Cole has walked on, and now Jenou, in a stage whisper, says, “Rio? If I don’t make it . . .”
“Shut up, you’re going to make it,” Rio snaps.
Look for the officer. Keep fire on him.
Kill him.
“Yeah, well, if I don’t, promise you’ll marry Strand. And if you have a girl, name her after me. Jenou. It can be her middle name, that’s okay.”
“If I have a girl I’m going to name her Jenou, all right, but I’ll make her pronounce it with a hard j.”
There’s no laugh in response, instead a long silence in which they can begin to hear the clank of half-track treads, not as insistently frightening as a tank, but not nothing either, and the grinding of truck gears.
“I’m scared,” Jenou says in the voice of a much younger self.
“We’re all scared.”
“Yeah, but I’m too cute to die,” Jenou says. “And, uh, I’m sorry I got us into this. It’s just . . .” She shakes her head. “My home isn’t like yours, honey. I needed to get away.”
Rio has long sensed something dark about Jenou’s family, but though they have talked of many things, shared many things, Jenou has seldom spoken about her parents other than to dismiss them as a pair of drunks. Jenou has built a wall around whatever her secret is.
Someday I’ll get her to tell me, Rio thinks. If there’s a someday.
“You didn’t twist my arm, Jen.”
“Goddammit, Rio. This was not what I had in mind.”
“FUBAR,” Rio says.
Jenou manages a short laugh. “How did we ever get by without that word in civilian life?”
“Folks weren’t shooting at us.”
“You’re my best friend, Rio. I would not have made it without you. Not back home, not in basic.”
Rio feels emotion rising in her. There’s a lump in her throat. But this is not the time. This is not the time for emotion.
“You’d have been fine,” Rio says curtly. She wants now to focus on the job ahead. On enfilade and defilade. On windage and elevation. Not feelings, not even friendship.
Waiting in her hole in the Tunisian desert, with German trucks and half-tracks, Kraut soldiers and their machine guns that fired fifteen hundred rounds per minute, twenty-five lead slugs every second, each one traveling at 2,461 feet per second, Rio does not want to remember home. She is here.
Here.
“I don’t want you to die, Rio. You’re all I’ve got,” Jenou says.
“Everyone’s scared,” Rio snaps. Then, desperate to ease the tension, she adds, “Everyone except Stick.”
Stick, in his hole to their left, says, “Well, I haven’t pissed myself yet, but the day is young.”
The lights crawl. The sound of engines grows. The head of the column is even with them now, somewhere between a hundred feet and a mile off, distances still impossible to judge well in the inky black.
Blow up the supply column, and run like hell before the tanks get here for the rendezvous.
Stars are visible now, as scattered high cumulus clear just enough to let starlight edge the clouds in silver. If only the moon had not set. Rio suddenly craves the reassurance of the moon.
She prays for survival, for courage. For a drink of water in a mouth as dry as the sand.
A shout!
Flares shoot up into the sky, long, red, smoky trails that zig and zag as they climb.
And . . . burst!
Eerie red light reveals a half-track, a line of trucks—six, eight—a staff car, another half-track, and lagging a little behind, still almost invisible in darkness, an ambulance.
Hark Millican’s bazooka fires. Fwooosh!
It hits the lead half-track dead center. The explosion ejects German soldiers like popcorn.
Find the officer!
If their commander was in the lead half-track, he’s either dead or definitely distracted, because fire is raging up through the vehicle. And now Stick opens up and there’s fire all down the line, M1s and carbines and BARs.
“Two fifty yards!” Sergeant Cole shouts above the sudden eruption of shattering noise.
With trembling fingers Rio clicks the wheel on her rifle. No wind.
The staff car. She sees it, sees three indistinct shapes, sees that the driver has gunned the engine. She sees the light of the flares is dying, more are launched, and already the Germans are shooting back, aiming blind, but firing at where they guess the flares came from. Soon they’ll sight on the sources of tracer fire, but the Germans are in the open and the Americans are in holes.
