Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

Stick speaks up. “Sir, even if we take and hold the beach and the valley, isn’t it mountains and rivers all the way from there to Rome?”

Lieutenant Stone aims a furious look at his most junior sergeant, but Morales nods. “Yes, it is, Sergeant. There’s something Napoleon said to the effect that Italy is a boot, you have to enter it from the top. Unfortunately, that option is not open to us.”

“We’ll get it done,” Stone says.

There is more of the same back-and-forth, practical concerns having to do with logistics, and optimistic talk of Day One objectives, Day Two, and so on. None of the combat veterans, from Cole down to Rio, believes any of it. The sand table, unlike reality, does not come complete with German 88s raining down.

Almost two weeks later, weary, footsore, and jaded, Rio is convinced of the physical accuracy of the sand table and painfully aware of the irrelevance of the timetable. She and the 119th were spared the worst of the landing, not being first wave, or even second wave, for once. The earlier arrivals ran into a wall of German artillery, machine gun fire, and air attack, but by the time the 119th joined the battle, the Germans were counterattacking.

That had been rough, but it was fighting from foxholes and prepared positions. In the end it was the massive firepower of American and British naval gunfire and planes from Sicily that hammered the German tanks and broke up their thrust.

But now the job is to expand the beachhead and begin the push north toward Naples and Rome beyond, which, for the 119th, means pacifying dozens of small villages and strongpoints held by a determined enemy rear guard.

Rio lies wedged between sharp stones that had once been someone’s home or shop, with an intermittent hail of machine gun bullets chipping away at the stone like some mad sculptor. She is reminded of a saying she’d first heard from Stick: No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Naples was the Day Three objective. They are beginning Week Three, and they are still some distance from Naples. How far, Rio does not know. What she does know is that she is facedown on the ground wishing she could dig a hole through the cobblestones beneath her.

Rio’s squad landed on the beach below Salerno at full strength, twelve men and women: Stick, Rio, Jack, Jenou, Tilo, Geer, Cat, Pang, Jillion, Beebee, Sergeant Cole, and a replacement. Rio had exchanged no more than a few words with the replacement, a woman named Karen Scalzi. Scalzi had stepped on a mine on her first day ashore. She hadn’t died, but she would no longer be able to count to ten on her toes.

Now they are eleven, and Cat has come down with dysentery, so half the time she is squatting behind whatever cover she can find. She should have been sent back, but she kept saying, “I’m okay, dammit, I’m fine, just don’t fugging look at me!”

“No one’s looking at you,” Tilo had wised off. “We’re just trying not to smell you.”

The heat does not approach the Sicilian heat, September having brought some moderation in temperature, but for hours they’ve advanced at a crawl through the heap of rubble that was once a town. The town has been worked over by naval gunfire, tank fire, and P-38 and P-47 ground attack planes. It was home to not quite a thousand people, but now every roof is blown away or collapsed. Scarcely a wall stands without ending in ragged crenellations at the top, here and there splintered wooden beams stick out or up, doorways have all been kicked in, windows have all been blown out, and if any civilian is left alive it is a miracle.

The full platoon is spread down both sides of what had almost certainly been the main street of town, now a tumbled, almost impassable jumble of fallen stone, all of it painful to lie on.

A Sherman tank burns behind them, burns too fiercely for anyone even to think about extricating the dead tanker whose charcoal body lies draped across its forward deck.

Rio is on point. She hears Stick clattering through the rocks, followed by sniper fire, to drop beside her.

“What do you see, Richlin?”

Rio and Stick are side by side, faces inches apart, both sheltering behind the same chunk of lathe and plaster. Rio risks a quick pop-up glance, drops hastily, and says, “That wall there, the building where the street turns? That high window, top floor? Machine gun. There’s maybe a second one farther on, I think. And you know about the—”

Boom!

A small explosion rearranges the rubble twenty feet ahead, temporarily obscuring their view with dust. Rio and Stick crouch low and let the shards of rock pelt their backs and helmets for several seconds.

“Mortar,” Rio says.

“Yeah, kinda noticed that. If the Krauts get a spotter and a radio up in that window they’ll murder us,” Stick says. He surveys the terrain ahead. “Can’t get another tank in here.”

Rio shakes her head. “Not if they’ve still got that 88 up around the corner.”

“Okay,” Stick says. “Take Stafford and Suarez and scout to the right, see if there’s a way to flank ’em.”

“Yep.” Not the answer she wants to give, but what can she do? There are two stripes on her shoulder now.

For a moment, just a brief, very strange moment, Rio realizes that despite her self-doubt she does actually know what Stick means. She knows how to do the job, knows what risks she should take and what she should avoid. It’s a strange moment, a moment out of time, a quiet, self-aware moment.

She crawls backward, not easy to do in these rocks. She makes a turn at what looks like a safe place and is nearly hit by that high-up machine gun. She decides to jump up and run, hunched over with bullets pinging and ricocheting off the rock around her.

The squad is a series of helmets barely poking up, like so many gophers who’ve dug their hole in the middle of a rock quarry.

“Stafford, Suarez. We’re taking a walk,” Rio says.

Two of the helmets begin to move and soon they are three, all prone, face-to-face, legs splayed out in different directions, hugging the ground as machine gun fire chips stone above them.