Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

The soldier glances toward his rifle, leaning against a fence post. Rainy carefully draws her Walther, keeping it low so only he will see it. “I can pay you twenty marks, or I can shoot you and take the sausage and keep the money,” she says.

Am I a thief if I steal what a thief has stolen?

A worldly smile appears on the man’s features. “I’m a Ukrainian, I won’t die for German honor.” He spits out the words German honor. “Give me your money.”

They carefully, suspiciously, trade money for sausage.

“You are hungry, and I have not had a woman in a long time,” the soldier says, leering.

“I am trying to find my lover,” Rainy says. “He is an SS sturmbannführer with the Das Reich.”

The man shrugs and jerks his head toward the north. “Up there. Maybe your man is there. But you had better watch out for the maquis, they are killing whores who sleep with Germans.”

Rainy moves on, gnawing on the sausage, no longer acting the part of a dirty, scared, starving refugee, but living it. Soon she is forced off the road by a rush of German tanks rolling forward. She watches them until they are almost out of sight and then sees them turn right off the road into trees.

It is another hour’s walk, pushing always against the incessant flow of refugees, till she reaches the spot where the tanks have turned off. She stops. It is not a road to anywhere, the tanks have made their own road, crushing fences and crops to disappear beneath trees they hope will hide them from the eager P-38s and P-47s and Spitfires.

The deception fails. Three P-47s, their wings heavy with missile pods, lacerate the stand of trees with pass after pass, firing missiles, blazing away with machine guns. As soon as they are gone, Rainy moves closer. The German encampment is in a fury of activity, with medics hauling men from tanks, soldiers spraying fire extinguishers on burning trucks, repair crews already assessing damaged treads and twisted gun barrels.

Veterans, Rainy figures. The chaos is too controlled: this is not their first air raid. Rainy hides behind a fallen log and peeks over the edge just in time to spot the fat German from Oradour, the one person she recognizes, aside from her prey.

It is the right company. She has found them. Now to wait for him, for the smiling sturmbannführer. Though how she is to take him on in the midst of a company of SS she cannot imagine.

Are you an assassin now, Rainy Schulterman?

She watches intently, hour after hour, as the light declines and shadows lengthen, but she does not see him. Nevertheless, she has an idea where he may be: there is a concrete German pillbox at the edge of the wood, well situated to cover the road.

In there. He must be in there, no doubt laughing happily again, no doubt imagining himself at risk only from the sky.

She falls asleep, propped against her log. When she awakes it is in sudden panic when the log bounces hard and all the noise in the world descends

with a massive series of crashes.

At first she thinks the planes are back, but no, this is artillery, big 105 and 155 millimeter shells exploding. And she is in the middle of it, cringing beneath her log, hands pressed against her ears to dim the crashing noise. The ground beneath her bounces and shakes. The air is stifling with the smell of powder and smoke.

The barrage ends. Sudden silence. Clods of dirt rattle down through the leaves. Rainy hears shouts and cries of pain. Can she get away with walking straight into the chaos and pretending to be a shell-shocked refugee?

No, they’ll peg her as an informer who gave the location to the Americans. But she can creep closer. She crawls on hands and knees through fallen pine needles, sliding beneath bushes, sometimes crawling on her belly. She reaches a crater, still smoking. A dead German is being hauled out.

Rainy slides down into the crater, taking the dead man’s place. From this vantage point she is much closer. She can see more and hear a great deal more. A gaggle of officers is at the entrance to the pillbox, smoking and occasionally barking orders. The pillbox has been hit but not damaged beyond a smoke mark.

Three officers. One with his back to her. She cannot see his face, cannot tell the color of his hair beneath his hat.

No closer, Rainy: wait.

She listens. Talk of moving to a different map grid. Discussion of whether they’ll find cover there. Names mentioned in low voices, the dead. Then a laugh and someone mentions that the damned Americans have blown up the officers’ latrine and a joke about not defecating until they are back in Berlin.

One of the officers, perhaps prodded by this, walks a few paces, and urinates against a tree. The man with his back to Rainy laughs and goes in pursuit of his own tree.

For a brief moment, only a moment, she sees his face.

Can she? Not without being caught. A single pistol round will have the whole camp racing here, guns blazing.

Is it worth dying to kill this one Nazi butcher?

The decision is physical as much as mental, as if her own body has decided, as if she is being moved against her will. She stands up and in German says, “Don’t be alarmed, Herr Sturmbannführer, I have only come to make you an offer.”

The German jerks, caught off-guard, and says, “Run away, you dirty woman. I don’t want your body.”