Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

“Chester! Get down!” Rio yells, but Rudy J. is beyond hearing.

She glances around, taking quick stock. Jack with her. Geer and Molina now crawling toward her. Jenou, face a streaked mess of bloody rivulets, is near and moving in the right direction. Beebee just a few yar

ds away, hand holding his helmet down hard. Pang gasping for breath on his back, but unhurt. Jenny Dial shivering and cursing a blue streak facedown at Rio’s other side.

“If we sit here, we die,” Rio yells, voice breaking. “Get to the seawall! Second Squad, let’s go!”

She rises, stays bent low, and starts to run toward the seawall. She glances back and sees that only Jenou and Beebee are with her.

“Goddammit!” Rio cries. “Go, go, go!” she says to Jenou and Beebee. Then she runs back. She grabs Pang’s collar and yanks hard. “Damn it, Pang, move!”

Geer grabs Molina and propels her to her feet and shoves her hard. She stumbles, hesitates, but then begins to run, shrieking wildly as she goes.

“Come back, come back, you’ll all get killed!” It’s Lieutenant Horne. Stick grabs the rim of his helmet and yanks the lieutenant sideways, shouting in his face, “Get hold of yourself, sir!”

Jenny Dial is yelling “Fug, fug, fug!” and cursing like a drunk longshoreman, but she’s running the right direction, unlike Rudy J. Chester, who is now walking along the beach like a demented holiday beachcomber.

Rio jumps to her feet and with machine gun rounds flit, flit, flitting inches behind her heels she tackles Chester like a fullback, knocking him down.

He’s still babbling, a mix of “no, no, no” and “let me go, let me go!” He writhes and kicks, hysterical. Rio lies on top of him, pulls out her koummya and holds the point an inch from his nose. “Get your shit together, Private Sweetheart, right the fug now!”

Whether it’s the knife or Rio’s snarling face that does it, Chester suddenly stops talking and stops writhing. And then he says, “Here I go!”

Rio rolls away. Chester stands up and with a trailing scream, runs toward the seawall.

Rio, like a sheepdog, follows as her squad runs and staggers, weeping and cursing over the shale and sand.

BLAM!

A cannon round lands and tosses two soldiers from Cat’s squad in the air. One is still alive when he lands, raising one hand to ward off further blows, but a machine gunner finds him and the hand falls.

Camacho. Hobart. Ostrowiz.

Rio’s squad is already down from twelve to nine. Cat’s is in the same shape.

Ahead there is a low concrete seawall topped with barbed wire. Rio lands hard against the concrete and sand of the seawall, panting, her heart a mad thing trying to kick its way out of her rib cage.

GIs are spread all up and down the seawall, wet, caked with sand, some bleeding, some shouting, some crying, some praying, most silently shivering. Dark shapes like piles of rags dot the sand. Soldiers lie floating facedown or faceup in shallow water, rising and falling sluggishly on the waves. The frantic, pitiful cries of “Medic! Medic!” come from every direction. Naval gunfire whistles overhead to land too far inland.

The Higgins boats are pulling away now, churning water, heading back to sea.

Leaving us, Rio thinks irrationally. Leaving us here to die!

There is only one thing to do.

“Geer! We gotta make a run for the base of the cliff.”

“We’ll get hung up in the wire,” Geer yells. There are double coils of barbed wire ahead.

Every communication now is a shout or a scream. The noise from mortars, artillery, bullets, and desperate soldiers is overwhelming. The air stinks of cordite and salt.

“Who’s got wire cutters?” Rio yells.

Jack curses under his breath, fumbles in his pack, produces the wire cutters, and starts to crawl up over the seawall.

“Stafford!” Rio yells. She’d meant to cut the wire herself, but it’s too late and now the Englishman is on his back, under the wire, cutting one . . . two . . . crawl and reposition . . . three strands. The wire springs away in a coil.

“When I yell go, we go!” Rio shouts.