Silver Stars. Майкл Грант

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