Front Lines (31 page)

Two fears vie for the upper hand in Frangie's mind. First, that she might do something stupid and kill the wounded captain. He's almost certainly dying anyway, but the Hippocratic oath is pretty clear: first, do no harm. She has done what she can; now she can only offer comfort and morphine.

The second fear is simply of the sounds of trucks and men approaching.

She does not want to serve out the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp. It is inconceivable that the racist Germans would be any better than the racist Americans in their treatment of blacks.

She wants to flee. There would be no shame in it, not really; the captain is doomed. The sergeant who stayed to help finally leaves with a terse, “Thanks for taking care of my captain.”

Ren remains behind still.

“Ren, get the fug out. Seriously, go. Go! I'm ordering you, go!” It is the first time Frangie has ever cursed, and she marks it in an abstract sort of way as something she will later pray over.

The bottle of plasma hangs from a lanyard dropped from a seam in the tent. It joins the transfused whole blood and flows now into the captain's arm, slightly more going in than comes out, though soon enough the plasma will be empty and there's no more whole blood to be had.

“Am I dying?” the captain asks in a shaky but rational voice.

Frangie wants to tell the truth, maybe then he'll order her to leave, to escape. But that isn't how it's done. A medic does not tell a soldier he is dying.

“You'll be fine, Captain. Just sewing you up is all. Sew you up, bandage you up . . .”

“Okay, listen . . . I'm going, Doc,” Ren says, looking tortured but relieved.

“God keep you, Ren.”

“You, too, Doc. I'll say a prayer for you.”

“I'll need it.”

He grabs a canteen and runs for it. Frangie listens for the sound of gunfire and blessedly hears none. But the sound of truck engines and tank treads and the rattle of soldiers' gear fill her hearing and her imagination.

Her hands are steady as she sutures, but tears flow and
she is having difficulty swallowing. Maybe the Germans will see that she is a medic with a patient and do the decent thing and leave her to it. After all, they can't really all be the monsters the propaganda makes them out to be. Surely there is something to the notion of soldiers' honor, surely—

The tent flap flies open, and three German soldiers rush in yelling incomprehensibly, leveling their submachine guns. They look tired and dirty but keyed up, blue eyes searching every corner of the tent.

“Schwarze!”
one says, his look contemptuous. He shoves the barrel of his machine pistol into her stomach, hard enough to double her over. The suture slips from her hand, she struggles to get it back, and the stock of the gun smashes against her forehead.

The whole world spins. Her knees collapse and she falls to the dirt, landing on her side, still struggling but unable to focus, unable to see anything but swirling, doubled reality. A blow to her kidneys, a kick, has the paradoxical effect of clearing her mind so she can focus on the agony that radiates up and down her spine. She lies on her side, panting, seeing in the dirt before her the bloody, twisted lead slug she took from the earlier patient. Bloody rags are all around. Some sort of rat is carrying one off.

Frangie does not yet expect to die, but she expects to be hurt, she expects a second boot and it is not long in
coming, this time smashing her tailbone. The electric agony she'd felt before is worse now. Her stomach heaves, but it is empty. She gasps and inhales dirt, which starts a coughing fit. She pushes at the ground, trying to rise, knowing it will just set her up for another blow.

But the next blow does not come, and she manages to get to her knees, head hanging down, lungs burning for oxygen, nerve pain zapping through her, tingling her hands and feet.

Someone new is in the tent, and his presence has calmed the excitable soldiers. Frangie twists her head and sees an expensive-looking pair of leather boots. They are caked with mud and adorned with spurs—she's only ever seen spurs in cowboy movies and their presence here seems like a hallucination.

Powerful hands grab her shoulders and haul her to her feet. Blood sheets down over her eyes, and she wipes it away with her arm. She cannot stand fully erect, not yet, leaving her to look and feel even smaller than usual.

She tries to look at the man in the boots but her eyes will not focus and all she can make out is that there are three soldiers in butternut-colored uniforms, and the spurred man wearing dusty black.

The man in black speaks. Is it German? No, the words are accented but familiar. English, but pronounced like a war movie villain. She struggles to make sense of it, to get
her brain to work properly, to understand—

A hard slap across the face knocks her against the table. She is almost facedown in the captain's ruined belly.

“Where have they gone?” the spurred man demands.

