First published in Great Britain in 2018

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA

Text copyright © 2018 by Michael Grant

First e-book edition 2018

ISBN 978 1 4052 7388 6

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1656 7

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To all the real soldier girls.

“Today we rule Germany, tomorrow, the world!”

—Adolf Hitler

“And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I’d shoot a snake!”

—General George S. Patton

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: D-DAY

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

LETTERS SENT

PART TWO: PARIS

19

PART THREE: HÜRTGEN FOREST

20

21

22

23

PART FOUR: THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

LETTERS SENT

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

PART FIVE: THE CAMPS

31

32

PART SIX: VICTORY

LETTERS SENT

33

INTERSTITIAL

PART SEVEN: AFTER

34

35

OBITUARIES

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IMAGE LIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Back series promotional page

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

1944.

World War II has raged in Europe for five long years, but the tide has turned decisively in favor of the Allies. France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, the western part of the Soviet Union and North Africa have all been occupied at one time, but now the edges of the Nazi Reich are being rolled up.

In Italy, Hitler’s clownish Fascist henchman, Benito Mussolini, has been overthrown. Pro-Nazi governments in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and parts of Yugoslavia are looking for ways to make peace with the Allies. The Nazis are out of North Africa and southern Italy.

The Soviet Union is ruled by the paranoid monster Joseph Stalin. Having once made a treacherous peace with Hitler allowing the Soviets to stab Finland and Poland in the back, Stalin then found himself betrayed in turn by Hitler. Ignoring a peace agreement between them, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, inflicting unspeakable brutality on Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Russians and, of course, above all, the Jews.

But the Soviet Union has proven to be too big a meal for Hitler to swallow. The Nazis have been turned back at Stalingrad and Leningrad, forced to flee after the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, and are now retreating with a vengeful Soviet Red Army hot on their heels.

From June 25, 1940, and the surrender of France, to June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Great Britain, her Commonwealth and her Empire stood alone against the Nazi tidal wave. With British cities being bombed by the Luftwaffe, and British shipping largely at the bottom of the Atlantic, cut off, hungry and alone, Britain still stood, the indomitable hero of the western world.

But after Hitler’s ally, Japan, attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the great, sleeping giant across the sea finally awoke. The United States of America, which had till then limited itself to supplying material aid to Britain, was all at once, overnight, fully engaged in the war.

America’s not-so-secret weapon was its productive capacity. By 1944 the USA was producing 96,000 warplanes per year, more than ten planes each hour in a twenty-four-hour day. In the total war effort, American industry produced 110 aircraft carriers, 41,000 cannon, 100,000 tanks, 310,000 aircraft, 12,500,000 rifles, and 41,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition.

It also raised, trained and equipped a military that by 1944 numbered nearly 12 million soldiers, sailors and marines.

The world waited as the Americans put on a poor show in North Africa and became bogged down in Italy under ineffectual generals. America’s allies granted the genius of American war production, but they doubted the fighting spirit, grit, determination and competence of American soldiers, from Eisenhower down to the private in a foxhole.

The Americans faced the ultimate test: leading a fractious, suspicious coalition of British, Canadian, Australian, Free French and Free Polish forces to invade and liberate Europe, and to destroy Hitler’s evil regime.

The Nazis were no longer advancing, but the Nazi empire was very far from beaten. New German weapons, the V1 cruise missile, the V2 ballistic missile, the world’s first jet fighter, the Me 262, and the massive Tiger tank were coming online.

Now on the defensive, the superbly-equipped, experienced, well-trained, well-generaled and dug-in German army, the Wehrmacht, and its brutal and fanatical counterpart, the Waffen SS, were fighting to save the Nazi regime and their Fatherland.

The Nazi beast cornered was at its most dangerous.

Between D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the German surrender, on May 7, 1945, 125,000 American GIs—more than 350 per day—would die bringing freedom to western Europe and destroying the greatest evil humanity had ever faced.

PROLOGUE

107TH EVAC HOSPITAL, WÜRZBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 1945

There’s a story going round, Gentle Reader, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but supposedly a guy heard it from a German POW. The story is that the first Allied bomb dropped on Berlin killed an elephant in the zoo.

I guess I’m sorry for the elephant, but that sort of sums up the way it goes in war. There’s no moral sense to it. Sure, one side may be better than the other, I mean, I was at Buchenwald. No one needs to convince me the Nazis are evil. But what I mean is that in the day-today of it death and destruction do not rain down on the bad and spare the good. Death does not care whether you’re a bright and sparkly hero or a yellow coward. Death doesn’t know you, or care to know you. You’re just the poor dumb bastard who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re just that elephant.

