Kitabı oxu: «The Front Lines series»

They are saying, “The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.” I ask, how is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?

—Evelyn Waugh, 1939

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

PART I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

PART II: OPERATION HUSKY THE INVASION OF SICILY

JOURNALS AND LETTERS

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

INTERSTITIAL

PART III: OPERATION AVALANCHE THE INVASION OF ITALY

25

26

27

28

29

LETTERS

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

INTERSTITIAL

AUTHOR’S NOTE

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CREDITS

Back series promotional page

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

1943.

Three great Axis powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Italy’s Benito Mussolini began as Hitler’s mentor, but after failure upon failure it has become clear that Mussolini’s Italy lacks the resources and the will to fight effectively. The war in Europe will be fought between the Allies and Germany, with Mussolini more a hindrance than a help.

For too long Britain stood alone while the Soviet Union’s paranoid dictator, Stalin, purged his own army and worked backroom deals with the Nazis to seize Finland and divide Poland. But in one of the great mistakes of history, Hitler attacked Stalin. The Soviet Union’s vast size, terrible winter, and the astonishing courage and endurance of its people have proven too much, even for the Wehrmacht.

And now, thanks to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States of America is in the fight, bringing staggering industrial might and a military that will, in just a few short years, go from being a negligible force of 334,000 to a 12 million strong juggernaut.

In the Pacific, the US Marines have survived a protracted living nightmare on Guadalcanal. Japanese expansion is halted. Australia and New Zealand are safe, but China, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia still bleed under brutal Japanese occupation.

In Europe, the Soviet Red Army has fought the German Wehrmacht to a halt at Stalingrad. Hitler’s mad order allowing no retreat will lead to the death of a third of a million Germans and the surrender of 91,000 more. The greatest tank battle in history will be fought at a place called Kursk, and by dint of sheer numbers and steely determination, the Soviet T-34 tanks will beat the German panzers back.

London is still struggling to recover from the Blitz, and now German cities cringe beneath falling bombs. In Poland, the Jews who had been herded into the ghetto to be starved to death rise up against their Nazi oppressors and, despite great heroism, are exterminated.

The Americans, British, British Commonwealth, and Free French forces have pushed the Nazis out of North Africa. Benito Mussolini is weakened and discredited but not yet destroyed.

No one is certain about the next objective, including the Allied leadership.

The Germans have been bloodied, but Nazi Germany is very far from beaten. And in places called Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz, the killing gas still flows and the ovens still burn hot.

PROLOGUE
107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945

Welcome back, Gentle Reader, welcome back to the war.

I’ve got quite a pile of typed pages now, quite a pile, and I’m not even a third of the way through. But I’ve already got some readers, some of the people here in this hospital with me, and, well, they’ve stopped complaining about me being up typing at all hours. So I guess I’ll keep at it.

I’m still not quite ready to tell you who I am. I’m not being coy or cute, I just find it easier to write about all of it, even my own part, as if it happened to someone else. And if I put myself forward you might start thinking of me as the hero of the story. I can’t allow that because I know better. I know who the heroes are, and who the heroes were, and I am neither. I’m just a shot-up GI sitting here typing and trying not to itch the wound on my chest which, dammit, feels like I’ve got a whole colony of ants in there. I suppose this means I’ll never be able to wear a bathing suit or a plunging neckline. That will bother me someday, but right now, looking around this ward at my fellow soldier girls, and at the soldier boys across the hall, I’m not feeling the urge to complain.

I hear civilians saying we’re all heroes, heard someone . . . was it Arthur Godfrey on Armed Forces Radio? I can’t recall, but it’s nonsense anyway. If everyone is a hero, then no one is. Others say everyone below ground is a hero, but a lot of those were just green kids who spent an hour or a day on the battlefield before standing up when they shouldn’t have, or stepping where they shouldn’t have stepped. If there’s something heroic about standing up to scratch your ass and having some Kraut sniper ventilate your head, I guess I don’t see it.

If by “hero,” you mean one of those soldiers who will follow an order to rush a Kraut machine gun or stuff a grenade in a tank hatch, well, that’s closer to meaning something. But the picture in your imagination, Gentle Reader, may not bear much similarity to reality. I knew a guy who did just that—jumped up on a Tiger tank and dropped a grenade (or was it two?) down the hatch. Blew the hell out of it out too. But he’d just gotten a Dear John letter from his fiancée in the same batch of mail that informed him his brother had been killed. So I guess it was right on the line between heroism and suicide.

Don’t take me for a cynic, though; I am not cynical about bravery. There are some real heroes, some gold-plated heroes, here on this ward with me. There are still more lined up in rows beneath white crosses and Stars of David in Italy and France, Belgium, Holland . . . And some of them were friends of mine.

Oh boy, it’s hard to type once I get teary. Goddammit, I’ll just take a minute here. . .

Anyway, my feeling bad doesn’t raise any of those people from the grave.

They brought some wounded Krauts in today, four of them. They’re in a separate ward of course, but I saw them through the window, saw the ambulance, dusty olive green with a big red cross on its roof. It wasn’t easy to tell that they were Germans at first—they were more bandage than uniform—but even through the dingy window glass I could make out that one still had some medals pinned to his tunic. Not our medals. So I guess he was a hero too, just on the wrong side.

I hope the medals give that Kraut some comfort because he was missing both legs above the knee and his right hand was gone as well. I saw his face. He was a handsome fellow, movie star handsome, I thought, with a wide mouth and perfectly straight Aryan nose and dark, sunken eyes. I knew the eyes. I didn’t know the Kraut, but yeah, I sure knew that look. I see it when I look in the mirror, even now. If you stay too long in the war, it’s like your eyes try to get away, like they’re sinking down, trying to hide, wary little animals crawling into the cave of your eye sockets.

No, not like animals, like GIs. There’s nothing a soldier knows better than squatting in the bottom of a hole. Cat Preeling wrote a poem about it, which I’ll probably mangle, but here’s what I recall:

Dig it deep and in you creep,

While all around there’s the boom-boom sound.

Mud to your knees while your buddy pees.

Another hole, like the hole before . . .

Yeah, that’s all I remember. It goes on for a couple dozen verses.

Anyway, I still type away at this battered old typewriter, and some of the girls come by and take a few pages to read when they’re tired of the magazines the USO gets us. They seldom talk to me about it; mostly they just read, and after a while they bring the pages back and maybe give me a nod. That’s my proof that I’m writing the truth because sure as hell I’d hear about it if I started writing nonsense. We soldier girls—sorry, I mean Warrior Women or American Amazons or whatever the hell the newspapers are calling us now—we’ve had about enough of people lying about us. The folks who hate the idea of women soldiers tell one set of lies, the people who like the notion of women at war tell a different set of lies. If you believe the one side, we’re nothing but a drag on the men, and the other side acts like we won the war all by ourselves.

We could probably get a pretty good debate going here on the women’s ward over the question of which set of lies we hate more—the one denies what we’ve done; the other belittles what our brothers have done.

We won’t have either.

We women are a red flag to the traditionalists—which is to say 90 percent of the military. But as much as we don’t want to be, the truth is we’re a symbol to people who think it’s about time for women and coloreds too to stand equal. Woody Guthrie wrote that song about us. Count yourself lucky you can’t hear me singing it under my breath as I type.

Our boys are all a-fightin’ on land, sea, and air,

But say, some of them boys ain’t boys at all,

Why, some of those boys got pretty long hair.

It may surprise, but I can tell you all,

When it comes killin’ Nazis, our girls stand tall,

And Fascist supermen die every bit as fast,

From bullets fired by a tough little lass.

For our part, we sure as hell did not want to be a symbol of anything, though we did sort of like Woody’s song. We wanted exactly what every soldier who has ever fought a war in foreign lands wants: we wanted to go home. And if we couldn’t go home, then by God we wanted hot food, hot showers, cold beer, and to sleep in an actual bed for about a week solid.

But we’re just GIs, and no one gives a damn what a GI wants, male or female.

Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany. Vicious little firefights you’ve never heard of and great battles whose names will echo down through history: Kasserine. Salerno. Monte Cassino. Anzio. D-Day. The Bulge. About all I missed was Anzio, and thank whatever mad god rules the lives of soldiers for keeping us out of that particular hell. There’s a woman here, a patient on the ward, who was a nurse at Anzio. All she ever does is stare at her hands and cry. Though the funny thing is, she can still play a pretty good game of gin rummy. Go figure.

Whatever the newspapers tell you, we women are neither weak sisters nor invincible Amazons. We’re just GIs doing our job, which after Kasserine we’d begun to figure out meant a single thing: killing Germans.

So, Gentle Reader, we come now to a period of time after Kasserine, when those truths were percolating inside us. We were coming to grips with what we were meant to do, what we were meant to be, what we had no choice but to become. We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only just begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.

It’s a hell of a thing when a person in that wonderful, trembling moment of readiness is suddenly yanked sharply away from everything they’ve ever known and is handed over to drill sergeants and platoon sergeants and officers.

“Ah, good, the youngster is learning that her purpose is to kill.”

Yeah, we figured that out, and we knew by then how to be good army privates. We could dig nice deep holes; we could follow orders. We knew how to unjam an M1, we knew to take care of our feet, we knew how to walk point on patrol. Mostly we knew what smart privates always figure out: stick close to your sergeant, because that’s your mama, your daddy, and your big brother all rolled into one.

But here’s one of the nasty little twists that come in war: if you don’t manage to get wounded or dead, they’ll promote you. And then, before you’re even close to ready, you are the sergeant. You’re the one the green kids are sticking to, and you’re the only thing keeping those fools alive. Right when you start to get good at following, they want you to lead.

Some of us made that leap, some didn’t. Not every good private makes a good sergeant.

But enough of all that; what about the war itself ? Shall I remind you where we were in the narrative, Gentle Reader?

After Kasserine, the army in its wisdom got General Frendendall the hell away from the shooting war, and it turned the mess over to General George Patton, “Old Blood-and-Guts.” He and his British counterpart, General Montgomery, finished off the exhausted remains of the German Afrika Korps and their Italian buddies and sent General Rommel back to Hitler to explain his failure.

Everyone knew North Africa had just been the first round; we knew we were moving on, but we didn’t know where to. Back to Britain to prepare for the final invasion? To Sardinia? Greece? The South of France? Being soldiers, we lived on scuttlebutt, none of it accurate.

Turned out the first answer was Sicily.

Sicily is a big, hot, dusty, stony, hard-hearted island that’s been conquered by just about every empire in the history of the Mediterranean: Athenians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Normans, you name it, and now it was our turn to conquer it. And damned if we didn’t just do it.

This is the story of three young women who fought in the greatest war in human history: Frangie Marr, an undersized colored girl from Tulsa, Oklahoma who loved animals; time after time she ran into the thick of the fight, not to kill but to save lives. Rainy Schulterman, a Jewish girl from New York City with a gift for languages and a ruthless determination to destroy Nazis. And Rio Richlin, an underage white farm girl from Northern California who could not manage her love life and never was quite sure why she was in this war, not until we reached the camps anyway, but she could sure kill the hell out of Krauts.

They didn’t win the war alone, those three, nor did the rest of us, but we all did our part and we didn’t disgrace ourselves or let our brothers and sisters down, which is all any soldier can aspire to.

That and getting home alive.

PART I

1
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“What was it like?” Jenou asks. “That first time? What did you feel?”

Rio Richlin sighs wearily.

Rio and Jenou Castain, best friends for almost their entire lives, lie face up on a moth-eaten green blanket spread over the hood of a burned-out German half-track, heads propped up against the slit windows, legs dangling down in front of the armor-covered radiator. The track is sleeker than the American version, lower in profile, normally a very useful vehicle. But this particular German half-track had been hit by a passing Spitfire some weeks earlier, so it is riddled with holes you could stick a thumb into. The bogie wheels driving the track are splayed out, and both tracks have been dragged off and are now in use as a relatively clean “sidewalk” leading to the HQ administrative tent.

The road might once have been indifferently paved, but has now been chewed to gravel by passing tanks, the ubiquitous deuce-and-a-half trucks, jeeps, half-tracks, bulldozers, and tanker trucks. It runs beside a vast field of reddish sand and loose gravel that now seems to have become something like a farm field with olive drab tents as its crop. The tents extend in long, neat rows made untidy by the way the tent sides have all been rolled up, revealing cots and sprawled GIs in sweat-soaked T-shirts and boxer shorts. Here and there are extinguished campfires, oil drums filled with debris, other oil drums shot full of holes and mounted on rickety platforms to make field showers, stacks of jerry cans, wooden crates, and pallets—some broken up to feed the fires.

The air smells of sweat, oil, smoke, cordite, and cigarettes, with just a hint of fried Spam. There are the constant rumbles and coughing roars of passing vehicles, and the multitude of sounds made by any large group of people, plus the outraged shouts of NCOs, curses and blasphemies, and more laughter than one might expect.

At the edge of the camp some men and one or two women are playing softball with bats, balls, and gloves assembled from family care packages. It’s possible that the rules of this game are not quite those of games played at Yankee Stadium, since there is some tripping and tackling going on.

Both Rio and Jenou wear their uniform trousers rolled up to above the knee, and sleeveless olive drab T-shirts. Cat Preeling, fifty feet away and playing a game of horseshoes with Tilo Suarez, is the only female GI with the nerve to strip down to bra and boxers. She’s a beefy girl with a cigarette hanging from her downturned mouth. Tilo, like many of the off-duty men, wears only his boxers and boots, showing off a taut, olive-complected body that Jenou would be watching much more closely if only Tilo were six inches taller.

The bra and boxers look is a bit too daring for Rio and Jenou, but Cat seems to have a way of deflecting unwanted male attention, like she’s wearing a sign that reads: Don’t bother. Even the ever-amorous Tilo is content to toss horseshoes with her, though the shoes in question are actually brass rings roughly cut from discarded 155 brass and the peg is a bayonet.

Rio and Jenou both have brown-tanned faces, necks, and forearms, but the rest of them blazes a lurid white with just a tinge of pink where the skin is beginning to burn.

“What was what like?” Rio repeats the question slowly. She has a wet sock laid over her eyes to afford some shade. There is a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola beside her. It was almost cold once and now is the temperature of hot tea. Jenou has a book held up to block the sun, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in a paperback edition.

It is the summer of 1943 in Tunisia, and it is hot. Desert hot. Completely immobile—except when they swat at a fly—both young women are still sweating.

“You know,” Jenou insists. “The first time. I’m just trying to get an idea.”

“What are you, writing a book?” Rio says sharply. “Suddenly you’re reading books and now you’re trying to plumb the depths of my soul?”

“My usual appetite for fashion and Hollywood gossip isn’t being satisfied,” Jenou says, adopting a light, bantering lilt before restating her question in a more serious tone.

Rio sighs. “I don’t know, Jen.” She pronounces the name with a soft j, like zh. Jenou’s name is inspired by the word ingenue, a perfectly inappropriate reference point for Jenou, who is far from being the innocent the name suggests.

Jenou is blond, with hair cut short to just below the ear. General Patton has decreed that all female soldiers will have hair cut to above the bottom of their earlobe. The general is improvising—army regulations have not quite caught up with the realities of female soldiers. In addition to being blond, Jenou is quite pretty, just shy of beautiful, and has a pinup’s body.

Jenou remains silent, knowing the pressure will build on Rio to say something. And of course she’s right.

“It was . . .” Rio searches for a word picture, a metaphor, something that will convey enough meaning that Jenou will not feel the need to ask anymore. Thinking about it takes her back to that moment. To the sound of Sergeant Cole’s voice yelling, Shoot!

Richlin! Suarez! Lay down some fugging fire!

Rio remembers it in detail. It had been as cold then as it is hot now. Her breathing had become irregular: a panicky burst followed by a leaden thud-thud-thud.

She remembers lining up the sights of her M1 Garand. She remembers the Italian soldier. And the pressure of her finger on the trigger. And the way she slowed her breathing, the way she shut out everything, every extraneous sound, every irrelevant emotion. The way she saw the target, a man in a tan uniform lined up perfectly on the sights.

The way her lungs and heart seemed to freeze along with time itself.

The moment when her right index finger applied the necessary seven-point-five pounds of pressure and the stock kicked back against her shoulder.

Bang.

The way she had first thought that he had just tripped. The way the Italian had seemed to be frozen in time, on his knees, maybe just tripped, maybe just caught his toe on a rock and . . . And then the way the man fell back.

Dead.

“Like it wasn’t me,” Rio says at last. “Like someone else was moving me. Like I was a puppet, Jen. Like I was a puppet.”

