Front Lines (28 page)

The Italian soldier trips. He falls to one knee.

He tripped. That's all.

The Italian drops his rifle. He clutches his thigh.

My God, I hit him!

“Keep it up, pour it on!”

Chug-a-chug-a-chug-chug-a-chug-a-chug!

Take aim.

Choices. Three or four men in view. Which?

You. The one with the mustache.

Breathe in, out sloooow . . .

BAM!

A miss. She breathes a sigh of relief, only no, no, now the Italian is falling. Straight back. Like he's falling in slow motion, an optical illusion that makes it seem that he's shrinking not falling, until suddenly his knees buckle and his entire body crumples.

A sob escapes her. She looks desperately to her right. Suarez is a ghost, pale, staring down the barrel of his rifle. Has he fired?

Beyond him she sees the rest of Second Squad falling back, Hansu Pang alive still and hauling the bazooka, all of them are running low, holding their helmets with one hand, Millican alive too, Jenou with steel ammo boxes in each hand, struggling to run. The lead tank turns slightly and—

BOOM!

This round sails harmlessly over the squad's heads to explode beyond them.

“Keep it coming, Richlin!”

Another target. Find the man. Find the one man who is going to die.

No, I don't want to, no, I don't want to.

Her body is a single tensed muscle, she's hard as a board, her teeth will break if she clenches any harder.

Tougher now. They're running.

The Italians know now they're being fired on, they know they're exposed and no matter what the Kraut officer yelled, they are ducking, running, cowering behind the tank, some preparing to return fire, most just trying to make themselves as small as possible.

You.

BAM!

“Aaaahh!” Rio cries, and the sound is something animalistic, some terrible blend of terror and triumph.

“Okay, Richlin, let's go!” Cole grabs her shoulder, and she is aware in a distant, disconnected way that he's had
to repeat it a couple of times, so she rolls over, gets awkwardly to her knees, then jumps up to run with bullets whizzing by overhead.

They run, the three of them, and ahead now she sees the rest of the squad. Jenou, still okay it seems, still hauling ammo though she's lost her helmet and her short-cut blond hair is like a bird in panicked flight. The rear tank sends another round after them, blowing another hole in the desert, and lends speed to Rio's legs.

It is flat-out, undignified running, track and field, kicking divots in the dirt.

Italian soldiers see them fleeing and now aim, aim at her, willing their bullets to find her, to blow a hole in her, to see her fall, to see her die. They're shouting in their foreign tongue, angry, scared shouts, firing fast, bullets everywhere.

Rio runs, Cole just behind her, Suarez ahead, runs and up ahead some rocks and the other squad is up in there, squinting from beneath their helmets, aiming their rifles but not shooting yet, not wanting to hit Second Squad.

Rio pants and sweats though it is still cold, even with the sun coming up now in a clearing sky. She runs to catch up to her own long shadow.

Suddenly the rest of the platoon opens up, blazes away at the advancing Italians as Rio, Suarez, and the sergeant rush past them, but already Rio sees some breaking,
pelting away from the advancing Panzers.

Rio falls into a bare scraped depression in the ground, each frantic breath painful in her raw throat. Her heart pounds like it will physically break her breastbone. Tilo Suarez drops beside her.

“Fugging tanks!” he yells.

“Unh,” she grunts in response.

“Never even got a chance to get off a shot,” he says, like he's making an excuse, like he's defending himself.

I shot at them.

Tilo says, “On us too fast. We're going to have to pull back. Tanks.” He sounds panicked.

The Italians hang back a little now as the rest of both platoons fire into them. They hold back, letting the tanks run on ahead, but now there's the German officer again in the staff car, yelling, berating them in harsh, German-accented Italian, clearly audible despite the cacophony of rifle fire. He waves a baton of some sort, a riding crop, waves it furiously, demanding the infantry advance.

But the Italians, the distant descendants of the greatest empire the world has ever known, do not seem in a hurry to get shot at in this particular place at this particular time.

Yet there's no stopping the tanks. Someone from another squad fires a hasty bazooka round that does
explode this time, but with all the apparent destructive effect of a cream puff thrown against a brick wall.

The tank fires back, and as the explosion fades Rio hears screams. She starts firing, somewhat wildly, not targeting, not picking out individual targets now, just shooting off the remaining rounds in her clip, which pops out with a musical
clang.
She cannot at that particular moment, cannot, just cannot coldly locate and target an enemy. She can manage to fire, she can make noise with her rifle, but she cannot right then take careful deadly aim and end another life.

She fumbles a clip from her belt and first tries to shove it in backward before turning it around and, with numb fingers, inserting it as she had done long ago in training, long ago, weeks ago, in the world of paper targets.

