Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“No,” Rio says, shaking her head and frowning dismissively. “Do it now. Do it here.”

“You’ll most likely feel this,” Frangie warns. She has her forceps in hand. With all the care she can manage in the vibrating, bucking, salt-spray-washed boat, she clamps the serrated teeth of the forceps onto a jagged protrusion on the metal slug. Rio winces. They are very definitely in range of small arms fire now, as if any further proof were needed, and bullets sing and buzz overhead.

“Okay, on the count of three. One . . .” She pulls the bullet out like a cork from a bottle of wine. There’s some blood, but it’s oozing, not pumping.

“Five minutes!” the coxswain yells down.

“What happened to counting to three?” Rio asks archly.

“Misdirection,” Frangie says, but she’s not chatty. She’s quickly breaking out a suturing kit, not so very different from the standard sewing kit.

“These won’t be pretty stitches,” Frangie says through gritted teeth. “No time for pretty.”

“That’s a shame, her legs are her best feature,” Jenou says, and pats Rio’s helmet comfortingly.

A part of Rio notes the fact that they’ve just seen a man’s face blown off and while they are shaken, they are not panicked. Maybe it’s the fatalism of veterans. Maybe it’s the fact that it was just a colored man who died.

“Ow!” Rio yells as the needle goes in. This she feels, and she is incongruously transported back to the hotel room in Tunis, back to the moment when she crossed the line between girl and woman. There had been a similar sharp pain, a surprising pain, but one that did not cause her to pull back. She had been almost helpless beneath Strand, feeling the full weight of a man on her for the first time, feeling the discomfort as he accidentally pulled her hair with his arms straining beside her head, feeling involved yet distant in a way.

He had wanted it. He had wanted sex, but yes, so had she, there was no point deceiving herself. She could have stopped it at any point. She had wanted to know it and understand it, but looking back now she did not feel that she had been somehow transformed. She was no longer a virgin, and my God, her entire life she’d been told how terribly important it was for her to remain a virgin, that magic word. But what did it matter, really?

Strand, too, had suggested an escape, just as Frangie was doing now: Escape through wound? Escape through pregnancy? Was it some kind of omen that two people had now offered her a way out? Was God trying to tell her something?

Probably not, God, Rio thinks, abashed at the tension between thoughts of an all-seeing divinity and the forbidden thing she had done with Strand.

Anyway, God wouldn’t kill her for fornicating. Would He?

I have a bullet hole in my leg, I’m three minutes from the beach, and I’m worried God will strike me down for fornication.

Steady, girl. Steady.

“Okay, I’m doing three more stitches,” Frangie Marr says. “Go ahead and yell if you want.”

“Richlin yell and admit she’s human?” Cat teases.

Three more sutures follow and Rio almost does yelp in pain, but now she can’t, can she? She can’t without seeming to playact, to be someone the others didn’t think she is.

I’m playing a role now. I’m an actor playing the role of warrior.

She looks around at the boat, at the scared, wet, shocked faces and realizes, Oh, they’re playing too: pretending nonchalance and doing an unconvincing job of it.

We’re all scared to death and pretending to be brave.

The first time—her first landing on a hostile beach—she had wondered whether she was brave. She had imagined losing control of herself, throwing down her rifle and fleeing. She had imagined the shame of it.

Were they all thinking the same thing? Were they all terrified of a bullet like the one that had blown open the Negro’s face, but more terrified still of the shame of running away?

“It’s too wet for tape,” Frangie says. “I’m going to wrap gauze around your leg and tie it off. It’ll probably slip if you run around much. Try to keep dirt out of it. Check in with one of your own medics as soon as possible.”

“All right, people,” Sergeant Cole says. “Saddle up, you know the drill. Keep your weapons high and dry, keep your heads down. We rally on Lieutenant Vanderpool, he’s a hundred yards down on our left.”

The experienced soldiers have used condoms to cover the business end of their rifles, more to keep sand out than water.

Walter says, “We’ll hang back until your people are clear, Cole. Best I can tell what’s left of my boys are way off to the south. Good luck.”

Cole glances at the poncho covering Daddy D. “Sorry about your men.”

“It’s war,” Walter says, but there’s a quiver in his voice.