Lieutenant Stone says, “Nothing we can’t handle, sir.”
This bravado is to be expected—you don’t get far in the army by displaying doubt, not if you’re an officer—but there is an inaudible, invisible, and yet unmistakable coolness coming from the combat veterans. They are men and woman who have actually fought tanks, and they don’t talk lightly about “handling” them.
Stick speaks up. “Sir, even if we take and hold the beach and the valley, isn’t it mountains and rivers all the way from there to Rome?”
Lieutenant Stone aims a furious look at his most junior sergeant, but Morales nods. “Yes, it is, Sergeant. There’s something Napoleon said to the effect that Italy is a boot, you have to enter it from the top. Unfortunately, that option is not open to us.”
“We’ll get it done,” Stone says.
There is more of the same back-and-forth, practical concerns having to do with logistics, and optimistic talk of Day One objectives, Day Two, and so on. None of the combat veterans, from Cole down to Rio, believes any of it. The sand table, unlike reality, does not come complete with German 88s raining down.
Almost two weeks later, weary, footsore, and jaded, Rio is convinced of the physical accuracy of the sand table and painfully aware of the irrelevance of the timetable. She and the 119th were spared the worst of the landing, not being first wave, or even second wave, for once. The earlier arrivals ran into a wall of German artillery, machine gun fire, and air attack, but by the time the 119th joined the battle, the Germans were counterattacking.
That had been rough, but it was fighting from foxholes and prepared positions. In the end it was the massive firepower of American and British naval gunfire and planes from Sicily that hammered the German tanks and broke up their thrust.
But now the job is to expand the beachhead and begin the push north toward Naples and Rome beyond, which, for the 119th, means pacifying dozens of small villages and strongpoints held by a determined enemy rear guard.
Rio lies wedged between sharp stones that had once been someone’s home or shop, with an intermittent hail of machine gun bullets chipping away at the stone like some mad sculptor. She is reminded of a saying she’d first heard from Stick: No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Naples was the Day Three objective. They are beginning Week Three, and they are still some distance from Naples. How far, Rio does not know. What she does know is that she is facedown on the ground wishing she could dig a hole through the cobblestones beneath her.
Rio’s squad landed on the beach below Salerno at full strength, twelve men and women: Stick, Rio, Jack, Jenou, Tilo, Geer, Cat, Pang, Jillion, Beebee, Sergeant Cole, and a replacement. Rio had exchanged no more than a few words with the replacement, a woman named Karen Scalzi. Scalzi had stepped on a mine on her first day ashore. She hadn’t died, but she would no longer be able to count to ten on her toes.
Now they are eleven, and Cat has come down with dysentery, so half the time she is squatting behind whatever cover she can find. She should have been sent back, but she kept saying, “I’m okay, dammit, I’m fine, just don’t fugging look at me!”
“No one’s looking at you,” Tilo had wised off. “We’re just trying not to smell you.”
The heat does not approach the Sicilian heat, September having brought some moderation in temperature, but for hours they’ve advanced at a crawl through the heap of rubble that was once a town. The town has been worked over by naval gunfire, tank fire, and P-38 and P-47 ground attack planes. It was home to not quite a thousand people, but now every roof is blown away or collapsed. Scarcely a wall stands without ending in ragged crenellations at the top, here and there splintered wooden beams stick out or up, doorways have all been kicked in, windows have all been blown out, and if any civilian is left alive it is a miracle.
The full platoon is spread down both sides of what had almost certainly been the main street of town, now a tumbled, almost impassable jumble of fallen stone, all of it painful to lie on.
A Sherman tank burns behind them, burns too fiercely for anyone even to think about extricating the dead tanker whose charcoal body lies draped across its forward deck.
Rio is on point. She hears Stick clattering through the rocks, followed by sniper fire, to drop beside her.
“What do you see, Richlin?”
Rio and Stick are side by side, faces inches apart, both sheltering behind the same chunk of lathe and plaster. Rio risks a quick pop-up glance, drops hastily, and says, “That wall there, the building where the street turns? That high window, top floor? Machine gun. There’s maybe a second one farther on, I think. And you know about the—”
Boom!