BANG!
and
ka-boom!
A tank fires and punches a round into the dirt just thirty feet from Rio, pelting her with debris that rattles on her helmet and dusts her shoulders and clogs the air.

Cole yells, “Where's the Loot? Where's Liefer?”

If the lieutenant is around, no one knows where she is. But Platoon Sergeant Garaman comes running up just then and says, “Come on, Cole, we're falling back.”

“Yeah,” Cole says, because there isn't much else to say. It's GIs versus tanks, and the bazookas aren't doing a damned thing, so it's fall back or die. “Fall back to where?”

Garaman shakes his head. “I'll be damned if I know, Jedron.”

It is the first time Rio has ever heard anyone call Sergeant Cole by his first name. It's a bad omen.

“Well, I guess we aren't knocking out any goddamn Kraut radio,” Cole mutters as Garaman stumbles away, looking for the lieutenant.

All of Fifth Platoon is falling back. Running away. And seeing their backs, the emboldened Italians are hot on their heels and the tanks
clank-clank-clank
behind, the sound of doom.

Rio runs with Sergeant Cole, who, like a magnet passing through metal filings, draws the rest of Second Squad behind him. Panic threatens to take over, Rio can feel it, can feel the razor edge of her own panic. Her combat boots seem unnaturally loud scrambling across loose rock and sand, sometimes silent as she leaps small depressions, panting, panting, gasping for breath in a burning throat.

Ahead she sees a gun of some sort, like a howitzer but smaller. It has a vertical rectangle of steel plate pierced by about four feet of barrel. British commandos man it, four of them, judging by the shallow soup-bowl helmets crouching behind the gun. One of the commandos is improbably smoking a pipe.

“Get past that two-pounder, join up with the Tommies,” Cole yells.

Rio goes tearing past the two-pounder, runs on another twenty feet and sees that the commandos have dug in, and drops herself into a foxhole no more than eighteen inches deep and just wide enough for her to cower in.

But the commando sergeant in the hole isn't having it. “You can bugger off, mate.” Then he looks at her and does a double take. “Sorry, miss. But you still aren't taking my hole. Keep running, we'll take care of Jerry.”

Rio hesitates, searches for Cole, and sees him in heated argument with the British captain, who keeps hacking at the air in a way that makes it clear he'd like the Americans to just keep on running.

Cole has no choice and yells for Fifth Platoon to fall back. He's not the platoon sergeant, still less the lieutenant, but he's there and seems to have some idea what he's doing, so both American platoons gladly accept his order and now all of them, all the Americans, run away. Run down the road. One soldier throws away his rifle the better to run.

It is a rout. It is panic, outright panic now.

It is about to get worse.

“Do they no longer teach spelling in school?” Sergeant Rainy Schulterman waves a paper in the air. “
There, their, they're.
Three different words! They are not interchangeable.”

Steam comes from her mouth as she speaks. It is cold. She has been typing with fingerless gloves on, and, in addition to two T-shirts, two pairs of socks, her regular uniform, and a field jacket, she wears a sweater knitted by her aunt Zaz. Aunt Zaz (short for Zlota) is an indifferent craftsman, but she has had the great good sense to knit the sweater using olive drab yarn, so it does not scream civilian even though the crew neck peeks out from beneath Rainy's jacket.

She is assigned to a small, forward detachment of General Lloyd Fredendall's headquarters, largely, she believes, because she can type sixty words a minute with few errors, and she speaks fluent German. All too often
for Rainy's taste this ends up meaning that she's just a glorified secretary.

In fact, she's noticing that the secretarial duties keep growing, while work related to her training and skills is handled by male soldiers.

The Detachment has an official numeric designation as part of II Corps, but is never called anything but “the Detachment” or occasionally, Maktar—the nearest Arab town—familiarly rendered as “Mucked Up.”

General Fredendall has not endeared himself to his soldiers with his decision to keep his own headquarters very far to the rear, where he is rumored to be expending prodigious engineering energies and resources in building tunnels in mountains to safeguard himself from air raids that never come.

There is one good thing from Rainy's perspective. The general's distance has led to the establishment of various outposts—like cavalry forts in the Old West—around Algeria and Tunisia in a system that makes it still harder for the general to track or respond to events in the area of his command, which is essentially all of North Africa this side of Casablanca.

Having formed a harsh opinion of the general, Rainy is relieved not to be in the general's new cave.

On a couple of occasions Rainy has ventured into Maktar itself to see the magnificent Roman ruins dating
back to Trajan. And from some of the windows in the Detachment's walled compound, Rainy can gaze out on a still-more-ancient Roman aqueduct. The area is neck-deep in history and unfortunately completely lacking in heat.

