Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

“How about you, Rio? Afterward, I mean? You still think there’s any potential in the handsome Mr. Braxton?”

Rio accelerates her pace and says, “I have to get back up front.” She ignores Jenou’s drawled “Uh-huh,” and catches up to Molina.

“All right, Molina, we may be getting close, so use all your senses, right? Listen. And smell too.”

“All I smell is me,” Molina mutters.

The trail is one person wide, sometimes just a single step wide so they have to walk heel-toe, which is awkward when you’re carrying weight. Snow comes drifting down through the trees, fat flakes of it. They’ve been traveling steadily downhill, and Rio worries about the return climb if snow starts to fall in earnest.

All conversation has stopped. They move slowly, with all the stealth they can manage while following a goat t

rail through trees with branches that reach out to snag them as they pass. It is getting on to afternoon, and Rio considers ordering a meal break. But Germans have noses, too, and the smell of C rations could give them away.

Molina stops suddenly and takes a knee.

“What?” Rio asks voicelessly.

Molina points through the tree trunks, through the bushes, to a sliver of unpaved dirt road. Rio unfolds her map and tries to connect wavy lines on paper to the forest around her. Down there, a road. Off to the right, a stream. “Yep,” she says. She waves her squad forward and motions them to gather around.

“Okay, listen up. We have to leave the trail here and go down this slope then follow the stream. Our guys are here.” She points at the map, and as if on cue they hear the chatter of a .50 caliber. “Krauts here. They’ll have patrols out. Do not start shooting unless I tell you or you have no choice. Right? Panzers are bunched up along this track trying to break through. I doubt they’ll be expecting us, but keep your eyes open.”

Now Rio takes point, with Jack just behind her. They no longer look for mines—the shadows in the forest are lengthening and the snow, falling faster now, will conceal wires or fresh-turned dirt.

She takes careful, silent but swift steps, moving with feline grace, her Thompson leveled at her waist. From time to time she stops to listen and to sniff the breeze. She looks for movement, any movement, listens for the snap of a branch underfoot, inhales any scent suggestive of German tobacco or food.

Step, step, step. Pause. Step, step, step, step. Pause.

It is an excruciatingly slow way to advance, but advance they do. They reach a small trickling stream, barely enough to submerge their canteens in. But the tiny stream has cut a deep ravine, almost head-high, and Rio leads them along the stream, stepping into, out of, and back into freezing water.

The temperature is dropping fast. Snow accumulates, just a dusting, but the start of worse to come. The squad breathes steam. Feet already cold are growing numb.

“Bridge,” Rio says, stopping and chopping her hand forward to indicate the direction. “It looks like something Kraut engineers threw up over this stream.”

In the most basic sense this stream, this ravine, delineates the line between the American Shermans dug in on the western side and the panzers on the other side. The sound of machine gun fire is sporadic, along with the higher-pitched sound of rifles. From time to time they’ve heard a tank firing followed by an explosion.

Rio now leads them up the bank, crawling on their bellies. Rio’s seen nothing, but her predator’s senses have warned her with a prickling on the back of her neck that Germans are nearby.

Crawl. Crawl. Pause. Crawl. And a brief snatch of spoken German, coming from way too close. In those bushes? Molina crawls beside her and points to their right. Sure enough: movement in the form of a gray uniform. A German patrol.

Rio motions everyone to lie flat. They lie still for twenty minutes as the German patrol passes within a hundred feet. And then . . .

BOOM!

The first round elicits a yelp from Molina, but that sound is obliterated by a catastrophic artillery barrage that lacerates the area where Rio believes the American tanks are dug in. It is presumably German artillery, but given how frequently artillery hits the wrong target, it could be American. Either way the sound of destruction is an opportunity.

“Let’s move out!”

At a crouching trot they move more quickly now, artillery exploding well to their left, the ongoing battle of the ridge blazing away behind, to the right, and many hundreds of feet up from where Rio’s squad is.

Suddenly through the trees ahead, Rio spots a German truck. And then, ahead of the truck, a tank.

“Mazur! What do you make of it?”

The Polish American bazooka man peers into the forest and whistles softly. “That is a Jagdpanzer, a tank-killer.”

“Looks strange.”

“No turret. It’s got a big old cannon, but it has limited movement unless you move the whole vehicle.”