A second bazooka round from the other platoon and the hollow sound of the sole mortar and Rio lines her sights up on the staff car.
Bang!
No way to tell if she missed or where the bullet fell.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Jenou is blasting away now on Rio’s right, Sticklin’s BAR rattles out a stream of bullets, red tracers rising across the sand as he finds his range and pours lead into one of the tanker trucks.
We light them up and open up, Cole said earlier.
Rio has lost sight of the staff car. She pushes her helmet back to get a better view, rises in her hole; where the hell is it?
There! Racing to get out in front of the burning half-track.
Rio fires after it. It’s a tracer round, and she can see it hit but can’t tell whether it hit steel or flesh.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Clang!
Empty clip. She pulls another from her belt and slams it home. Bang! Bang!
The staff car is still moving, but it tips into a ditch or depression and rolls partway onto its side.
Ba-woosh!
A tanker truck explodes, spraying flaming fuel. It looks like a deadly flower blooming at accelerated speed. Rio hears screams. A man is on fire, running, a torch in the dark. The burning gasoline outlines the staff car. She sees a helmet.
Bang! Bang!
A mortar round stops a second tanker. It does not explode, but it’s not moving either, and out of the corner of her eye Rio sees the driver leaping from the truck.
Everywhere are shouts and cries, both sides yelling versions of kill them and help me and cursing, but they are small sounds in contrast with the steady staccato of rifle fire and the intermittent roar of the BAR.
The second half-track is making a move toward the front. It goes around to the east side of the column, visible now only in the gaps between trucks.
“I got movement here!” It’s Jenou, the dangling end of their too-short line.
Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, rifle and machine pistol fire erupts, fast but disciplined fire, veteran troops for whom this is not their first ambush. They are trying to flank the line, crossing the T that will let them roll up the line, foxhole by foxhole, while the Americans can’t shoot for fear of killing their own people.
A scream. More fire.
“Suarez, Preeling, Stafford!” Sergeant Cole shouts. “On our right, on our right! Castain, Richlin, drop back behind Stick. Stick, you open up soon as they’re clear!”
Jenou pops up out of her foxhole and runs past. She’s forgotten her rifle.
Rio has been ordered back, but she knows she’s not in Stick’s line of fire, and she thinks she sees a head that is adorned not by a helmet but by a peaked cap. She aims.
The BAR, Suarez, Preeling, and Jack open up on the advancing Germans, but the fire coming back the other way is just as intense.
Rio cannot look at that, cannot waste the time to look at the Germans now just a hundred yards away, she has a target.
Bang! Bang! Two shots, the first one carefully aimed, the second sloppier, but a peaked cap flies off the distant head.
Now, Rio twists to face the advancing Germans. There must be twenty of them, twenty against five while the remainder of the squad continue to fire on the column.
Rio aims, fires, aims, fires. Germans fall but they keep coming, heads low, firing from the hip, running straight into the BAR and rifle fire, and Rio thinks, They’re bett
er than we are. My God, look at them!
Another clip gone and the reload jams. She feels frantically, pushing, pulling, banging with the heel of her hand until the clip slides free. She reloads carefully this time, carefully, but the butternut uniforms are right there, right there. Bang! Bang! Bang!
Something fast dings her helmet. Something else plucks at her collar.
She keeps firing, firing, and reloading, and now the Germans are hesitating, two drop into Jenou’s abandoned foxhole, but the German fire still comes fast and accurate, and there’s nothing to be done now but to keep shooting back.
The battlefield is silent.
The sound of her own heart.
The sound of her breath.
The silent impact of the rifle butt on her shoulder as she fires round after round, reloads, fires.
Off to her left another tanker truck explodes.
Have we done enough? Can we run away now?
Suddenly Rio is shaking, her entire body, every muscle so weak she can’t stay up, she slumps into her hole, drawing her helmet down out of the line of fire as the BAR’s tracers arc overhead to seemingly bounce back as German bullets.
