Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

Rio stays close to Jenou, who is on about her usual whine: “What happened to females being given typewriters and rich, handsome lieutenants, that’s what I want to know.”

“Yes, well I requested something in the technical field, something of great significance but with only the bare minimum of danger,” Jack says in his poshest English accent. “Imagine my surprise when the army failed to fulfill my every wish.”

He says this to Rio. Everyone hears, of course, but he says it to her, especially the last part. My every wish.

“No one gets everything they want,” Rio says, keeping her voice bland, implying nothing—at least nothing that anyone else will understand. Except Jenou, of course, because Jenou was there when the incident occurred, a week ago.

“So true,” Jack says ruefully, smiling his simultaneously cheeky and abashed smile. “But it never hurts to dream big.”

It was his smile that first got to Rio, all the way back at Camp Maron. The accent hadn’t hurt either. But this is not the time and not the place. Memories of a drunken moment—a shameful moment, really, given the place Strand Braxton holds in her heart—are out of place here and now.

The transport never happened. There was no kiss.

And anyway, I was drunk, so it doesn’t count.

But Rio grins anyway. It’s good to have an excuse to smile, no matter how much effort it takes when your insides are churning and your imagination is painting lurid pictures of amputations and cries of pain. The grin freezes in place. She’s clenching her jaw, and now consciously unclenches it.

Imagination is not your friend in war, Rio knows. It’s too easy to imagine yourself dead: shot or torn to shreds by bomb shrapnel. Or mauled but left alive to suffer another thirty years of misery, like the Stamp Man.

And why is she here? Why exactly is she here on this desert-front beach in a country she’s barely heard of? It is decidedly not for the purpose of flirting with Jack Stafford, especially when Strand’s picture is in her inner pocket, wrapped in waterproof oilcloth alongside the picture of her parents and her sister.

Strand is there, close to her heart.

Jack is there, close.

“Well, when I think about it, the army did fulfill my every wish,” Rio says, trying gamely not to sink into a funk. “But that’s because I wished to be cold and confused and surrounded by smelly, unwashed apes.”

People laugh. That’s good. Laughter fights worry.

“See, Private Richlin here has it figured out,” Stick says. Stick is still the closest thing to a real soldier in the squad, aside from the sergeant. “You just have to wish for something lousy and the army is sure to arrange it.” He shifts his big, heavy BAR from one sore shoulder to a slightly less sore shoulder.

The sky is losing the last of its gloomy, gray glow as night turns silver to slate. The desert around them begins to lose its form and color as shadow swallows it up. Ochre becomes gray, muted reds become gray, the world shifts from color to grayscale, a prelude to blackness.

“That’s a cheerful thought,” Rio mutters under her breath.

Rio carries a pack and gear that weighs thirty-five pounds all told, one-third her own weight. The pack contains one spare khaki uniform, four pairs of khaki socks, one khaki bra—not the sort of thing one finds in the average department store—one clean khaki undershirt and one that smells like an animal has crawled into it and died. There is a personal care kit, which is basically a comb, a few hairpins, a toothbrush and dental powder, lice-killer, a thinning bar of soap she’d had no chance to use recently, and a bottle of fingernail polish that she now regrets.

The heaviest thing in Private Richlin’s pack is three days’ worth of combat rations consisting of canned beef stew, canned corned beef hash, canned pork and beans, and canned cheese. The cans are olive drab, the food is not. The food is a sort of mealy tan hue unless it’s the cheese, and then it is bright yellow.

Other food items consist of dehydrated lemonade, dehydrated coffee, and dehydrated cocoa. There is also something called a D-ration bar, which is alleged to be related to chocolate and has a tendency to break teeth and give soldiers the runs. GIs claim the D-bar is the enemy’s secret weapon.

Tied to the back of Rio’s pack is an entrenching tool, which a civilian might call a shovel. Rio’s experience of the war so far—at Camp Maron, at two separate training bases in Britain, and thus far in Tunisia—has involved extensive use of the entrenching tool and no use at all of her weapon outside of the firing range.

It is all, all of it, khaki or light-olive drab. Khaki and OD alike are liberally decorated with mud splatters from passing deuce-and-a-half trucks.

Her fingernails—what is left of them—are pink. She’s been unable to find fingernail polish remover, so the pink she applied seven days ago on the transport coming down from England is just slowly chipping away, another few flakes every time she digs a hole or cleans her rifle or unscrews the top of her tin canteen to take a swallow of brackish water.

The fingernail polish was a stupid decision. Rio was talked into it by Cat. Amazing what boredom will drive you to, Rio thinks.

Sergeant Cole, upon first seeing the nail polish just after they’d landed in Oran, stared at Rio with a look that reduced her height from five eight to just eight. He spoke not a word, just stared at her in disbelief and head-shaking disappointment.

The only reason Rio did not immediately toss the bottle of polish away is that she is saving it for a special occasion—like the end of this war, maybe. This will most likely be within a few months, because now that the Americans are in this fight, the Germans and Italians will give up pretty quick.

At least that’s the consensus among the eight men and four women of Second Squad, Fifth Platoon, Company A, 119th Division based on precisely zero actual combat experience.

Their British allies, with two years of hard experience of the war, do not share this high opinion of the

Americans, a fact that has been conveyed at times forcefully, even obscenely, from passing British forces.