A small explosion rearranges the rubble twenty feet ahead, temporarily obscuring their view with dust. Rio and Stick crouch low and let the shards of rock pelt their backs and helmets for several seconds.
“Mortar,” Rio says.
“Yeah, kinda noticed that. If the Krauts get a spotter and a radio up in that window they’ll murder us,” Stick says. He surveys the terrain ahead. “Can’t get another tank in here.”
Rio shakes her head. “Not if they’ve still got that 88 up around the corner.”
“Okay,” Stick says. “Take Stafford and Suarez and scout to the right, see if there’s a way to flank ’em.”
“Yep.” Not the answer she wants to give, but what can she do? There are two stripes on her shoulder now.
For a moment, just a brief, very strange moment, Rio realizes that despite her self-doubt she does actually know what Stick means. She knows how to do the job, knows what risks she should take and what she should avoid. It’s a strange moment, a moment out of time, a quiet, self-aware moment.
She crawls backward, not easy to do in these rocks. She makes a turn at what looks like a safe place and is nearly hit by that high-up machine gun. She decides to jump up and run, hunched over with bullets pinging and ricocheting off the rock around her.
The squad is a series of helmets barely poking up, like so many gophers who’ve dug their hole in the middle of a rock quarry.
“Stafford, Suarez. We’re taking a walk,” Rio says.
Two of the helmets begin to move and soon they are three, all prone, face-to-face, legs splayed out in different directions, hugging the ground as machine gun fire chips stone above them.
“We’re going to scout down that alley to our right,” Rio says.
“Won’t that just be fun,” Jack mutters under his breath.
They set off at a crawl until they are out of the direct line of fire, and then it’s the familiar stooped run, take cover, stooped run, take cover, till they are well within the alley. The alley is so narrow Rio can touch both walls without stretching. At least here they are safe for a moment. Tilo lights a cigarette.
“Give me a puff,” Rio says, and takes the cigarette from Tilo. She draws the smoke in. She doesn’t smoke, not really, she tells herself, just the occasional puff. But she no longer chokes and coughs from the smoke. She started up after the mission to rescue Strand, and while she does not carry her own pack of smokes, she is beginning to irritate people with her cadging of a puff here, a complete cigarette there.
They creep down the alley, which opens onto a narrow street. This street seems less damaged—it’s still possible to see patches of cobblestone not covered by rubble. But they proceed cautiously since they cannot see beyond a curve ahead. But then they happen on an extraordinary sight, a surreal sight: there are dozens of big, white and tan loaves of Italian bread, and many more fragments of bread outside a burned-out bakery. It’s like a snowstorm of bread crumbs. A solitary crow has found this bounty and casts a jaundiced eye at the advancing GIs, following it up with a harsh warning croak.
“Someone blew up the bakery,” Tilo says. “If we find a cheese shop and a wine store, we’re set for the duration.” He stuffs a fat, crusty loaf in his shirt. The heel sticks up under his chin.
The alleyway being only moderately filled with rubble, they a
dvance, Rio hugging the left side, Jack and Tilo on the right. They measure each step, one foot in front of the other, heel to toe, heel to toe, rifles at waist height, training side to side, eyes scanning ahead, up, right, left.
“I’ll be damned,” Tilo says. “There’s my bottle.”
Rio hears him.
Rio says nothing. She is focused on a sound from ahead, maybe a rat, maybe a civilian, maybe . . .
Suarez grabs the bottle, which is sitting quite undisturbed on a dusty table outside what must be a bar.
Bang!
To ears accustomed to everything from tank fire to 88s to the massive explosions of naval gunfire, it sounds slight. Slight but terribly close and intimate.
Rio slams her body against the wall and yells, “Stafford, Suarez, down!”
“Shit!” Jack yells.
Rio spins to look and sees Jack rushing to Tilo, who sits on the ground. His face is black with soot. His uniform is smoking. His right arm hangs twisted all the way around, like he’s trying to reach the far side of his lower back. Blood gushes from the chewed meat of his shoulder.