“Gone?” she mumbled, uncomprehending.

“Your unit. Your men. Where have they gone? Where is their rendezvous?”

She blinks and wipes away more blood and turns with slow, arthritic dignity to face her interrogator. Her vision focuses on silver collar patches, each marked by the SS lightning bolts.

She does not then recognize the significance of those emblems, nor can she decipher the insignia of rank on his uniform, but she knows him to be an officer by the stiffness in the poses of the soldiers.

“I will strike you again, if—”

“They ran off,” she says.

“Where are they going? What is their destination? Are they joining another unit?”

She shakes her head and cries out sharply at the pain that swarms her. “I'm just a medic. Just trying to sew this man up.”

“You stayed behind to care for him?”

“Leave her alone, she's just a Nigra,” the captain says from the table.

The German officer jerks his head, and before Frangie can protest, one of the soldiers steps close, presses the barrel of his rifle against the captain's head, and fires once.

Bone and brain explode from the opposite side of the captain's head. A piece of skull shatters the hanging bottle of plasma.

“Damn it!” Frangie cries. “You didn't have to do that! You didn't have to do that, he was dead anyway!”

“Then no harm has been done,” the officer says, and grins, revealing uneven but bright-white teeth.

He snaps orders to the soldiers, who immediately begin to gather up what medical supplies remain.

His next order will be to shoot Frangie, unless rape is on the menu first, and from the look in at least one of the German soldiers' eyes, it is. He is anxious, she can see it, anxious lest the officer order that she be killed before he can have his fun.

The officer says two things, neither decipherable, but it makes the soldier with the hungry eyes grin. The officer laughs indulgently, as though he's jolly Saint Nick handing out presents, then he turns and leaves.

Before he has cleared the tent flaps, Hungry Eyes' belt is unhitched and the other two are crowding in close.

“No, don't,” Frangie says, knowing it won't help, knowing in her heart that the officer has told the men to have their fun and be quick about it, and then shoot her.

The tent flap opens again, a second officer, this one in
gray. His uniform is stained with blood as well as mud. He speaks in German, as harsh as the first officer, but with more irritation in his tone, more like a stern schoolteacher addressing stupid pupils.

The soldier with his pants down around his ankles remonstrates, but this just sets off a torrent of derisive abuse. Reluctantly and angrily he pulls his pants back up, creating mirth among his fellows, who follow him as he rages out of the tent.

“I am Oberstarzt Hefflewezen. Doctor-Major to you,” He leans over the dead captain. “These are your sutures?”

Frangie grunts a yes.

“The wound is septic, he would not have lived.”

“I know that.”

He sighs, not a sympathetic sound, an annoyed one. “Your officers are fools leaving a medic behind. They will come to regret it.”

I already regret it
, she thinks bitterly, though despite everything she does not quite believe it.

“You are my prisoner.” There is subtle weight on that word
my.
“My company has several cases of typhus. I have no time for routine bandaging and suturing.”

Lest Frangie believe she has fallen in with a sympathetic medical professional, the doctor grabs her by the back of the neck, squeezing painfully hard, and shoves her toward the tent flap.

She is startled to see that the gray light of morning is in
the eastern sky. German soldiers pick over the remains of the abandoned camp, looking carefully for booby traps, scrounging for food and water, hoping for alcohol.

The German unit is a long column of trucks, most of them tankers carrying either water or fuel. There are two half-tracks—lightly armored vehicles with tank tracks at the rear, conventional tires up front, an open bed that carries nine or ten German soldiers, and a machine gun mounted over the low, sloped roof of the driver's compartment.

The column is starting to move again, engines roaring, gears grinding. Frangie sees the SS officer in an open staff car, drinking something from a thermos bottle.

Doon Acey's body lies still unburied, laid out on the ground beside the road with three other American dead, awaiting graves registration units. A bored-looking German soldier methodically shoots each corpse in the chest and head.
Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang.
Making sure the dead Americans stay dead.

The column jounces and sputters past, truck after truck, until a green-painted ambulance adorned with a red cross very similar to the one on Frangie's helmet appears. Behind it, just ahead of the final half-track, an open, slat-sided truck full to overflowing with wounded Germans.

