Front Lines (30 page)

For the better part of a day, retreating American troops and some scattered units of Brits stream past Frangie and the shattered but still-functioning remains of her unit. Trucks, jeeps, battle-scarred Sherman tanks, one with its turret blown clean off, come rattling by, steel beasts pushing past scared and beaten men and equally scared and beaten women. The GIs come as slumping groups that look like they've never seen a parade ground, or as individuals with heads down, and occasionally as more or less ordered squads and platoons.

Some in that passing show are wounded, and there is no surplus of medics, so some, a few, have spotted the cross on Frangie's helmet and come in search of help.

About half turn back once they see the color of her face. But she's still not short of patients to treat—bullet holes and shrapnel, broken bones and burns, but also diarrhea from bad water, and fevers from infections.
There are some who just can't go on but reach her tent and fall down, fall straight down like felled trees, their last reserves of energy utterly drained.

Frangie is using forceps to dig painfully into the meat above the collarbone of a wounded soldier, looking for the lead. It must have been a nearly spent bullet since it went in and did not come out the other side. For the most part the bullet wounds she's seen are like this, suffered at a distance, not close up. And many, like this wound, are in the back or the back of legs, arms, or buttocks—the wounds of those fleeing, not advancing.

“Gotta sit still, Corporal, and Private? Keep that light still.”

The sun is up, but inside the tent it's all soft-green shadows and canvas-filtered glare. The private holding the flashlight—Frangie knows him only as Ren—is tired, everyone is tired, but she can't hope to see what she's doing unless he holds the light still.

“It hurts, goddammit,” the injured corporal says angrily, twitching again. Tears stream down his face, but they're not tears of pain or sadness, they're tears of helpless rage.

“Listen to me, Corporal, this ain't going to kill you unless you jump around and make me nick an artery, so sit still.”

“That's what I get,” he says bitterly. “Nigra skirt trying to kill me.”

It's not the first time Frangie has heard some variation on that theme. The worst refuse to accept any help. Others like this angry corporal will take the help but curse her while she's delivering it. Others, though, are just grateful for anyone of any color who will ease their fear and pain.

“Give me some damn morphine!”

“We're short of morphine; we keep it for those that need it worst.” She shouldn't be wasting breath. The wound is bleeding freely, and she can't swab fast enough to get a look inside the hole. She's feeling for the bullet, gently moving her probe from side to side, hoping to feel a click. She feels a click but it's bone, and the corporal howls.

“Saving it for your Nigras, more like!”

“Shut the fug up, Brattle, I'm tired of hearing it.” This from a white male sergeant who's escorting the wounded man.

“This Nigra's going to finish what the damned Krauts started!”

It's been like this hour after hour. Frangie has no time to wash her hands between patients, no water to be spared for washing even if she had time. She's got first draw on water supplies, but it doesn't matter much because there isn't any more than a few mouthfuls for anyone.

In the back of her mind she keeps a running inventory. So many pressure bandages, so much tape, so many
splints, so much gauze, so many ampules of morphine. She's begun “charging” for her services, requiring patients to give up most of the contents of their emergency medical kits. But it's not enough, and she's already put out the word that she needs T-shirts. Her orderly, Ren—in reality just a passing white private whose nerves collapsed under the strain of combat—cuts them into strips when she doesn't have him holding the flashlight.

Her patient, Brattle, says something that's obliterated by the shattering noise of the remaining guns opening up again after a brief interlude.

Frangie doesn't know anything about artillery, but she knows the pace of outgoing shells has slowed. Some of the cannon have barrels melted and twisted, others are jammed, many were lost to the German 88s, but mostly it's the fact that they are running out of ammunition. “Ordnance,” as the artillerymen call it.

BOOM!

Everyone knows the battalion is going to have to withdraw, soon as they get orders. They are way too far forward for an artillery unit. The barrels of the big guns are trained ever higher, creating steeper but shorter arcs for the shells, a sure sign that the enemy is close, way too close.

Frangie's probe clicks, a dull feel more than a sound. Ever so carefully she widens the tips and slides them
around the slug. She grips it tightly, wipes sweat from her forehead with her free hand, and begins to tease the bullet out.

BOOM! BOOM!

The earth shudders from each outgoing package. She pulls the bullet free, drops it in the dirt, sprinkles on a precious few grains of sulfa powder, far too little but all she can spare, and wraps the arm in white gauze and a black man's T-shirt.

“Thanks, Doc,” the sergeant says between eruptions. “Brattle, let's go.”

There's a rush of feet outside, and Frangie sighs, knowing that it presages yet another casualty.

Four dirty soldiers, two men and two women, come rushing in, carrying a fifth man on a makeshift stretcher of tied-together field jackets.

