Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

She watches him walk away. He looks lost, somehow. He’s swallowed up in the rush of soldiers and vehicles, and Frangie figures that’s it, he’s done what he thought he had to do and having discharged his duty she’ll hear no more from him. But within ten minutes a five-gallon can of awful-tasting but satisfyingly wet water is delivered.

It takes the battalion an hour and a half before they can relocate and begin the job of doing unto others what’s been done to them, and by then half a dozen soldiers have disappeared, melting into shadows and heading toward the rear.

Frangie has seen the insides of her hometown friend. When she writes his parents, she will not mention that. And she will try to forget it.

Then, as if she is receiving a vision, a glimpse ahead in time, like a newsreel of her future, Frangie knows that blood and bone, spasms and shrieks, terrible, terrible things will be her future so long as she is in this war.

She looks longingly back down the road, back toward safety, and thinks, Let them court-martial me. Let them lock me up and call me a coward. I don’t care. I can’t do this.

I can’t.

Dear God in heaven, you know I can’t.

25

RIO RICHLIN—A BEACH NEAR SOUSSE, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“Off the beach, off the bea

ch! Come on!”

The person yelling sounds authoritative, and Rio responds, moves, moves, anything to get away from the scene of Kerwin Cassel’s death, from the salty smell of his blood, from the memory of a beating heart come to full rest.

It’s a panic reaction, a visceral need to get away, to put distance between herself and death, and it almost gets her killed. She stands up and instantly earns a shout of, “Stay low, you stupid bugger!” in a British accent. It’s Jack. “Sorry, Rio, didn’t mean—” His unnecessary apology stops abruptly when they hear shouts and gunfire and then . . .

Crump!

Crump!

Two grenades go off in rapid succession, and the machine gun falls silent. Shots. Slow, aimed, deliberate. Someone is finishing off whoever the grenades didn’t kill. Shooting bullets into human beings.

Liefer yells something about getting the wounded onto the boats, but most of the boats are gone already, racing away to safety in deeper water.

What will they do with Cassel? He has to go home. He has to go home.

A coal miner and his haggard wife, that’s what Rio pictures. Pictures them getting the telegram all the way up in the steep, green hills of West Virginia.

“Second Squad, over here!” Sergeant Cole, somewhere in the darkness ahead, for once not mumbling.

Rio can’t see where “over here” is, but she runs toward the sound of his voice, runs hunched over until she plows into a seated soldier and hits the sand face-first.

“What the hell?” Cat’s voice.

“Sorry, Preeling.”

“Jeez, Richlin, you kneed me in the neck.”

“I said sorry.”

Rio spits sand and struggles into a kneeling position. After a moment it occurs to her that she should probably level her rifle. She adopts the textbook kneeling firing position, with one shin flat on the ground, the other vertical with her knee up, elbow on knee, rifle leveled. At Cole.

“Excellent position, Richlin,” he says, looming up out of the dark. “But if you shoot me, I will be irritated at you.”

“Sarge got the machine gun!” Suarez says, running up and kicking sand as he does. He’s excited. Giddy. “You should have seen him, it was—”

“Knock it off,” Cole snaps. “The Tommies say we’re on the wrong beach.”

“What?” half a dozen voices chorus. Followed by variations on, “Lousy navy,” and “It figures,” and assorted curses and nervous witticisms.