“You,” the Doctor-Major orders, and shoves Frangie
toward the truck. She catches the tailgate and climbs aboard on shaky legs to be met with hostile stares from men with every variety of battlefield injury. One man winks at her and grabs his crotch suggestively. Another spits in her general direction, though with insufficient force, so it lands on the helmet of a man who is either unconscious or dead.

Frangie sits as far back as she can from the more threatening enemy soldiers. A private running from the ambulance tosses her a small box marked with the red cross. It contains bandages, tape, scissors, and sulfa powder. There's a smaller box that should contain morphine, but it's been emptied, presumably to keep her from killing one of the Germans or herself.

That last thought lingers in her mind. She is a prisoner. She is a woman. And with sick dread she knows what to expect.

But for now there's a man with a bandage the color of old meat. She will change that bandage and worry about the rest later.

“Nothing we could do up against tanks, right?” Tilo says.

“Fugging bazooka bounced off,” Corporal Hark Millican says, not for the first or last time. “How we supposed to stop tanks with that? Like throwing a fugging water balloon.” He has previously compared the bazooka shell to a baseball, a rock, and a watermelon.

“What do you expect?” Luther snaps. “We're fighting with girls against men. I always said this was doomed. I always said that.”

Stick says, “As far as I can tell, the only one who inflicted any casualties on them was a girl.”

“Because the men are too busy looking out for the women, that's what,” Geer insists furiously. “Girls and a goddamned Jap. We're cursed.”

Hansu Pang cannot help but hear this. He clamps his jaw tight but says nothing and no one comes to his defense. The fact that Pang did exactly what he was ordered to do
and performed as well as anyone means nothing; he has the face and the hair and, above all, the eyes of a Jap. And scared, beaten men need an excuse. Blame the women, blame the Jap, blame the officers all the way up the chain of command, blame anyone but themselves.

They've lost Cassel. They've lost their medic. And, to make matters worse, everyone has earlier overheard the furious British captain reaming out Lieutenants Liefer and Helder, before leading his men off.

“You ran, you silly bastards,” he raged. “We could have managed a fighting withdrawal, but you broke and ran.”

To which Liefer had responded by making things worse. “I can only be as good as my people. These are green troops.”

“Young lady, it's a bloody poor officer that blames her men,” the captain shot back savagely. “I've got five of my boys dead and one so shot up he won't be long joining them. And you were well in the rear, Lieutenant. That fact will be in my report, you may count on it.”

And with that the British commandos double-timed past them, not without harsh words from some of the Tommies.

“Soft Yank bastards.”

“Americans, my arse.”

“You fight like women. Oh, too right: you
are
women.”

Rio does her best to ignore the taunts. She ignores, too,
the unsettling mix of respect and resentment that comes from being the only one in the squad to provably hit an enemy soldier.

She watches it in her memory. She sees the Italian through her sights. She feels the pressure of her finger on the trigger. He trips. He falls. Just a stumble.

No, he's hit. He's fallen. He's bleeding into the sand. Just like Cassel.

She wants to walk with Sergeant Cole, but she resists. It would be like clinging to her parents, and she's past that, she's not a little girl needing her father. She's a soldier, right? A soldier.

Instead she walks with Jenou, good old Jenou who can always perk her up with chatter about boys and girls and clothing and hairstyles and . . .

“What was it like?” Jenou asks her.

There's no doubt in Rio's mind what her friend means. “It's my job, right? I just did my job.”

Jenou lets a few paces pass. “You were pretty cool under pressure.”

“No different than anyone else,” Rio says, trying to shut her friend down. She's feeling, feeling way too much now that the fight is past. She's like a steam boiler, pressure building up inside, a churning feeling. She wants to scream.

Everyone just shut up.

“Bet there's lions out here, up in those rocks. Mountain lions.” Cat walking just a few steps behind.

Again with the lions. Give it a rest, Preeling, shut up, just shut up and let us march.

“Probably eating the guts out of that Italian you shot,” Cat says.

Rio spins to face her. Rio is vibrating, all of her body straining to contain the pressure. She wants to snarl at Preeling, but can't find the words. Her clenched and cocked fist hovers, trembling, before dropping to her side.

Rio grits her teeth and starts walking again. Jenou has at last realized her friend is upset. “Don't pay any attention, Rio. Let it go.”