The white man on the stretcher is wearing captain's bars. Blood saturates his crotch and spreads down his legs.

“What the hell? It's a Nigra!” one of the stretcher bearers yells.

“Put him on the table,” Frangie snaps.

The table is a makeshift affair of empty ammo crates topped by a jagged but almost flat piece of a blown-up water tank.

“Get him undressed,” she orders.

“What the hell?”

“You have knives, don't you? Cut his clothes off, and be careful not to cut him.”

One of them turns away to retch. A chunk of the captain's thigh is gone, as if a shark had bitten it off, just a gaping nothing where muscle should be. A curious flap of skin is peeled off the front of his hip and now drapes over his privates. Blood is everywhere, not pumping, not spurting, but seeping from too many places at once. Frangie looks at his face. He's not just white, his brown eyebrows look like caterpillars crossing a sheet of paper. His eyes are wandering, seemingly sightless.

The wound is far too grave for her skills, far too grave for anyone's skills, and she knows she should follow the laws of triage. There are three categories: those who will likely live without treatment, those who may be saved by treatment, and those who have no chance of survival.

Hurt, hurt bad, and goners, in the shorthand version.

“What's his name?”

“Captain Schrenk,” a soldier answers.

“He got a first name?”

“Sol, I think. Some Jew name like that. But he's a good officer.”

“Good captain,” another confirms.

“Ren, get me sulfa, scrap sponges, and water,” Frangie says.

“You know what you're doing, Nig . . . Doc?”

“No, I do not,” Frangie says. “You want to take over?”

That's the end of the second-guessing.

“Two of you stay in case I need to hold him down,” Frangie says. “The other two, take off, it's tight in here.”

The matter is decided with looks between the four soldiers. One woman and one man stay behind. Frangie guesses they're the two with the strongest stomachs. At least she hopes so.

There's an artery, a big, fat glistening artery that ought to be pumping but is merely draining. There's very little blood left in the captain. Frangie pulls out his dog tags.

“AB Negative? Jesus, I don't have any AB anything. Ren, hang some plasma.”

It turns out the woman soldier has type AB negative, a rare bit of good luck. “At least it'll be white blood,” she mutters.

“Pretty sure it'll be red,” Frangie says, now feeling her way with bare fingers around the chewed meat that is the captain's thigh.

Suddenly the captain shouts; at least he intends to shout, he's too weak to make much noise.

“Morphine?” Ren asks.

“No, weak as he is it'd kill him for sure.”

“You, AB: pull that chair over here, sit down as close as you can get. Ren?”

Ren has learned enough in the last twelve hours to
know where the needles and tubes are. He uncoils a plastic tube and fits a used hollow needle to one end.

“You, pressure right here,” Frangie orders the male soldier, only now noticing that he's a senior NCO, and that he, too, is bleeding from the side of his face, bleeding but walking wounded, likely to survive on his own. “Your thumb. Right there.” He looks a little sickly, so Frangie adds, “If you need to throw up, don't do it on my patient.”

She manages to find an artery on the female soldier, but the captain's system is collapsing and she wastes precious seconds finding a vein. Finally red liquid surges through the piping. She stops it with a clamp. First she needs to sew up the hole in the femoral artery—no point pumping blood in only to have it drain out.

“You tell me if you get light-headed,” Frangie instructs the donor as she pushes the NCO's thumb aside, clamps the artery, and places three quick sutures. They won't stop all the bleeding, but they'll slow it down.

She unclamps the transfusion and blood flows from the woman to the captain.

“Now, to—”

The tent flap flies open. It's Sergeant Green. “Doc, orders: we're bugging out.”

“Can't,” Frangie says.

“Orders,” he says, insisting on the word. “They're going to blow the tubes.”

“What?”

“We're tossing grenades down the last few artillery tubes and skedaddling.”

This obviously gets the full attention of the man and woman who came in with Captain Schrenk, but they stay, though their body language telegraphs a desire to go.

Frangie hadn't even noticed that the artillery was no longer firing. The only explosions she's heard in the last sixty seconds have been muffled bangs—grenades.

“I have a patient,” Frangie says, now tracking smaller bleeders.

“Doc . . . Private Marr . . . that man isn't even one of ours.”

“Well, he's one of my patients, Sarge. Go, go, take care of yourself, I'll catch up soon as I have this man stable.”

Sergeant Green looks torn. He takes off his wire-framed glasses to wipe them off with his shirttail, obviously considering his path. “Look, I would . . . But it's no good, I have to stay with my men.”

“That's your duty, Sergeant Green, this is mine.”

“God keep you safe, sister.”

“You too, Sarge. Wait, give me your medical kit.”

He does, nods, and is gone.

