Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“Listen, Williams, I can’t have you unconscious or flaking out. So you can either die in a morphine haze or maybe get out of here. Hang on. Just hang on.”

She draws the shovel to her, turns it awkwardly, and stabs it weakly into the dirt beneath Williams’s face. It is immediately apparent that this will never do because she has nowhere to put the dirt she digs out. It will pile up but then tumble right back down.

The sergeant, looking down from what feels like a very distant height, sees the problem and says, “Get me a poncho. Now!”

In less than a minute the sergeant has flapped the poncho down, like a housewife making a bed, to cover the ground to Frangie’s left.

Frangie digs out another spadeful, and Williams screams.

Another spadeful, and another, and Williams screams as the sergeant carefully draws the poncho and the dirt up the slope. He empties it and returns the poncho.

This process is repeated a dozen times. The blood is rushing to Frangie’s head and hands, making her eyes tear up and her nose run and causing her legs to go numb. The heat is appalling, and she can smell her own hair singeing. After twenty minutes Frangie has herself pulled back up just long enough to clear her head.

“Water,” she gasps. She upends a proffered canteen and some sensible fellow drains a second canteen over her head. Then she slithers back down and the slow, slow digging proceeds anew.

Finally she notices that Williams is screaming less. She asks for and is passed a flashlight. In the light she can peer ahead and see that a small gap has opened between Williams’s back and the bottom of the tank. His shirt is soaked red.

With infinite care despite the trembling in her fingers she walks her fingers down his back until she finds the place where a shattered rib sticks out. She feels around the hole; there shouldn’t be an artery there, but she has to be sure. Has he lost so much blood he’ll go into shock?

“Pass me a rope. Put a loop in it!” Frangie calls, spitting dirt. “All right, Williams, I’m giving you the shot now.” She stabs down into his shoulder and squeezes the blessed pain relief into him. “Before you flake out, try to raise your hands together.”

This brings a fresh cry of agony, but Williams can sense the possibility of life now, and he does it. He has big hands, the calloused hands of a man who has picked cotton since the age of five. Frangie passes the rope over them and tugs to tighten the knot.

“Okay, Sarge, pull me up first,” she yells.

She is yanked up like a cork popping from a bottle of champagne.

The sergeant takes over. “Okay, boys, on the rope and pull, but slow and easy.”

They pull and Williams slides up the side of the ditch and is dragged several feet away to cries of relief from his comrades, followed quickly by relieved insults and hectoring. Frangie leaps to kneel beside him. She tries not to think about the fact that within five seconds the tank slips with a muffled but earth-rumbling sound to crush the narrow gap beneath its thirty-three tons of steel.

Thank you, Lord.

She uses scissors to cut Williams’s shirt from tail to collar and examines his broad back. The rib is a mess and the exit wound is gruesome, but that alone won’t kill him. But that says nothing about internal bleeding and possibly fatal damage to internal organs. And she counts at least three other broken ribs, though not extruding.

“Turn him over, gently,” she instructs the attentive soldiers around her.

This time Williams’s scream of agony is cut off abruptly as he faints. Morphine only does so much.

She pulls away the cut uniform and sees that a piece of root or perhaps a branch has been shoved into his belly. The wood is still in place, a bung in a barrel, limiting the bleeding.

“We have to get him to a field hospital right now,” Frangie snaps.

“Shouldn’t you pull out that stick?” the sergeant asks, much more deferential than he had been earlier.

“No. It may be acting as a plug, in which case we’d need whole blood and plasma and an operating theater.”

“Right,” the sergeant admits.

“And a surgeon,” Frangie adds. “Move him to a jeep while he’s out—he’s better off not feeling it.”

In less than five minutes Williams is on a stretcher tied to the hood of a jeep.

“That was good work, Doc,” the sergeant says. “You okay?”

“I’m going to throw up.”

The sergeant grins. “You go right ahead, honey, you deserve a good puke. Hell, you deserve a damn Silver Star, although they aren’t handing those out to colored soldiers much.”