Rio rushes to him, but bam-bam-bam! a German rifle drives her back.
Tilo says, “I think I’m all right.”
Rio on her belly now, Jack on his, both pressed against their respective walls, bullets everywhere, and Tilo stares blankly ahead. He looks baffled and amused, as though something unexpected but entertaining has occurred.
The firing stops.
Rio glances frantically around, looking for a way to get to Tilo, maybe to grab and drag him to cover. But there is no cover, not close enough.
A single bullet hits Tilo’s half-severed arm, knocking it free of the arteries and tendons holding it. The arm lies on the cobbles, seeming to point at Rio.
Seconds tick.
“What do we do?” Jack calls to her in an anguished voice.
A second, carefully aimed bullet hits Tilo in the chest. There is the cleaver sound of steel on flesh and paradoxically it knocks Tilo forward so he sits bent over as if examining his shoes or doing a sit-up back at Camp Maron.
A pause. The sniper is waiting for the pressure to mount, hoping a new target will present itself.
“Stay put,” Rio tells Jack. If she can just time it perfectly, grab Tilo’s shoulders, haul him back over the cobbles to the door opening . . . She calculates the time. No way it’s less than seven or eight seconds, more likely ten or fifteen.
Suicide.
Jack drops back down the street, back to where he can cross without being shot, and sidles up to Rio’s side.
“No way,” he says, panting.
The sniper fires a third time. And a fourth. Tilo falls backward now. The loaf of bread in his shirt is soggy with blood.
“You fugging Kraut asshole, he’s already dead!” Rio cries.
The unseen German sniper shoots Tilo a few more times, maybe hoping to goad them. And Rio is ready to be goaded, panting and sobbing in frustration and rage, but feeling Jack’s arm on her shoulder, hearing his voice, “He’s dead, Rio, he’s dead. We can’t help him.”
“I’ll kill that Kraut bastard,” Rio says. The threat is hollow, and she knows it. They may well get the sniper, but Tilo will still be dead.
“We have to go back and warn Stick that Jerry’s booby-trapped the place.”
“Goddammit, Suarez,” Rio says, half like she’s yelling at him, half like she’s mourning. But she turns away into the shelter of the alley and in a few minutes finds Stick and the squad, much where she left them.
“Where’s Suarez?”
“Stayed behind,” Rio says with a quick, furious wipe of her eyes. “Booby trap and then a sniper.”
“Suarez bought the farm?” Geer asks, an almost tender note in his usually abrasive voice. He reaches to the cat—no longer a kitten—that rides inside his shirt.
“We have to get out of here,” Jillion says in a trembly voice. Like all of them, her face is covered in dirt, grease, sweat, and plaster dust. It makes the terror in her wide eyes even more insistent. “We gotta go back and tell Sergeant Cole we can’t get through.”
She’s not wrong.
Jesus Christ, I lost Suarez!
Stick says, “We pull back, that Kraut up there’ll see it and have an MG sitting down on this very rock, and we’ll have to pay twice for the same rubble. No, we are not pulling back, to hell with pulling back, we’re finding a way through!”
If only I’d seen Suarez reach for that bottle.
Should have. Could have.
Didn’t.
It’s a sickening, grinding thing inside her, a weight, like she’s swallowed a cannonball. She feels a poison spread through her body, a sapping weariness. It will swallow her up if she lets it. It will grow and consume her, she knows that, and she fights it down, fights it down like a seasick person straining not to puke.
He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, and he’s lying there chewed up like a . . .
Tilo Suarez has joined Kerwin Cassel in whatever place dead soldiers go to. Maybe heaven. Maybe hell. Maybe oblivion. Tilo would have wanted none of those choices. Tilo would only have wanted to go home.
He’s dead, just like Cassel, but with one terrible difference: she was leading the patrol.
Tilo’s death is on her.
27
RIO RICHLIN—A VILLAGE IN ITALY
Jenou says, “What about we make our own path?”
“What?” Rio snaps at her. It’s getting harder to ignore a growing distance between them, a cordial, polite, but definite distance.