From outside she hears more muffled bangs, running feet, a jeep engine, shouts, and urgent orders.

The reality of it hits her. She will be alone here with the captain, alone waiting for the enemy. Everyone who
can leave has left. “Ren, you take off too. You done good, now get the hell out of here.”

The raw, exposed flesh under the captain's torn skin oozes with some thick, green-brown liquid, black in the minimal light. Bile, maybe, or the contents of his lower intestines. The wound is deeper than she can see, there is almost certainly shrapnel up inside his belly, and it is septic—she can smell the intestinal contents. There's no way the captain survives, not even at a field hospital, most likely. But Frangie does not believe for a moment that she can leave him. Medics do not only care for the wounded, they comfort the dying.

Outside, the last jeep takes a load on its engine and begins to draw away. There's a shockingly loud explosion and a flash of light that turns every seam and gap in the tent bright yellow for a second. They've set off the last of their ammunition, keeping it from the enemy.

Frangie ties off as many bleeders as she can. Is that a hint of color returning to the captain's face? Must be, because he sits bolt upright, stares in horror and confusion at the mess of his crotch, and cries, “They shot my dick off!”

“It's still there—”

“Kill me now, kill me now, kill me now!”

“Like hell I will,” Frangie snarls.

“Sergeant! Sergeant! I order you to shoot me!”

“Captain, you're okay, you're okay, take a look!”

Frangie draws the skin flap back, exposing the captain's genitals.

“It's all there, Cap, it's all good,” the white sergeant says.

But of course it's not all good. Frangie has not the faintest clue what to do about what may be a perforated intestine or gallbladder. She is not a surgeon, not a doctor, not even close.

A silence descends. Outside, the feet no longer rush. There are no more small explosions. The only things Frangie hears are the captain's labored breathing, almost a sob, and the sound of blood dripping onto dirt floor.

Then, in the distance, engines.

“You're a girl.”

“No, sir, I'm a sergeant. I'm a sergeant carrying orders from Colonel Clay.” Rainy tugs the single sheet of paper from her pocket and opens it for the skeptical sergeant.

“You some kind of paratrooper?” He doesn't seem mean as much as amused.

“I am no kind of paratrooper,” she says. “This will be a first for me.”

“Well, I have to tell you, Sergeant Schulterman, this here is what we call FUBAR.” But he extends a hand, shakes hers, and says, “But I'll fly you. Call me Skip.”

“Skip?”

“Warrant Officer Elihu J. Ostrowski if you prefer, but Skip rolls off the tongue a bit easier.”

Rainy manages a grin, a shaky, tenuous grin, and says, “I'm Rainy. And I know it's FUBAR, Skip, and I'm sorry to drag you into it.”

He's an older man in his early thirties, with a face creased by a lifetime in the sun. He doesn't seem happy about flying a young woman barely more than half his age, but he's not hostile, and Rainy has learned to welcome anything short of open contempt. And after all, she's dragging him into a bad situation, so he'd be justified in a little resentment. She reminds herself not to mention that this whole mission is largely her idea.

They stand before an Army L-4, basically just a Piper Cub. It has a single engine and a single overhead wing, without weapons, armor, or speed to protect it. It has two seats, one behind the other, and only one cramped door that requires Rainy—newly bulked up with not one but two parachutes—to squeeze in with great difficulty.

Though she's not a big person, Rainy is squashed in a sandwich between her own seat back, her main chute, her belly chute, and the pilot's seat back. This does nothing to calm her, but, she reminds herself, she'll have lots of fresh air as she plummets toward the ground.

Skip revs the engine, which is not a reassuring sound, and the tiny plane goes bouncing down the dirt field, swerving to avoid a mud puddle and then lifting off in a sort of crablike, half-sideways fashion.

The cockpit is tiny and freezing but at least there are ample windows, and with the wing above them the view of the ground is good. They fly over the town of Maktar,
on overcultivated fields now fallow as they head into winter. It's interesting enough for a while—Rainy has not only had no experience with parachutes, this is her first time up in a plane—but it soon becomes monotonous as signs of human habitation disappear and the ground below becomes one long stretch of sand and rock.

She passes the time replaying her hasty instruction in the use of the parachute. Climb up into the doorway, legs dangling out. Push hard away from the plane and for God's sake don't pull the rip cord too soon. Or too late. Or forget to pull it at all.

And if the main chute should fail to deploy, she should calmly and without panic go to her emergency chute. Calmly. While falling like a rock.

They run into some turbulence, and the little plane starts to rise and fall just like a boat on the waves, elevator up, and a playground slide down. Up . . . down. Up . . . and the combination of the movement and the fear, the growing fear of jumping, turns her stomach acid. She needs to pee. She needs to vomit. She needs to not be here, not be in a tiny plane on her way to the middle of nowhere, and not be contemplating a parachute jump with zero experience.