This is the third time, not the first, that Jenou has asked about that first killing. Rio is vaguely aware that it has become important to Jenou that Rio remain Rio. She understands that Jenou does not have the sort of home you get sentimental over, and that as a result Rio is home to Jenou. Sometimes she intercepts a look from Jenou, a passing betrayal of inner doubts. Jenou, who Rio would never have thought capable of any sort of reflection, has developed a sidelong, contemplative gaze. A judging gaze tinged with worry. And sometimes Rio looks for ways to reassure Jenou, but at this particular moment it is just too damned hot.

“Doing my job,” Rio says with a hint of wry humor. “Rio Richlin, Private, US Army, sir! Shootin’ Krauts, sir!” She executes a lazy salute.

A truck rattles by, and a dozen male GIs whistle and yell encouragement along the lines of “Hey, sweetheart!” and “Oh baby!” and “Bring those tatas here to papa!”

Rio and Jenou ignore the catcalls as just another bit of background noise, like the coughing engine of a Sherman tank lurching toward the motor pool, or the insect buzz of the army spotter plane overhead.

“Hey, I got a letter from Strand,” Rio says, wanting to change the subject and dispel her own lingering resentment.

A dozen soldiers, mostly men, march wearily past, coming in from a patrol. “Which of you broads want me between your legs?”

Jenou raises a middle finger without bothering to look and hears a chorus of shouts and laughs, some angry, most amused.

“Well, dish, sweetie. How is tall, dark, and handsome doing?” Jenou asks.

“He says he’s fine. And he’s looking for a way to get here.”

“From Algiers? Kind of a long walk.”

“I think he was hoping for a train. Or a truck. Or a plane.”

“He’d fly his own plane over here if he really loved you.”

Does he? Does he still? Am I still the girl he fell for?

Rio reaches blindly to give Jenou a shove. “I don’t think the army just lets you borrow a B-17 whenever you want one.”

“He could offer to pay for the gas.”

“Let’s roll over. This side’s parboiled.”

They roll over, Rio recoiling as bare flesh touches the metal skin of the vehicle.

Suddenly a siren begins its windup and both girls sit up fast, shield their eyes, and scan the horizon.

“Aw, hell,” Jenou says, pointing at two black dots rushing toward them from the direction of the sea.

The cry goes up from a dozen voices. “Plane! Plane! Take cover!”

They climb down quickly—much more quickly than they climbed up.

“Under the track?” Rio wonders aloud, looking toward the nearest ditch, which is already filling up with scrambling GIs.

“The Kraut will aim for the track!” Jenou yells.

“He’ll see it’s one of his own and burned out besides,” Rio counters in a calmer tone. They crawl madly for the shelter of all that steel and lie facedown, breathing dust, almost grateful for the shade. Antiaircraft guns at the four corners of the camp open up, firing tracer rounds at the dots, which have now assumed the shape of Me 109 fighters with single bomb racks.

Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap! The antiaircraft guns blaze, joined by small arms fire from various soldiers firing futilely with rifles and Thompsons.

The Messerschmitts come in fast and low, and starbursts twinkle on their wings and cowling. Machine gun bullets and cannon shells rip lines across the road and into the tents. A voice yells, “Goddamn Kraut shot my goddamn coffee!”

The planes release one bomb each, one a dud that plows into the dirt between two tents and sticks up like a fireplug, smoking a little. The second bomb is not a dud.

Ka-BOOM!

The front end of a deuce-and-a-half truck, clear at the far end of the camp, explodes upward, rises off the ground on a jet of flame before falling to earth, a smoking steel skeleton. The engine block, knocked free by the power of the bomb, twirls through the air, rising twenty feet before falling like an anvil out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon as GIs scurry out of the way. Rio does not see where it lands.

The planes take a tight turn and come roaring back overhead, machine guns stitching the ground like some mad sewing machine.

And then they head off, unscathed, racing away to the relative safety of their base in Sicily.

Rio and Jenou crawl out from beneath the half-track and gaze, disgusted, at the caked-on dirt that covers their fronts from toes to knees to face.

“They could have waited till we toweled off,” Jenou says.

“We best go tell Sarge we’re still alive,” Rio says.

The air raids are fewer lately, as the Royal Air Force planes with some help from the Americans have claimed control of the North African skies. But now Rio hears a distant shriek of pain and thinks what every soldier thinks: Thank God it isn’t me, followed by, At least some poor bastard is going home.

A term has become common: million-dollar wound. The million-dollar wound is the one that doesn’t kill or completely cripple you but is enough to send you home to cold beer and cool sheets and hot showers.

A team of medics, three of them, rush past, with only one taking the time to turn and run backward while yelling, “I have some training in gynecology; I am happy to do an examination!” as he grabs his crotch.

He trips and falls on his back, and Rio and Jenou share a satisfied nod.

The US Army, Tunisia, in the summer of 1943.

2
FRANGIE MARR—CAMP MEMPHIS, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

Several miles away there is a different scream. This scream comes and goes, rises, falls, lapses into silence, then starts up again.

It’s a battlefield sound, but they are not on the battlefield, they are in a camp very much like Rio’s. Tents stretch away toward the west in long green lines across the dried mud and gravel. Austere, lifeless hills rise in the far distance, like red waves rushing toward a shore, but frozen in time. The only immediately noticeable difference between this encampment and the one where Rio and Jenou sunbathe is that here all the soldiers—except for the officers—are black. It is a colored artillery battalion, its 105 and 155 howitzers parked in a well-spaced, random arrangement so as to make air attack a bit more difficult for the Krauts.

There is a Sherman tank ahead. It weighs 66,800 pounds.

Corporal Frangie Marr, army medic, does not know this fact, but it doesn’t matter much because she’s spent some time in close proximity to tanks and she does not need to be convinced that they are large and terrifying and very, very substantial.

The Sherman, the 66,800-pound Sherman, is oddly perched with its nose pointed up at about a seventy-degree angle, which aims its 75-millimeter main gun almost straight up in the air, as if someone has decided to use the tank to shoot at airplanes.

“Gotta help him, Doc, get him some happy juice. Poor bastard, he’s in a bad way!” The staff sergeant takes Frangie’s arm—not bullying, just urgent—as he pulls her along, practically lifting her off her feet as they leap over a half-dug latrine ditch.

“What happened?” Frangie asks, panting a little. She is mentally inventorying the medical supplies she has in her bag and the extras stuffed into the ammo pouches in a belt hastily slung over her shoulder.

“Green kid sacked out in a bomb crater beside the road, and the Sherman pulled off to check something, a bad bearing, or maybe the driver just needed a piss.” The sergeant takes a beat and says, “Sorry, I meant maybe he had to answer nature’s call. Anyway, side of the crater collapses, tank slips, and that’s all she wrote.”

As they hustle along the scream grows louder and the tank larger. Several dozen men are gathered around, including the tankers, distinguished by their leather helmets and white faces. The tankers stand a little apart and smoke and ignore the angry muttering of the gathered troops, who naturally blame them for crashing their tank.

“Make a hole, make a hole,” the sergeant says. He releases Frangie’s arm and uses both hands to pry men apart. At last Frangie—far and away the smallest person of either race—sees the tank up close and has the distinct impression that it is in a very precarious, certainly temporary, position. All 66,800 pounds of it is held in place only by the bite of the treads into soft, crumbling earth. With a good firm push it could even topple onto its back like an upended turtle. But the more likely scenario is that it will slide down onto the still-unseen screaming man.

Frangie squats beneath the shade of the tank’s sky-tilted prow and tilts her head sideways, but she cannot see the man trapped beneath. She goes counterclockwise around the tank to the back, and the once-muffled moans of pain are now more clearly audible. She has to lower herself onto her belly and stick her head over the lip of the crater to see a man’s helmeted head a few feet away. He is facedown with his head and shoulders free but is pinned at the bottom of his shoulder blades by some—but surely not all—of that massive weight.

The sergeant squats beside her and says, “Hang on, Williams, Doc’s here.” Then more quietly he says to Frangie, “We were going to dig him out, but we’re worried the damned thing could slip back farther. We called for a tractor but that could take a while, nearest engineers are twenty miles away.”

“He could go into shock,” Frangie says through gritted teeth. “Hey, Williams, are you bleeding?”

The answer is a scream of pain that rises, rises, and then stops. Followed by a twisted, barely comprehensible voice saying, “I don’t know. Give me a shot, Doc. I can’t . . . Oh, Jesus!”

“I’m going to help you,” Frangie says, and twists her head sideways to see the sergeant looking at her skeptically. She understands his skepticism. In fact, she is pretty sure she has just told a lie.

“Can’t you run chains or rope to the front of the tank and pull it forward?”

“That could make it settle deeper.”

“What am I supposed to do, crawl down there?” It’s a rhetorical question that the sergeant answers with a blank look.

Why am I doing this? I could be killed.

Several curses come to Frangie’s mind, but as the words form she sees her mother’s face, and worse still, Pastor M’Dale’s disappointed look, and she swallows the curses. She tosses the belt with the medicine-stuffed cartridge pockets aside. Then she buttons her uniform to the top button hoping to avoid pushing ten pounds of Tunisian red dirt down her front. She pulls a morphine ampule from her breast pocket and clutches it in her left hand.

There are many ways Frangie does not want to die, and being crushed face-first in the dirt by a tank rates high on her list. But it’s too late now to say, “This is not my problem.”

Keep me strong, Lord.

“Grab my ankles,” Frangie says.

The sergeant summons two beefy soldiers and each takes a leg.

Using her elbows, Frangie moves like a half-crippled insect down the slope of the crater. The tank blocks the sun, and she can feel its mass poised above her, inch-thick steel plates, mud-clogged treads to left and right. The rear of the tank is a louvered grille that radiates the stifling heat of the engine, which, added to the hundred-degree air temperature makes the crater a place where you could bake a biscuit.

Frangie imagines her body being squeezed through those louvers, like so much meat in a sausage grinder, cooking even as she . . .

Fear. It’s been creeping in, little by little, tingling and twisting her stomach, but now it is beginning to seem that she is actually going to do this, and at that point the fear sets aside all subtlety and comes rushing up within her.

Lord, help me to help this man.

And don’t let that tank slip!

She should add a prudent and humble “Thy will be done,” but if God’s will is to crush her with a tank, she doesn’t want to make it any easier on Him.

Frangie has known fear in her life. Fear of destitution when her father was injured and lost his job. Fear of hostile whites, a fear made very real by the history of her home state and city. Just twenty-two years have passed since white rioters burned down all of the Greenwood district, once known as the black Wall Street, blocks from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And since enlisting she has felt fear (mixed with anger) as she endured various threats by white men who hated the very idea of a black soldier. Then, too, there were the dark mutterings of many of her fellow colored soldiers, who equally despised the idea of a woman in uniform.

But right now her fear is focused on the fact that her head and now shoulders too are right in line to be crushed if the tank slips.

I’m a roach beneath a shoe.

She is far enough down that Williams can look at her and she can see his face, though it is so transformed by pain and terror that she doubts his own mother would recognize him.

Don’t cry, don’t cry or it will scare him.

But I want to cry.

“I think we best get him out of here,” Frangie calls back to the men holding her ankles. She tries to keep panic out of her voice—Williams doesn’t need to be reminded that he’s in danger—but fear raises her tone an octave and she sounds like a child. A scared child.

“Just give me the shot, Doc! Oh God!”

“Just hang on, Williams, hang on.”

The problem is clear and insoluble. If she can dig out enough dirt beneath Williams she may be able to pull him free, or at least do so with some help. But with every spadeful she will increase the odds of the tank sliding.

“The tractor will get here sooner or later,” the sergeant says. “It’s the later that’s a problem,” Frangie says. Her voice is strained, she is very nearly talking upside down, and grit has already found its way to her mouth, sucked in with each breath. She tries to spit, but her mouth is as dry as the dust she inhales. “I can scoop the dirt that’s just right under him.”

There’s a moment’s pause as the sergeant confers in low tones with someone else, perhaps an officer.

“Give it a try, Doc,” comes the verdict.

“Pass me an entrenching tool,” she says. She is fully, blazingly aware of the possibilities. She’s always had a good imagination, and imagination is not a help at times like this. She can imagine the sounds. She can imagine the cries of warning from the men watching her. She can imagine them yanking her back, but too slowly, too slowly to stop that hot louvered grill from turning her head into thick, sizzling slices of salami.

An entrenching tool—a foldable shovel—is passed down to her, blade open and locked in place by its adjustable nut. She is head down, hardly the best position for digging.

Williams lets loose another scream.

“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 hand 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 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 William’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.”

Frangie vomits into a shallow depression, and a soldier solicitously shovels dirt over the mess as the sergeant hands her a hip flask.

“It’s some French brandy we liberated from an A-rab shop.”

Frangie has never before tasted any form of alcohol. Her church does not approve, not at all, and she has sat through many of Pastor M’Dale’s sermons on the subject of demon rum. But it would be rude not to accept, and she wants something more than water to wash away the vile taste of her own bile. Maybe it will stop the trembling in her hands. She takes a careful swig and gasps.

The brandy burns its way down her throat to form a small ball of liquid fire in her stomach. She’s a small person and inexperienced at drinking, so even this small draught is enough to spread a strange but comforting warmth out through her limbs.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You saved that boy’s life.”

She has no answer to that. She’s broken the prohibition against alcohol, but she’s not ready to abandon the humility she’s been taught. “It’s my job, I suppose,” Frangie says.

She walks away on legs shaking from the aftereffects of adrenaline and notices that the alcohol has done its job of pushing fear back just a little. Just a little, but enough for now.

3
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

“Sergeant Schulterman, sir.”

“At ease. Please take a seat, Sergeant; we are not very big on formality around here.”

Rainy removes her cover—her cap—and sits in a well-worn wooden chair, the kind with arms that come around and are too high for her to prop her elbows on comfortably. She places her hands flat, palms down, on her neatly ironed olive drab uniform slacks, keeps her mirror-polished shoes flat on the linoleum floor, and trains her eyes on the lieutenant colonel. Rainy is on leave in New York, having returned from a successful mission in North Africa.

Colonel Corelli is middle-aged, with steel-gray hair cut a bit too long, a pale face, and thoughtful brown eyes sunk deep beneath bushy brows. The brass on his uniform says colonel, but his look, his demeanor, says professor.

No sooner is she seated than there is a brief knock and they are joined by a very different sort of creature. He is a civilian in a passable dark-gray suit, starched white shirt, conservative tie, and expensive and properly shined—but not military-polished—shoes.

The colonel performs the introductions. “Sergeant Schulterman, Special Agent Bayswater, FBI.”

Rainy’s heart sinks. She knows immediately what this is about. The end of her career in the US Army may be only minutes away. Her expression turns from curious to deliberately blank.

“Agent Bayswater.”

“Sergeant Schulterman.”

They do not shake hands, and she does not rise from her seat.

She doesn’t like him. It’s a snap judgment, in part a reaction to what she expects he will be saying next. But beyond that, there’s something smug and condescending in the way he looks her up and down, like he’s trying to decide whether she’s a crook or a piece of meat. He has a bent nose, broken while boxing perhaps, and that prominent twist in his nose has given his mouth a permanent sneer.

“I don’t suppose you know why you’re here, Sergeant,” Colonel Corelli says.

“No, sir.”

“Oh, I bet she’s got some idea,” the FBI man says. “Don’t you, honey?”

Colonel Corelli winces, the way refined people do when they hear someone being rude or unpleasant.

Rainy turns slightly toward Bayswater. “Sergeant. It’s Sergeant Schulterman.”

“Is that so? Well, Sergeant, you’re supposed to be a very bright girl, so I’m betting you have a pretty clear notion of why the FBI is here. Am I right? Or have I been misled and you’re not so bright after all?”

“When my superior officer informs me as to his reasons for bringing me here, then I will know,” Rainy says frostily. She places the emphasis on his reasons. She is a soldier, not a civilian, and she does not take orders from the FBI.

The colonel takes the opportunity to lean forward, his body language favoring Rainy. “There may be a mission. A mission you may be able to carry out better than anyone else.”

Rainy is intrigued and ready to feel relieved, but she keeps her face guarded and neutral. Rainy Schulterman is of medium height and medium weight with frizzled, medium-brown hair that has been pinned down to stop its tendency to spring up and out. Her eyes are brown and distinctly skeptical, even judgmental. She gives the impression of being closed up tight, self-contained; not quite hostile, but not one to suffer fools gladly either. For a person of the female sex, neither large nor powerful, possessing neither rank nor title, and young besides, she is unsettlingly intimidating.

