Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“The squad, mostly. Folks from the rest of the platoon too, whoever is sitting still long enough but won’t notice me. It makes people nervous, but it keeps me from getting nervous.”

Rio half turns to favor her with a skeptical look. If this is Jillion Magraff not being nervous she’d hate to see her nervous.

“Would you like to see?” Jillion asks.

“Sure.”

Jillion draws her bent, sweat-stained sketch pad from under her blouse. She opens it to a page and shyly holds it for Rio to see.

“That’s Castain! Hey, Jenou, come here.” But Jenou is busy flirting with a drunk but darkly attractive staff sergeant. “You got one of me?”

Jillion pales. “Um . . . I have a few of you.”

“Well, let’s see.”

“Okay, but, you know, I’m just an amateur,” Jillion says deprecatingly. “This is the first one I did of you.”

The sketch is of a girl, in partial profile, looking off to one side and smiling. The girl is in uniform, but without a helmet, and she looks just ready to start laughing.

“Oh man, my freckles,” Rio says. Jillion starts to put it away, but Rio puts her hand on the page, stopping her. “Who was I looking at when you drew this?”

“I don’t remember,” Jillion says.

But Jillion blushes, and it’s pretty clear she’s lying. Why, though? Who would she smile at that way? Not Stick. One of the other girls? Certainly not Pang or Tilo. She hopes it wasn’t Cassel, but then the answer slowly dawns: Jack. Of course. She was looking at Jack, ready to laugh.

“Okay,” Rio says, confused as to how exactly she should be reacting. She wants to compliment Jillion: it’s a very good likeness, but it’s also, maybe . . . revealing. Rio swallows and forces a laugh. “Any others?”

Jillion, perhaps reading Rio’s uncertainty, shakes her head.

“Come on, Magraff, you said there were others.” Rio dreads seeing something equally revealing, but dreads more not seeing it.

Jillion turns through the pages, past a frightened-looking Tilo, past Geer strangely tender in a face-to-face with his kitten, past Sergeant Cole’s gap-toothed grin in an obviously posed picture with his Thompson on his hip. And then, at last, reveals a somber picture of a GI. The GI’s face is partly shaded by the brim of a helmet, so only the mouth is visible. It’s a partly open mouth, showing a hint of upper teeth. It’s a wolfish half-smile, nothing like the laugh-ready grin of the first picture. There’s something predatory in that expression that matches the tension of the body. In the picture she has her M1 leveled, and a wisp of smoke curls from the barrel.

For a moment Rio can only stare. For some reason she feels the collar of her blouse chafing her neck, distracting, annoying, spreading irritation through her. She searches for something to say, because again, it’s a very good drawing, but she doesn’t like it. It seems connected to the scrape of collar on her neck and connected as well to the vague nakedness she feels not having the weight of her rifle on her shoulder. In the sketch her right hand melts into the trigger housing of the rifle.

“That’s—” she begins, but suddenly two male hands appear, reaching around Rio to cover and squeeze her breasts. Rio says, “Can I borrow your cigarette?” and without waiting for a reply takes Jillion’s cigarette from her mouth and stabs the lit end into one of the hands.

“Goddammit!” the man shrieks. “You burned me! You fugging bitch!”

“Sorry,” Rio says mildly. “I must have slipped.” There’s an angry red-and-black circle on the back of the man’s hand, and he alternately shakes it and massages it.

“If you weren’t a woman, I’d punch you in the face!”

This is loud enough and angry enough to cause Jenou and Cat to close in, standing shoulder to shoulder with Rio. Beebee dithers uncertainly before finally deciding that loyalty to his new platoon mates is more important than loyalty to a fellow male.

“How about I buy you a beer to show there are no hard feelings?” Rio says, breaking out a tight, false, predatory smile which, it occurs to her, she has just seen in the sketch. That very smile. No smile at all, really.

“How about you—” the man begins in a belligerent tone, but taking a second look at determined faces, he backs away muttering curses under his breath.

They order another round of beers and then move on to a different establishment, where the Arab barman, and his whole family who help serve and clean up, is happier to serve them. There they run into Jack, Stick, and Tilo, all somewhat impaired and clearly intent on getting still more impaired.

Suddenly self-conscious, Rio whispers, “Don’t mention my knife. Or the masher back there.”

Jenou rolls her eyes but just says, “Oooookay,” with a drawn-out vowel. But she can’t stop herself, so in a whisper adds, “We wouldn’t want you frightening your backup boyfriend.”

This leaves Rio in the impossible position of either denying or asking who Jenou means by “backup boyfriend,” both of which seem likely to cause Jenou to say still more. She limits herself to shooting Jenou a furious look—not the look from the sketch, an angrier but less dangerous look—which Jenou laughs off, saying, “Save it for the Krauts and the mashers. You don’t scare me, Rio.”

“The ladies are here, thank God!” Jack says with a big and somewhat misaligned grin. “I’m stuck with these two.” He waves vaguely at Stick and Tilo. Tilo has the look of an unfocused owl trying to see in daylight. Stick is less tipsy but not quite his usual solid, steady self.