Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

Off to her left another tanker truck explodes.

Have we done enough? Can we run away now?

Suddenly Rio is shaking, her entire body, every muscle so weak she can’t stay up, she slumps into her hole, drawing her helmet down out of the line of fire as the BAR’s tracers arc overhead to seemingly bounce back as German bullets.

Rio is praying aloud now, praying gibberish interspersed with the kind of curses that once would have made her blush, stars in the sky above, God up there somewhere, three clips left, three clips, twenty-four bullets.

And three grenades.

There’s a tunnel in space, a warping of the fabric of reality between Rio and the Germans. She sees nothing but the end of that tunnel, nothing else exists. Just that space directly before her, just the enemy.

The location of Jenou’s foxhole is clear in her mind. She unhooks a grenade and crooks her finger through the pin.

She pulls the pin. Her hand, tight now, strong in a kind of spasm, holding down the lever.

Release it. Release it and throw. Release it and throw, Rio, do it.

Rio releases the lever, which cartwheels away as the fuse pops and now just four seconds. She does not throw. One. Two. And . . . she stands up, head just inches below the BAR fire, and throws.

36

FRANGIE MARR—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA

Frangie changes every bandage. She sews up a split finger, irrigates an eye crusted shut with blood, and manages to do it despite rude thrusting fingers and groping hands.

The column is driving on relentlessly, no longer on anything resembling a road but pushing out into open desert. The overcast skies keep Allied air power from spotting them, but there are many nervous glances skyward from wounded and healthy soldiers alike.

Eventually she is given a can of tinned meat and crackers. It’s what the German soldiers are eating, and grumbling as they do so. The grumbling is not comprehensible, but is nevertheless familiar to Frangie. Soldiers complain; German, American, every kind of soldier.

An open staff car carries the black-uniformed officer who ordered her patient shot and a second officer in the more familiar butternut khaki. There is clearly no love lost between these two as she learns from their body language, each on his own side of the car, each avoiding looking at the other.

A young German who is missing his right foot rides along in the truck and offers her a half cigarette. Frangie doesn’t smoke, and in any case fears if she takes it she’ll be accepting some unspoken bargain. She shakes her head no.

The soldier shrugs, says something to his companion, gets a laugh in return.

The ambulance is just behind them and off to one side to avoid the vast clouds of choking dust the truck tires throw up. The ambulance driver leans out of his window and yells something that Frangie does not understand but contains one word she has learned: schwarze.

Black.

The cigarette soldier gives her a light shove and waves her toward the ambulance, but they’re moving at a steady twenty miles an hour. Maybe she can jump off the truck, but she can’t climb onto the ambulance.

Another shout, an impatient wave, and Hungry Eyes, the lowering brute who seems more or less in charge of the wounded, says something that causes cigarette soldier to shove her again, harder.

She stands up, bracing against the lurching, spine-jarring assault of the truck’s suspension, climbs as far down as she can, down onto the bumper, takes a deep breath, and jumps the last two feet. Unsurprisingly she stumbles, falls on her back, and rolls onto her side to stand up.

The ambulance comes to a halt beside her. The back door now flies open and the Doctor-Major yells, “Get in here, American.”

The inside of the ambulance reeks of sweat, vomit, human waste, and fear. The sides are lined with stretchers hinged to the walls, three on each side, but there are two men in each cot, lying head to foot, and three more sitting hunched over against the front of the rectangular space.

Frangie frantically runs through what she knows about typhus, but that turns out to be almost nothing.

The Doctor-Major says, “Lice,” as if answering her query. “We raided a village, not knowing . . . Some of the men passed their time with the women, many of whom turned out to be louse-ridden with rickettsia typhi–bearing lice. It’s a nasty little disease that displays as a very severe headache, fever, cough, muscle pain . . . death in usually twenty percent or so of healthy men, but these are not healthy men, these are exhausted men who have gone too often without food or water or sanitation.”

The men are either stripped down to their underwear or buried in blankets, depending on the state of their fevers. Frangie sees rashes from the illness, but also protruding ribs and injuries in various stages of healing . . . or not healing.

“I have had no sleep in three days,” the Doctor-Major says. “I must sleep.”

His eyes are glassy, his whiskered face sallow.