“Yes, sir,” Rainy says.

“Your old man’s a crook,” Agent Bayswater says.

Rainy shoots to her feet. “Colonel, do I have permission to return to my duties?”

The colonel smothers a grin and waves her down. “Sit, sit. You don’t have any duties, Sergeant, you’re on leave.” He pulls a slim manila folder from atop a pile of folders, opens it, and reads. “In fact, you are on thirty days’ leave in recognition of your actions in Tunisia, where you parachuted—and with only the most minimal training—into the middle of a retreat, joined a lost platoon, and managed by the end of it to come away with a Waffen SS colonel in your custody. I understand you’ve been recommended for a Silver Star.”

“I have that honor, sir, though it was the GIs in that platoon who did the real work.”

“Well, it was a hell of a thing,” Colonel Corelli says, shaking his head in admiration. “I’ve read the reports from your colonel and from a Sergeant Garaman who was in command of the patrol after both the officers were killed.”

Bayswater isn’t having it. “Which doesn’t change the fact that your father, Shmuel Schulterman, is a numbers runner for Abe Vidor, who works in turn for the Genovese crime family. And that could mean hard time in Dannemora prison for your old man.”

Rainy turns a cold glare on the FBI man. “Agent Bayswater, you want something from me. Threatening me is not the way to get it.” There are times, she reflects, when her own chutzpah amazes her.

“On the contrary, honey, I don’t want a damn thing. It’s your people, Army Intelligence, who want something from us. I’m just making sure you understand who’s in charge, and it ain’t you.”

The colonel sighs and raises pacifying hands. He has no patience for this posturing, but neither does he have the force to end it. “Maybe we should get to the point. Schulterman, the US Army is planning an action—I won’t say where or when—but there is a person in the . . . let’s say, target area . . . who may be of some use to Army Intelligence. Agent Bayswater, perhaps you’d like to explain your end of it.”

Bayswater stares at Rainy. It is a hard, aggressive stare, an intimidating stare, no doubt a stare he has used to cow many a criminal suspect. Rainy is worried, but she is not intimidated by Agent Bayswater, and she lets him know it by returning his gaze with a blank, emotionless expression.

Finally, the FBI man sighs, shrugs his shoulders, and mutters, “Broads in the army. You can keep ’em. It’ll never happen in the FBI; I can promise you that.”

“A woman might have gotten to the point by now, rather than playing games,” Rainy snaps.

Bayswater snorts a derisive laugh. “A real woman would still be gossiping; I don’t know what you are, honey. But okay, I’ve got things to do, and maybe you do too. So here it is. We’ve tried working out deals to get help from the crime bosses. A lot of ’em have connections overseas, and in addition to that they could help with labor troubles on the docks. But all any of them wants is for Lucky to be let out of jail, and that ain’t gonna happen.”

“He means Lucky Luciano,” Corelli explains unnecessarily. Charles “Lucky” Luciano is the boss of all bosses in New York crime. He is in prison for “pandering” which is a polite way of saying he ran a prostitution ring, along with gambling, protection rackets, union rackets and assorted other profitable enterprises.

“Luciano is in a hole in Dannemora and he ain’t getting out, but that’s all the mob wants, all it says it wants anyway. Give us Luciano and we’ll be good, patriotic Americans and help out the war effort. That’s their demand, and they won’t budge.”

Corelli picks up the narrative. “The target area is a place where certain members of New York criminal gangs have useful contacts. Contacts who may provide us with intelligence on German positions.”

“I see,” Rainy says, and she does. Obviously the target is Italy or perhaps one of its islands, Sicily or Sardinia. It was not hard to look at a map and see that the next move for US and Allied forces in Tunisia might be some portion of Italy. Knocking Italy out of the war would be very helpful.

“I doubt very much that you do see, honey,” Bayswater says.

Rainy’s pride flares and she very nearly becomes indiscreet, but she reins it in. Barely. “You believe my father has connections to organized crime. You believe he can introduce me to someone in the organization who wants something other than freedom for Lucky Luciano. You believe this person has connections in Sicily or Sardinia or wherever in Italy that would be helpful. You want my father to make a connection and for me to approach this person with a suggestion or at least pave the way for someone more senior to have that conversation.”

This leaves the FBI man open-mouthed and temporarily flummoxed. His mouth closes with an audible click. But he recovers quickly. “We don’t want a damned thing, the army wants it, and we are just making sure you don’t say or do something you shouldn’t. And we want a full report on whatever goes on.”

“I don’t take orders from the FBI.”

“You damn well will take orders from me, sister.”

He’s moved from honey to sister. Progress, of a sort. “No. And I will not be threatened either.”

“How about if I arrange to put your old man in the clink?”

“Then you’ll report back to your superiors that you jailed a small-time numbers runner and blew the assignment, which I would guess was to render support to Colonel Corelli.”

“Jesus!” the FBI agent explodes in disgust. He can no longer remain seated but jumps up, nearly knocking his chair over. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Rainy is about to tell him when Corelli intervenes. “She’s a soldier and under military law, not civilian law, so how about we all calm down? What do you say?” He shakes his head in irritation mixed with amusement. “Sergeant, I am not going to order you to take this on. But as I understand it, there’s a lesser boss, there’s a term for it—”

“A capo,” Agent Bayswater says, still glaring at Rainy. “Or underboss.”

“Underboss. Le mot juste. An underboss named Vito Camporeale. He’s got family connections in . . . the target area. And he has a son named Francisco—Cisco they call him—right here in New York. Cisco has gotten himself into a heap of trouble.”

Bayswater says, “Racketeering, pandering, pornography, and loansharking. Only, Cisco screwed up and got overly ambitious. He tried to take over a block that belongs to a colored gang up in Harlem. But see, there’s a peace deal between the Wops and the coons, and the Five Families don’t want a war with the coons right now, what with making money hand over fist on the docks and off drunk soldiers. Cisco shot a colored boy who was connected, see, and now it’s blood for blood.”

The full truth begins to dawn on Rainy. “You’re going to offer to get Cisco to . . . to a safe place. And you want me to get my father to introduce me to Camporeale and—”

“Vito the Sack, they call him.” Bayswater now comes close. He puts his hands on the back of Rainy’s chair, leans down so she can feel his breath on the side of her neck. “Because when a fellow displeases him, see, he likes to take a razor and swipe, swipe, the man’s not a man anymore, if you take my meaning.”

Without turning to face him, Rainy repeats, “You want me to get my father to introduce me to Vito the Sack and get him to help us in . . . the target area. In exchange, we’ll save his son.”

Bayswater is taken aback by her calm. She feels him release his grip on her seat back. Of course her calm is mostly an act because Rainy’s mind is screaming with complications and personal fears, the foremost of which is confronting her father with this. She wrote to him months earlier to let him know that she knows about his other activities. But since coming home on leave she and her father have never mentioned it. Forcing him to face it? To face the fact that his activities have now ensnared his daughter? That feels very, very hard to Rainy.

On the other hand, part of Rainy is excited. The part of her that wants to contribute something to destroying the monster Hitler. She is a mere buck sergeant, one of hundreds of thousands of such in the US Army, but she’s being offered an assignment that could really amount to something. She could help to save the lives of GIs like those she met in Tunisia. She has fond memories of solid, reliable Dain Sticklin and charming Jack Stafford, and she was amazed—and just a little scared—by Rio Richlin.

Since the desperate combat in the desert, that young woman, Rio, has insinuated herself into Rainy’s mind. The mix of freckle-faced naiveté and savage Amazon brutality has affected Rainy’s worldview, has shown her a glimpse of a future in which ideas of masculinity and femininity could be utterly transformed. There is a revolution in Rio Richlin (who would no doubt snort derisively at such a notion). All over the country women are going into factories and doing jobs previously reserved for men only. All over the world clever women—and Rainy knows herself to be in this category—are contributing their intelligence and insight to the war effort. But women have always worked, if not as shipfitters and aircraft mechanics, then as maids and nurses and teachers. And there are examples going back to the time of the Romans of women bright and determined enough to wield real power, though often it was from behind the scenes.

But Rio, and women like her, are intruding in an area that has always been reserved to men: Rio is a warrior. She and others like her have shown that girls—women—could do more than work; women could be brave and aggressive. Women could kill. And Rainy is sure that reality will change the world.

She’s sure it will have no effect on the minds of men like Agent Bayswater, but for Rainy it feels like a challenge.

Colonel Corelli takes charge again as the FBI man seems to have run out of steam. “You will be required to give us a full report of the contact. You must attempt to convince them to speak with me directly, but if you find yourself dealing with Vito Camporeale, you will prepare a full report on him and on anyone else associated with him.”

“Of course,” Rainy says.

“And on your father,” Bayswater adds.

“No,” Rainy says without hesitation.

“That’s not a request, that’s an order,” Bayswater snaps.

Rainy turns in her chair to look the agent in the face. There’s a confident sneer on his thin lips. His head is cocked to one side, a parody of some movie tough guy. “Agent Bayswater, I’m not an informer. I will not betray my father.”

“Well, you uppity little skirt,” Bayswater snaps. He seems to think insults will move her. Or . . .

Or he’s deliberately trying to goad her. Is he testing her? Or is he just a deeply unpleasant man?

“You’ll report to me, Sergeant Schulterman,” Corelli says with strained calm, glaring at Bayswater. “And I have no interest in your conversation with your father. You’ll find a connection. You may even meet with Camporeale yourself. But you will only report back, you will make no commitments. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“I’ll have your orders cut,” Corelli says. “You are dismissed.”

She is out on the crowded sidewalk and heading toward the subway station when Special Agent Bayswater catches up to her.

“A moment, Sergeant,” he says.

“Yes?”

They are in the middle of the sidewalk, and Bayswater draws her into the relative calm of a department store doorway. The FBI man’s arrogance is undiminished, but the smug offensiveness is toned down now.

“You don’t like me much,” Bayswater says.

Several answers pass through Rainy’s quick mind. I don’t like you at all. And, Don’t be so modest, I actively despise you. But Rainy is a tightly controlled person when in performance of her duty. So she says nothing.

“You’re a smart broad,” Bayswater says. “And I don’t want to have to bring your old man in to identify your body. So a word to the wise: we got Naval Intelligence, we got this new OSS spy service, and we got us, the FBI. Everybody and their aunt Tilly is playing spy all of a sudden. Bunch of amateurs mostly.”

“I freely confess I am an amateur,” Rainy says, impatient now, not interested in another futile go-round with the annoying agent.

“Not talking about you, sister.” He jerks his thumb back toward the door through which they have both just emerged. “You know what Corelli did before the war?”

“Colonel Corelli?” She pointedly emphasizes his rank.

“Professor of Oriental Languages at some college up in Vermont.”

He lets that sink in, and it does. Rainy’s guard comes down just a little.

Bayswater continues. “We have professors too, all kinds of professors working for the Bureau. Very helpful, some of them. But we don’t let them plan or run operations. Guy like that is way smarter than me, but he’s never done this work before. His whole outfit—your outfit—you’re supposed to be counting tanks and deciding where some bunch of Krauts will be. This is not your bailiwick.”

That sinks in as well.

“Word to the wise,” Bayswater says. “Do this, this meet, but no more. Amateurs get people hurt. And your colonel is the textbook definition of an amateur. I know you don’t want to hear it, but that man is going to get you killed.” He touches the brim of his fedora, nods, and walks briskly away.

4
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“You know what I want to do today?” Luther Geer says, stifling a yawn and using the heel of his hand to grind the sleep from his eyes. “I want to go sit in a damn LC and invade that same damn beach all over again. At least I get cool and clean wading through the waves.”

His kitten, the former Miss Pat, now renamed Miss Lion of the Sahara, blinks owlishly from her position on his chest.

Rio Richlin has not warmed up to Luther Geer. She thinks he is a bully and not very bright to boot, but she nevertheless agrees.

Since the fighting wound down in Tunisia, the 119th Division has trained and practiced and trained some more. There has been renewed effort to improve soldiers’ effectiveness with the bazooka. There have been lectures on the necessity of actually firing one’s rifle and not just carrying it around like some family heirloom. There have been the inevitable marches around the desert—marches that had started off unpleasantly cold and then moved without seeming transition to being fiercely hot. And there have been amphibious assaults.

They have assaulted the same beach three times already, and the weary consensus among the deeply bored GIs of Second Squad, Fifth Platoon, Company A of the 119th, was that today heralded yet another phony invasion.

Jenou rolls upright in her canvas cot and upends her boots before putting them on. There are scorpions and snakes and things that have no name in the Tunisian desert, and many of them like to find shelter in a shady boot. Jenou is already partly in uniform and has in fact slept in it, there being no such thing as army-issue pajamas or nightgowns. And anyway, with zero privacy she’d have had no way to change without being stared at by the men of the squad, especially Tilo Suarez, who reacts to boredom by becoming even more irritatingly amorous.

Jenou stands up and says, “I’m grabbing chow before the coffee gets cold.”

“I’m with you,” Rio says. “I like to get the powdered eggs before they start separating.”

“This is the life, man,” Dain Sticklin says, scratching his chest through his OD undershirt. “A thousand tents surrounded by a million square miles of sand with a million sand fleas per man—or woman.”

“Are those sand fleas or lice?” Cat Preeling teases. “Because if it’s lice, we’re going to have to barbecue you, Stick. It’s the only way. Death by fire.”

“I think mine are sand fleas.” Stick picks up his uniform blouse, shakes it, and begins peering closely at the fabric, searching for tiny crawling things.

Dain Sticklin, inevitably called “Stick,” is the closest thing to a real soldier in the squad. Smart, educated, disciplined, with a prominent widow’s peak that somehow makes him look the part of the mature GI, he’s been in only as long as Rio herself and in fact went through basic training with her.

“We’re not going to know until we put them side by side whether it’s fleas or lice,” Geer opines. Geer is a big ginger hick, the least open to the idea of women in the unit. But in battle he’s performed well, and that has become more meaningful to Rio than his daily obnoxiousness.

“We ought to take a louse and a flea and put ’em together, see who wins.” This from Tilo, who seems vaguely excited by the idea, or as excited as a bored, doe-eyed young lothario in a deathly hot tent can get.

“Jesus, let me out of here,” Jenou mutters. She and Rio head for the flap and throw it open onto a blindingly bright day.

There, just arriving, is Sergeant Cole and some male private neither Rio nor Jenou recognizes.

“Where you headed?” Cole asks.

“The latrine followed by the chow line,” Rio answers.

“Then the latrine again,” Jenou says darkly. There is some dysentery in the camp, and the food is the prime suspect.

“Hold up a second,” Cole says, and the two young women back into the tent.

Sergeant Cole is the oldest member of the squad, in his midtwenties but with the air of an older man. He has wide-set eyes in an open face, thinning sandy hair, a gap-toothed grin, and the stub of an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.

The young man with him is a mystery, so for the moment no one bothers to acknowledge his existence.

“I got good news, and I got kinda good news,” Cole announces.

“Oh, I do hope it’s a five-mile hike in full gear,” Jack Stafford suggests. He’s just about Rio’s height, with sparkling eyes, reddish-blond hair and a grin that practically defines the word devilish. Jack is a displaced British boy with the luck (either good or bad) to have ended up in the American army.

“First, the not-so-good news,” Cole says.“We got a replacement for Cassel.”

A replacement? For Cassel?

“This is . . . Who are you?” There’s something anticipatory in Cole’s voice.

“Private Ben Bassingthwaite,” the young man says.

“Tell ’em where you’re from.” Cole hides a smile by taking a sudden interest in the ground.

The private suppresses a sigh. “I’m from Beaverton, Oregon.”

“The hell?” Geer demands rudely.

“That’s right,” Cole says, struggling to keep a straight face. “He’s Private Benjamin Barry Bassingthwaite from Beaverton.” And then he waits as his squad runs through various possibilities.

“Call him Beaver?” Cat suggests.

“But that’s what I call Castain,” Tilo says, grinning at his own wit and batting his admittedly gorgeous eyelashes at Jenou.

“Not before I get my coffee, huh, Suarez?” Jenou says. “Coffee before bullshit: it’s in the manual.”

“Triple B?” Cat offers.

“Beebee,” the newcomer says. “That’s what it always comes down to. Beebee.” His tone is resigned. Not happy, but not unduly upset either.

“I still like beaver,” Tilo mutters. “Not that I’m getting any in this dump.”

Jillion Magraff and Hansu Pang do not join in the banter. Magraff is either shy or sullen, Rio still isn’t sure which. And Hansu Pang is a Japanese American, and despite his good soldiering he remains deeply suspect.