Skip yells something back to her that she cannot hear, so he makes a chopping motion off to their right, and when Rainy looks she sees vehicles on a road, heading
north. They're nothing but tan rectangles, but she's had enough training in reading recon photos to recognize German tanks and trucks. They're leading a long plume of dust.

Those are the Germans she'd have run into had she tried to reach her destination by jeep. Unfortunately this means she will almost certainly be cut off once she drops, retreat barred by the enemy.

Skip holds the stick with his knees and jots notes into a notebook, tapping his compass to check their bearing and unfolding a map to compare what he's seeing and what the map wants him to be seeing.

Skip reaches back to tap her leg and get her attention. Then he holds up one hand, fingers splayed.

Five. Five minutes.

This is a terrible idea.

This is crazy.

This is suicidal.

She feels like something large is stuck in her throat, like she tried to swallow a hamburger in one bite and now can't get it down. Her heart is pounding in her chest.

Skip motions again, and now he unlatches the door, which will be hard to push open against the wind. Harder still is climbing up there. Left leg forward, squeezing, sucking in her breath while all the while she
feels she can't breathe, leaning into Skip, her weight on his left shoulder, her face practically pushed into his bald spot. He's scrunching over as far as he can get while still keeping a hand on the stick, and then she slips. Her hand reaches instinctively for anything solid—the stick—and the plane plunges right and down. Something much bigger and much, much faster goes blazing by.

Backwash buffets the plane, it's rattling, the engine is coughing, the door is unhitched, and in the wild careening Rainy sees the flat-nosed Focke-Wulf 190 banking into a tight turn to come back at them.

“Now or never!” Skip yells.

She's got her back to the door, hunched over like a cooked shrimp.

“Are we there?”

Skip strong-arms her, pushing hard on her chest. Her hands tear loose from their hold, the door bangs on her thigh, air pressure like a hurricane hits her full force, and she's falling, tumbling, head over heels, head over heels, like an acrobat.

She does not scream but wants to, her mind a blur, her body in a state of rigid panic. But a part of her brain, some cold, calm, reasoning fragment, says,
Pull the rip cord, you
meshuggeneh
fool!

She pulls the cord. Nothing happens. She's stopped
breathing. The desert is whirling around, blue sky, beige dirt, blue sky, and then there is a sharp, almost brutal jerk that digs straps into her crotch and gives her whiplash as the chute brings her upright, feet dangling.

But she's still falling, falling to her death . . . No. No, she can see the white-silk canopy above her, so she's done it, she's done it, she's parachuted.

You still have to land!

A quarter mile above her and away to the south, the spotter plane comes apart, pieces flying as the Focke-Wulf pours machine gun fire into it. She watches but does not see Skip getting out, does not see a second chute blossoming, just the plane falling nose-down in wild loops. Part of the wing comes off, and the loops become a disorganized tumble.

She looks away as the plane hits the ground, a puff of dust, soundless.

And the ground is rushing up at her, and she forgets everything she was told about landing, no bracing, no bent knees, no rolling to spread the impact, she hits hard, bone-jarringly hard, and falls over. The chute, still full, drags her on her back for a few feet before she can roll over, get first to her knees and then to her feet, and the chute collapses.

She works her way free of the parachute harness. Rainy Schulterman has just parachuted behind enemy lines.
And gotten a man named Skip killed.

Featureless desert sand in every direction. She lies on her back, panting, willing her heart to slow down enough to actually pump blood rather than just hammer at her rib cage.

“Get up,” Rainy orders herself. “Move!”

Direction is easy enough: she can see the sun. And she remembers seeing a road on her way down. East. That's right, east. She walks a few steps, collapses to her knees, pushes herself back up, and heads on again.

The unit she's looking for is out there somewhere, a somewhere that looks a whole lot larger from ground level than it did on a map.

She has survived the jump, she reminds herself, and that was the hard part, surely. How hard can it be to find fifty or so soldiers in a million miles of trackless emptiness?

It takes a half an hour just to find the road. She flops beside it, nervous and scared as hell, but alive. If only she knew . . . anything, really, about the survival skills a soldier should have. If only . . . The plan had been to spot the platoon, fly low, give them a wing wag to get their attention, then jump.

That did not happen. But the fortunes of war that had turned against her and dropped her here, lost and abandoned, now capriciously come to her rescue.

There is a jeep coming down the road, hell-for-leather, a single soldier at the wheel.

Rainy climbs heavily to her feet and then, composing her face into a calm and, she hopes, authoritative expression, steps out into the middle of the road.