Front Lines

by Michael Grant

  “The short of it is that I sent what we had to HQ, where I understand Sergeant Schulterman was able to make some sense of it. We got some triangulation on the signal, not very good, unreliable frankly, but nevertheless, we have a working theory.”

  “A supply column,” Rainy said. “Probably crossing open desert. A rendezvous with some element of the German armored thrust.”

  The colonel’s eyebrows shake hands with each other again at that, and the other men equally stare in open disbelief, all but Herkemeier, who winks at Rainy.

  “Where would you guess that rendezvous would take place, Sergeant?”

  It’s a challenge, a sign of his confidence in her. He is showing off his star pupil.

  Rainy takes several minutes to study the map, muttering to herself as if no one else is in the room. “He’ll send his flanking force right across open desert, this wadi here. German supply depot . . . this road . . . say they make thirty miles an hour . . .” She taps the map. “The two roads intersect here . . . crossroads . . . middle of nowhere . . .” Rainy shrugs and steps back, suddenly self-conscious.

  Captain Herkemeier is keeping a straight face, and anyway it’s Colonel Clay’s reaction that matters.

  The major clears his throat and gets a nod. “Sir, we have nothing to put up against that armored column. If we had air cover we might be able to intercept the supply column, and that would likely stop ’em dead in their tracks. But we have nothing in the area but a few scattered elements.”

  Now it is the lieutenant’s turn to clear his throat—very polite, very upper-crust, Rainy thinks, very much not the aggressive Jewess with criminal tendencies. “Sir, there’s a small force. Two platoons that were sent in to buttress a British commando mission. The commandos have been beaten up pretty badly, and what’s left of them are heading out cross-country to try to circle back to the beach, but they last saw our two platoons on this road, heading back toward Sidi Bouzid, which means they’ll most likely run right into the Kraut main force.” He shakes his head doubtfully. “They aren’t much, but if the Brits are right, they’re within ten miles, give or take.”

  “Who’s in command?” Colonel Clay asks.

  “A Lieutenant Liefer and a Lieutenant Helder. I believe Liefer is senior, so with the Tommies out of the picture, she’d be in command. But, Colonel, we have no radio contact. Their set must have been knocked out.”

  “We could send someone,” the major says, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “A German speaker with a radio might just make it; he could stay in touch and monitor any continuing chatter.”

  “See who we have,” Colonel Clay says.

  “Sir,” Rainy interrupts.

  She’s forgotten now that the officers are speaking. Sergeants in the company of senior officers are like children: best seen and not heard. But something about having been labeled an aggressive Jewess . . .

  “Sir,” she repeats when the conversation continues uninterrupted.

  “Yes, Sergeant, what is it?” the colonel snaps.

  “Sir, we have someone who can get there with a radio and who speaks German.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she sees Captain Herkemeier, concerned, shaking his head slightly and mouthing the word no.

  “Me, sir,” Rainy says. “Get me a jeep and a driver, I’ll carry the orders.”

  “Very commendable,” Colonel Clay snaps dismissively. “But this isn’t a drive in the country. In fact, it won’t be a drive at all. It would mean jumping.”

  “Jumping, sir?”

  “Out of an airplane,” Colonel Clay says.

  And before Rainy Schulterman can think through the implications of what she is saying, out come the words “I can do that.”

  30

  FRANGIE MARR—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA

  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 Germ
an 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.

  31

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—MAKTAR, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

  “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.