“Beebee it is,” Stick says. “Seen any action, Beebee?”

Beebee is short, painfully thin, scrawny even, nothing at all like Cassel. He has the slightly nauseated look Rio would expect from a new guy suddenly pushed into a room . . . well, tent . . . full of new people all giving him the stink eye. For the moment at least, Beebee embodies the gap that opens up between those who have been under fire and those who have not. He is an unknown quantity, and just like the new kid in high school, people size him up, looking for vulnerability.

Cat’s begun rolling up the side of the tent nearest her. The tent sides go up during the heat of the day and down for the chilly desert night. “Okay, that’s the bad news,” Cat says. “So what’s the good news?”

Cole displays his uneven teeth. “Children, I got you a twenty-four-hour—”

The word pass is lost in an eruption of cheering followed immediately by a whirlwind of GIs grabbing whatever money they’ve stashed away and pounding for the exit with such enthusiasm that Cole might well be trampled.

“If only I could get you all to move that fast for inspection,” Cole says. “Now hold on! Hold on! ”

They freeze, forming a comical tableau, like a freeze-frame in a cartoon.

“Do not, I repeat, do not make damn fools of yourselves. I don’t want anyone in the hospital because of some drunk bar fight, and I don’t want anyone falling out because they’ve caught the clap, and Richlin? You and Castain have custody of the new man.”

Cassel’s replacement.

Rio wipes her right hand down the side of her pants, unconsciously wiping Cassel’s blood from her hand. Cassel, the first to die. His final word, “Oh.”

Oh. And two minutes later he had bled out into wet sand.

“Aw, jeez, Sarge,” Jenou complains theatrically. “If I’ve got to babysit, at least get me someone with some shoulders on him. Dammit.” She sighs. “Okay, Booboo or whatever your name is, you got thirty seconds to drop your gear and grab your cash because we are heading for town.”

“Wait a minute,” Rio says. “I thought being a private meant I didn’t have to babysit. I mean, that’s sergeant work, isn’t it?”

Cole says, “Yes it is, Richlin, just like it’s my job to delegate, and hey, guess what? I just did.”

Rio is not specifically excited to see Tunis, but she is bored to the point of unconsciousness and welcomes anything at all that breaks the routine. Tunis, Paris, or the Gates of Hell, she’s up for anything that is not this tent. She shoulders her rifle.

“Nuh-uh-uh,” Cole says. “No weapons. Drunk GIs and weapons are not a good mix. Do you all comprehend me? I am dead damn serious: I sure as hell better not be hearing about you from the MPs.”

Rio and Jenou, with Beebee in tow, join the others climbing aboard an open deuce-and-a-half truck whose driver has been persuaded to drive into town in exchange for half a carton of Luckies.

It’s a dusty, bouncing, behind-pounding, spine-crunching, noisy, two-hour drive down roads choked with military vehicles. A sort of hierarchy governs the roads: at the lowest end are civilians, Arabs and Berbers with huge loads on their backs or smacking heavily laden donkeys; next, soldiers on foot; then the trucks. Jeeps carrying officers are next, and at the top of the precedence, tanks, because no one wants to get in the way of a Sherman.

Speaking of which, there is a very odd sight by the side of the road, a Sherman pointing vertically out of a crater. A bulldozer idles beside it, and colored troops are running a thick chain from the tractor to the front of the tank.

Beebee says, “So I guess some of you fellows have seen action?”

Luther Geer seizes the opportunity to impress and terrify the new guy. “We have been into the jaws of death, youngster. Jaws of death! Krauts everywhere, bullets flying, blood up to our knees!”

“And how about you girls?” Beebee asks, unconsciously drawing closer to them.

“Well,” Jenou drawls, “we mostly just follow behind the men and bring them tea and cookies when they get tired of killing Krauts.”

Jack emits a guffaw. Then, as if it’s the most serious matter in the world, he leans toward Beebee and says, “Of course you Yanks call them cookies, but the proper term is biscuits.”

“I like Castain’s biscuits.” Tilo smirks. “Richlin’s biscuits haven’t quite risen, if you see what I mean.”

“Stick, you’ve read the manual cover to cover,” Jenou says. “Is it okay if I shoot Suarez?”

“Gonna get me some A-rab tail,” Tilo says, undeterred. “Gonna see for myself what they’ve got underneath those scarves and outfits they wear. I hear an A-rab woman will go with a GI for a dollar.”

“I’m getting me some hooch first,” Geer says. “Then tail. What about you, Jappo?”

Hansu Pang jerks in surprise. He is rarely spoken to directly.

Before Pang can decide on a reply, Geer continues. “I know you Japs like pussy, what with all the raping and such your people did in China.”

“Knock it off, Geer,” Stick says.

“I am one-quarter Japanese,” Pang says with all the dignity he can muster as the truck rattles noisily over ground torn up by tank treads. “Half Korean and one-quarter white.”

“Well, goody for you,” Geer says. “So you’re a half-breed who’s only one-quarter traitor.”

No one comes to Pang’s defense, though the silence that follows is distinctly uncomfortable. It nags at Rio’s conscience, this baiting of Pang. There were Japanese (or Japo-American, whatever, she isn’t sure what to call them) farmers around Gedwell Falls. They were just regular, hardworking farmers, no different than the various English, Scots, Italians, French, and so on in the area. She has heard about them being rounded up and sent to camps, many of them being forced to sell their farms for far less than they were worth.

She thinks someday she might get annoyed enough by Geer to say something. But not now. Not yet. She tells herself she has enough trouble being a woman in the army, she doesn’t need to pick fights on behalf of Japs.

Anyway, they have a twenty-four-hour pass. Time for fun, not for picking fights.

Tunis is a city, not a town—a vast, sprawling maze of sun-bleached one- and two-story stucco homes, narrow crooked streets, and narrow, even more crooked alleys. Their progress is slowed by donkeys piled high with bushels of dates, big pottery jars of honey, bushels of wheat, and colorful rugs; by men with dark, suspicious faces glowering from the shade of hoods; dirty, excited, nearly naked children racing alongside yelling their few words of English, “Hey, Joe, gimme cigarette?” and “My sister love you long time—one dollar!”

Jillion Magraff digs in her pocket, comes up with a chocolate bar—or what passes for chocolate in army rations—and tosses the bar into the gaggle of children, who instantly start fighting over it.

Finally the truck lurches to a halt outside an intersection choked with foot traffic milling past awning-shielded stalls selling olives, grapes, dates, chickpeas, bright orange spices, and war souvenirs that run from German medals and helmets to British tea and cans of bully beef to American cigarettes.

“Far as I go,” the driver yells, leaning out of his window.

The squad piles out, eyes wide, voices high, various uncreditable appetites honed to desperation.

“So what do we do now?” Rio asks Jenou. Rio is still a small-town, rural girl, intimidated by cities, especially strange cities full of people who do not look at all happy to see her.

“We look around, I suppose, see what there is to see.” Jenou has always been the worldly wise balance to Rio’s naiveté, though in truth Jenou is a bit overwhelmed too.

“What, no whorehouse?” Cat asks, joining them. Jillion Magraff hovers at the edge of their little group.

“Where are you ladies going?” Jack asks Rio.

Rio shrugs. “I’ll follow Castain; she’s my guide to the seamy side of life. I suppose you’re off to have a different kind of fun.”

Jack grins. It is an irresistible thing, his grin, full of mischief and fun. “I’m not much for bordellos, I’m afraid, I’m saving myself for the future Mrs. Stafford. But I guess I’ll see if I can keep Suarez and Geer out of the guardhouse.”

Beebee shows every sign of wanting to go with the men, but says, “Well, I suppose the ladies will need an escort. Anyway, Sergeant Cole said . . .”

“Yeah, you protect us,” Cat says, rolling her eyes, but not unkindly. Cat Preeling is approximately twice Beebee’s size, and Cat once strangled a Kraut with the strap of her M1.

The five of them, Rio, Jenou, Cat, Jillion, and Beebee spend the next several hours wandering alien alleyways, buying snacks of unfamiliar food from women squatting beside open charcoal braziers, and picking out trinkets to send home to little brothers and sisters, moms and dads. Rio buys a small silver necklace for her mother and tucks it into her pocket.

At a stand whose rickety table looks ready to collapse under the weight of bronze cookware, brass filigreed boxes, and, incongruously, a ragged and scorched chunk of steel bearing most of a German cross, Rio spots something.

She points at it and says, “Show me that.”

The shopkeeper, a very old man with a face like leather that’s been boiled then left out in the sun to shrivel, ignores her.

“That!” Rio says, pointing insistently.

The shopkeeper shakes his head and adds a wagging finger.

“Can’t you understand plain English?” Cat demands, self-mocking. “We’ve come to save you from the Hun, you ungrateful—”

“It’s on account of you being a woman, I expect,” Beebee says. “The men, most of them, have a blade of some kind, not the women.”

Rio stares at him. Clever boy. “Okay, you ask him.”

Beebee steps past Rio and points at the object, and the shopkeeper reluctantly hands it to him. It is a dagger, a curved knife with a silver butt on the dark, hardwood hilt and a silver scabbard covered in a repeating pattern of curlicues.

Beebee hands it to Rio, who draws the blade slowly. The scabbard is curved, the blade, almost a foot of lightly corroded steel, slightly less so. Rio tests the edge.

“A little dull, but I could sharpen it up.”

“You sending it home?” Jenou asks skeptically. “For who, your dad?”

“Maybe,” Rio says with a shrug and hands it back to Beebee, much to the shopkeeper’s relief. “Tell him you’ll give him a dollar.”

Beebee and the shopkeeper haggle for ten minutes before arriving on a price of six dollars. Beebee takes the prize and hands it to Rio, who slips it into her belt.

“I think he was saying how it’s called a koummya,” Beebee offers.

“Koummya and I’ll stabbya,” Cat quips.

“My birthday present to myself,” Rio says with some satisfaction.

“Your . . .” Jenou says, and then stares at her, mouth hanging open. “Oh my God, honey! It’s your birthday! I cannot believe I forgot your birthday!”

“Eighteen,” Rio says, then, noticing the surprised looks from everyone but Jenou, adds, “Um . . . nineteen?”

“They’re not going to kick you out now,” Jenou says, and gives her friend a hug before holding her out at arm’s length to look her up and down. “Well, there you go, honey. You are a legal adult.”

“Clearly we need a beer to celebrate,” Cat says. “How the hell do we find it, that’s the question.”

“Down that alley over on the right,” Beebee says, which earns him curious looks from his companions. He shrugs. “I noticed some GIs coming out. They looked like they’d been drinking.”

Cat slaps him on his narrow shoulder, earning a wince, and says, “We may have use for you after all, young Bassingthwaite. Lead on!”

The tavern is a low-ceilinged, dimly lit place with a short and narrow door providing the only light. Had there been artificial light it likely would not have penetrated the thick blue cigarette smoke which swirls and hovers and is parted by the squad’s entry into the room. At least twenty GIs are crammed in so tightly that the two small round tables have become de facto stools.

Rio has been in British pubs, and those could be raucous at times—she has sidestepped more than one drunken brawl between American GIs and British Tommies. Or between American GIs and American sailors. Or between white GIs and black GIs. Or . . . Well, fit, energetic young men far from their families had a tendency to get into trouble, especially when drunk. But the tone of this place is subtly different. Here there is more weariness on the one hand and on the other hand a more desperate edge to the braying laughter. There are silent, sullen drinkers and loud, lit-up, electrified drinkers who are all raw nerve.

Rio checks shoulder patches and the condition of uniforms and the look in men’s eyes and knows these are not rear-echelon soldiers but men who had been in the fight.

There are a number of long looks plus the inevitable catcalls and lewd propositions as Rio, Jenou, Jillion, and Cat, with their male escort Beebee, walk in. The more civilized men offer to buy them drinks; others offer to give them a baby so they can muster out and go home.

The four women have very different ways of dealing with this. Jenou smiles and in a loud, welcoming voice says, “I’ll decide who buys me a drink, and it ain’t you, short stuff. I want handsome and I want rich. If you’re rich enough, I’ll give a pass on the handsome.”

This confuses most of the men and leaves them temporarily stalled, unsure how to proceed. They might be veterans, these men, but few are over twenty-five and none of them are suave or sophisticated with women.

Cat Preeling has a different approach. When a rowdy, red-faced buck sergeant comes up demanding a dance—despite the absence of music or room to dance—Cat says, “Aw, fug that. Pull up and tell me a war story, Sarge.” In five minutes Cat has a gaggle of men around her, all competing to come up with the best story, or failing that then the most extravagant complaint about the army. And of course Cat is giving back as good as she gets.

Jillion is the lost lamb, clinging nervously beside Rio, glancing toward every new sound. Rio manages to push her way up to the bar—actually a section of perforated steel resting at a noticeable angle on a sawhorse and a chest of drawers. The man behind the bar glares at her with naked hostility as she says, “A beer, please, and one for my buddy here.”

The barman ignores her. So Rio pulls the knife and scabbard from her belt and lays it on the bar, examining her recent purchase. She draws the blade, holds it up to the smoky light and runs her finger carefully along both sharpened edges.

The beers appear, and the knife is put away.

“I wish I could do that,” Jillion says ruefully.

“It’s all bluff,” Rio says. “But don’t tell anyone.” She avoids smiling because she knows her grin, which is slow to arrive but dazzling when it does appear, makes her look even younger than her current just-barely eighteen years.

“I’ve only ever tasted beer once,” Jillion says. “I didn’t like it then. But now I like anything wet.” She offers Rio a cigarette, which Rio declines, then lights one for herself.

She’s a fussy person, Jillion, with quick, small movements and an air of alertness that makes Rio think of a squirrel hiding its nuts. She has none of the physical robustness that Rio, Jenou, and Cat all share, and Rio wonders, not for the first time, how Jillion made it through basic training. She can’t picture this nervous squirrel running five miles in full gear, though to be fair she’s always kept up with the rest of the squad. Not much of a fighter, maybe, and a bit of a goldbrick, but there are others in the platoon as useless. Or almost as useless.

“So, what’s your story, Magraff ?” Rio asks, partly from curiosity, more just to have an excuse to shut out the noise around her.

“Me?” It comes out almost as a squeak. “Well . . .” She has to think about it while hunching her shoulders around her drink as if afraid it will be snatched out her hands. “I’m from a place called Chapel Hill in North Carolina. It’s where the university is.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Small town really, I guess. My father works in a print shop. I was figuring to go to work there maybe someday.”

“What does he print?”

“Oh, you know, flyers and church bulletins and diner menus and such. But they do some artwork sometimes and well, I kind of, uh . . .”

“You like art?”

Jillion nods and looks away as if admitting something shameful.

“I see you drawing some times in that notebook you have.”

“It passes the time.”

“What do you draw?” Rio asks, and now she’s actually interested. The closest she’s come to knowing anyone with artistic interests is Strand, who enjoys taking pictures. Her hand moves involuntarily to the inner pocket where she keeps her photographs and letters.

“The squad, mostly. Folks from the rest of the platoon too, whoever is sitting still long enough but won’t notice me. It makes people nervous, but it keeps me from getting nervous.”

Rio half turns to favor her with a skeptical look. If this is Jillion Magraff not being nervous she’d hate to see her nervous.

“Would you like to see?” Jillion asks.

“Sure.”

Jillion draws her bent, sweat-stained sketch pad from under her blouse. She opens it to a page and shyly holds it for Rio to see.

“That’s Castain! Hey, Jenou, come here.” But Jenou is busy flirting with a drunk but darkly attractive staff sergeant. “You got one of me?”

Jillion pales. “Um . . . I have a few of you.”

“Well, let’s see.”

“Okay, but, you know, I’m just an amateur,” Jillion says deprecatingly. “This is the first one I did of you.”

The sketch is of a girl, in partial profile, looking off to one side and smiling. The girl is in uniform, but without a helmet, and she looks just ready to start laughing.

“Oh man, my freckles,” Rio says. Jillion starts to put it away, but Rio puts her hand on the page, stopping her. “Who was I looking at when you drew this?”

“I don’t remember,” Jillion says.

But Jillion blushes, and it’s pretty clear she’s lying. Why, though? Who would she smile at that way? Not Stick. One of the other girls? Certainly not Pang or Tilo. She hopes it wasn’t Cassel, but then the answer slowly dawns: Jack. Of course. She was looking at Jack, ready to laugh.

“Okay,” Rio says, confused as to how exactly she should be reacting. She wants to compliment Jillion: it’s a very good likeness, but it’s also, maybe . . . revealing. Rio swallows and forces a laugh. “Any others?”

