Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

Rainy stares. And while she stares, her mind frantically shifts through all she has seen and heard from her father about his life, his work. A numbers runner? Gambling is illegal, though many people indulge. A numbers runner is a person who takes bets on slips of paper, collects them, and brings them to the central booking office, which tracks winners and losers. He collects from the losers and pays the winners.

Her father? A numbers runner?

Milk delivery. Door to door. A perfect cover for a numbers runner.

In her mind she compares what she knows of the family’s finances against what she believes she knows of the likely income of even a successful and industrious delivery man. Her memory illuminates photos of the annual family vacation, the necklace her mother wears on special occasions, the one her father dismisses as “nothing but paste, really,” but that glitters like real diamonds. She considers the lessons the family has always been willing to pay for—violin, piano, languages. The books. The food.

Rainy feels honor compels her to protest. But honor is not analysis.

“Sir, I was not aware.”

“You don’t dispute it?”

“I neither endorse nor dispute, Captain. I don’t know. But I believe it is possible, and I do not believe you would have confronted me unless you felt the evidence was compelling.”

“You are not cleared to see the actual evidence,” he says. Then he lifts a sheet of paper from his desk, forms it into a funnel, takes a lighter from his pocket, and sets the paper afire.

They watch it burn, and when it is almost entirely consumed, Herkemeier drops the last of it in his metal trash can.

“The FBI of course has a copy, and in time it may surface. If you were stationed here in the States, that might spell trouble. You might be busted out of MI and sent to a different duty. You might end up a clerk in some backwater. I think that would be a hell of a waste of a damned good mind, an army intelligence mind.”

“Sir.” She can’t manage another word just then because her throat is a lump and her heart is pounding and her mind is filling with black anger.

“Half the people here, and more than half of the women, want a nice soft billet far from the shooting. Now, you? I think you want to cause damage to this country’s enemies. Am I mistaken?”

“Sir, you are not,” Rainy says tersely.

Herkemeier straightens his tie, straightens the collar, and leans forward. “I don’t think we win this war with protocols, Rainy. I think we win this war by ruthlessly applying a single unifying principal: killing Germans by any and all means necessary. So I don’t really give much of a damn what sex you are, or whether your father is a petty crook.”

That phrase, “petty crook,” feels too harsh, too final. She loves her father; he is and will always be a great man to her, but that’s not the issue now—that is for another time.

“Let me kill Germans, sir.”

Herkemeier grins. “I had a premonition you might say that. You are hereby ordered to present yourself to the transport clerk where you will show him these orders. . . .” He raises a manila envelope and hands it to her. “Whereupon he will arrange your earliest possible departure. Once you’re in theater, no one will give a hoot in hell about your background. It will be up to you to make the most of that.”

He stands, and Rainy does as well, though her legs are weak and her mind is still swimming with dark thoughts and far too much emotion.

“Sir, I . . .” She is brought up short by the realization that tears are forming in her eyes. She manages to say, “Thank you, sir.”

Herkemeier shakes her hand and says, “Now, you go get ’em, Rainy Schulterman.”

“By any and all means necessary, sir.”

11

RIO RICHLIN—CAMP MARON, SMIDVILLE, GEORGIA, USA

“Jumping jacks, twenty-five and sound off. HUT!”

Rio doesn’t recall this particular sergeant’s name, but she resents his being this awake and fit and energetic at an hour when sunrise is still a long way off.

Forty mostly young, but not all young, recruits begin. Feet thrown to the side, arms over the head, recover. All across the base are identical formations of identically bleary and sore soldiers, all shouting along to the rhythm of their own PT leader.

Voices, some male, some female, yell, “One! Two! Three!”

“Why can’t we eat first, that’s all I want to know,” Kerwin Cassel mutters under his breath.

“Four! Five! Six!”