast. We’re going to have to pull back. Tanks.” He sounds panicked.

  The Italians hang back a little now as the rest of both platoons fire into them. They hold back, letting the tanks run on ahead, but now there’s the German officer again in the staff car, yelling, berating them in harsh, German-accented Italian, clearly audible despite the cacophony of rifle fire. He waves a baton of some sort, a riding crop, waves it furiously, demanding the infantry advance.

  But the Italians, the distant descendants of the greatest empire the world has ever known, do not seem in a hurry to get shot at in this particular place at this particular time.

  Yet there’s no stopping the tanks. Someone from another squad fires a hasty bazooka round that does explode this time, but with all the apparent destructive effect of a cream puff thrown against a brick wall.

  The tank fires back, and as the explosion fades Rio hears screams. She starts firing, somewhat wildly, not targeting, not picking out individual targets now, just shooting off the remaining rounds in her clip, which pops out with a musical clang. Sh
e cannot at that particular moment, cannot, just cannot coldly locate and target an enemy. She can manage to fire, she can make noise with her rifle, but she cannot right then take careful deadly aim and end another life.

  She fumbles a clip from her belt and first tries to shove it in backward before turning it around and, with numb fingers, inserting it as she had done long ago in training, long ago, weeks ago, in the world of paper targets.

  BANG! and ka-boom! A tank fires and punches a round into the dirt just thirty feet from Rio, pelting her with debris that rattles on her helmet and dusts her shoulders and clogs the air.

  Cole yells, “Where’s the Loot? Where’s Liefer?”

  If the lieutenant is around, no one knows where she is. But Platoon Sergeant Garaman comes running up just then and says, “Come on, Cole, we’re falling back.”

  “Yeah,” Cole says, because there isn’t much else to say. It’s GIs versus tanks, and the bazookas aren’t doing a damned thing, so it’s fall back or die. “Fall back to where?”

  Garaman shakes his head. “I’ll be damned if I know, Jedron.”

  It is the first time Rio has ever heard anyone call Sergeant Cole by his first name. It’s a bad omen.

  “Well, I guess we aren’t knocking out any goddamn Kraut radio,” Cole mutters as Garaman stumbles away, looking for the lieutenant.

  All of Fifth Platoon is falling back. Running away. And seeing their backs, the emboldened Italians are hot on their heels and the tanks clank-clank-clank behind, the sound of doom.

  Rio runs with Sergeant Cole, who, like a magnet passing through metal filings, draws the rest of Second Squad behind him. Panic threatens to take over, Rio can feel it, can feel the razor edge of her own panic. Her combat boots seem unnaturally loud scrambling across loose rock and sand, sometimes silent as she leaps small depressions, panting, panting, gasping for breath in a burning throat.

  Ahead she sees a gun of some sort, like a howitzer but smaller. It has a vertical rectangle of steel plate pierced by about four feet of barrel. British commandos man it, four of them, judging by the shallow soup-bowl helmets crouching behind the gun. One of the commandos is improbably smoking a pipe.

  “Get past that two-pounder, join up with the Tommies,” Cole yells.

  Rio goes tearing past the two-pounder, runs on another twenty feet and sees that the commandos have dug in, and drops herself into a foxhole no more than eighteen inches deep and just wide enough for her to cower in.

  But the commando sergeant in the hole isn’t having it. “You can bugger off, mate.” Then he looks at her and does a double take. “Sorry, miss. But you still aren’t taking my hole. Keep running, we’ll take care of Jerry.”

  Rio hesitates, searches for Cole, and sees him in heated argument with the British captain, who keeps hacking at the air in a way that makes it clear he’d like the Americans to just keep on running.

  Cole has no choice and yells for Fifth Platoon to fall back. He’s not the platoon sergeant, still less the lieutenant, but he’s there and seems to have some idea what he’s doing, so both American platoons gladly accept his order and now all of them, all the Americans, run away. Run down the road. One soldier throws away his rifle the better to run.

  It is a rout. It is panic, outright panic now.

  It is about to get worse.

  27

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—MAKTAR, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

  “Do they no longer teach spelling in school?” Sergeant Rainy Schulterman waves a paper in the air. “There, their, they’re. Three different words! They are not interchangeable.”

  Steam comes from her mouth as she speaks. It is cold. She has been typing with fingerless gloves on, and, in addition to two T-shirts, two pairs of socks, her regular uniform, and a field jacket, she wears a sweater knitted by her aunt Zaz. Aunt Zaz (short for Zlota) is an indifferent craftsman, but she has had the great good sense to knit the sweater using olive drab yarn, so it does not scream civilian even though the crew neck peeks out from beneath Rainy’s jacket.

  She is assigned to a small, forward detachment of General Lloyd Fredendall’s headquarters, largely, she believes, because she can type sixty words a minute with few errors, and she speaks fluent German. All too often for Rainy’s taste this ends up meaning that she’s just a glorified secretary.