The philosophy of the combat soldier in a nutshell: you’re gonna die. Might be today, might be tomorrow, might be fifty years from now all safe and snug in your bed. But when your number is up, your number is up. And that might be in three . . . two . . . Bang!

Do I sound like a weary old veteran? A sweet young slip of a girl like me? Shall I blush?

When this all started, when the US of A got into this war, and the Supreme Court decided what the hell, let’s send women too, everyone wondered what effect it would have.

Could women fight? My girl Rio has a shiny Silver Star, a fistful of Purple Hearts, and a notched M1 that say yes.

Could the men fight alongside women or would the simple creatures be too distracted by feminine curves? Well, I once spent a long night in a hole with Luther Geer, who has never been a gentleman, but he is a good soldier, and he never even made a pass at me. Possibly he was distracted by the artillery barrage coming down on our heads. Possibly it was that I hadn’t showered in . . . God only knows how long; you’d have to ask my fleas. We were not a man and a woman in that hole, we were two scared little babies screaming and cursing and so cold we were grateful for the warmth of our own piss running down our legs.

It was not a romantic evening.

And people wondered what it would do to us afterward, to us ‘Soldier Girls.’ Would we lose all our feminine attributes? Would we become mannish?

Stupid question. Women don’t stop being women, and men don’t stop being men. Both of us, men and women, become an entirely new creature: the combat soldier. You don’t recognize combat soldiers by legs or breasts or the hidden bits; you recognize them by their eyes. Maybe a civilian wouldn’t spot it, but we always will. We are our own separate tribe. We know things. And we are none of us, men or women, the people we started out being.

Sorry, Gentle Reader, I’ve been prosing on and I should be sticking to the story. It’s just that as bad as North Africa and Sicily were, as miserable and brutal and pointless as Italy was, what comes next I am afraid will defeat my meager talents as a writer. I don’t know quite how to explain Omaha Beach, or the bocage country, or the bloody goddamned forests they call the Hürtgen and the Eifel. And Shakespeare himself could not do justice to Buchenwald or Dachau.

Sorry.

I guess you can’t tell, but for a minute there I couldn’t type. Maybe it was more than a minute. I suppose it must have been a while longer because one of my pals here in the hospital came up and for no reason laid her hand on my shoulder and that’s when I realized I’d been crying.

There are things in my head, pictures and sounds and smells . . . I did not need to know these things, Gentle Reader. I could have lived my life and never known, but now I do, and perhaps it’s perverse of me, but I’m passing those terrible things along to you.

Not very nice of me, really.

Maybe that’s why the old guys, the veterans from the first war, don’t talk much. Maybe they don’t want to inflict it all on unsuspecting civilians. Maybe they are kinder than I am. But I figure you deserve the truth.

Here’s some truth: I once shot an SS prisoner in the throat. He was begging for his life, half dead from hunger and cold. He only had one boot and the other foot was black from some combination of trench foot and frostbite. And I put a carbine round right through his Nazi throat. I could have shot him in the head, but I wanted him to have a few seconds to reflect on the fact that he was going to die.

You don’t approve, Gentle Reader? Are you tut-tutting and shaking your head? You would never do that? Oh? Were you there in the Hürtgen? Were you there on Elsenborn Ridge? No? Then with the greatest respect I have to tell you that your moral opinion means nothing to me. My judges are the filthy, freezing, starving men and women who were there with me. Come with me to the beach and the bocage and the forests, Gentle Reader, spend a few days, and then render your judgment.

Well, enough of that. Tell that story when it’s time. Wipe your eyes and keep typing, old girl.

Time is short. They’re shipping me out soon, back to the land of Coca-Cola and Cadillacs, and I need to finish this story. At night I read bits of it to some of the other guys and gals here. We drink the hooch smuggled in by our buddies outside, and we chain-smoke, and we don’t say much because there isn’t much to say.

This last part of my story begins with the most long-awaited battle ever.

For long years the Nazi bastards had been killing people in Europe. Doing things, and not just at the camps, things that . . . Well, you’ll see. Let me just say that anyone who says G2 aren’t real soldiers, I’ll introduce you to Rainy Schulterman. She may be in intelligence, not combat, but she’s a soldier that girl. She told me some things.

Where was I? Right, reminding you that we were still mostly new to this war. Everyone had been at it longer than we had, we were the new kids at school, but everyone knew we were the biggest new kid they’d ever seen. Before D-Day the war in the west had been mostly Britain and its Commonwealth.

After D-Day it was our war.

Every eye on the planet was turned toward us. From presidents and dictators, to car salesmen and apprentice shoe-makers, from Ike up in his plush HQ down to the lost little children with helmets on their heads and guns in their hands, the whole world held its breath.

D-Day. June 6, 1944. On that day many still doubted the American soldier.