“What is it now, Schulterman?” Staff Sergeant Pooley, seated at the desk across from Rainy's, asks wearily.

“A report that says, ‘
They're—t-h-e-y apostrophe r-e—
tanks are coming through the gap,' is not the same as a report that says, ‘
Their
—
t-h-e-i-r
—tanks are coming through the gap.'”

The staff sergeant nods. He is twenty years older than Rainy and forms the calm counterpoint to her passion. He doesn't seem to dislike her, but neither does he see much use for her. He is old army, and absolutely no one old army favors women soldiers. Neither do 90 percent of new army officers and noncoms, but among the old guard it is unanimous. Nevertheless, Sergeant Pooley has never been unpleasant about it.

“Your language skills are commendable, Schulterman. Therefore consider yourself commended.”

Rainy aims her big eyes at him and considers a smartass retort. But she likes Pooley. He has tolerated her, and she is aware that she's a person who requires tolerance, and not just because of her gender. The phrase “does not suffer fools gladly” very definitely applies to Rainy. She
makes a note to herself to attempt greater tolerance for fools in the future.

Pooley's phone rings. He listens, says, “Yes, sir,” and hangs up. “You're up, Schulterman. Staff meeting. They need someone to take notes.”

Rainy jumps up, arranges her uniform, tries to squeeze the bulk out of her sweater, checks her hair, grabs her notebook and three sharpened pencils, and is on her way in fifteen seconds. Buck sergeants do not keep colonels waiting.

She slips unobtrusively into the conference room where Colonel George Jasper and his staff are gazing thoughtfully at a map spread out across a long, rectangular table.

The colonel is not an impressive figure. He is nearly as small as Rainy herself, is often indifferently turned out, has a lugubrious hound dog face, and despite being third-generation military and a professional soldier who graduated in the respectable middle of his West Point class, seems to have no gift for commanding respect. His staff officers range from incompetent to excellent, but the colonel, much like the general, his boss, has no great talent for differentiating the two.

They are discussing intelligence reports that the Germans are either launching or about to launch a full-scale attack. Rainy faithfully writes down the
essentials of the conversation, using her own version of shorthand. “C” is the colonel. “S2” is his intelligence chief, Lieutenant Colonel Courter Clay, a sour-faced, brush-mustached, cold fish of a man with wide-set eyes that stare challengingly out from beneath impressive iron-filing eyebrows. He has the look of an unpleasant private school headmaster.

The other major participants in the conference are: 1) a British major named Wiltshire (W), who is supposed to be the liaison with the Britain forces but spends most of his time frowning at documents he doesn't read; 2) another lieutenant colonel, Kanly Coffee (KC), whose main duty appears to be acting as General Fredendall's spy; and 3) a major from the air corps named Bencell, abbreviated not as B but as (A) for air.

C—Likely just probe.

S2—Don
'
t believe so. Three forward units report contact w/ German or mixed Germ-Ital units.

C—Reports like this before. What sense wd it make? Germans between us & Monty
'
s whole army. No sense.

KC—If we panic at every report . . .

C—Maybe if we had air recon.

A—No planes to spare for recon.

C—Wiltshire?

W—Nothing. Monty does not see evidence of attack.

Rainy at this point could very well stop taking notes—she doesn't—because she's been around long enough to recognize the sounds of paralysis. The only officer she really trusts is the one she likes least: the S2, Colonel Clay.

Lieutenant Colonel Clay is, as Sergeant Pooley has observed, “a humorless prick,” but he has energy and determination, which set him apart from the lethargy at this outpost, and indeed the lethargy throughout II Corps.

Eventually the colonel will decide to do nothing other than forward a memo to the general, who will also decide to do nothing. It takes Colonel Jasper another half hour to reach that point, but the conclusion Rainy writes down is not a surprise. Nor is it a surprise when the colonel moves on to a much more passionate discussion involving kerosene heaters.

Is it treason to suspect that the men commanding II Corps are incompetent? Surely the powers-that-be in Washington would not send incompetents to oversee America's first real contact with the German foe.

Rainy tells herself that, but she fails to convince.

When she returns to her desk to type up her notes, Pooley looks up questioningly and gets a terse “They're going to wait and see” from Rainy.

She types up her notes and puts them in the “out” basket on her desk. They will be collected by the corporal,
who will take them to the staff sergeant—Pooley—seated just five feet away—who will take them to the colonel's aide, who will, as far as Rainy can tell, file them away, never to be seen again.

At times she envies the frontline troops. At least they know what they are doing.

