Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

Feeling an overwhelming swirl of mismatched feelings, including the giddiness of attraction to Halev, nervousness, and fear—but mostly fear of screwing something up—she shakes Halev’s hand chastely and self-consciously, and slides into the backseat of the Plymouth.

6

RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“You Cole?”

It is four o’clock in the morning, and the man speaking is an MP corporal. He is behind the wheel of a jeep pulling a wooden cart on bald automobile tires. It’s a makeshift arrangement that has never appeared in an army field manual. But then the army manual does not contemplate this particular sort of cargo.

Sergeant Cole rubs sleep from his eyes and looks at the MP, then at the bodies piled and intertwined in the cart. Eight of his soldiers—the new guy Beebee, plus Suarez, Stick, Stafford, Castain, Preeling, Magraff, and Richlin—are in various states of consciousness. They are bleeding, bruised, groaning, and trying unsuccessfully, in the case of the marginally conscious ones, to climb out.

“I’m Cole,” he admits, with disgust in both syllables.

“I think these belong to you.” The driver jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

“You can drive ’em right on back to the stockade,” Cole snaps.

The corporal laughs. “No can do, Sarge, stockade is full. So’s the city jail. And anyway, the dark-haired one there slipped me a fiver to get them here. There’s been some roughhousing. Your bunch were in a fight with some Frog colonials. Then, best as we can tell, they went on to get into a second round with a Texas outfit.”

“Dammit,” Cole says, which is about as extreme as his language gets unless there’s shooting going on.

Rio rolls off of Cat, tumbles, and slams hard into the dirt. She lies there, facedown, for quite a while, arms and hands flattened on the ground. She might just as well have fallen out of a passing plane.

How did I get here?

The ground does not feel quite solid to Rio, in fact it is spinning, spinning, and sort of falling away, like one of those boards they use to ride the waves at Stinson Beach. Oh, she wishes she were there right now, wishes she were far away, lying on some beach. And also really wishing hard that she had not started drinking that ouzo they got . . . somewhere.

Her tongue is a dead rat coated in tar; her muscles are both limp and sore; her stomach . . . oh, she doesn’t even want to think about that because she’s got nothing left to puke up unless she’s going to start puking up her liver.

Also, her face hurts. She almost remembers the punch that connected with her right cheek. And she can vaguely trace the soreness in her throat muscles to an armlock, possibly from an MP, that part is not at all clear. The one thing she does remember with a certain satisfaction is that the sprain in her right ankle is from the impact of her boot tip on a sensitive area of a male Texan’s person.

“All right, you useless bunch of clowns, crawl off and shower. Who knows what bugs you picked up, and I won’t have them in my tents. And, Suarez, for God’s sake pull up your pants!”

Cat says, “Hey, I lost a tooth.”

By reveille they have showered and caught ninety minutes of sleep. Rio returns only very reluctantly to consciousness because consciousness is pain. Her head. Oh God, her head. And her eyes! Oh no, that’s even worse.

Like a zombie she dresses and runs a comb across a head that has become a big bass drum pounding, pounding.

“You okay?” Rio says to Jenou through gritted teeth.

“Unh,” Jenou answers.

“You have a black eye,” Rio points out.

“Unh,” Jenou agrees.

The squad shuffles miserably toward the assembly area. They feel that their misery must be obvious to all, but as Rio blinks in the painful sunlight she notices that the same misery afflicts at least two-thirds of the forty-seven—now forty-eight—men and women who make up Fifth Platoon.

Sergeant Cole lines up with them, no one too concerned with spit and polish given that this is now a veteran platoon with a number of experiences in combat.

Phil O’Malley, the new platoon sergeant who has replaced Garaman, is an ancient forty-five-year-old veteran of the last war. He’s a man who gives an impression of being almost as wide as he is tall, but the width is in the shape of solid muscle and gristle. He has a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, a tan face, and slitted brown eyes that could be amused or cruel, depending. O’Malley stands a little ahead of the formation.

Rio assumes this is the usual morning ritual, with the usual pro forma assurances that all are present and accounted for. But it’s already gone on too long and the thought that maybe she should force herself to pay attention begins to form in the woolly depths of her hungover brain.

Or I could just sit down right here in the dirt. That would be nice.

There are two lieutenants up there now in the eye-searing light. One Rio recognizes as the headquarters company lieutenant who has been filling in until a new lieutenant can arrive to replace the deceased-but-not-mourned Lieutenant Liefer.