No time to worry about that, there is a war on.
I lost Suarez.
Jenou’s eyes flare and she almost turns sullen, but she shakes her head and says, “Listen, maybe this is stupid, but instead of crawling down the street in the open, why don’t we go through the walls between all these buildings?”
“Because they’re walls?” Cat says.
“We blow a hole in ’em with grenades,” Jenou says. “Look at the angle: Krauts can’t see through walls, right? All these buildings have connecting walls, so we can push through them while still being covered by the exterior walls facing the street.”
“Huh,” Stick says thoughtfully.
Rio, already regretting snapping at Jenou, says, “Could work.”
It’s not Jen’s fault Suarez is dead.
“Probably six, seven walls,” Beebee estimates. He’s holding up well aside from having dropped his rifle and almost shooting a major when the gun went off. That incident of course led to a lot of teasing but also a more general acceptance of him as part of the platoon. Any enlisted man who can make an officer leap into a chow line steam table full of bacon is an instant hero.
“Okay,” Stick says. “Here’s how we do it. Richlin, Castain, and Preeling—maybe you’ll find a toilet, Preeling—blow out the walls. But we synchronize our watches, then every time you toss a grenade, we throw one here too, maybe the Krauts only count that as one and they don’t figure out what we’re doing. Get set up, send Preeling back, and let us know. Then Preeling fires two quick rounds as a signal, count twenty seconds exactly, then bang-bang. Got it?”
They had it.
Rio, Jenou, and Cat crawl to the nearest doorway on their right. Easier said than done, given that rubble practically chokes the doorway in question. A mortar round lands on the burning tank, turning the charcoal body to fine ash. Once inside they find a barbershop with a single swivel chair, shattered jars of pomade and perfume and hair dyes that fill the narrow room with a sweet chemical stink. The wall they need to blow up is fronted by built-in cabinetry and a long mirror.
“That’s a complication,” Jenou says.
They are able to stand, the three of them, now that they are no longer in the line of fire. Rio has the feeling this may be the first time in three days she’s stood all the way up. Cat rushes to the back of the shop and yells back, “My God, there’s toilet paper!”
“Take whatever you don’t use!” Jen
ou says. There is a chronic shortage of toilet paper.
Rio and Jenou, side by side, stare at their reflections in the barber’s mirror: two young women, uniformed, covered in dust, faces white with sweat-streaked plaster dust, helmets low on their foreheads, rifle and carbine respectively propped on hips, and in Rio’s case a big knife strapped to her thigh.
Jenou sighs. “I remember when I used to be sexy.”
Rio nods and sighs. “Dear Strand: this is a picture of me at work.”
Cat’s back in three minutes, by which time Rio and Jenou have broken the mirror with blows from their rifle butts—great fun—and have begun to yank the cabinet free of the wall.
“Okay,” Rio says. “Ready, Cat?”
Cat runs back to the doorway, aims her rifle up in the air, squeezes off two shots.
Rio stares fixedly at her watch. “Cat, Jen, back to the bathroom.”
“Oh, I don’t think you want to go in there,” Cat warns.
“Fourteen seconds,” Rio says.
“Come on,” Jenou says, grabs Cat by the arm and pulls her along, saying, “It’s okay, Cat, we know your shit stinks.”
“Not yours, though,” Cat says.
“Of course not,” Jenou says. “Mine couldn’t.”
Suarez has not yet been dead an hour and already the teasing, the mordant GI sense of humor, is back. Days of mourning for Kerwin Cassel; an hour for Suarez. In another month or two will anyone even pause to take note of a new death?
Rio has a grenade in hand. She pulls the pin. The fuse doesn’t light until she releases the clip and she counts the seconds down. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six.
On five she releases the clip, hears the fuse pop, rolls the grenade against the base of the wall, and leaps to join her friends in an admittedly fragrant bathroom.
CRUMP!
Crump!
Two grenades, one right here, loud enough to make their ears ring and raise a fine dust cloud, the second one outside, separated by perhaps half a second. Will the Krauts fall for it?