Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Rainy does not want to see what comes next. She pivots, races back to Philippe, fires a few rounds over his shoulder at the Germans beyond, and yells, “We need to get out of here!”

Philippe nods. Their horse-drawn wagon is still where they left it, but that fact is overwhelmed in importance by the sudden sharp crackle of gunfire coming from down the road.

“The ambush!” Philippe says.

Somehow German forces have already been sent, triggering the ambush.

Impossible! Not even the Germans react that quickly!

But that’s beside the point, because what matters is that the road is closed to them. The only option left is the railroad tracks, which are beyond the now-towering wall of furious flames and boiling smoke.

Flames lick at the tires of the forklift, their only cover. The heat is intense and mounting by the second. Rainy’s skin feels stretched as tight as a drum skin. She smells her hair crisping.

“We take this!” Philippe yells, and smacks a hand against the forklift.

“You drive,” Rainy says.

Philippe jumps into the single seat. Rainy climbs on the back. Two Germans rush toward them, one spraying his Schmeisser, the second on fire and screaming as he runs in panic, trying to outrun the flames burning his flesh. Rainy shoots them both, finishing her last clip. She grabs Philippe’s gun as the forklift engine catches and the vehicle jerks forward.

They veer away from what is now a mountain of flame, jetting hundreds of feet in the air, turning night into an orange-lit nightmare of eerie shadows.

“Hang on!” Philippe yells, and Rainy sees that he means to crash right through the chain-link fence separating the dump from the railroad tracks. She grabs a handhold but the sudden crunch of impact stops the loader and knocks Rainy off. She rolls on the ground, quickly pops up, and fires a burst through the smoke toward whoever might still be pursuing them.

Philippe backs up, then rams the loader forward again, aiming for one of the poles, which this time tilts away. The fence is down, but the loader is stalled in place, hung up on the fence, so Philippe and Rainy both race on foot through a narrow band of woods, toward the train tracks, where they turn north, running flat-out along the ties until they s

pot a body ahead. A body with blond hair.

“Marie!” Philippe cries.

She is alive. Hair a mess, clothing dirty, but alive. There is a red mark on the side of her face. A bump swells beneath the flesh of her temple. Her Sten gun lies beside her, and Rainy scoops it up.

“Can you move?” Rainy demands.

Marie nods.

Philippe and Rainy haul Marie to her feet and they run. Rainy pops the clip on Marie’s Sten as Marie gasps out her story.

“Étienne! My own brother,” she says. “A traitor! He was calling to a German patrol. Wickham shot Étienne, but before he died Étienne shot the Englishman. Both are dead!”

At least a dozen rounds are gone from Marie’s clip.

Rainy does not relax her helpful grip on Marie’s arm, but as they run a terrible sadness wells within Rainy.

There is a traitor, but that traitor is not Étienne.

13

RIO RICHLIN—NORMANDY, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

“Dig in,” Rio says.

They may be the two hardest words she’s ever spoken. Ordering her squad to dig in means she, too, must dig a fighting hole, and she, like every one of them, is exhausted to the point of sleepwalking.

They have gained the heights. They’ve moved a few hundred yards inland. To the amazed relief of everyone on or near Omaha Beach, the dreaded Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, has been nearly invisible. But word has come down to expect a counterattack at any moment. The Germans will certainly counterattack, the only question is whether it will come in the form of small probing attacks or full panzer divisions.

Night is falling on the longest day in any of their young lives. The platoon is lined up fairly tightly with a massive hedge to their rear and an open field ahead. They sit slumped forward or lying on their backs, legs extended, a row of men and women so destroyed they don’t look any livelier than the dead soldiers on the beach.

The field, perhaps an acre in size, is bordered by the same hedges. Rio’s squad is positioned closest to a wooden-gated gap. In the field are three cows taking turns moaning loudly. Rio knows the sound well—it’s the distress cry of cows who have not been milked, so their udders are painfully distended. For years Rio had the chore of milking her mother’s small herd before leaving for school. Since she was twelve, she’d been waking up an hour earlier and stumbling out into misty darkness to fill buckets with milk. And on the one or two occasions where she petulantly avoided her chores, the cows would be making just this sound when she came home from school. She had faced her mother’s raised eyebrow and irritated expression.