Rio pulls out her canteen. Why are her hands trembling now when they were so steady before? She can feel the lightness of the canteen. There's no more than two inches of water in it.
Save it, don't drink until you can't stand it.

But she drinks, just a mouthful, just enough to wash some of the grit from her teeth.

“Sarge,” Sticklin calls out. “Off to the left at eight o'clock.”

Cole halts, and the squad bunches up behind him. He's like a mother duck with newborn ducklings; they follow him, go where he goes, stop when he stops.

They all turn to look.

“It's a car,” Jillion Magraff says. “Probably coming to get us to surrender.”

“It's not German, it's a jeep,” Hansu Pang says quietly.

Geer unlimbers his rifle. “If the Jap says it's a jeep, it's for sure a German.”

Sticklin levels the BAR at the approaching dust plume.

“Hold your fire,” Cole says. “It's a jeep.”

Rio sees two people in the vehicle, a man and a woman. She looks ahead up this endless dirt road to nowhere. The Tommies are no longer in sight. Lieutenant Liefer has stopped. She's shading her eyes, staring at the approaching vehicle. Behind them in the direction they've come from, Helder and Third Platoon. They, too, are watching the jeep, which pulls up in a skid.

A female buck sergeant jumps out. “Are you from the 119th?”

Lieutenant Liefer glares at her. “Have you forgotten how to salute an officer, Sergeant?”

The sergeant does a double take, sighs, and snaps an entirely correct salute that Liefer takes her time returning. “This is Fifth Platoon, Charlie Company, 119th Infantry. You're looking for us?”

That last is said with an incredulous tone.

“Excellent, our relief is here,” Jack says. Jack remained silent during the taunting by his fellow countrymen—this has earned him respect from the squad. He could have
said he was English, he could have distanced himself from the disaster around him, but instead he remained loyal to his outfit.

“Sergeant Schulterman, ma'am, and this is Corporal Seavee. May I ask if you are in command here, ma'am?”

Liefer does not like her tone. The sergeant is not so disrespectful that she can make an issue of it, but it's clear that Rainy Schulterman is not impressed. The lieutenant holds out her hand. “If you have orders for me, let's have them.”

Two folded sheets are drawn from within the sergeant's shirt. She hands them to the lieutenant. Helder comes trotting up, and the two officers, as well as Garaman, peruse the two paragraphs and peer closely at the signature.

Lieutenant Helder says, “Are you out of your fugging mind, Sergeant? We're to turn north? Across that?” He waves at the desert and the looming hills. “And attack a German supply column? We've got two platoons, no armor, no artillery or air support.”

“Sir, those are the orders,” Rainy says simply. Then adds, “The colonel's orders,” and points at the signature.

Rio notices the way Liefer's face turns rigid as it dawns on her that the orders are for real and that failure to obey will mean the end of her career. If she still has one.

“Then Colonel Clay has lost his fugging mind,” Helder
snaps. “My men are not going to march across nine, ten miles of wasteland to get killed.”

But Liefer has reached a different conclusion. “I'm in command here.”

“You're a second lieutenant, same as me,” Helder says.

“What's the date of your commission?”

They compare commission dates, the day on which they were promoted to lieutenant, and Liefer has seventeen days' seniority. Lieutenant Helder curses, but he's powerless unless he wants to disobey clear, written orders.

Garbled repetitions of everything being said filter back through the GIs, who grumble, and more than grumble, about the stupidity of charging off into the desert with practically no water and damn little ammo. At least here on the road they may be taken prisoner by the Germans, who, by all accounts, treat prisoners humanely and according to the rules of war. But out in the deep desert, who knows?

“I'm already almost dry,” Jillion Magraff says.

“Almost? Hell, I've been out of water for a couple hours, at least,” Suarez says. He rattles his canteen to make the point.

As the lieutenants and NCOs discuss their fate, Second Squad sits or sprawls or lies down beside the road.

Rio closes her eyes. Closes them and sits there slumped over, her butt cold on the ground, swaying back and forth
with exhaustion. It's hit her all at once. No sleep last night, no sleep today, and it's noon. Sleep, food, a hot shower, in that order, that's what she wants. Top it with mail from home, and it would be a foot soldier's paradise.

The next thing she hears is Cole sounding bitterly unhappy. “All right, Second Squad, gear up.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jenou groans.

