“I freely confess I am an amateur,” Rainy says, impatient now, not interested in another futile go-round with the annoying agent.
“Not talking about you, sister.” He jerks his thumb back toward the door through which they have both just emerged. “You know what Corelli did before the war?”
“Colonel Corelli?” She pointedly emphasizes his rank.
“Professor of Oriental Languages at some college up in Vermont.”
He lets that sink in, and it does. Rainy’s guard comes down just a little.
Bayswater continues. “We have professors too, all kinds of professors working for the Bureau. Very helpful, some of them. But we don’t let them plan or run operations. Guy like that is way smarter than me, but he’s never done this work before. His whole outfit—your outfit—you’re supposed to be counting tanks and deciding where some bunch of Krauts will be. This is not your bailiwick.”
That sinks in as well.
“Word to the wise,” Bayswater says. “Do this, this meet, but no more. Amateurs get people hurt. And your colonel is the textbook definition of an amateur. I know you don’t want to hear it, but that man is going to get you killed.” He touches the brim of his fedora, nods, and walks briskly away.
4
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA
“You know what I want to do today?” Luther Geer says, stifling a yawn and using the heel of his hand to grind the sleep from his eyes. “I want to go sit in a damn LC and invade that same damn beach all over again. At least I get cool and clean wading through the waves.”
His kitten, the former Miss Pat, now renamed Miss Lion of the Sahara, blinks owlishly from her position on his chest.
Rio Richlin has not warmed up to Luther Geer. She thinks he is a bully and not very bright to boot, but she nevertheless agrees.
Since the fighting wound down in Tunisia, the 119th Division has trained and practiced and trained some more. There has been renewed effort to improve soldiers’ effectiveness with the bazooka. There have been lectures on the necessity of actually firing one’s rifle and not just carrying it around like some family heirloom. There have been the inevitable marches around the desert—marches that had started off unpleasantly cold and then moved without seeming transition to being fiercely hot. And there have been amphibious assaults.
They have assaulted the same beach three times already, and the weary consensus among the deeply bored GIs of Second Squad, Fifth Platoon, Company A of the 119th, was that today heralded yet another phony invasion.
Jenou rolls upright in her canvas cot and upends her boots before putting them on. There are scorpions and snakes and things that have no name in the Tunisian desert, and many of them like to find shelter in a shady boot. Jenou is already partly in uniform and has in fact slept in it, there being no such thing as army-issue pajamas or nightgowns. And anyway, with zero privacy she’d have had no way to change without being stared at by the men of the squad, especially Tilo Suarez, who reacts to boredom by becoming even more irritatingly amorous.
Jenou stands up and says, “I’m grabbing chow before the coffee gets cold.”
“I’m with you,” Rio says. “I like to get the powdered eggs before they start separating.”
“This is the life, man,” Dain Sticklin says, scratching his chest through his OD undershirt. “A thousand tents surrounded by a million square miles of sand with a million sand fleas per man—or woman.”
“Are those sand fleas or lice?” Cat Preeling teases. “Because if it’s lice, we’re going to have to barbecue you, Stick. It’s the only way. Death by fire.”
“I think mine are sand fleas.” Stick picks up his uniform blouse, shakes it, and begins peering closely at the fabric, searching for tiny crawling things.
Dain Sticklin, inevitably called “Stick,” is the closest thing to a real soldier in the squad. Smart, educated, disciplined, with a prominent widow’s peak that somehow makes him look the part of the mature GI, he’s been in only as long as Rio herself and in fact went through basic training with her.
“We’re not going to know until we put them side by side whether it’s fleas or lice,” Geer opines. Geer is a big ginger hick, the least open to the idea of women in the unit. But in battle he’s performed well, and that has become more meaningful to Rio than his daily obnoxiousness.
“We ought to take a louse and a flea and put ’em together, see who wins.” This from Tilo, who seems vaguely excited by the idea, or as excited as a bored, doe-eyed young lothario in a deathly hot tent can get.
“Jesus, let me out of here,” Jenou mutters. She and Rio head for the flap and throw it open onto a blindingly bright day.
There, just arriving, is Sergeant Cole and some male private neither Rio nor Jenou recognizes.
“Where you headed?” Cole asks.
“The latrine followed by the chow line,” Rio answers.
“Then the latrine again,” Jenou says darkly. There is some dysentery in the camp, and the food is the prime suspect.
“Hold up a second,” Cole says, and the two young women back into the tent.