Jillion, perhaps reading Rio’s uncertainty, shakes her head.

“Come on, Magraff, you said there were others.” Rio dreads seeing something equally revealing, but dreads more not seeing it.

Jillion turns through the pages, past a frightened-looking Tilo, past Geer strangely tender in a face-to-face with his kitten, past Sergeant Cole’s gap-toothed grin in an obviously posed picture with his Thompson on his hip. And then, at last, reveals a somber picture of a GI. The GI’s face is partly shaded by the brim of a helmet, so only the mouth is visible. It’s a partly open mouth, showing a hint of upper teeth. It’s a wolfish half-smile, nothing like the laugh-ready grin of the first picture. There’s something predatory in that expression that matches the tension of the body. In the picture she has her M1 leveled, and a wisp of smoke curls from the barrel.

For a moment Rio can only stare. For some reason she feels the collar of her blouse chafing her neck, distracting, annoying, spreading irritation through her. She searches for something to say, because again, it’s a very good drawing, but she doesn’t like it. It seems connected to the scrape of collar on her neck and connected as well to the vague nakedness she feels not having the weight of her rifle on her shoulder. In the sketch her right hand melts into the trigger housing of the rifle.

“That’s—” she begins, but suddenly two male hands appear, reaching around Rio to cover and squeeze her breasts. Rio says, “Can I borrow your cigarette?” and without waiting for a reply takes Jillion’s cigarette from her mouth and stabs the lit end into one of the hands.

“Goddammit!” the man shrieks. “You burned me! You fugging bitch!”

“Sorry,” Rio says mildly. “I must have slipped.” There’s an angry red-and-black circle on the back of the man’s hand, and he alternately shakes it and massages it.

“If you weren’t a woman, I’d punch you in the face!”

This is loud enough and angry enough to cause Jenou and Cat to close in, standing shoulder to shoulder with Rio. Beebee dithers uncertainly before finally deciding that loyalty to his new platoon mates is more important than loyalty to a fellow male.

“How about I buy you a beer to show there are no hard feelings?” Rio says, breaking out a tight, false, predatory smile which, it occurs to her, she has just seen in the sketch. That very smile. No smile at all, really.

“How about you—” the man begins in a belligerent tone, but taking a second look at determined faces, he backs away muttering curses under his breath.

They order another round of beers and then move on to a different establishment, where the Arab barman, and his whole family who help serve and clean up, is happier to serve them. There they run into Jack, Stick, and Tilo, all somewhat impaired and clearly intent on getting still more impaired.

Suddenly self-conscious, Rio whispers, “Don’t mention my knife. Or the masher back there.”

Jenou rolls her eyes but just says, “Oooookay,” with a drawn-out vowel. But she can’t stop herself, so in a whisper adds, “We wouldn’t want you frightening your backup boyfriend.”

This leaves Rio in the impossible position of either denying or asking who Jenou means by “backup boyfriend,” both of which seem likely to cause Jenou to say still more. She limits herself to shooting Jenou a furious look—not the look from the sketch, an angrier but less . . . less dangerous . . . look—which Jenou laughs off, saying, “Save it for the Krauts and the mashers. You don’t scare me, Rio.”

“The ladies are here, thank God!” Jack says with a big and somewhat misaligned grin. “I’m stuck with these two.” He waves vaguely at Stick and Tilo. Tilo has the look of an unfocused owl trying to see in daylight. Stick is less tipsy but not quite his usual solid, steady self.

“Why, you boys have been drinking,” Jenou drawls.

“Why, yesh, yesh we have,” Jack confesses without shame. He bows from the waist, almost falling over, takes Jenou’s hand, and kisses it.

“Well, la-di-da, aren’t we fancy?” Jenou says.

Jack moves to take Rio’s hand, but she deftly sidesteps and he winks knowingly at her. On a previous occasion where too much drink had been consumed, Rio and Jack shared a drunken kiss. Rio has tried since then to put it entirely out of her mind, to file it away under “irrelevant distractions,” but the memory is too strong and seems oddly to be growing stronger and more specific over time. And now it takes the form of that first sketch, the happy one, the one where she isn’t holding a smoking rifle.

Wet, freezing cold, and suddenly so warm, warm all the way through, when we kissed.

Her hand reaches for the photograph of Strand Braxton but thinks better of it. It would be too obvious that she was using it as a talisman to ward off thoughts of Jack.

Inevitably the comparisons come floating up through Rio’s somewhat addled thoughts. Strand is taller, better looking, a pilot, a dashing figure, an officer, not to mention being a hometown boy who will no doubt get married when the war is over, presumably to Rio.

Maybe.

If that’s what I want.

Which it must be.

Surely.

Jack is tall enough without being striking, has reddish hair, faint freckles like her own, and he’s funny. And charming. Strand is also charming, but he lacks Jack’s quick and easy wit.

I’ve kissed them both, and . . .

Jillion and her damned pictures.

Strand, unlike Jack, is not here. Strand is on an air base three hundred miles away on the coast of Algeria. She’s had letters from him, all censored of course, but it is clear that he is not flying the fighters he’d hoped to pilot but rather is flying bombers. Where he’s bombing and who he’s bombing, she does not know.

What she does know is that there are women with the Air Corps, as well as nurses and local women, all of whom would presumably find Strand as attractive as she does herself.

Strand isn’t that kind of fellow.

But really, is there a male who isn’t that sort of fellow? Really?

Suddenly Rio wants a drink or several. Or else to hide away somewhere, all alone, and think. Or better still, not think.

Jillion and her damned pictures.

Tilo says, “Heard we’re shipping out. For real, this time.” He speaks with the exaggerated care of an inebriate.

Rio nods. Everyone knows they aren’t staying in North Africa. Everyone knows they’re going somewhere, and probably soon since summer is coming on and up north the Soviets are crying endlessly for the Allies to open a second front by invading Europe proper.

“France,” Tilo says in what he mistakenly believes is a confidential whisper.

“Not France,” Stick says. “It’s either Sardinia or Sicily.”

“What’s the difference?” Cat asks and drinks half her beer in a single long pull that leaves her with a foam mustache.

“Damned if I know,” Jack says, but he’s not really paying attention, he’s watching Rio, head cocked, grin hovering.

Stick sighs and says, “Okay, here it is.” He dips his finger in his beer and begins tracing squiggly lines on the countertop. “That’s the Mediterranean Sea. That big boot sticking down? That’s Italy. And here’s Sicily and Sardinia, which the Eye-Ties control. If we set out for southern France, see, we’d pass right under Kraut and Eye-Tie planes and get shot to hell.”

Rio looks on, partly out of actual interest and partly because it allows her to form a blank expression. Is Jillion recording this too? Like most front line soldiers, Rio has no real idea where she is, let alone why. The geography is a mystery to her. “That one,” she says, stabbing a finger at the larger of the two islands.

“Why?” Stick asks, curious.

“Because it’s bigger?”

Stick laughs. “That’d probably be enough of a reason for the generals,” he admits.

“We’ll know when we know,” Jillion offers in a soft, almost-inaudible voice.

“But when?” Tilo cries in exaggerated despair, arms thrown wide and nearly sweeping an overflowing tin can ashtray onto the floor.

“You in a hurry?” Cat asks him.

“I don’t like not knowing. It gets on my nerves. Back and forth, scuttlebutt and more scuttlebutt. Let’s just get this war over with!”

“I’m happy to let someone else win it,” Rio says. “I’m happy just to sit here in the desert. I can have my folks send me some magazines. Maybe I’ll take up knitting.”

“Right,” Jack says. “Knitting.”

He can’t even imagine me as I am back home. He’s never even met that Rio. He doesn’t know me. Not me.

And that’s when a half dozen exceedingly drunk Goums come bursting in, loud and aggressive.

The Goums are Berbers, French colonial troops now supporting the Allies. They are Muslim, so they are not allowed to drink, but like the many Baptists equally forbidden to drink, they have suspended some rules temporarily. They are dark-skinned, fantastically bearded, dressed in loosely belted, open-front robes of sorts, like bathrobes, with wide vertical stripes of tan and sun-bleached burgundy. They wear last-war French helmets or white cloth head wrappings and carry what appear to be daggers very much like the one Rio purchased.

“I thought towel-heads didn’t drink,” Tilo says. It is unlikely that any of the Goums speak enough English to understand his words, but they see the challenge in his eyes and then see that he is in company with women.

One of the Goums shoves Tilo, knocking him back against Rio. Stick moves quickly in front of Tilo, holding up his hands, palms out, and speaking in a soothing voice.

The Goum laughs, takes a step back, grins, and launches himself forward.

And the bar fight begins.

The first bar fight of the night.

5
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

Rainy Schulterman is wearing a dress in the bathroom. It is a perfectly nice dress, a young woman’s dress, a navy-blue dress with a white collar. She puts it on, twists the collar into place, and performs the necessary gymnastics to raise the zipper from her lower back to her neck. Then she resets the collar, runs smoothing hands down the front of the garment, and stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She moves this way and that, trying to see it from as many angles as possible, a little dance that causes her to brush against her mother’s brassieres, hanging from the shower curtain pole.

She last wore this dress to attend her cousin’s bar mitzvah. It is her good dress, the only thing she can wear to a place like the Stork Club.

“No,” Rainy says.

She considers, face solemn, and decides to try the look with her hair down. She pulls a few strategic hairpins and her brown hair explodes out into its natural bristle brush.

“No.”

Her uniform hangs neatly from the hook on the back of the door, and in five minutes she is in her Class-A’s, complete with shiny men’s shoes and bright brass buttons. Three gold chevrons adorn each shoulder.

She sighs with resignation and begins pinning her mad tumbleweed of hair back into place. Finally she settles her service cap, steadying it with a hairpin as well.

Rainy steps out of the bathroom. Her mother is waiting.

Her mother says nothing—nothing in actual words—but with sighs, rolled eyes, a mouth opened as if in shock, and with gestures of shoulders and hands, manages to convey her weary disappointment.

“I was in uniform when he met me,” Rainy says defensively.

“Oy.”

“Mother.”

“Is it so wrong I should miss my daughter, my little baby girl?”

“Your daughter is right here,” Rainy says with teeth-gritting impatience.

“My daughter wears a dress when she goes out, especially to the Stork Club. What if Walter Winchell is there and he sees you dressed like a man? And who is this boy you’re seeing? Is he a good boy?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You go out dancing till all hours with a boy you don’t know?”

Rainy’s father sticks his head around the corner. “What boy?”

“He’s a nice Jewish boy,” Rainy says.

“At least there’s that,” her mother says. Her shoulders slump. Her entire body is one big, middle-aged advertisement of disappointment and desolation. This disappointment at least is not really about Rainy, but rather her brother, Aryeh, a Marine, who married his pregnant shiksa girlfriend, Jane, before heading off to the Pacific. Their baby is expected momentarily.

“You look beautiful, even in uniform,” Rainy’s father says, “and I don’t want you looking too beautiful in a dress with legs and arms and legs, giving this boy ideas.” He puts a hand over his heart. “I speak as a man when I say never trust any man.”

Rainy is not worried about Halev Leventhal getting too familiar. What does worry her is speaking to her father. She’s put it off and put it off, each time looking for some perfect moment.

She glances at the wall clock. She has time.

“Get it over with,” she mutters. If she doesn’t get it over with the anxiety of it will ruin her night with Halev.

Her date with Halev. That’s right, it is a date. Definitely a date.

She waits until her mother decides the living room rug needs a quick vacuuming and pulls her father aside in the hallway outside her bedroom.

“What, you need cab fare to come home if he gets fresh?” He starts to dig in his pants for his wallet.

“Dad. I . . .”

And now he knows this is not about producing a five-dollar bill for cab fare.

“What is it, sweetheart?”

“Dad, I love you and nothing will ever change that.”

“Of course nothing will ever change that, what could change that?”

“Vito Camporeale,” Rainy says.

She watches in fascination as various options play out across her father’s face. Should he play dumb? Should he say it’s none of her business?

“Dad, the people I work for want me to talk to the people you . . . someone you may know.”

“Oh, Rainy,” he says, and sags back against the wall, head down on his chest. “Oy vey iz mir.”

“Dad, listen to me. Daddy.” She waits until he raises a face she has never seen before, weary and defeated and ashamed. “Dad, you know the FBI found out and told Army Intelligence. I admit I was shocked, but do you think I really care if you run numbers? Everyone in the neighborhood plays a number.”

He moans and scrubs his face with his palms.

“The army wants something, and they think they can get it from this Vito Camporeale.”

“It didn’t start out like this. I was working for one of our people, a Jewish businessman, but there was some deal and he gave the territory to the dagos. So . . . there is still rent to pay each month.” He shrugs.

Rainy takes a moment to note that most of her father’s shame over running numbers stems from the fact that he’s no longer doing it for a Jewish mobster.

“Listen, Dad, we need to talk about this now while Mother is vacuuming, I don’t want—”

Her father waves his hand. “Oh, she knows. She’s my wife! Of course she knows.”

This keeps getting stranger.

“Okay, but we don’t want anyone to know who doesn’t have a need to know,” Rainy says. It takes her father a moment to figure out that by “we” she does not mean the family, but the army.

“Of course,” he says, straightening up and sending a glance in the direction of his wife.

“You just need to pass the word that we’d like one of our people to meet with him. No cops—this is not about the law.”

That sounds strange coming out of her mouth, but she will have time to consider the moral question later.

Her father nods. “I can tell someone who will tell someone . . .” He shrugs in a way that signals that after that it will be out of his hands. “But you, you don’t talk to Don Vito, you understand me? Some of those people, they’re animals, these dagos.”

Rainy gives him a kiss on the cheek and the doorbell rings. “I’m just passing along a message,” she says, sure that she’s telling the truth. No one with any sense would strike a bargain with a three-striper. “Please do make the call as soon as possible. My colo—my superior officer is in a hurry.”

Halev arrives looking perfectly respectable, wearing a dark suit and a yarmulke, shoes shined, hair combed, face scrubbed, fingernails trimmed, manner a bit intimidated and nervous. After enduring a thorough grilling from Rainy’s mother and father—an interrogation that is only slightly more gentle than what Rainy’s SS colonel endured—Rainy and Halev escape into the stairwell and finally into the glowing Manhattan night.

“Sorry about all that,” Rainy says. She breathes a long exhalation of relief. She’s bearded her father in his den, and Halev has not been frightened off by her mother, so now she can let herself relax, at least a little.

“Oh, it was nothing,” Halev says. “Just help me get these bamboo shoots out from under my fingernails.”

Rainy laughs. Then says, “Sorry about the uniform too. My good dress needed mending.”

“I wouldn’t have recognized you any other way,” he says, and adds with awkward gallantry, “Besides, you look better in a uniform than any other girl in a ball gown.”

The eternally logical part of her brain considers counter-arguments to that obviously false statement. The rest of her brain tells her to shut up and accept the compliment.

They walk side by side, but not arm in arm, and descend into the subway before emerging on Fifth Avenue, just blocks from the club on East Fifty-Third Street. They race, laughing, to avoid a sudden shower.

The Stork Club is the place to see and be seen, and Rainy half expects to be denied entry. This is, after all, the epicenter of New York’s low society—actors and actresses, impresarios, promoters, theater owners, and writers—all presided over and reported on by the powerful columnist Walter Winchell.

The Stork Club’s owner, Sherman Billingsley, a garrulous, table-hopping force of nature and former bootlegger, greets them as they squeeze through the door just ahead of a woman in evening wear with gloves up to her biceps and décolletage down to . . . well, much farther than Rainy would ever have dared.

“So, you’re Saul’s boy?” Billingsley says, shaking Halev’s hand before bowing slightly to Rainy, raising her hand and not quite touching it to his lips. “And with a charming sergeant on your arm!”

They are not given the best table in the house. In fact they are shown to a small table far from the dance floor and far too near the banging kitchen door, but it is impossible to resent this in any way as the best tables are occupied by the rich and the famous.

“Is that Orson Welles?” Rainy blurts. “And . . . and . . . is that . . . is that really Frank Sinatra? He’s not very tall, is he?”

The room is all swank leather booths, crisp linen on the tables, glittering crystal, and rushing waiters. The band is just filing out onto the stage.

“This may not be a discreet question, but how did you get reservations here?” Rainy asks.

Halev smiles, leans across the table, and says, “My father is rather successful in the garment trade, and my uncle Max is tailor to probably a quarter of the men in the room.”

“Do tell me you’re rich,” Rainy jokes. “It will make my parents so happy. The only thing better would be if you were a doctor.”

“I am not in any way rich,” Halev says. “My father? My uncle?” He shrugs. “They make a living.”