“I knew it,” Hark Millican says, his eternal gloominess validated.

Jenou is standing; she offers Rio her hand and pulls her friend up.

“Bloody march in the bloody desert.” Jack Stafford's usual good humor has deserted him.

An argument has broken out between the two lieutenants and Corporal Seavee. The officers are requisitioning his jeep.

“I'm only here because she”—the newly arrived sergeant—“popped up and shoved those orders in my face, but I got other orders, orders to get this jeep back to my captain,” Seavee says, standing with arms crossed.

“Do you have written orders to that effect?”

Seavee shakes his head, amused in a bad way, pissed off but defeated by the relentless logic of officers. “Goddammit. Goddammit. We don't know what the hell's out there, Lieutenant, all due respect.”

“Welcome to the war,” Liefer snaps, and seems quite
pleased with that terse response.

Sergeant Cole and his counterparts from the other squads do a water and ammo count. It quickly becomes clear that there's nowhere near enough water, and half a dozen soldiers out of maybe sixty, seventy men and women left in the two platoons have lost or thrown away their rifles, though in Second Squad only Jillion Magraff has done so. Food is short as well. The jeep brought some cans of water, but barely enough to take the edge off.

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we are on short rations,” Cole says. “We've got a good nine, ten miles at least, assuming there's a pass through those hills over there.”

“Are they sending us some supplies?” Stick asks.

“Hell, Stick, we've got a military disaster going on here, the whole front is being rolled up. We are no one's top priority. If we find this column, maybe we can drink their water.” It's a peevish joke, and no one laughs.

“What's this column we're supposed to find?” Luther demands, angry because he has a blister from poorly worn-in boots, and because his kitten is kneading his chest with her sharp little claws.

“Supposed to be ammo trucks and fuel tankers rendezvousing with a German armored column.”

“A what? An armored column? Tanks?”

“If we get there fast enough, maybe we get the trucks and skedaddle before the tanks show up.”

“If we don't, we're fugging dead,” Jack says. “Infantry against tanks? In open desert? That's mad!”

Cole does not argue with him. Stafford's summation and the sergeant's silence begin to sink in. The two green platoons are going off on a suicide mission with no help coming. There's mutiny in many eyes, but the problem is that there's nowhere to run. They are separated from any other force, and in the middle of a major German attack.

“I'd sure like to know who the hell dreamed up this hair-brained scheme,” Geer demands belligerently.

“I did.” It's the female sergeant who brought the orders from headquarters.

Her announcement earns her looks ranging from skepticism to resentment to outright hate.

“Great, another woman soldier,” Luther sneers. “Thanks. Fugging excellent.”

The complaints continue, but in the end they carry as much weight as a soldier's complaints generally do: none.

Sergeant Schulterman has been kicked out of the jeep so Liefer can take her place, with a PFC from Third Platoon perched on the back to employ the .50 caliber machine gun.

The jeep takes off at a walking pace with Second Squad behind it eating the dust it kicks up, and the rest of the two platoons behind them eating still more dust. This does not improve anyone's mood. But gradually Cole stretches
the distance between the squad and the jeep. It's not quite enough to save them from a fine coating of dust that gets into their clothing and noses and eyes and mouths.

“Maybe we should get off to one side, Sarge,” Jillion Magraff suggests.

“No, I think we best follow the jeep's tracks,” Cole says.

“But the dust is—”

“You can get used to the dust,” he says. “Can't get used to land mines.”

The entire squad misses several steps. It would be funny if they weren't talking about mines.

“See, the good thing is, if there are mines they're most likely antitank not antipersonnel. So it'd take something heavier than a man to set one of those off.” Cole reluctantly spits out the butt of his cigar, now no more than half an inch long. He pulls a replacement from his breast pocket and looks at it regretfully. He draws his knife and cuts the end off, then lights it with a Zippo. “But maybe there's antipersonnel mines, in which case something heavy will set them off too. Either way . . .”

Stick is the first one to grin, and it spreads throughout the squad as more GIs realize that they are basically letting Lieutenant Liefer ride in comfort . . . and check for mines. It's the sort of thought that brings a bit of joy to a foot soldier.

Rainy Schulterman walks beside Rio and Jenou, drawn by gender not rank.