Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Frangie’s eyes are instantly open. She jerks upright. Looks frantically left, right, a smoking truck at the head of the column.

BLAM!

A second vehicle, this one at the rear of the column, blows up.

And now, emerging from the tree line across an empty field, come the beasts, the German tanks.

“Tigers!”

It’s over before Frangie can rub the sleep from her eyes. More and more German tanks rumble from the woods and advance on the stalled column at point-blank range. They cannot possibly miss.

There is only one Sherman in the column. It traverses its guns . . . and stops. The barrel lowers in submission. A few dozen GIs bolt, heading toward the woods behind them, but the Tigers’ machine guns discourage that move.

“What’s happening?” Manning asks.

“Nothing good,” Frangie mutters.

The Tigers stop at a distance of less than a hundred yards. The barrels of their big guns are trained on the vehicles; the machine guns are leveled at the soldiers.

And now, to Frangie’s shock, she sees an artillery captain walking toward the Germans with a white rag stuck on the end of his rifle. He’s waving the white flag.

“We’re surrendering,” Frangie says in an appalled whisper.

The captain with the flag walks to one of the lead tanks. Its commander is a handsome blond man with a confident leer. Frangie squints hard and says, “It’s an SS division.”

“A Kraut’s a Kraut,” Manning says, and spits.

Frangie knows better but stays silent. Wehrmacht—German army units—can be brutal, but they are not usually as utterly sadistic and cruel as SS.

The captain and the SS colonel speak briefly. Then the captain comes walking back. He is followed by a file of SS Panzergrenadiers.

“Men . . .” the captain starts to say before being rudely cut off by an SS lieutenant who begins shouting orders in heavily accented English.

“You are now prisoners of the Reich. You will be well treated if you immediately obey all orders. If you do not, you will be shot!”

They are ordered to stack weapons and line up. Frangie has no weapons so she grabs her bag, and she and Manning fall into line, two black faces among mostly white ones, a consequence of the chaos of the battlefield.

The SS lieutenant spots them, approaches, stops, and actually pushes his face forward to sniff them. He steps back. “You smell no different,” he says, and seems disturbed by this.

“I think we all stink, if—”

The blow hits Frangie before she notes his hand moving. It is a backhanded swing that connects with her cheek and causes her to stagger.

“Hey!” Manning yells.

The officer snaps his fingers and a Panzergrenadier shoots Manning twice in the chest. She’s dead before she hits the ground.

“No!” Frangie yells.

Other soldiers surge forward as if they might do something, but more Panzergrenadiers are leveling more weapons and just waiting for the word. One of them slams the stock of his machine pistol into Frangie’s stomach and swings it sideways to catch the side of her head as she falls.

When Frangie returns to consciousness, she is moving. She feels movement even before she opens her eyes. But she feels, too, that her own feet are being dragged, that strong arms are under her shoulders.

She pries open a bloody eye. She does not know the soldier bearing her weight; he’s a white man for one thing, and instinctively she pulls away.

“No, no, missy, make sure your knees work first,” he says kindly.

It’s good advice. It’s a few minutes before she is confident that she can walk. “Thanks.”