“Where's the goddamned interpreter?” This is from Colonel Clay, the S2, who now looks around the stuffy office with an irritated gaze. He is referring to Lieutenant Belfurd who, Rainy knows, is in town visiting a prostitute.

“Colonel, the lieutenant's out of the HQ,” she says discreetly.

“I'll just bet he is.”

“Colonel, I speak and read German.”

Colonel Clay stares at her as if she is a dog who has suddenly announced a talent for plate spinning. His two bushy gray eyebrows become one.

Pooley speaks up, saying, “Colonel, she is fluent. She sometimes helps out Belfurd . . . Lieutenant Belfurd, I mean.”

“What is your clearance? Your security clearance, miss.”

It is not protocol to address her as miss. It is protocol to address her as sergeant. Or by her last name, Schulterman. But Rainy does not have quite the cheek to reprove
a lieutenant colonel. Not right away.

She reassures Colonel Clay that she is cleared for sensitive documents. He sniffs, sighs, and finally crooks a finger at her.

Rainy leaps from her chair and follows him out of the room. They go to Colonel Clay's office. The walls there are festooned with the usual maps, but interspersed in unused spaces are drawings of fish, done in oil crayon. Quite good pictures, Rainy thinks. Some are only partly finished.

“Steelhead,” Rainy mutters, not thinking.

“Did you say steelhead, miss?”

“Sorry. Yes, sir. I didn't mean . . . it's just . . .” and she waves vaguely at one of the fish. “That's a steelhead trout. Rainbow trout, some call them.”

The colonel stares sideways at her and lights a cigarette without offering one to her. “And what would you say that was?” He points to a second drawing.

“I'm not completely sure, Colonel. Some type of salmon, but I'm not as up as I should be on salmon species.”

“It's a Coho salmon. I caught him in Scotland. Twenty-nine inches. No record, but a fine fish that cooked up very nicely over a campfire.”

For a moment he seems lost in memory. Rainy is fascinated at the possibility that an actual smile might appear
beneath the unfortunate mustache, but no. He is content to smoke and contemplate his various fishes. “You must be a country girl.”

“No, Colonel, I'm from New York City. But every summer we had Jewish camp up in the mountains. We fished a bit, and I got so I liked it.”

Almost as if his primacy has been challenged, Colonel Clay says, “I tie my own lures.”

“It's a skill I wish I had, sir.”

He still looks sourly at her, but she senses that she has passed some kind of test and been found to be of at least marginal intelligence and wit. He waves her over to his desk. “These are transcriptions of a dozen unguarded German radio intercepts. They've been written down phonetically since we are short of German speakers. Can you make any sense of them?”

She gathers up the flimsy sheets and, without being asked or given permission, sits down in the colonel's chair and frowns in concentration.

For five full minutes she ignores the colonel as he stands, impatient and annoyed by the effrontery of a mere three-striper, a female at that, sitting there like a schoolgirl working out her homework.

“This one is a Kraut lieutenant asking about some crates of brandy. He says he is short of brandy, and if he is to move as ordered he will need more.”

“And what would you make of that?”

“There's another one here from a tanker also talking about brandy, so I think unless the Wehrmacht is composed of drunks, they are not talking about brandy. Either ammo or fuel, most likely fuel.”

Colonel Clay's eyes narrow. “Cigarette?”

She takes one but sticks it behind her ear to trade later. “The others are more obvious, I think. This one is a fellow asking about an injured soldier. This one asks whether there has been any mail.” She hesitates. “No, wait, there are two asking about mail. . . . It's hard to be sure since these are just phonetic but yes, I think they are both asking about mail.
Post
. Is
post
available.”

“Artillery support,” Colonel Clay says. “A sort of crude code, barely disguised. They lack landlines, but they haven't got the latest code, I suppose. Dismissed.”

She nearly misses that last word, but after a moment's hesitation, jumps up, snaps a salute, and walks away, deflated.

Later that day she learns that she has been reassigned to Colonel Clay's staff.

It is a step down in the sense that she'll be working for a lieutenant colonel of intelligence rather than a full bird colonel in charge of the detachment, but she allows herself a satisfied grin. She has a feeling Colonel Clay might put her to better use.

And there is the added advantage of not working for a complete fool.

Clearly some sort of major German attack is coming. It may already have started, and General Fredendall is in “Speedy Valley” obsessing over his new headquarters construction, and Colonel Jasper is not inclined to make waves. Only Colonel Clay seems to have a clear notion of what he's doing.

Somewhere out there in the vast reaches of the trackless Sahara, someone is very likely catching hell and perhaps about to catch a great deal more of it. Now at least Rainy Schulterman may be able to help them.