Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

“Jack? If I were you, that’s who I’d pick.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll try to keep your backup boyfriend alive.”

“Fug you, Geer.” Rio laughs and hopes the dirt on her face will hide any blush.

Geer gives her a sidelong look. Then, having seen something in her face, he groans. “Are you kidding me? Are we moving up again?”

“Heading north. Some kind of Kraut attack. You round up anyone and everyone, regardless of MOS, regardless of whatever they have to say. Cooks, clerks, pharmacists, I don’t care: get them.”

“What in hell is a dead Jap doing here?”

Rio and Geer both turn. A soldier with a clipboard. He’s a good-looking young man with spectacles and a very clean uniform.

“What are you?” Geer demands.

“I’m attached to graves registration, we’re—”

“Well, you just got unattached. Four Eyes, you just joined Fifth Platoon. I am Luther Geer, your new lord and master.”

“You can’t—”

Geer cuffs him on the side of his head, knocking the man’s glasses askew. He bends down and whispers, “Sorry, Pang. Gotta borrow this.” He lifts Pang’s M1 and shoves it into the clerk’s chest. “Welcome to hell, little buddy.”

The trucks do not show up on time, of course, and Rio uses the time to pick a replacement for Cat. She calls together the ragtag remnants of Cat’s squad and says, “Any of you people want to be squad leader?”

When almost every eye turns in one direction, she has her pick. “There you go . . . How do you say that?” She points at her name patch, which reads Dubois. She’s new to the platoon, but she’s a corporal and had been at Anzio before being wounded.

“Doo-boyce, Sarge,” she says.

“Where you from, Dubois?”

“I was born in Montana, but I was living in Oregon, working as a copy editor at the local paper.”

“Well, your people seem to trust you, so I’m going to trust you. We are taking a ride, a long one. Get your people squared away, and grab anyone you see who is not attached, find ’em a rifle, and hog-tie them if you need to.”

“Will do.” Then, in a lower voice she says, “We know you were with Stick from the beginning, Sarge. We’re all sorry as hell. He was good people.”

Rio nods, unable suddenly to trust herself to speak.

He was good people. Past tense.

Sergeant Mercer has pulled himself together, but his squad looks spooked. Rio catches the eye of the squad’s ASL, a woman named Pettyfer.

“I have no time for bullshit, so give it to me straight: Is Mercer okay?”

Pettyfer glances in Mercer’s direction. He has his back turned and is loading a clip. The rest of his squad looks past him at Rio and their corporal. “I don’t know, Richlin, to be honest.”

Rio pulls her a short distance away. “You got the word, obviously. I don’t know where we’re going except someone, somewhere up the line screwed up. So maybe it’

s all a big hurry-up-and-wait, and maybe it’s right into some new shitstorm. If Mercer goes batty, you take charge.”

“Aw, jeez, no!”

“Hey. You think I want this job? Do what has to be done.”

It is three hours before the trucks come rattling into camp, and when they arrive they do not look good. Bullet holes pucker door panels. The canvas covers are ripped by shrapnel. One of the canvas covers has been burned, so now it’s just blackened tatters. And the drivers are so far gone that as soon as they come to a complete stop they fall asleep on their steering wheels.

The dispirited, mud-caked, stinking, hungry, and in too many cases battle-stunned troops climb wearily into the trucks. Rio finds herself for the first time in charge of people she does not know. Her squad is almost a family, but a platoon—even a much-diminished platoon—is an organization.