By June 7, no one did.

SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground.

Our Home Fronts have given us a superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your devotion to duty and skill in battle.

We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)

1

LUPÉ CAMACHO—CAMP WORTHING (SOUTH), HAMPSHIRE, UK

“Camacho comma Gooda . . . Goo-ada . . . Gooa-loopy?” Sergeant Fred “Bonemaker” Bonner does not speak Spanish.

Camacho comma Guadalupé, age nineteen, cringes and glances left and right down the line of soldiers as if one of them can tell her whether or not to attempt to correct the sergeant.

But there are no answers in the blank faces staring forward.

“It’s Guadalupé, Sergeant!” she blurts suddenly. “But you can . . .”

She had been about to say that he can call her Lupé. As in Loo-pay. And then it occurred to her that old, gray-haired, fat, bent, red-nosed sergeants with many stripes on their uniform sleeves do not always want to chat about nicknames with privates.

The Bonemaker turns his weary eyes on her and says, “This here is the American army, not the Messican army, honey. If I say it’s Gooa-loopy, it’s Gooa-loopy. Now, whatever the hell your name is, get on the truck and get the hell out of here.”

Guadalupé starts to go but Bonemaker yells, “Take your paperwork. I didn’t fill these forms out for nothing!”

Lupé takes the papers—there are several carbon sheets stapled together—and rushes to the truck. Or at least rushes as fast as she can with her duffel over one shoulder, her rucksack on her back with the straps cutting into her shoulders, a webbing belt festooned with canteen and ammo pouches, and her M1 Garand rifle.

She heaves her gear over the tailgate of an open deuce-and-a-half truck and struggles to get up and over the side herself until one of the half dozen soldiers already aboard offers her a hand.

She slumps heavily onto one of the two inward-facing benches. She nods politely and is met with faces that are not so much hostile as they are preoccupied by nervousness and uncertainty. That she understands perfectly.

She is only five foot five, tall enough she figures. She has black hair cut very short, the sort of dark eyes that seem always to be squinting to look into the distance, a broad face that no one would describe as pretty, and dark, sun-tanned hands and forearms marked with lighter-toned old scars from barbed wire, branding irons, horse bites and even a pair of tiny punctures from an irritable rattlesnake.

Guadalupé has had a mere thirteen weeks of basic training from an Arizonan sergeant who had precisely zero affection for ‘wetbacks,’ and who, as far as Lupé could tell, had no direct experience of anything war-related. Just the same, she was not a standout at basic, and to Lupé that was a victory. Lupé does not want to be here at this replacement depot, or in any other army facility, especially not in England getting ready for the invasion everyone says is finally coming.

Her only outstanding quality at basic had been her endurance. She had grown up on a ranch in southern Utah, a family-worked ranch. She started riding horses at age three, learned to accurately throw a lasso by age five, and by age twelve was doing about ninety percent of a full-grown ranch hand’s work. Plus showing up for school most if not all of the time.

But Lupé has another talent which did not come out during training. She’d shot an eight-point mule deer buck right through the heart when she was nine at a distance of three hundred yards. She’d killed a cougar with a shot her father advised her not to take because it was near-impossible.

Guadalupé Camacho could shoot.

In fact, she shot well enough to consistently fail to qualify with the M1 Garand rifle and the M1 carbine while making it look as if she were trying her best. She failed because she did not wish to go to war and shoot anyone, and she was worried that had she shown any ability she would be shipped off to the war. So on the firing range she amused herself by terrifying instructors with near-misses and general, but carefully-played incompetence.

It turned out not to matter. The pressure was on to move as many recruits as possible to the war in Europe, so Lupé was marked qualified with the M1 Garand, the M1 carbine, the Thompson submachine gun and the Browning automatic rifle—the light machine gun known as the BAR. She had in fact never even fired the Thompson, and with the BAR she legitimately could not hit much of anything—it was nothing like a hunting rifle—but various sergeants stamped various documents and thus she was qualified.

Stamp, stamp, staple, staple, and it was off to war for Guadalupé Camacho, Private, US Army.

Lupé had been drafted very much against her will. She was not a coward, nor lacking in patriotism, but she was needed at home. She had already missed the spring round-up, and if she didn’t get out of the army and back to Utah she would miss the drive up to the Ogden railhead. It was to be an old-fashioned cattle drive this year—trucks, truck tires, truck spare parts and most of all truck fuel were hard to come by. You could buy everything on the black market, but Lupé’s father simply did not do things like that. Besides, Lupé knew, he’d been pining for the days of his youth when cowboys still occasionally ran cattle the old-fashioned way. So her father, looking younger than he had in twenty years, had decided to do it with horses and ropes and camping out under the stars, bringing some extra hands up from below the border—Mexican citizens not being subject to the rapacious needs of the US military.

