Purple Hearts. Майкл Грант

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      “It is,” he allows, mock-solemn.

      It might be funny, but it doesn’t feel that way to Lupé. There’s something specific in the way she says killed. It’s not a word to Richlin, it’s a memory.

      “Keeping you from getting killed is the main job of a sergeant. When I was a green fool of a private fresh out of basic, I had Sergeant Jedron Cole to keep me from getting killed. He kept me and Stick both from getting killed in Tunisia, and in Sicily and in Italy.”

      “Many times,” Stick agrees.

      “Now it’s our job to do the same for you. Maybe you don’t care about staying alive to get home again someday, but I suspect you’d prefer to stay alive, so here’s how you do that: you listen to Sergeant Sticklin. You listen to me. You listen to Corporal Geer there.” She crooks a thumb toward the big galoot who has already disappeared back into the tent. “Corporal Geer is my ASL, my assistant squad leader. He and I are going to train the living sh—stuffing out of you in whatever time we have in hopes that you can stay alive long enough to carry Corporal Castain’s extra gear.”

      Still not funny, Lupé thinks. Even Rudy J. Chester looks solemn. Hank Hobart looks positively petrified.

      “Now get over to Company HQ to process in,” Rio says. “When you’re done, grab some chow and get back here and Corporal Castain will get you settled. And about eight seconds after that, Geer is going to march you over to the rifle range and make sure you know which end to point at the Krauts.”

      The three recruits turn and flee, not even bothering to ask where the Company HQ tent is.

      But as they walk away, Lupé, who is in the rear, overhears Corporal Castain saying, “That was very good, Rio. Very Sergeant Mackie, if I may say.”

      And she hears a low chuckle from Dain Sticklin.

2

      RIO RICHLIN—HAMPSHIRE, UK

      “Two packs of smokes and the gin,” Rio Richlin says.

      The corporal, a chubby young woman with a smiling face and cold eyes, leaning insolently against a jeep, sizes Rio up. “I can get gin anywhere. Give me your knife.”

      Rio makes a thin, compressed smile. “I have a sentimental attachment to my koummya,” she says. “Besides, you wouldn’t like it. I haven’t cleaned all the blood from it yet.”

      The smile disappears from the corporal’s face. She glances at the knife, then at Rio’s chest, then back at the knife. “Four packs plus the gin.”

      “Done. I’ll have it back in twenty-four hours tops.”

      Rio Richlin seldom wears her dress uniform, in fact, never recently, but there is one advantage in the remarkably uncomfortable get-up with its multiplicity of buttons, its impossible-to-keep-on cap and its khaki tie: in full dress one wears one’s medals.

      The three stripes of the buck sergeant will impress precisely no one in a Britain neck-deep in the soldiers, sailors, coastguardsmen and airmen of a dozen nationalities. But the red, white and blue ribbon, beneath which hangs a pale gold star, is the Silver Star, (despite the baffling color of the actual star) and is given for Gallantry in Action. Quite a few Silver Stars have been handed out, but when Rio received hers it was the first time the medal had been awarded to a female combat soldier. Ever.

      The star cuts down considerably on the number of leering, obnoxious, improper suggestions Rio has been on the receiving end of. Mostly you didn’t get the Silver Star unless you’d made a fair number of German and Italian widows and orphans, and that realization causes some male soldiers to . . . well, reconsider making a crude pass at Rio.

      Alongside the Silver Star is a second medal, a purple ribbon above a gold heart, which has within it a lacquered purple valentine, all framing a gold profile of George Washington himself.

      This is the Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in battle. On the back in raised letters the citation reads For Military Merit, which is a bit silly since to Rio’s mind there’s no great “merit” in getting shot or sliced up by shrapnel. But resting as it does beside her Silver Star, the combination sends a clear message in the language of the US Army: this is the real deal.

      This is a combat soldier.

      And that separates Buck Sergeant Rio Richlin from ninety percent of the men and women in uniform swelling the trains and roads and villages and village pubs of Britain.

      The transaction complete, Rio hops in the jeep and drives away, moving fast because that’s how all the jeep drivers drive, fast, like gangsters trying to outrun the cops in a James Cagney movie.

      It is forty-seven miles to the air base where Strand Braxton is based. It should be an hour’s drive at most, but the road through the damp-lovely springtime English countryside is jammed with every manner of military vehicle from jeep to truck to tank. Military Police man crossroads and try to direct traffic, sometimes in loudly profane ways, and at one point Rio is told she cannot take a particular road but must go far out of her way. Here too her medals (plus two packs of smokes and a silk scarf) convince the MP that the restriction somehow does not apply to her.

      The slowness of the drive eats up hours of time she doesn’t have, and worse, leaves her free to think. Rio has a lot to think about—the imminent invasion and the role of her squad. It still seems strange to think of it as her squad. The squad, nominally twelve men and women led by a sergeant, in this case Rio, consists of her lifelong friend, Jenou Castain—Corporal Jenou Castain—as well as her long-time companions Luther Geer, Hansu Pang, Cat Preeling, Beebee, whose real name no one even remembered anymore, some replacements that didn’t yet matter, and Jack Stafford.

      Jack Stafford with whom she shared a foolish kiss long ago. Jack with whom she had spent a horrible night lying in a muddy minefield, huddling together for warmth. Jack, the Brit who’d ended up in the American army. Devilish, witty, fearless Jack.

      Jack who is now her subordinate and about whom she was not to think of in that way. Not that she ever really had, well . . . occasionally. But that whole thing was utterly impossible now. Over. Done with.

      Which is one of the reasons she was going to see Strand Braxton, because if Strand and she were . . . well, whatever you called it, engaged, she supposed, then she would have one more mental defense against stray thoughts of Jack.

      Stafford, Rio chides herself, not Jack. Private Stafford.

      She arrives at the air base to find more MPs, and these are not quite so easily dealt with. So she gives her name at the gate, and Strand’s name, and after a phone call they decide she’s not likely to be a German saboteur or spy, and wave her through.

      The airfield is a vast expanse of torn up grass and mud distantly ringed by trees on two sides, farm fields on one side, and the road itself. Rio pulls over to look, taking it in. She can see a handful of low buildings, a stubby control tower with a fitful windsock, a bristling antiaircraft gun emplacement, the usual cluster of jeeps and trucks and low-slung tractors, and beyond them the great behemoth planes, the B-17s. She counts six, but suspects there are more out of view.

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