Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

Cole had said they were pulling a search-and-rescue mission, a plane down in the hills to the northeast. The crash zone was seven miles away. Who could march seven miles and carry extra water? Who would, if necessary, shoot with intent? Who would sneak up on a Kraut or Eye-tie guard and knife him in the dark?

> Suddenly the choice was not between Jenou and Tilo. It was between Geer and Pang. Pang’s presence might create conflict, especially with the radioman who had not dealt much with him. Geer, on the other hand, would be hard to manage but probably fit in better.

“Okay, people, listen up,” Rio says in unconscious imitation of Sergeant Cole. “Jack, Cat, and Geer, we’re going for a walk. Canteens topped off, rations for twenty-four hours, extra ammo, extra water, leave everything else, we have to move fast.”

The radioman, Petersen, comes wandering over. He doesn’t look like much, with a face so narrow he could be a flounder, but then his job is just to manage the radio. He has a pistol on his hip but no rifle and no pack. He has a single canteen and no ammo other than what’s in his pistol. But of course the radio itself, the size of a backpack, weighs thirty-eight pounds, and with all that still only has a range of three miles. Three miles in open country, a few hundred yards in hill country.

Anyway, the radioman is not Rio’s chief concern. Her chief concern is the carefully blank look on Jenou’s face. It’s the look Jenou gets when her feelings have been hurt but she doesn’t want to show it.

Rio feels a flash of annoyance. She shouldn’t have to be thinking about this nonsense. She shouldn’t feel like she has to defend herself or soften the blow. My God, she’s leading a patrol for the first time, which she sure as hell did not ask for, and her head is full of worry for Jenou!

Rio avoids looking at her friend and instead locks eyes with Cole, who is relighting his cigar and giving her a look of . . . what? Support? Sympathy?

They go over the map carefully, Cole, Rio, Jack, Cat, Geer, and Petersen in a circle.

“Whenever you’re ready, Richlin,” Cole says, and his tone is gentle. He knows what this means. He knows that for the first time responsibility is falling directly on Rio’s shoulders—on the shoulders of an eighteen-year-old girl.

“Yep,” Rio says. She takes a deep, steadying breath and says, “Let’s move out. Geer? Take point. Cat, on our six.”

In this, too, she is copying Cole, who always stays to the middle, the better to survive an ambush or minefield, the better to watch both ends of the line, the better to stay in touch with his squad. And she knows taking point will please Geer.

Does Cole have all these same sorts of worries about who and when and how? Does he take hurt feelings into consideration? For the first time Rio gets a glimpse of what it means to be the good sergeant her father talked about, the good sergeant whose job it is to keep you alive when an officer’s orders are sending you in harm’s way.

I am heartily sorry for any time I made your life harder, Jedron Cole.

The first mile or so is past twilit farm fields. The road is narrow but not overly rutted. Rio can see the hills rising ahead of them. Glancing back, she can see nothing of the platoon beyond Cat. Finding their first turnoff becomes a bit of a comedy as there are two very similar roads just fifty feet apart. But one turns out to lead nowhere except a tiny farm almost entirely surrounded by prickly pears, as if the farmer wants to strongly discourage visitors.

As it is the farmer comes out carrying a shotgun, but on being assured that they are amici and not Germans or Fascists, he insists on handing a wineskin around before giving them better directions.

They find the right track, but by now full dark has come. The road is barely a wagon track—at no time paved and with no convenient ditches to dive into should the need arise. They are exposed without cover, but fortunately hidden by darkness. Off to the southeast she sees distant flashes, and off to the southwest as well, but none are any more threatening than distant lightning.

After a while Geer raises a clenched fist, and they all take a knee.

“What is it?” Rio whispers.

“Hear that?”

Rio listens and breaks into a grin. “Cows, Geer.”

“You sure?”

She holds up a hand he probably can’t see and says, “Before I got calluses from humping jerry cans I got calluses milking cows.”

They move on, and after a while, after she’s sure Geer won’t resent it as coming too early, she moves him back and puts Jack on point. Jack, Cat, Rio, Petersen, Geer.

If there are mines . . .

If there’s an ambush . . .

No, she sternly warns herself. You cannot protect your “backup boyfriend.” You are in charge, Rio. You have a military objective, you have orders, you have the weight of it on your shoulders, and you cannot choose to expose only the people you don’t like.

This is not high school.

The track joins a better road for half a mile before veering away again onto what is likely a cattle path. This path meanders through prickly pears and olive trees, past ever-smaller fields of ever more random shapes. The angle of the slope increases until pretty soon Rio is feeling it in her calf muscles, and far more in her bandaged thigh. But of course she is the one to set the pace, so she cannot take it easy. She ignores the ache as best she can, and pushes out thoughts of Jenou’s tellingly blank face and the image of Jack stepping on a mine, and focuses on the job at hand, which is to not get lost and to avoid wandering into either an ambush or a minefield.

The Milky Way shines cold and impossibly distant in a mostly clear sky, and eventually a sliver of moon rises as well. But still they fail to spot the four armed men who are walking the opposite direction and carrying shotguns, until Jack yells, “Drop it!”

Jack has his rifle leveled, and seeing this, every rifle in the squad snaps up. Even Petersen pulls his pistol. Had the Sicilian men been a bit more surprised the shooting might have started, but the men all keep their shotguns pointed cautiously down at the ground.