They make a living. So, yes: rich, or close to it.

They sip cocktails and sneak subtle glances at the famous folk. They each order a shrimp cocktail to be followed by a steak with asparagus and potatoes au gratin. A very tall man trailing a small gaggle of men and women passes by and tosses a casual salute and a wink at Rainy. It’s not until the big man is past that Rainy recognizes him and very nearly stabs her fork into her tongue.

“Was that John Wayne?”

“Elisheva Schulterman,” Halev says, leaning back in his chair with an expression of great satisfaction. “You have just been saluted by the Duke.”

“And winked at, let’s not leave that out of the story.”

“Wait until you hear the band. You won’t see them very well unless we go up to dance, but that’s Benny Goodman’s band.”

Rainy frowns. “This is mad! I shouldn’t be in a place with these people! And . . . I don’t think I dance.”

“You don’t think you do?”

“Well, I am certainly not dancing at the Stork Club in front of Frank Sinatra.”

But she does dance after a few more cocktails and fortified by a massive steak of the sort regular folks aren’t supposed to be getting, what with there being a war on.

It is a glittering, wonderful evening, but Rainy has to work at enjoying it. This is not her place, not her people. Her people wear green uniforms, curse frequently, smell usually, and complain constantly. But within Rainy’s limited ability to relax and enjoy life, it is an enjoyable, even somewhat enchanting, evening.

Be honest, she scolds herself, it’s better than somewhat enchanting.

Emerging into the fresh air afterward they find the rain has stopped, leaving the streets wet and shining. The washing that often hangs from balconies and fire escapes is gone, the sidewalk vendors have all fled, and the streets feel empty and clean. There’s a metallic smell that is at once chemical and sanitary, as if the city has just been mopped with ammonia.

An aging Hasid, his beaver hat sparkling with rain drops, casts a disapproving look at them, and only then does Rainy realize that Halev has taken her hand. Ultra-Orthodox Jews do not like men and women walking together, let alone holding hands, let alone a man holding hands with a woman wearing a uniform.

Rainy feels Halev’s hand shrinking in hers, and she tightens her grip in defiance. Let the alter cocker sneer, she will not be shamed by those people. She will not be shamed by anyone.

And if he wants to kiss me?

Halev insists on walking her home, despite acknowledging that she was the one who at their first meeting rescued him from a street fight and not the other way around. Still, a gentleman does not let his date roam the streets of the city alone at night.

They are a block from Rainy’s home when she notices that a long black Plymouth sedan is creeping along the wet street behind them. Halev notices it too. “Let’s walk a little faster, shall we?”

“Actually, Halev, I have a feeling that may be my ride.”

“What?”

She stops and turns back to face the car, which now accelerates gently to come even with her. A burly man in a heavy overcoat and wearing a homburg hat, rolls down the window and says, “You the Jew’s girl . . . uh, what’s her name?”

A second man, smaller but with the dead eyes of a porcelain doll, says, “Schulterman.”

“That’s me,” Rainy says.

The car brakes and both men get out. Both wear loose-fitting overcoats to conceal the bulge of shoulder holsters. That they are gangsters is not in question, they practically have the word gangster hung on a sandwich board around their necks.

“Come on, Rainy,” Halev says nervously.

“I’m so sorry, Halev, but I have to say good night.”

“But—”

“It’s something . . .” She searches for the word and only comes up with, “Official.”

“I see.”

“I had a great time.”

“So did I. But these gentlemen are definitely putting an end to my schemes for a good night kiss.”

Rainy smiles. “Next time?”

“Promise?” he asks with a crooked smile that reveals a sweet mix of desire and bashfulness.

Feeling an overwhelming swirl of mismatched feelings, including the giddiness of attraction to Halev, nervousness, and fear—but mostly fear of screwing something up—she shakes Halev’s hand chastely and self-consciously, and slides into the backseat of the Plymouth.

6
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“You Cole?”

It is four o’clock in the morning, and the man speaking is an MP corporal. He is behind the wheel of a jeep pulling a wooden cart on bald automobile tires. It’s a makeshift arrangement that has never appeared in an army field manual. But then the army manual does not contemplate this particular sort of cargo.

Sergeant Cole rubs sleep from his eyes and looks at the MP, then at the bodies piled and intertwined in the cart. Eight of his soldiers—the new guy Beebee, plus Suarez, Stick, Stafford, Castain, Preeling, Magraff, and Richlin—are in various states of consciousness. They are bleeding, bruised, groaning, and trying unsuccessfully, in the case of the marginally conscious ones, to climb out.

“I’m Cole,” he admits, with disgust in both syllables.

“I think these belong to you.” The driver jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

“You can drive ’em right on back to the stockade,” Cole snaps.

The corporal laughs. “No can do, Sarge, stockade is full. So’s the city jail. And anyway, the dark-haired one there slipped me a fiver to get them here. There’s been some roughhousing. Your bunch were in a fight with some Frog colonials. Then, best as we can tell, they went on to get into a second round with a Texas outfit.”

“Dammit,” Cole says, which is about as extreme as his language gets unless there’s shooting going on.

Rio rolls off Cat, tumbles, and slams hard into the dirt. She lays there, face down, for quite a while, arms and hands flattened on the ground. She might just as well have fallen out of a passing plane.

How did I get here?

The ground does not feel quite solid to Rio, in fact it is spinning, spinning, and sort of falling away, like one of those boards they use to ride the waves at Stinson Beach. Oh, she wishes she were there right now, wishes she were far away, lying on some beach. And also really wishing hard that she had not started drinking that ouzo they got . . . somewhere.

Her tongue is a dead rat coated in tar; her muscles are both limp and sore; her stomach . . . oh, she doesn’t even want to think about that because she’s got nothing left to puke up unless she’s going to start puking up her liver.

Also, her face hurts. She almost remembers the punch that connected with her right cheek. And she can vaguely trace the soreness in her throat muscles to an armlock, possibly from an MP, that part is not at all clear. The one thing she does remember with a certain satisfaction is that the sprain in her right ankle is from the impact of her boot tip on a sensitive area of a male Texan’s person.

“All right, you useless bunch of clowns, crawl off and shower. Who knows what bugs you picked up, and I won’t have them in my tents. And, Suarez, for God’s sake pull up your pants!”

Cat says, “Hey, I lost a tooth.”

By reveille they have showered and caught ninety minutes of sleep. Rio returns only very reluctantly to consciousness because consciousness is pain. Her head. Oh God, her head. And her eyes! Oh no, that’s even worse.

Like a zombie she dresses and runs a comb across a head that has become a big bass drum pounding, pounding.

“You okay?” Rio says to Jenou through gritted teeth.

“Unh,” Jenou answers.

“You have a black eye,” Rio points out.

“Unh,” Jenou agrees.

The squad shuffles miserably toward the assembly area. They feel that their misery must be obvious to all, but as Rio blinks in the painful sunlight she notices that the same misery afflicts at least two-thirds of the forty-seven—now forty-eight—men and women who make up Fifth Platoon.

Sergeant Cole lines up with them, no one too concerned with spit and polish given that this is now a veteran platoon with a number of experiences in combat.

Phil O’Malley, the new platoon sergeant who has replaced Garaman, is an ancient forty-five-year-old veteran of the last war. He’s a man who gives an impression of being almost as wide as he is tall, but the width is in the shape of solid muscle and gristle. He has a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, a tan face, and slitted brown eyes that could be amused or cruel, depending. O’Malley stands a little ahead of the formation.

Rio assumes this is the usual morning ritual, with the usual pro forma assurances that all are present and accounted for. But it’s already gone on too long and the thought that maybe she should force herself to pay attention begins to form in the woolly depths of her hungover brain.

Or I could just sit down right here in the dirt. That would be nice.

There are two lieutenants up there now in the eye-searing light. One Rio recognizes as the headquarters company lieutenant who has been filling in until a new lieutenant can arrive to replace the deceased-but-not-mourned Lieutenant Liefer.

This would explain the second lieutenant who is shaking hands now with the acting lieutenant, who salutes pleasantly and ambles off.

“Better put them at ease, Sergeant O’Malley, some of them look about ready to keel over,” the new lieutenant says.

He’s young—they always are—twenty-three or twenty-four years old. His uniform is perfection, creases all crisp and ruler straight, lapels starched and ironed to a knife’s edge, cap set to the correct angle with just a bit extra for a hint of swagger. He has a patrician face with high cheekbones, smooth peaches-and-cream complexion, and eyes the color of a calm sea on a sunny day.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Jenou says voicelessly.

The lieutenant is gorgeous.

“I’m Lieutenant Mike Vanderpool, I’m your new platoon commander.”

Despite the dandy’s uniform, he stands easy, a slight tilt to his head, and neither his voice nor his expression mark him as any kind of martinet.

“I’m a West Pointer, I’ll just confess that right from the start.”

There is a rustle of low laughs, quickly quashed.

“Yes, I am one of them. And this is my first time in the actual war. So I am relieved to find that I have under me some of the finest NCOs in the army. Sergeant O’Malley, Sergeant Shields, Sergeant Cole, and Sergeant Alvarez, I will rely on your experience as we work together.”

Rio almost smiles to see Cole standing a bit taller before self-consciously relapsing to an unimpressed slouch.

“You men—and women—I will come to know each of you in time. Give me a chance, and I’ll return the favor. Sergeant O’Malley? Anything you or your NCOs would like to say?”

Jack suddenly collapses, but he picks himself up and is diplomatically ignored by the new lieutenant.

Cole speaks up. “Sir, I don’t know if this is the right time, but I’m down a corporal and I’d like to replace him out of my squad.”

“You have someone in mind?”

“I’ve got a man who’s been filling the role temporarily. Stick. I mean, um, what the hell is your actual name, Stick?”

“Dain Sticklin, sir.” He winces noticeably, perhaps because his jaw is bruised a yellowish blue and may not be quite centered. But he looks better than Jack, who may well have died, been buried, and only recently been disinterred.

Lieutenant Vanderpool steps over, hands behind his back, interested. “You seem to have been injured, Private Sticklin.”

“Sir, we had a pass and . . . well, those back streets get pretty dark, with stairs and all, so I tripped.”

“Ah.”

“Landed on my face, sir.”

“Well. Maybe we could issue more flashlights. This tripping problem seems to be something of an epidemic in the platoon.”

“Yes, sir,” Stick says, his expression that of a man straining not to throw up.

“I will also require more attention to your uniforms in the future. The general is a stickler for proper uniform, including ties and shined boots. I would rather not be chewed out by General Patton. I saw it happen to a bird colonel once, and it was not a show I care to see twice.”

O’Malley, standing beside Lieutenant Vanderpool, says, “Yes, sir. Understood, sir.”

Vanderpool flashes a grin that gradually becomes a thoughtful frown. “It seems this platoon is afflicted with an unusual degree of clumsiness. At least half of you seem to have . . . tripped and fallen on your faces. But we’ll fix that right up. Sticklin, do you know what’s good for the aftereffects of tripping?”

“Oh . . .” Stick says, sensing where this line of questioning is going.

“A nice five-mile run, out to the wadi and back. I need to confer with my sergeants, so Corporal Sticklin? Lead the men out.”

Jenou raises a trembling hand, and Vanderpool says, “Yes, the women too.”

Rio has made many five-mile runs. But a five-mile run with a crashing headache and a mouth full of wool is a whole new level of agony.

“Is it okay, do you think, if I marry the lieutenant?” Jenou asks as they slog through the camp toward the distant cluster of trees they’ve taken to calling the wadi.

“Unh,” Rio answers.

7
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

The smaller gangster slides in beside Rainy. Something about him reminds her of the SS colonel. There’s something not fully human about him, as if one parent had been a lizard or a snake.

“You have a number for me?” Rainy asks, keeping her voice level on a sea of rising and falling waves of emotion.

“Number? You trying to be funny?”

“I assumed you were here to give me a way to contact Mr. Camporeale.”

“Way to contact? You’re the contact, girly.”

“It’s sergeant, not girly,” she says, and the instant the words are out of her mouth she thinks it’s a mistake. The little man’s reptilian expression turns feral for a moment, the look of an animal ready to pounce. But he leans back, reins in his hostility, and says, “All right then, Sergeant. We’re all good Americans, aren’t we, Louie?”

“I bought a war bond for my kid,” Louie offers over his shoulder. “Twenty dollars!”

“Don Vito don’t want to talk to some FBI or some army officer either, don’t trust ’em. He’ll talk to you.”

“Then I would be pleased to talk to him,” Rainy says stiffly, feeling very uncomfortable, as if she’s disobeying an order. She isn’t exactly, her orders had contemplated the possibility of a face-to-face meeting, but she’s already thinking ahead to having to report all this to Colonel Corelli.

Professor of Oriental Languages Corelli.

Amateur.

They drive far longer than is strictly necessary, sometimes creeping at walking speed around a block only to go racing away up Broadway at full speed. Louie keeps a close eye on his rearview mirrors.

“We’re clean,” Louie says at last, and moments later they pull to a stop in the oily darkness beneath an elevated train track. They are in the Bowery, an elongated rectangle of streets around Delancey and Forsyth in Lower Manhattan, just north of Chinatown. It is a neighborhood of secondhand shops, employment agencies, cheap hotels, and narrow all-hours diners catering to the crowds of sailors and soldiers who wander unsteadily from tavern to tavern.

The nearest lit-up establishment is a second-story pool hall above a closed-for-the-night grocer.

Louie climbs out and opens Rainy’s door. Then he glances in the direction of a loud shout floating down from the pool hall and says, “This may not be the most suitable place for a young lady of quality.”

“She’s a kike, she ain’t quality,” the smaller one says.

“I’ve been in worse places,” Rainy says, images of the Tunisian desert appearing in her memory. She ignores the casual anti-Semitism.

They walk up a long, steep, narrow flight of stairs, at one point having to turn sideways to let a trio of Marines come down. Before she sees the pool hall she hears it, a rich concerto played by cues hitting balls, and balls snapping into others, and glasses tinkling with ice, and shouts of frustration and triumph, loud guffaws, and somewhat more distant the musical ding-ding-ding! of pinball machines. All of that, and someone is spinning records, because Rainy hears the risqué Andrews Sisters song “Strip Polka” playing.

There’s a burlesque theater where the gang loves to go

To see Queenie, the cutie of the burlesque show.

And the thrill of the evening is when out Queenie skips

And the band plays the polka while she strips.

There’s no door at the top of the stairs, so they emerge directly onto the gaming floor, onto wood stained almost black by generations of benign neglect, and wallpaper that fairly drips with congealed smoke. There are a dozen tables in three rows of four, green felt bright beneath bare bulbs, and three pinball machines against the far wall, ding-ding-dinging away. There’s a bar at the back and a record player perched on one end of the bar along with a tall stack of seventy-eights.

A lanky, sad-looking sailor in a stained white uniform sits at a stool thumbing through the records. All the pool tables are in use, sailors, soldiers, working men in dungarees or overalls, and interspersed here and there like flowers in a sea of weeds, are women—women of the type one would expect to find in a pool hall late at night. They aren’t all beautiful, but they are all young, or pass for young, and they are all dressed down to the very lowest limits of propriety.

“Like I was sayin’,” Louie says with an abashed half-grin, “maybe not the place for a young lady such as yourself, miss. Sergeant, I mean.”

“I promise not to faint,” Rainy says, which tickles the gangster’s fancy and he gives up a huge guffaw.

“Take it off, take it off,” cries a voice from the rear.

“Take it off, take it off,” soon it’s all you can hear.

But she’s always a lady even in pantomime,

So she stops and always just in time.

They cross the length of the room toward the bar, and there is something in Louie’s size, and in the eyes and manner of the other thug, that causes even inebriated longshoremen and ladies of the night to step gingerly out of the way.

There’s a door beside the bar. The driver knocks once, hears a single gruff syllable, and opens the door wide for Rainy to step in.

It’s an office, a square room with a curtained window that probably leads to a fire escape. There’s an impressive oak desk with a vacant swing office chair behind it. One wall is covered in thumb-tacked travel posters with curled edges: Naples, Sicily, Rome, but also Miami and New Orleans.

The wall to Rainy’s right is fitted with shelves, mostly empty, but some bearing stacks of newspapers and magazines. There are three books, one of which, Rainy is sure, must be the Christian Bible. An impressive engraved silver crucifix hangs from the leading edge of the top shelf.

There are two men already in the room, one small and old and gray, with a face that looks like a piece of driftwood, improbably craggy with a sagging mouth, and wearing no expression.