Rio is praying aloud now, praying gibberish interspersed with the kind of curses that once would have made her blush, stars in the sky above, God up there somewhere, three clips left, three clips, twenty-four bullets.
And three grenades.
There’s a tunnel in space, a warping of the fabric of reality between Rio and the Germans. She sees nothing but the end of that tunnel, nothing else exists. Just that space directly before her, just the enemy.
The location of Jenou’s foxhole is clear in her mind. She unhooks a grenade and crooks her finger through the pin.
She pulls the pin. Her hand, tight now, strong in a kind of spasm, holding down the lever.
Release it. Release it and throw. Release it and throw, Rio, do it.
Rio releases the lever, which cartwheels away as the fuse pops and now just four seconds. She does not throw. One. Two. And . . . she stands up, head just inches below the BAR fire, and throws.
36
FRANGIE MARR—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA
Frangie changes every bandage. She sews up a split finger, irrigates an eye crusted shut with blood, and manages to do it despite rude thrusting fingers and groping hands.
The column is driving on relentlessly, no longer on anything resembling a road but pushing out into open desert. The overcast skies keep Allied air power from spotting them, but there are many nervous glances skyward from wounded and healthy soldiers alike.
Eventually she is given a can of tinned meat and crackers. It’s what the German soldiers are eating, and grumbling as they do so. The grumbling is not comprehensible, but is nevertheless familiar to Frangie. Soldiers complain; German, American, every kind of soldier.
An open staff car carries the black-uniformed officer who ordered her patient shot and a second officer in the more familiar butternut khaki. There is clearly no love lost between these two as she learns from their body language, each on his own side of the car, each avoiding looking at the other.
A young German who is missing his right foot rides along in the truck and offers her a half cigarette. Frangie doesn’t smoke, and in any case fears if she takes it she’ll be accepting some unspoken bargain. She shakes her head no.
The soldier shrugs, says something to his companion, gets a laugh in return.
The ambulance is just behind them and off to one side to avoid the vast clouds of choking dust the truck tires throw up. The ambulance driver leans out of his window and yells something that Frangie does not understand but contains one word she has learned: schwarze.
Black.
The cigarette soldier gives her a light shove and waves her toward the ambulance, but they’re moving at a steady twenty miles an hour. Maybe she can jump off the truck, but she can’t climb onto the ambulance.
Another shout, an impatient wave, and Hungry Eyes, the lowering brute who seems more or less in charge of the wounded, says something that causes cigarette soldier to shove her again, harder.
She stands up, bracing against the lurching, spine-jarring assault of the truck’s suspension, climbs as far down as she can, down onto the bumper, takes a deep breath, and jumps the last two feet. Unsurprisingly she stumbles, falls on her back, and rolls onto her side to stand up.
The ambulance comes to a halt beside her. The back door now flies open and the Doctor-Major yells, “Get in here, American.”
The inside of the ambulance reeks of sweat, vomit, human waste, and fear. The sides are lined with stretchers hinged to the walls, three on each side, but there are two men in each cot, lying head to foot, and three more sitting hunched over against the front of the rectangular space.
Frangie frantically runs through what she knows about typhus, but that turns out to be almost nothing.
The Doctor-Major says, “Lice,” as if answering her query. “We raided a village, not knowing . . . Some of the men passed their time with the women, many of whom turned out to be louse-ridden with rickettsia typhi–bearing lice. It’s a nasty little disease that displays as a very severe headache, fever, cough, muscle pain . . . death in usually twenty percent or so of healthy men, but these are not healthy men, these are exhausted men who have gone too often without food or water or sanitation.”
The men are either stripped down to their underwear or buried in blankets, depending on the state of their fevers. Frangie sees rashes from the illness, but also protruding ribs and injuries in various stages of healing . . . or not healing.
“I have had no sleep in three days,” the Doctor-Major says. “I must sleep.”
