Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

“Shut the fug up,” comes a terse whisper. Then, a bolt of fire, a loud crack, and the sound of running, falling . . .

“Hah! Got him!” a male voice says, coming from the blackness to her left.

Had someone just shot a German?

She hears crawling and scuffling and low, distinctly Anglo-Saxon curses. Then, “Hah! It’s a baby deer! Meat!”

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The artillery comes again, and again Martha rocks back and forth in the bottom of her hole until it ends. She no longer cares that she is weeping. She no longer cares that she has peed herself.

And then, a female voice, strong and confident, yells, “Here they come!”

And instantly from ahead comes the rattle of small arms fire. Someone to Martha’s right fires, and the female voice yells, “Wait till you have a target!”

Then all at once it seems everyone has a target, the night lights up with muzzle flash to her left, to her right, and dead ahead. She forces herself to stand on legs that want so badly to collapse. She looks out and sees right there, right there, a gray uniform.

The German fires his rifle.

Martha sees the flash. Hears the bullet strike packed snow behind her head.

And something . . . snaps.

Freezing, weeping, snot running down her lip, Martha Swann grabs her rifle and does not return fire; instead she climbs out of the hole as the German fires again and misses again.

Then he turns and begins to run away as a now-screaming Martha chases him.

A shot rings out. The German falls, and through the veil of bloody rage that has seized Martha’s mind she sees Rudy J. Chester. He says, “Get back in your hole, you idiot!”

But there’s a certain laughing admiration in that “idiot.”

It’s a small probing attack, nothing more, and the Germans are driven off.

Martha crawls back to her hole, slides in, and falls instantly asleep.

Rio had made a hole in the ground the only way now possible: by clearing away the snow to reach the soil beneath and then setting off a grenade.

The ground is frozen. The grenade shatters the top layer and allows her to insert the blade of her entrenching tool. But the ground is frozen at least a foot down, and once she manages to dig and hack her way past the frost she all too soon found water.

One of the first things Rio had done after leaping at the opportunity to add Frangie to her rump platoon had been to ask Frangie to do a twinkle-toes inspection.

Now Frangie slides down into Rio’s foxhole. Both are wrapped in every stitch of clothing they own. GIs have taken to stripping dead Americans and sometimes dead Germans of boots, coats, hats, sweaters, gloves, and, above all, socks. There are any number of frozen dead Germans in the woods, but very few wearing overcoats at this point. Rio has a gray wool scarf wrapped around her head and tied at the back like some bargain-basement pirate, with her helmet shoved down over it. Frangie had a wool watch cap pulled low and her clean socks stuffed up under the watch cap to cover her ears. Her helmet unfortunately pushes the socks down, exposing the tops of her ears to cold.

Or more cold. Because no part of either woman was anything but cold. Cold was everywhere. Cold was in everything. Cold was inside them, no longer kept at bay; it had infiltrated them, lurked inside them now, weakening muscles, bringing on debilitating shivers, spreading a leaden lethargy.

Hungry. Lonely. Scared. But above all, cold.

Rio sometimes wonders how anyone holds out. Every now and then the Germans—who during daylight are within sight across a snow-covered field—would warm up their loudspeakers and shout, “Surrender, Americans! Warm beds and hot meals await you!” And sometimes when Rio looked into the whiskered or just filthy faces of her soldiers she wondered if they might not have been tempted . . . but for one word.

Malmédy.

The word, which had been unknown a day before, is now on every American GI’s lips.

Malmédy.

GIs had fought before this. GIs had hated before this. But the American army after Malmédy, after the deliberate murder of American prisoners, was an army stripped of doubt, stripped of ambivalence. The American army after Malmédy had a single unifying goal almost as powerful as the goal of getting home alive: killing SS. An army that had thought the war almost over, an army ready to go home as soon as possible, had become an army of hunters.

Rudy J. Chester comes stumbling in at the head of a three-person patrol composed of himself, Beebee, and the new replacement who had run screaming at the Germans the night before.