The other is a large, portly man in a decent brown suit. He has a round, cheerful face and the red nose of a dedicated drinker. He steps forward smiling, hand out.

“So you’re Schulterman’s kid. Well, glad to meet you, honey, your old man must be proud as hell—excuse my French—proud as a peacock.”

“Thank you, and it’s good to meet you, Mr. . . .”

“Camporeale,” he says. “It’s hard for folks to pronounce unless they grew up speaking Italian. We go with Campo, mostly, but you can call me Don Vito. That’s easier, right?”

Instinctively, Rainy lies. “Don Vito it is, then, because I don’t speak any Italian. I have no head for languages.”

She’s hoping her father has not bragged too often about his multilingual daughter. But almost certainly he would not have brought her name into his work, and in any case he works only indirectly for Camporeale.

“And what do they call you, aside from Sergeant, I mean?”

“Rainy will do fine,” she says, forcing a smile. Time to be friendly: she is surrounded by gunsels.

“Rainy. I like that. Must be a story there, huh?”

“No doubt, but my parents have not shared the details.”

He laughs knowingly. “Come, sit, what are you drinking?”

“I’ll have a club soda,” she says.

“Ah, a killjoy,” Don Vito says in mock irritation. “Get her a soda. Put a straw in it. Plenty of ice. Throw in a cherry, it’ll be like a, what do they call ’em? A Shirley Temple. She’s just a kid, after all. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?”

Rainy sits in a hastily supplied wooden chair, and Don Vito settles in behind his desk. He leans forward, forearms on his desk blotter. “So. What can a humble immigrant do for the United States Army?”

“Well, sir . . . Don Vito . . . I’m only a lowly sergeant, and this is a conversation you should have with someone who has some rank.”

He winks, a move which, owing to his chubby cheeks, closes both eyes for a second. When his eyes open again the cheerfulness is gone, replaced by shrewd appraisal. A second earlier and Rainy might have mistaken him for a door-to-door salesman. But a much different animal is looking at her now from dark, porcine eyes.

“I’m allergic to people with rank. Regular beat cop? That’s no problem, I buy ’em free drinks and let ’em play some pinball. Cops with rank? You never know if they’ll be reasonable or not. Same thing in the army, I’m guessing.”

He lets the silence stretch and at last Rainy speaks. “I have no opinion on my superior officers.”

Don Vito and Louie, now leaning against the door, both erupt in loud laughter. The gray man does not laugh.

“That was funny, Tony, you should laugh,” Don Vito says to the gray man, who still does not laugh. Then he says something in Italian—although in a dialect that to Rainy’s ear is subtly different from the standard Roman Italian she’s learned.

Still, she can translate it. Don Vito has said, “The Jew bitch thinks she’s smart.”

This, finally, earns a dusty wheeze that might be a laugh from gray Tony.

“Listen, Rainy, right? Rainy. Yeah. Okay, Rainy, for obvious reasons I’d rather talk to people I know. People I trust. And I trust you because I know you love your father and would never want to do anything that could hurt him.”

The threat is clear, and Rainy nods in acknowledgment. It occurs to her that playing word games with NCOs and officers who are, after all, generally reasonable and constrained by the uniform code of military justice, is very different from sparring with a man who earned his nickname by castrating the men he kills. The threat is not empty, and this is not a friendly chat.

“Here’s the thing,” Don Vito says. “I got a son, little older than you, a good boy but headstrong. You know? Impulsive. He’s smart, but he’s young.” He shrugs.

Rainy sips at her drink and takes a moment to realize that what Don Vito means by “headstrong” and “impulsive” is probably violent, predatory—the gangster son of a gangster father.

Don Vito, speaking that same odd Italian to Tony, says, “Ten bucks says Cisco’s in her pants inside of twenty-four hours.” Then to Rainy he says, “I’m translating for Tony, his English isn’t so good. He’s my counselor. Like my lawyer, but Napolitano.”

Napolitano? As in Naples? That’s mainland Italy, not Sicily. Rainy nods, blank, giving nothing away.

“So my boy, Cisco, Francisco, but hey, he’s born American, right, so Cisco. Anyway, Cisco has a little problem with some people up in Harlem. They want an eye for an eye, but we ain’t giving ’em Cisco, so that could be war—our own kinda war—and that’s bad for everyone. So it would be convenient if Cisco could spend some time in the Old Country, with my uncle. My uncle is a very wise man; he’ll get Cisco straightened out.”

“You want the army to get your son to Italy?”

“You’re very quick, you know that?”

“The army would want something in exchange.”

Don Vito made a comical face that translated meant, Of course they do. How could they not?

“I’ll need to talk to my superiors. I don’t have a list of their requests.”

He waves that off. “I know what they want. There’s a city called Salerno in Italy. It’s at the north end of a beautiful long beach, beautiful, you should see it. Just the kind of beach an army might want to land on.”

Rainy freezes and is too slow to stop the reaction from showing. Don Vito grins like a barracuda.

“I hear things,” he says. “Sicily first. Then Salerno. You want to know the dates?”

“No,” she says quickly. “The less I know, the less I can reveal.” She feels safest speaking stiffly, formally.

Vito the Sack nods with sincere approval. Of course he would favor closed mouths. “Here’s the deal. I’ll give you chapter and verse on Fascist and Kraut positions around Salerno. My family runs most of Salerno, not all, but enough that nothing moves there we don’t know about.”

“I don’t have the authority to make a commitment,” Rainy says.

“Fair enough. You go talk to your colonel or captain or whatever. You know where I am. Just one thing: you.” He points a thick finger at her. From Rainy’s angle it seems to come at her from just beneath dark and dangerous eyes. “You come back. Just you. And you personally, and your father, will guarantee my boy’s safety until he gets to my uncle’s house.”

“I’ll do my—”

“Uh-uh!” He interrupts sharply, wagging a finger for emphasis. “I don’t care about your best. Simple yes or no: is my boy with my uncle, that’s it. You got that? You get him there. Clear?”

“Signore Camporeale,” Rainy says, pronouncing his full name in a very credible Italian accent, “I follow orders. If my orders say to get your son to Italy, then I will get your son to Italy. But I don’t work for you, I work for the army.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir, it is. And your son will not be getting into my pants, not in twenty-four hours or twenty-four days or twenty-four years.”

It takes a few beats before Don Vito realizes what’s happened.

“Lei parla Italiano? ”

“Si, Don Vito, un poco.”

“You deceived me.”

“I gained an advantage.”

“And now you give up that advantage?”

Rainy shakes her head. “No, Don Vito, because now you’re going to have me checked out, and you’ll soon find out that I’m often used as a translator.”

“I’ve always said Hebes were the smartest race . . . next to partenopeos. That’s people from Naples, see.”

Rainy stands up and discovers that her knees have gone a bit wobbly and her breathing is ragged. Yes, there is something about these people that is similar to what she’d felt coming from the SS colonel. It was like trying to hold a calm discussion with a hungry tiger.

Don Vito stands and comes around the desk. He takes Rainy’s hand in two of his and holds her firmly but not harshly.

“You’ll do this?”

“If my commanding officer orders me to, yes.”

Rainy disentangles herself and leaves, by way of the pool hall. There’s a new song playing, the bleary, slow-tempo tune with lyrics sung over a mellow sax.

Rainy is trembling as she reaches fresh air, and the stress catches up with her. Down the street she finds an all-hours diner with a pay phone in one corner. She fumbles in her purse for a nickel and makes a call to Colonel Corelli.

Ten minutes later an unmarked army staff car picks her up a block away.

8
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—LAGUARDIA FIELD, NEW YORK, USA

Amateur.

That’s what Bayswater said of Corelli and his organization. Amateur. He’s going to get you killed. And it eats at Rainy. From her first days in the army she’s been taught that her first duty is to obey orders. She has latched onto that thought, relied on it, let it shape her thinking about the army and her job in that army.

It is comforting to be able to shift responsibility, to be able to shrug and say, I’m following orders. But what if the person giving the orders doesn’t know what he’s doing?

Rainy saw the colonel again, was congratulated, thoroughly debriefed, and sent home for two days. Then she was summoned to see Corelli a third time and given a sealed packet of orders along with instructions not to open it until she is airborne out of New York. She pats it through her overcoat as her car and its driver come to a halt on the bleak tarmac.

The C-47 is a twin-engine tail-dragger, meaning that it lands on the wheels beneath its wings and lets the tail settle down onto a third, smaller wheel. It is the workhorse of the American air forces with variant versions used to haul supplies, to haul men, to haul VIPs, and to carry airborne troops to drop zones. Its civilian version is known as a DC-3.

This plane sits tail down, with both engines running, round nose pointed optimistically toward the eastern sky. A light early morning rain falls, slicking the concrete runway and turning the green-painted fuselage almost black. The props are kicking up a horizontal tornado of mist that plucks at Rainy’s cap, so she has to hold it with one hand while hefting her light pack on one shoulder.

At least she won’t be jumping out of this plane. Hopefully.

Ground crew lead her from the colonel’s thoughtfully provided car to the doorway abaft the wings, which means passing right through that gale of backwash. She shouts a “thank you” that the ground crewman cannot possibly hear.

She is helped up the steps by a sergeant, who grabs her bag and with quick, practiced movements whips it into one of the seats and ties it down with a series of cords. The seats run down both sides, facing toward what would be the center aisle on a DC-3. Inside the plane are some crates, one quite large, lashed down with thick straps.

There is only one other passenger, a civilian, obviously Cisco Camporeale. At first glance he doesn’t look like a gangster, though there is something flash and cheap about him. He’s dark of hair, eye, and complexion, of medium height, solidly built. He’s dressed in an expensive overcoat with an equally expensive and fashionable dark suit beneath. His tie is silk, somewhat flamboyant, and carefully knotted.

Rainy is shown to a seat beside him and has her seatbelt fastened for her. A second, more careful inspection takes in the way the young gangster looks at her. His eyes are large and moist, framed by girlish lashes. His lips are thin and rest in an ironic smile. It is a handsome face, a very handsome face, but his expression, at first predatory, softens into dismissal.

Apparently, Rainy is not his type.

She breathes a sigh of relief at that. She’s been worried he might, over the course of a long mission, get ideas that would make Rainy’s job harder.

“I’d stand up, you know. I am a gentleman, but I’m strapped in,” Cisco says, and extends his hand with a languid superiority that almost suggests he expects it to be kissed rather than shaken. “Cisco Camporeale.”

His palm is damp, either with nerves or perhaps just a result of the steam rising from wet clothing.

“Sergeant Schulterman,” she says.

“What do I call you?”

“Sergeant Schulterman.” She wants to set the tone of their relationship at the start.

“Okay, Sarge, have it your way,” he says, smirking and then dismissing her.

It amazes Rainy that the uniform she wears and the stripes on her shoulder do such a very good job of transforming her from a teenaged young woman into someone who can shut down a mobster. For the very first time she has the fleeting thought that military life might be something to extend even after the war is over. For all its incessant hostility toward women soldiers, the army is one place that a bright but uneducated young woman can do important work.

But as soon as that thought pops into her head she quashes it. Good grief, become a career soldier? She’d thought of becoming a lawyer or a teacher or starting a business. None of those careers involve risking life and limb.

To which another part of her mind, using a very different tone, answers, Exactly: none of those careers involve risking life and limb. And damned if she doesn’t sort of enjoy the danger. She’s jumped out of a plane and survived a firefight without turning tail. Having walked so close to danger, some part of her wants to return, to see whether she has the courage to take it further still.

Within minutes the plane is trundling down the runway, tail rising to level, and the noise from the wheels rushing down the tarmac gives way to the whine of electric motors raising the wheels into the underbelly of the plane.

The sergeant, who explains that he is the “loadmaster,” a term Rainy has not heard before, shouts the itinerary and the rules.

“Okay, folks, here’s the deal. First stop is St. John’s, Newfoundland. That’s 1,130 miles. We’ll be cruising at about 180 miles an hour, so figure six, six hours and change, depending on tailwinds. We top off the fuel tanks—our range is just 1,600 miles, so we top off in Newfoundland and then head to Lajes base in the Azores, which is 1,420 miles. It’s within range, but there’s some weather up north, so we’ll assess things when we approach the point of no return.”

“The point of no return?” Cisco says, skeptical.

“Halfway. It’s the place where it takes the same amount of fuel to get back as it does to continue,” the loadmaster replies seriously. “Our motto is, ‘don’t get cocky.’ The Atlantic is a big ocean, and I’m not that good a swimmer.”

“Point of no return,” Cisco repeats in a more serious tone. “That’s good. I’ll have to remember that.”

“We’ve rigged a chemical toilet behind that draw curtain back there. It’s awkward, but at least you get a little privacy. I’ll bring you a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches in a while, and once we’re at cruising altitude you can unbuckle and sack out on the floor if you want, but it’ll be plenty cold.”

“Thanks,” Rainy says.

The vibration and engine noise make it necessary to concentrate in order to make out what’s being said, but Rainy has taken note of the flight times and the mention of coffee. She pulls her orders from her pocket. Three typewritten pages, though the last page is only a paragraph.

She reads it quickly. Reaches the end. Frowns.

She goes back and reads it more carefully, certain that she has missed something. Missed more than a few things, actually.

By the time she’s done with her second reading, her hands are trembling and her breath is short. This can’t possibly be all there is. She checks the envelope again in case she’s overlooked a sheet. Nothing.

She is ordered to appear at the airfield, to take the flight to the Azores, there to rendezvous with a Royal Navy submarine, which is to take her to Italy. She is to deliver Cisco to his uncle and receive in return a map of enemy emplacements around Salerno. She is to deliver the packet to a certain person working at the Swedish Embassy in Rome.

And then?

Her orders are silent about then.

She swallows past a rising lump in her throat and barely stops herself reading through one more time. Nothing about then. Nothing about where she is to go, what she is to do, how she is to escape.

She wants to throw up. Her face feels like it’s burning. Surely this can’t be it. Surely even an amateur would have a plan? But of course there is a plan for getting what Corelli wants, just no plan for keeping her alive and out of the hands of the Gestapo or Italian counterintelligence.

The Swede. He must have the next set of instructions, the ones explaining how she is not simply being forgotten in the middle of enemy territory.

The Swede. Sure. That’s it. He’ll help her.

But try as she might, she cannot make herself believe it, not all the way.

There’s a difference between taking risks and committing suicide.

The six hours and twenty minutes pass in relative silence. Cisco leans back and dozes, eyes half-shut. Rainy’s mind races in circles. This isn’t a plan, this is a sketch. This is espionage through rose-colored lenses. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that if she were an officer more attention would have been paid to her survival.

I’m a nobody, a buck sergeant, a GI. Expendable, like any other GI.

The Newfoundland base is a bare, scraped place beside dark water. There are rows of Nissan huts, the British version of a Quonset hut, a scattering of tin-sided administrative buildings, and a hangar. A bulldozer with a snow blade attached lies parked between two huts, but while it is chilly for summer, there is no snow.

A jeep fetches the two passengers and hustles them away to thaw out around an iron stove in a Nissan hut equipped with the usual military lack of comfort.

“Can a man get a drink at least?” Cisco asks a Canadian airman, who looks him up and down before walking away without a word. Cisco intertwines his fingers and cracks his knuckles and says, “That fellow needs a good punch in the neck.”

Rainy feels sleepiness steal over her and spends the hour’s break savoring the warmth of the stove. Then it’s back aboard the plane, another takeoff, and a rapid ascent into low clouds. They burst through into hazy, declining sunlight beneath a higher, thinner layer of cover, and take a big, sloping, rightward turn to the south. This leg of the trip is to take eight hours, a very long time to sit on what amounts to a hard bench contemplating the line between duty to the mission and the duty to stay alive.

Gestapo. That is the word that keeps pushing its way into her thoughts. Geheime Staatspolizei, the secret state police, Hitler’s enforcers, his torturers. Beatings. Beatings at the very least. The breaking of bones, the crushing of fingers, the gouging of eyes, rape, and . . .

She sucks air, feeling panic add volatile fuel to her misgivings, panic that seems to crush the air from her lungs. She licks her lips and glances at Cisco to make sure he isn’t watching her, isn’t seeing the sick fear she has not yet suppressed.

Rainy slips off her seat belt and stands, urgently needing to move. She explores the bare cylinder of the plane’s fuselage, locating the chemical toilet and . . . and nothing else. She uses the facility, sitting perched on the tiny seat, bent forward, face in her hands.

Soldiers die every day. Soldiers are sacrificed every day. She is a soldier.

