Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“Grab me a ham and cheese,” Cisco says. “And some coffee. Black.”

“Black it is, since we got no sugar and no milk,” the loadmaster says. “We’ll be landing in an hour. Might be a bit hairy.”

“Hairy?” Rainy asks.

The loadmaster holds his hand out flat, palm down, and simulates a plane trying to land in heavy wind. It is not reassuring.

And in fact the landing is not pretty. There is an unusual amount of bouncing and tail-skewing involved, but eventually the plane comes to a stop, the door opens, and Rainy piles out just as quickly as she is able. The ground is hard and it is wet and the sky is dark, but she barely restrains herself from falling to her knees and kissing it.

Cisco? Unaffected. “Now what?”

A jeep with its canvas cover up tears across the tarmac from the direction of a squat, unimpressive control tower, bearing a woman lieutenant and a male sergeant. Rainy remembers belatedly to salute.

“I trust you had a pleasant flight?” the lieutenant asks with the gleefully malicious grin common to airmen and sailors when dealing with earthbound folk. She’s wearing a black armband that reads OD—officer of the day. Or night, in this case.

Only then does Rainy realize she’s still clutching the unused vomit bag. She crumples it and shoves it into her pocket.

They are driven to a white plaster building full of unoccupied desks. Someone has thoughtfully laid out Azorean bread rolls, roast beef, a local cheese, giant cans of mustard and mayonnaise, and a dozen Cokes in a bucket of ice. The Coke settles Rainy’s stomach enough for her to recognize and feed a ravenous hunger.

“Where the hell are we, anyway?” Cisco asks.

The lieutenant answers. “Lajes Field, Azores. The island is called Terceira. It means third. There are nine islands all together. We’re about two thousand miles from New York and just under a thousand from Portugal, and no distance at all from the U-boats, although they’ve had their horns trimmed a bit. Soon as you’ve finished, we’ll drive you down to the harbor, Angra, the biggest city they got here.”

“Any action in Anger?” Cisco asks.

“Angra. Angra do Heroísmo.” Rainy recognizes a fellow linguist. The lieutenant has worked on her pronunciation, not a normal thing for American troops overseas. “It means Bay of Heroism. And to answer your question, no, no action unless you mean two bars serving bad beer, worse wine, and no whiskey.”

Cisco nods thoughtfully. “Sounds like an opportunity. You got horny GIs and . . . pardon my, uh, choice of words . . .”

“Oh, there’s a cathouse,” the lieutenant assures him, showing no sign of feminine embarrassment. “Like you said: horny GIs will find a way.”

They drive through slackening rain down a road paved with cobbles made of black lava. The road is lined with hydrangea bushes, blue and pink. The fields are small, extravagantly green rectangles marked off by low, volcanic-stone fences. The road winds and curves upward before beginning to descend into Angra. They pass a donkey cart and a small civilian truck, but that’s all for the half-hour drive.

The harbor is a small, neat bowl surrounded by two-story whitewashed buildings with red tile roofs. The only prominent building is a church with twin square towers topped by neat white domes. The Americans have erected an antiaircraft tower, but no German plane has the range or the inclination to fly this far. There are two naval vessels tied up on the ocean-facing side of the protectively curved pier. One is a small destroyer or corvette, Rainy doesn’t know ships well enough to know quite what to call it. But she recognizes the long, narrow, gray dagger of a submarine.

The sub is a Royal Navy T-class, a sullen-looking beast with a strange bulge at the front where external torpedo tubes look like the nostrils of a dragon’s flared head. She’s 275 feet, about four railroad cars long, or just shy of a football field, but just a tenth as wide in the beam. There’s a superstructure divided in two bits, the higher rear portion festooned with antennae and what can only be the retracted tops of two periscopes. The lower, forward part of the superstructure is taken up by a four-inch gun that seems oversized for its environment.

Fishing boats are heading out from the shelter of the pier, chugging slowly, one after another into choppy seas gray in the faint light of dawn. The night has been shortened by their eastward progress.

“There’s your ride,” the lieutenant says. The sergeant shows his face to a bored Portuguese sailor on sentry duty, and they drive out onto the mole, coming to a stop beside the sub.

“Hey,” Cisco says. “That’s not ours, is it?”

“His Majesty’s boat, Topaz,” the lieutenant says. “They’re your ride.”

“The hell they are,” Cisco says. “There is no goddamn way I am going down underwater. No way in hell.”

“You’ll have to,” Rainy says.

“No. No.” Cisco shakes his head violently. He looks like a man ready to crawl out of his skin. Fearless through the battering airborne thunderstorm, he is transformed now. “No way. No way, no how. The hell with this! Uh-uh, no way.”

But in the end there is a way, involving quite a bit of Azorean vinho de cheiro, a red wine that smells of strawberries. And just two hours behind schedule an exceedingly drunk and raving mobster is manhandled down the hatch and lashed into a canvas hammock by wonderfully amused British submariners.

9

RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“Richlin! Someone here to see you.” Sergeant Cole holds the tent flap back, and a tall young man bows his head to enter.