Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

Frangie grunts a yes.

“The wound is septic, he would not have lived.”

“I know that.”

He sighs, not a sympathetic sound, an annoyed one. “Your officers are fools leaving a medic behind. They will come to regret it.”

I already regret it, she thinks bitterly, though despite everything she does not quite believe it.

“You are my prisoner.” There is subtle weight on that word my. “My company has several cases of typhus. I have no time for routine bandaging and suturing.”

Lest Frangie believe she has fallen in with a sympathetic medical professional, the doctor grabs her by the back of the neck, squeezing painfully hard, and shoves her toward the tent flap.

She is startled to see that the gray light of morning is in the eastern sky. German soldiers pick over the remains of the abandoned camp, looking carefully for booby traps, scrounging for food and water, hoping for alcohol.

The German unit is a long column of trucks, most of them tankers carrying either water or fuel. There are two half-tracks—lightly armored vehicles with tank tracks at the rear, conventional tires up front, an open bed that carries nine or ten German soldiers, and a machine gun mounted over the low, sloped roof of the driver’s compartment.

The column is starting to move again, engines roaring, gears grinding. Frangie sees the SS officer in an open staff car, drinking something from a thermos bottle.

Doon Acey’s body lies still unburied, laid out on the ground beside the road with three other American dead, awaiting graves registration units. A bored-looking German soldier methodically shoots each corpse in the chest and head. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Making sure the dead Americans stay dead.

The column jounces and sputters past, truck after truck, until a green-painted ambulance adorned with a red cross very similar to the one on Frangie’s helmet appears. Behind it, just ahead of the final half-track, an open, slat-sided truck full to overflowing with wounded Germans.

“You,” the Doctor-Major orders, and shoves Frangie toward the truck. She catches the tailgate and climbs aboard on shaky legs to be met with hostile stares from men with every variety of battlefield injury. One man winks at her and grabs his crotch suggestively. Another spits in her general direction, though with insufficient force, so it lands on the helmet of a man who is either unconscious or dead.

Frangie sits as far back as she can from the more threatening enemy soldiers. A private running from the ambulance tosses her a small box marked with the red cross. It contains bandages, tape, scissors, and sulfa powder. There’s a smaller box that should contain morphine, but it’s been emptied, presumably to keep her from killing one of the Germans or herself.

That last thought lingers in her mind. She is a prisoner. She is a woman. And with sick dread she knows what to expect.

But for now there’s a man with a bandage the color of old meat. She will change that bandage and worry about the rest later.

33

RIO RICHLIN—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA

“Nothing we could do up against tanks, right?” Tilo says.

“Fugging bazooka bounced off,” Corporal Hark Millican says, not for the first or last time. “How we supposed to stop tanks with that? Like throwing a fugging water balloon.” He has previously compared the bazooka shell to a baseball, a rock, and a watermelon.

“What do you expect?” Luther snaps. “We’re fighting with girls against men. I always said this was doomed. I always said that.”

Stick says, “As far as I can tell, the only one who inflicted any casualties on them was a girl.”

“Because the men are too busy looking out for the women, that’s what,” Geer insists furiously. “Girls and a goddamned Jap. We’re cursed.”

Hansu Pang cannot help but hear this. He clamps his jaw tight but says nothing and no one comes to his defense. The fact that Pang did exactly what he was ordered to do and performed as well as anyone means nothing; he has the face and the hair and, above all, the eyes of a Jap. And scared, beaten men need an excuse. Blame the women, blame the Jap, blame the officers all the way up the chain of command, blame anyone but themselves.

They’ve lost Cassel. They’ve lost their medic. And, to make matters worse, everyone has earlier overheard the furious British captain reaming out Lieutenants Liefer and Helder, before leading his men off.

“You ran, you silly bastards,” he raged. “We could have managed a fighting withdrawal, but you broke and ran.”

To which Liefer had responded by making things worse. “I can only be as good as my people. These are green troops.”

“Young lady, it’s a bloody poor officer that blames her men,” the captain shot back savagely. “I’ve got five of my boys dead and one so shot up he won’t be long joining them. And you were well in the rear, Lieutenant. That fact will be in my report, you may count on it.”

And with that the British commandos double-timed past them, not without harsh words from some of the Tommies.

“Soft Yank bastards.”