She heads forward to the open cockpit door and looks inside at a confusing array of dials and switches. The pilot is head-back and mouth open, fast asleep, while the copilot keeps his hands on the yoke. Peering through the windshield, Rainy sees taller, darker clouds ahead.

“Boomers. Thunderstorm,” the copilot says over his shoulder, indicating the clouds with a jerk of his chin.

The piles of cloud are red in the light of the plunging sun. Darkness looms in the east beyond. Rainy returns to her seat and straps in.

Thunderstorm it is, and the C-47 is not able to rise above it and has no slack in its fuel supply to try an end around.

A flash, like the world’s biggest camera flashbulb going off and . . .

Craaaack!

Boom!

A massive fist punches the C-47 in its aluminum spine and drives it down a stomach-churning five hundred feet.

“Shit!” Rainy yelps as she is thrown against her seat belt.

Cisco looks at her, amused, and yells, “Nice language coming from a lady.”

Boom-bum-bum-bum-BOOM!

The thunderclap is louder than anything Rainy has ever even imagined hearing. The physical blow that follows shivers the thin skin of the fuselage. She’s amazed the small porthole hasn’t blown out.

The cockpit door is still open, and Rainy can see the pilots are both awake, engaged, and tense, but not so tense that one doesn’t take a moment to glance back and grin at what must be a look of terror on Rainy’s face. His face is illuminated by the sickly glow of instruments and then in blazing white as a bolt of lightning flashes and fractures and crawls across the cloud face ahead.

Wind buffets the plane, sends it slipping sideways and off-center, like a car sliding on an icy road. Thunder batters them again and again, each clap more violent than the one before. The lightning is so close and so wild it seems to pass right through the plane, turning every last rivet blazing white and leaving behind an afterimage on her retinas. Static electricity raises the hair on the back of her neck and arms.

Hour after hour. Rainy has never been one to get seasick or airsick, but she clutches the paper vomit bag close, just in case, because the lunatic elevator ride they are on kneads and shoves and twists her stomach as if determined to reduce her to shivering, puking helplessness.

But eventually the lightning comes from farther astern and the thunder falls away to a distant, disgruntled rumble. The wind, however, intensifies, and the plane is a very small piece of flotsam on a continent-wide river of turbulent air. Up . . . down . . . up . . . down, like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island.

The loadmaster comes walking back, moving easily with the lurch, and carrying a small cooler and a thermos.

“Want to try to eat something?”

Rainy glares hatred at him and his sandwiches, but Cisco says, “Sure, whatcha got?”

“I got ham and cheese on rye, and I got tuna salad on white.”

The mention of tuna salad almost does it, almost has Rainy puking, and she would have but for the fact that her stomach is empty.

“Grab me a ham and cheese,” Cisco says. “And some coffee. Black.”

“Black it is, since we got no sugar and no milk,” the loadmaster says. “We’ll be landing in an hour. Might be a bit hairy.”

“Hairy?” Rainy asks.

The loadmaster holds his hand out flat, palm down, and simulates a plane trying to land in heavy wind. It is not reassuring.

And in fact the landing is not pretty. There is an unusual amount of bouncing and tail-skewing involved, but eventually the plane comes to a stop, the door opens, and Rainy piles out just as quickly as she is able. The ground is hard and it is wet and the sky is dark, but she barely restrains herself from falling to her knees and kissing it.

Cisco? Unaffected. “Now what?”

A jeep with its canvas cover up tears across the tarmac from the direction of a squat, unimpressive control tower, bearing a woman lieutenant and a male sergeant. Rainy remembers belatedly to salute.

“I trust you had a pleasant flight?” the lieutenant asks with the gleefully malicious grin common to airmen and sailors when dealing with earthbound folk. She’s wearing a black armband that reads OD—officer of the day. Or night, in this case.

Only then does Rainy realize she’s still clutching the unused vomit bag. She crumples it and shoves it into her pocket.

They are driven to a white plaster building full of unoccupied desks. Someone has thoughtfully laid out Azorean bread rolls, roast beef, a local cheese, giant cans of mustard and mayonnaise, and a dozen Cokes in a bucket of ice. The Coke settles Rainy’s stomach enough for her to recognize and feed a ravenous hunger.

“Where the hell are we, anyway?” Cisco asks.

The lieutenant answers. “Lajes Field, Azores. The island is called Terceira. It means third. There are nine islands all together. We’re about two thousand miles from New York and just under a thousand from Portugal, and no distance at all from the U-boats, although they’ve had their horns trimmed a bit. Soon as you’ve finished, we’ll drive you down to the harbor, Angra, the biggest city they got here.”

“Any action in Anger?” Cisco asks.

“Angra. Angra do Heroísmo.” Rainy recognizes a fellow linguist. The lieutenant has worked on her pronunciation, not a normal thing for American troops overseas. “It means Bay of Heroism. And to answer your question, no, no action unless you mean two bars serving bad beer, worse wine, and no whiskey.”

Cisco nods thoughtfully. “Sounds like an opportunity. You got horny GIs and . . . pardon my, uh, choice of words . . .”

“Oh, there’s a cathouse,” the lieutenant assures him, showing no sign of feminine embarrassment. “Like you said: horny GIs will find a way.”

They drive through slackening rain down a road paved with cobbles made of black lava. The road is lined with hydrangea bushes, blue and pink. The fields are small, extravagantly green rectangles marked off by low volcanic-stone fences. The road winds and curves upward before beginning to descend into Angra. They pass a donkey cart and a small civilian truck, but that’s all for the half-hour drive.

The harbor is a small, neat bowl surrounded by two-story whitewashed buildings with red tile roofs. The only prominent building is a church with twin square towers topped by neat white domes. The Americans have erected an antiaircraft tower, but no German plane has the range or the inclination to fly this far. There are two naval vessels tied up on the ocean-facing side of the protectively curved pier. One is a small destroyer or corvette, Rainy doesn’t know ships well enough to know quite what to call it. But she recognizes the long, narrow, gray dagger of a submarine.

The sub is a Royal Navy T-class, a sullen-looking beast with a strange bulge at the front where external torpedo tubes look like the nostrils of a dragon’s flared head. She’s 275 feet, about four railroad cars long, or just shy of a football field, but just a tenth as wide in the beam. There’s a superstructure divided in two bits, the higher rear portion festooned with antennae and what can only be the retracted tops of two periscopes. The lower, forward part of the superstructure is taken up by a four-inch gun that seems oversized for its environment.

Fishing boats are heading out from the shelter of the pier, chugging slowly, one after another into choppy seas gray in the faint light of dawn. The night has been shortened by their eastward progress.

“There’s your ride,” the lieutenant says. The sergeant shows his face to a bored Portuguese sailor on sentry duty, and they drive out onto the mole, coming to a stop beside the sub.

“Hey,” Cisco says. “That’s not ours, is it?”

“His Majesty’s boat, Topaz,” the lieutenant says. “They’re your ride.”

“The hell they are,” Cisco says. “There is no goddamn way I am going down underwater. No way in hell.”

“You’ll have to,” Rainy says.

“No. No.” Cisco shakes his head violently. He looks like a man ready to crawl out of his skin. Fearless through the battering airborne thunderstorm, he is transformed now. “No way. No way, no how. The hell with this! Uh-uh, no way.”

But in the end there is a way, involving quite a bit of Azorean vinho de cheiro, a red wine that smells of strawberries. And just two hours behind schedule an exceedingly drunk and raving mobster is manhandled down the hatch and lashed into a canvas hammock by wonderfully amused British submariners.

9
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

“Richlin! Someone here to see you.” Sergeant Cole holds the tent flap back, and a tall young man bows his head to enter.

“Everyone decent?” Strand Braxton asks, grinning. He’s in an Air Corps uniform: khaki slacks and a sheep’s-wool-trimmed leather jacket that looks very dashing and is completely wrong for the heat.

Rio at that moment is carefully cleaning and oiling her M1. The pieces are laid out on her cot atop a spread-out towel. She has removed the strap. She has pulled the trigger guard forward and pulled the trigger assembly all the way out. She has separated the stock and has even disassembled the gas cylinder, laying the parts out in a neat, familiar pattern.

With clean rags, brushes, and solvent she has cleaned each and every part. She is now busy using a second clean rag to cover all moving parts with a thin coat of oil.

Her hands are greasy, and she smells of sewing machine oil and kerosene. She is dressed in dungaree trousers and a sweat-stained T-shirt. The army has spent approximately zero time considering the fact that army bras—devices with as many straps and as little sex appeal as a parachute—are only indifferently covered by the T-shirt.

The fact that she is in a shocking state of undress flashes through Rio’s mind, but that does not stop her from yelling, “Strand!”

She sets the traveler (a small, curiously shaped metal piece) down, glances furtively around to see if Jack is there. Then she runs to Strand, throwing her arms around him.

They kiss, but discreetly, a kiss that is more passionate than brother-sister, but more self-conscious than would be the case if Geer, Stick, and Cat were not watching with undisguised interest.

“Huh,” Geer says. “So Richlin is still a girl. I’ll be damned.”

“Strand, this is Stick, the one with the clean new corporal’s stripes, that’s Preeling there, and the asshole is Geer.”

The word asshole is out of Rio’s mouth before she can think it through. She sees Strand wince, then cover it up. Geer doesn’t even pretend to be offended.

“Sorry,” Rio says, genuinely embarrassed. “My language has gone to . . . I mean, well, you know . . .”

“It’s good to meet you all,” Strand says. Then he looks more closely at Rio. “Is that a bruise?”

“What, this?” Rio waves it off. “Just, um . . . I accidentally ran into a pole last week.” She avoids eye contact with her squad members, all of whom maintain what might be called a patently false silence, including Cat, who ostentatiously makes a turning key motion over her mouth.

Just then Jenou enters, spots Strand, and gives him a peck on the cheek. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome. What are you doing, Lieutenant Braxton, slumming with lowly enlisted types. Did you remember to salute him, Rio?”

“She gave me a different kind of salute, and I liked it a whole lot better,” Strand says.

“What are you doing here?” Rio asks. She’s holding him by the biceps, keeping him close, enjoying the feel of him. He’s a solid reminder of a different life, and a different Rio. And she quite likes the feel of his lean muscles.

“I volunteered to fly a bird colonel over here. He and his staff were in some big hurry, and we’re stood down for a couple days. So I gassed up my plane, grabbed my copilot and flight engineer, and here I am, at least until tomorrow morning. I don’t suppose you can wrangle a twenty-four-hour pass?”

Jenou laughs, and Rio shoots her a warning look, but of course Jenou ignores that and says, “Well, we had some passes last week, and you see the results.” She aims an accusing finger at Rio’s bruise. Mock-serious she says, “I’m afraid Rio can’t handle her drink.”

“Knock it off, Jen,” Rio says, not quite playfully.

“Why, Rio told me she ran into a pole,” Strand says with a wink. “And I am honor-bound to believe her.”

“You should have been there when that big old Texan boy, the one with the bandaged ear, came after her, thinking she was easy prey, and she pulls out that big knife of hers—”

“Jen!”

“Knife?”

“It’s a keepsake,” Rio says quickly. “You know, a souvenir. I think it’s something the A-rabs carry just for show.”

“‘I will stick this in your guts and push it till the point comes out of your mouth.’ That’s what you said, wasn’t it, Rio?”

Jenou bats her eyes at Rio, who is not interested in being teased, not right then, not when she’s hoping Strand doesn’t notice that she stinks of solvent and oil, not to mention just stinking from the lack of a shower after a sweaty morning spent unloading a truck.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rio says, “Let me just reassemble my rifle.”

She sits back down and looks at the pieces laid out. It’s a complex job, but one she can do blindfolded by now. But having Strand watch with a show of interest makes her self-conscious. Her best time is four minutes and six seconds. If she does it that fast won’t she look like . . . well, like a soldier? But if she slows down the others will spot it immediately and the reaction will not be kind.

“Who’s got a watch with a second hand?” Cat asks, obviously perfectly aware of Rio’s dilemma. And that settles it. Rio can only do her best.

Slide bolt into receiver. This is always tricky and usually involves some wiggling of the piece, but Rio has it down to a single, smooth insertion. Then slot the operating rod back into the housing, slide it back to make sure it catches the rod. Then the follower assembly—drop and slide. Bullet guide, follower arm, operating rod catch, holding pin, check the movement, slide in the long spring, lever the assembly into the stock, pop in the trigger guard, lock it down, check the bolt, squeeze the trigger to earn a pleasantly layered metallic click and . . .

“Five minutes, thirty-eight seconds,” Geer says. “Hell, I can beat that, Richlin.”

“Not my best,” she mutters, and when she looks up, Strand’s expression is not congratulatory but serious. His forehead wrinkles, his brows lower over his eyes, shadowing them. His mouth is set in a stern, pressed line, and it takes him longer than she would like for him to ease it into a pleasant smile.

“Okay,” Rio says with false cheer to conceal her unease, “let’s see if Sarge is feeling generous.”

She takes Strand’s arm, actually clamps a hand on his bicep—and draws him outside into the light and heat and dust. She looks around for someplace private, any place, but she is surrounded by a half a square mile of tents, temporary huts, cooking fires, male soldiers naked to the waist, piles of discarded crates that once held canned food, the cans that came from those crates, parked jeeps and deuce-and-a-halfs rumbling by in clouds of dust.

One of the parked jeeps apparently belongs to Strand, at least for now, and he has a corporal dozing in the driver’s seat, helmet tilted forward to shield his eyes, feet up on the dashboard.

Sergeant Cole is sitting on a camp chair drinking coffee with O’Malley and another sergeant. Rio says, “Come on,” and hauls Strand over.

“Sarge, meet Lieutenant Braxton, a friend of mine from back home. Strand, Sergeants Cole, O’Malley, and Alvarez.”

Cole stands, pivots, salutes, then shakes Strand’s outstretched hand. “Good to meet you, Lieutenant.”

“And you, Sergeant, I’ve heard a bit about you through Rio’s letters.” He raises a finger, forestalling a response, and reaches into his inner pocket to pull out a small parcel wrapped in newspaper. “Rio happened to mention that you enjoy an occasional cigar. I don’t know if these are any good, I picked them up in a little shop in Casablanca . . .”

Strand unwraps the parcel, revealing six fat brown cigars. Cole swallows hard. “Those are Cubans. Those are the real thing!”

“Well, they’re yours,” Strand says.

“Thanks, Lieutenant. I take that very kindly. So, just what is it I can do for you in response to this very, very, very welcome bribe?”

“Well, I’m only here for twenty-four hours, and I was wondering . . .” He shrugs.

“I see.” Cole pretends to consider this carefully. “Sergeant O’Malley, I wonder if we might be able to rustle up a twenty-four-hour pass for Private Richlin.”

“Wait,” Strand says. He darts over to his jeep, feels around inside a canvas carryall, and produces a bottle of rye whiskey, which he carries back to O’Malley. “I don’t suppose you’re a drinking man?”

“I’d have thought an officer would have more sense than to even ask that question.” O’Malley hefts the bottle and says, “I do believe you’re correct that we’re being bribed, Jedron. And a damned fine bit of bribery it is too. Make it a case next time, Lieutenant, and you can have Richlin for the whole rest of the war.”

The pass appears with record speed—it’s possible the rye will be shared with the captain. Strand dismisses his corporal to the mess tent and settles behind the wheel with Rio beside him. They drive off, and then Rio sees Jack. Jack is shirtless, stripped down to his boxer shorts and boots, wielding a shovel and digging a new latrine trench. He is bathed in sweat that rolls intriguingly down his smooth, tanned chest. He spots Rio, then does a double take, eyes narrowing as he realizes who is driving.

It is the moment Rio had hoped to avoid. Strand is oblivious, Jack being just one more soldier with a shovel. Jack nods at Rio, tries and fails to smile, and ends up seeming to grimace in disgust. Rio raises her hand in a guilty, halfhearted wave and the jeep roars on by, its dust-cloud swirling over Jack.

It doesn’t matter. Strand is Strand, while Jack is just Jack.

“Where are we going?” Rio asks, raising her voice to be heard over the rush of wind in her face.

“I, uh . . . I arranged a little privacy.”

“How much privacy?” Rio asks archly.

“It’s a room in a hotel, but we can leave the door open. And I’m told there’s a shower.”

“Uh-huh.” A slow, skeptical drawl.

Strand grins at her. “You know, being in the army has made you cynical.”

“Being around men all day and night will do that to a girl.”

“I imagine that’s true. Say, how are you, Rio?” It’s a serious question, more serious than it would have been back home, more serious than it would have been on the Queen Mary. As she feared, the sight of her in OD T-shirt reassembling her weapon like an automaton has left an impression.