Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“We thought it was her and the two of you. Although Castain kept saying you’d just lit out for Berlin to shoot old Adolf all by yourselves. Damn, you have no idea how good the two of you look! Now, dig a hole.”

“It’s just like the parable of the Prodigal Son,” Jack says. “Except for the part about digging a hole.”

“The Krauts haven’t forgotten we’re here,” Stick says gloomily. “They hit us every few—”

He stops because the whine of falling shells is suddenly audible and with a soggy BOOM! a section of mud erupts.

Stick runs for his hole, Jack dives in with Geer and Pang, and Rio slides down into the soupy filth with Jenou and Cat.

“They better not blow off my roof!” Cat warns loudly, as if the Germans can hear, and as if they’d take heed.

The barrage lasts only a few terrifying minutes. A man from another squad is hit while trying to use the latrine. They hear his screams mixed with cursing. “I was just trying to take a shit, you Kraut bastards!”

When the shelling stops, Rio asks, “I don’t suppose there’s any chow?”

“They set up a field mess back past where we picked up the boats, but it got blown to hell,” Jenou says. “Beebee’s got a little fire going, don’t even ask me how.” She rises cautiously, lifts a corner of Cat’s rain cover, and nods in the direction of a scrap of canvas showing above the lip of a crater.

“Guess I’ll see if he’s got any coffee on,” Rio says. “Then I guess I’ll dig a hole.”

“You’re welcome to join us in our warm, comfortable, dry establishment,” Cat says. “So long as you dig out that end and help us bail.”

Rio slithers up out of the hole, not an easy maneuver, and runs to the crater where Beebee has managed to set up a tidy lean-to atop a flat rock that’s been exposed at the bottom of the crater. It’s not dry, nothing is dry, but he has managed to get a small hidden fire going and has a pot of coffee brewing over an empty can filled with sand and gasoline.

Beebee looks up and says, “Hah! That’s five bucks Geer owes me. He bet you were captured. Coffee?”

He pours a few inches into her canteen cup, and she drinks it with reverence—the first warm thing she’s felt in twenty-four hours, aside from Jack.

“First one’s free,” Beebee says. “A refill costs three smokes.”

Rio carries her steaming cup back to Jenou’s hole and proffers a sip to her and Cat. For the next hour she digs out the right side of the hole, then bails for a while.

“Now it’s just like the Plaza Hotel,” Cat says contentedly.

“The very finest of mud-filled holes anywhere,” Jenou agrees.

They are still joking around, Cat and Jenou, partly no doubt energized by Rio’s reappearance. But Rio sees something dark and dangerous in their eyes. She wonders if they see the same on her face.

“We’re going up again?” Rio asks.

Jenou nods. “Stick says the captain asked about pulling us off the line for a while, but no dice. We’re fighting this war alone.”

“The engineers have a Bailey bridge slung, so no boats this time, but we’ll be crossing in single fugging file,” Cat says. And then she mimes a machine gunner. “Bap-bap-bap-bap. Like ducks in a shooting gallery.”

Both Jenou and Cat are doing their best to put on a brave face, but Rio sees the signs of deep strain. No one has slept in at least thirty-six hours. Nor has there been a hot meal. Or a single instant of escape from the rain and the filth. And with all of that, the artillery, and Magraff’s death, and the assumed deaths of Rio and Jack, strain is understandable.

The squad is down to nine: Geer, Pang, Cat, Jenou, Beebee, Stick, Rio, Sergeant Cole, and Jack.

There comes the supersonic screech of artillery falling, and for ten minutes the three young women crouch in freezing water, keeping their heads down below the horizontal flight of jagged shrapnel. As long as a shell doesn’t land right beside them or drop right down into the hole they survive, but it’s like playing dice with life itself. The odds are against coming up snake eyes, but it is possible, all too possible.

When the shelling stops, Stick calls out from his hole to take roll.

“Just like school,” Jenou says, and yells, “Present!”

Then they are called to help unload an ammo truck, hauling wooden crates off the tailgate, humping them awkwardly to deposit them up and down the thin line formed by the platoon. They unload quickly, despite their weariness—no one wants to be standing next to an ammo truck when the German gunners spot it through the rain.

But with the job done, Rio is sick with exhaustion, both sleepy and bone-weary.

“Ammo,” Cat says.