His eyes are glassy, his whiskered face sallow.
“Have you taken your own temperature, Doctor-Major?”
He hesitates, bites his lip. “One hundred point five. And yes, my head aches and my muscles as well. I pray it is not typhus or who will care for these men? It is only me.”
He pulls a blanket from a man who, Frangie now sees, is dead. He spreads the blanket out on the filthy floor, lies down, mutters something about rationing the water, they always want water, and falls asleep.
Wasser. That was the German word for water. There is a tin ten-gallon tank bolted to the wall behind one of the seated men. A tin cup hangs from a chain and rattles softly.
Schwarze, give me water . . .
I want morphine, kaffer, this pain . . .
I am so cold . . .
They are the enemy, and they have come down with this disease as a consequence of attacking a village and raping the women. They are abusive, despite being sick, arrogant though prone. These are not fresh recruits, that is clear from their disease-yellowed tans, the ancient scars, and the tattoos that proudly advertise the names of battles they fought against the British and the French before them.
First: love. That was what my faith has taught me.
Love even those that hate you.
Well, Frangie Marr is nowhere near summoning love for these men, but she can dole out water and hold the bucket for men who vomited, and she can spoon-feed potted meat and rehydrated cabbage to the men who can eat. She can do that.
Hour after hour the column lurches on. An especially sharp jolt wakes the Doctor-Major, who rises groggily to check on his patients. A new one arrives to be manhandled into the back of the ambulance, and is laid on the blanket the Doctor-Major had vacated, both Frangie and the German doctor straining weary muscles.
Frangie leaves the door swinging open, squeaking and banging as the ambulance hits ruts and gullies and climbs soft hillocks of sand with grinding gears. The fresh air is worth the noise. Night has long since come and is now threatened by just a hint of gray in the east. A half-track is behind them and to one side, headlights slitted, machine limned by silver starlight.
“How much longer?” Frangie asks.
The Doctor-Major has slept seven hours and awakened at last to find his charges all well cared for. And the
mood has changed. Frangie is no longer Schwarze, at least for some of the men, she has become Schwester: sister.
Nurse.
The Doctor-Major shakes his head. “I don’t know. We are to rendezvous with a tank unit. But that is only the next step, America, it never ends, you know. It never ends, this war. You’ll see.”
But two hours later, as Frangie sits scrunched in a corner catching a catnap, it does end, at least for most of the men around her.
The first explosion wakes her.
The rattle of gunfire propels her to her feet.
“What’s happening?”
“War,” the Doctor-Major says sourly.
The rear door is still open. Frangie shoots a terrified glance at the Doctor-Major and at the door, now an eerie red rectangle in the light of the flares.
“No,” the Doctor-Major snaps, grabbing her by the back of the neck. “There will be more wounded, and I cannot—”
A noise, several rapid sounds like a knife being stabbed into a tin can, and red holes appear in the side of the ambulance and spray blood across Frangie’s chest and arm.
It is a sheer panic reflex that sends her stumbling out through the open door to land hard on the sand.
In a shocked instant she takes it all in: a burning vehicle up ahead, shouts, a storm of rifle and machine gun fire coming from the left, the zing of bullets flying in search of soft targets.
She begins to stand up but thinks better of it and lies flat, her belly in the dirt. Tracer rounds pierce the ambulance again and again, like flaming arrows. The men on the stretchers twitch and jerk, try to stand and fall, collapse, roll out of the back of the ambulance to crawl or lie still on the cold ground.
She sees the Doctor-Major twist, slap at a hole in his buttock made by a .30 caliber round, then drop to his knees as more rounds pierce him again and again.
Frangie rolls away, rolls and rolls like some game she would have played in the park with Obal, frantically aware of the half-track rushing toward her with a roar and a grinding of gears, a bear maddened by bee stings, desperate to escape the deadly fire that pursues it.
It careens past, the tracks missing her by inches.
Front Lines Page 34
