Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Rio spots Pang, walking bent and backward, hauling Jenou up the beach.

Is she hit? Is Jenou hit?

Jack Stafford is facedown on the beach, but she can see him crawling. He’s alive.

Thank God!

One of the latest replacements, Maria Molina, is farther out. She’s got her arms around one of the hedgehogs, weapon gone. Beebee is with her, also scared to death, pale and shaking, but with his M1 still in one hand.

“Come on, Second Squad! Beebee! Molina! Move your asses!” Rio shouts.

Organize. She has to organize and move! This is her squad, these are her soldiers.

She hears Captain Passey’s voice. “Get going! Get going! Stick, get these people moving!”

She has to get her people out of the surf, over the shale, and over the sand to the seawall.

Mortar rounds fall, quieter than artillery, sometimes preceded by a half-second’s whistle, then . . .

Boom!

Sand showers down on Rio. Something soft bounces off her shoulder. She does not look, does not want to see what it is.

Pang falls on his behind as Jenou suddenly starts yelling and stands up.

“Get down, Jenou!” Rio shouts.

Jenou looks stunned, and there’s a bloody gash on her forehead dribbling blood into her eye, but she reacts by stooping low and running.

Beebee is wading ashore now, heavy with water and an overstuffed pack. Maria Molina still clings to the hedgehog like it’s her only salvation.

Down the beach one of the hedgehogs explodes. The engineers are—somehow in the midst of chaos—going about the work of blowing up Rommel’s fortifications, wading through the water with TNT and Primacord.

“Geer! Get Molina ashore!”

Geer doesn’t look as if he thinks that’s a good idea at all, but he runs, crouched low, back into the surf.

Jack Stafford lands beside Rio, grabbing his helmet as it rolls away, thrusting it back on his head with seawater rushing down his face.

“You okay?” Rio asks him.

He has no time for a smart-aleck remark, just nods. He’s so pale she can almost see his bones.

Geer reaches Molina and pries her hands from the steel even as a combat engineer begins placing packs of TNT. Geer half carries, half kicks Molina ashore, with machine gun bullets making the water jump.

Lieutenant Horne is crawling across the sand, face red with effort.

“Richlin! Richlin!” he shouts, but seems to have nothing else to say.

Stick runs over and lands next to Horne. “Captain says we gotta get going, sir!” he yells.

But Horne has stopped and is now using his arms to scoop sand, like a turtle making a nest, perhaps imagining that six inches of loose dirt will stop a German machine gun round.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Mortars again, and one lands close enough to temporarily deafen Rio in one ear.

Rudy J. Chester, who Rio had begun to write off as dead, suddenly rises from the surf, and walks down the beach, fully upright, yelling “No! No! No!” and waving his hands like a teacher trying to quiet a rowdy class of children.