Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

They are in a space no more roomy than a phone booth, with a dying, gurgling German tangled around their legs. The second German starts to yell, but Rio punches him in the nose, which turns his cry into a grunt.

She stabs at him, but he’s fully awake and parries her thrust, taking another cut in the process.

He’s bigger than she is. Stronger. And he’s no raw recruit. He reaches for his rifle, but it’s out of reach, so he fumbles for his own knife and Rio stabs again, the blow again deflected from its intended target—his throat—and stabbing a bare inch into his collarbone.

She has mere seconds before his greater strength and her own desperate need for silence defeat her. She collapses, literally sitting on the dying German at her feet, and stabs upward.

The koummya goes deep into the German’s crotch, and she levers herself up to clamp her hand over the scream that rises within him while simultaneously digging the koummya deeper, deeper, working the blade back and forth to cut up whatever internal organs the blade can reach.

The German bucks, flails, punches madly, catching Rio with a stunning hit on the side of her head. She lets go of the koummya, and the German now scrambles frantically to escape the hole. He’s halfway up and out, but the koummya sticks out from the bottom of his uniform trousers like a horrifying Popsicle stick.

Rio makes a mad grab for the koummya, pulls it out, making a slurping sound, then grabs his uniform and pulls him back down. And now, the koummya goes around his throat and she pulls back hard.

She sits panting in the foxhole, recovering as the two Germans bleed and die at her feet. Then she crawls back to the hole and gathers her freezing, weary flock.

29

MARTHA SWANN, RIO RICHLIN, AND JENOU CASTAIN—ELSENBORN RIDGE, BELGIUM

Private Martha Swann is a draftee. She is eighteen, five foot six inches tall, a redhead, pale, with distinctly green eyes.

Exactly twenty-one weeks earlier Martha received her notice from the draft board in Chicago, Illinois. She reported, was sent to basic training, tossed on a boat, landed in Britain, spent days in the Repple Depple, and was shipped forward.

And then, before she’d even seen her own assigned unit, it had started: the brutal fight that would come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Martha is from an academic family. Her father is a professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Chicago, and her mother is a secretary in the dean’s office. She herself has never had much interest in either of her parents’ work, though she is bookish in her own way, reading voraciously, everything by the greats like Dickens and Tolstoy, but especially more modern, more exciting works by Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who she loves to distraction. She loves mysteries, the more hard-boiled the better. She enjoys nothing more than a scene involving some cheap hood with a gat in his hand being slapped down by Chandler’s great detective, Philip Marlowe.

But prior to basic training she had never even seen an actual gun, let alone fired one. When she reads tales of action and derring-do, Martha never sees herself as the hero. She is not even in her imagination the hero’s girlfriend or moll. She sees herself as one of the anonymous passersby, one of the minor characters perhaps glimpsed on a street corner or sitting at the counter of a diner. She is by nature an observer, not a participant. She attends university football games dutifully, attends drama club productions a bit more enthusiastically, cheers on the lacrosse team, but always from the sidelines.

Martha is happy in the role of observer. Happiest when she is almost invisible, like one of those secondary characters Marlowe might describe as a “sweet little package, but not one I had time for.”

Her father did all he could—going hat-in-hand to an alderman to see whether he could get his daughter a draft deferment. The war would soon be over, after all. People said by Christmas. But the alderman had either been powerless or unwilling. And the truth is that Martha did not hate the idea of being drafted because—so she thought—it would be fascinating to observe the process, to be able to see it up close. To watch the war and take mental notes.

The first time her training sergeant had punched her in the belly with the butt of an M1 she had experienced the shattering and disorienting realization that she was not to be an observer. She was to be a participant.

After that she had done her best—she is not rebellious by nature, and is smart and willing—and by the time the army deemed her ready for war she had qualified with all infantry weapons, could perform basic first aid, and knew how to march in formation.

That last, she suspected, would not be of much use here in the eternal, dense, dark, frightening forests of northern Europe.

She’d been taken in the night to a freezing, mud-and-snow-slush tent camp where she had spent the next day writing letters home and reading before being called out by a young PFC with the unlikely name of Benjamin Barry Bassingthwaite.

“But everyone calls me Beebee. Hell, even I call myself Beebee.”

He’s in a jeep. The back is loaded with musette bags stuffed with who-knows-what, some crates of C rations, and what looks like a half-dozen bazooka rounds.

“I’m Martha Swann.”

“Let’s go, Swann. Have any idea how to fire a fifty?”

She almost says, “A what?” before realizing he means the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the jeep. It rests atop a short pole mount, with the long barrel pointed forward over her head. “I’ve never . . .”

“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come up.”

He grinds the gears, drops the clutch, and the jeep goes bouncing and careening away, out of the camp and down a wooded lane. The sun is down and the wind is up and Martha is freezing within seconds.

“Cold?” Beebee yells.

“Yes!”