  In fact, she’s noticing that the secretarial duties keep growing, while work related to her training and skills is handled by male soldiers.

  The Detachment has an official numeric designation as part of II Corps, but is never called anything but “the Detachment” or occasionally, Maktar—the nearest Arab town—familiarly rendered as “Mucked Up.”

  General Fredendall has not endeared himself to his soldiers with his decision to keep his own headquarters very far to the rear, where he is rumored to be expending prodigious engineering energies and resources in building tunnels in mountains to safeguard himself from air raids that never come.

  There is one good thing from Rainy’s perspective. The general’s distance has led to the establishment of various outposts—like cavalry forts in the Old West—around Algeria and Tunisia in a system that makes it still harder for the general to track or respond to events in the area of his command, which is essentially all of North Africa this side of Casablanca.

  Having formed a harsh opinion of the general, Rainy is relieved not to be in the general’s new cave.

  On a couple of occasions Rainy has ventured into Maktar itself to see the magnificent Roman ruins dating back to Trajan. And from some of the windows in the Detachment’s walled compound, Rainy can gaze out on a still-more-ancient Roman aqueduct. The area is neck-deep in history and unfortunately completely lacking in heat.

  “What is it now, Schulterman?” Staff Sergeant Pooley, seated at the desk across from Rainy’s, asks wearily.

  “A report that says, ‘They’re—t-h-e-y apostrophe r-e—tanks are coming through the gap,’ is not the same as a report that says, ‘Their—t-h-e-i-r—tanks are coming through the gap.’”

  The staff sergeant nods. He is twenty years older than Rainy and forms the calm counterpoint to her passion. He doesn’t seem to dislike her, but neither does he see much use for her. He is old army, and absolutely no one old army favors women soldiers. Neither do 90 percent of new army officers and noncoms, but among the old guard it is unanimous. Nevertheless, Sergeant Pooley has never been unpleasant about it.

  “Your language skills are commendable, Schulterman. Therefore consider yourself commended.”

  Rainy aims her big eyes at him and considers a smartass retort. But she likes Pooley. He has tolerated her, and she is aware that she’s a person who requires tolerance, and not just because of her gender. The phrase “does not suffer fools gladly” very definitely applies to Rainy. She makes a note to herself to attempt greater tolerance for fools in the future.

  Pooley’s phone rings. He listens, says, “Yes, sir,” and hangs up. “You’re up, Schulterman. Staff meeting. They need someone to take notes.”

  Rainy jumps up, arranges her uniform, tries to squeeze the bulk out of her sweater, checks her hair, grabs her notebook and three sharpened pencils, and is on her way in fifteen seconds. Buck sergeants do not keep colonels waiting.

  She slips unobtrusively into the conference room where Colonel George Jasper and his staff are gazing thoughtfully at a map spread out across a long, rectangular table.

  The colonel is not an impressive figure. He is nearly as small as Rainy herself, is often indifferently turned out, has a lugubrious hound dog face, and despite being third-generation military and a professional soldier who graduated in the respectable middle of his West Point class, seems to have no gift for commanding respect. His staff officers range from incompetent to excellent, but the colonel, much like the general, his boss, has no great talent for differentiating the two.

  They are discussing intelligence reports that the Germans are either launching or about to launch a full-scale attack. Rainy faithfully writes down the essential
s of the conversation, using her own version of shorthand. “C” is the colonel. “S2” is his intelligence chief, Lieutenant Colonel Courter Clay, a sour-faced, brush-mustached, cold fish of a man with wide-set eyes that stare challengingly out from beneath impressive iron-filing eyebrows. He has the look of an unpleasant private school headmaster.

  The other major participants in the conference are: 1) a British major named Wiltshire (W), who is supposed to be the liaison with the Britain forces but spends most of his time frowning at documents he doesn’t read; 2) another lieutenant colonel, Kanly Coffee (KC), whose main duty appears to be acting as General Fredendall’s spy; and 3) a major from the air corps named Bencell, abbreviated not as B but as (A) for air.

  C—Likely just probe.

  S2—Don’t believe so. Three forward units report contact w/ German or mixed Germ-Ital units.

  C—Reports like this before. What sense wd it make? Germans between us & Monty’s whole army. No sense.

  KC—If we panic at every report . . .

  C—Maybe if we had air recon.

  A—No planes to spare for recon.

  C—Wiltshire?

  W—Nothing. Monty does not see evidence of attack.

  Rainy at this point could very well stop taking notes—she doesn’t—because she’s been around long enough to recognize the sounds of paralysis. The only officer she really trusts is the one she likes least: the S2, Colonel Clay.

  Lieutenant Colonel Clay is, as Sergeant Pooley has observed, “a humorless prick,” but he has energy and determination, which set him apart from the lethargy at this outpost, and indeed the lethargy throughout II Corps.