Lupé felt she was missing the opportunity of a lifetime.

She looks around her now, trying not to be obvious, sizing up the others in the truck. Five men, one woman. The woman draws her eye: she is an elegant-looking white woman with blonde hair and high cheekbones and an expression like a blank brick wall. Closed off. Shut up tight.

The only one who returns her gaze is a cheerful-looking man, or boy really, with red hair and a complexion that would have doomed him out under the pitiless sun of the prairie. He is gangly, with knees so knobby they look like softballs stuffed into his trousers. He has long, delicate fingers unmarked by scars or callouses.

Not the sort of man she’s been raised around. The men she knows are Mexican or colored or Indian for the most part, compact, quiet, leathery men who can go days without speaking more than six words. Cowboys. Men whose list of personal possessions started with a well-worn saddle and ended with a sweat-stained hat. Some also owned a Bible and/or a Book of Mormon, because Guadalupé’s father was a Latter-Day Saint and he tended to hire fellow Mormons on the theory that they were less likely to get rip-roaring drunk. They were also less likely to get ideas about his young daughter.

Guadalupé’s mother had died of the fever shortly after her birth. Her father, Pedro, who everyone called either Pete or Boss or (behind his back) One-Eyed Pete, was determined to raise his daughter to be a proper lady.

A proper lady who could rope, throw and tie a two-hundred-pound calf in thirteen seconds. Not exactly rodeo time, but quick just the same. A proper lady who could cook beans and rice for twenty men and laugh along as they farted. A proper lady who could string wire, castrate a bull calf, cut a horn, or lay on a branding iron.

Now instead of putting her skills and talents to work, Lupé sits in the back of a truck beneath a threatening British sky being eyeballed by a city boy with red hair and a happy grin.

The truck lurches off, rattling through the hectic camp, weaving through disorganized gaggles of soldiers and daredevil jeeps before heading out into the English countryside.

“Hey,” the redhead says.

“Me?”

“What are you, some kind of Injun?”

Lupé blinks. “No.”

“What are you then?”

“My folks come from Mexico. I come from Utah.”

“Utah, huh? Well, that beats all,” he says and shakes his head. Then he leans forward and extends his hand. “Hank Hobart, from St. Paul, Minnesota. Pleased to meet you.”

She’s been expecting hostility—there are a lot of Texans in the army, and few of them are ready to be civil to Mexicans. So she is non-plussed by his open expression and the outstretched hand. She takes it and feels a softness she’s never felt before in any hand, male or female.

“What do you do, Loopy?”

“Guadalupé,” she corrects. Then, “Or Lupé.”

“Loopy. That’s what I said, isn’t it?” He seems sincere, as though he hears no difference between his pronunciation and hers, which is more loo-pay than his loo-pee.

“Okay, Hank. I live on a cattle ranch.”

His blue eyes go wide and his pale eyebrows rise to comic heights. “You’re a cowgirl?”

“I guess so,” she says, feeling uncomfortable since that title is generally earned by many long years of work. Where she comes from “cowboy” means a whole lot more than major or captain.

“Guess what I do?” Hank asks. He’s tall, lanky, and so pale he’s practically translucent, and he owns an almost comically large nose that belongs on a statue of some noble Roman.

Lupé shakes her head. “No idea.”

“I play trombone in an orchestra.” He mimes moving a trombone slide.

This is so far from anything Lupé might have guessed that for a moment she can only frown and stare.

“You like jazz?” Hobart asks.

Lupé shrugs. “Like Tommy Dorsey?” It’s a lucky guess. There is no radio on the ranch, and what she knows of music is restricted to cowboy tunes and church hymns. But some of her school friends have radios, and she’s heard a few of the big names.

He nods. “Best trombone player around, I guess. Man, if I ever got that good . . . If ever ‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You’ comes on the radio, sit down and open your ears and, man, that is one cool T-bone.” He has a look on his face that Lupé associates with religious ecstasy. Then he snaps back to reality. “So, where you figure we’re going?”

Lupé shrugs. This is more conversation than she’s had in a long time.

“Reckon we’re going to France,” Hank says. He looks concerned by the idea.

Lupé nods. “Reckon so.”

“Hell, yes, we’re going to France,” another male GI, a big slab of beef with an incongruous baby face, sandy hair and tiny blue eyes interjects. “We’re going to finish off the Krauts. They won’t know what’s hit ’em.” He bounces his legs a bit, either nervousness or anticipation.

Neither Hank nor Lupé is excited at this prospect and conversation dies out. They ride for an hour on roads choked with trucks and jeeps, ammo wagons and half-tracks, 155 Long Tom artillery pieces towed behind trucks, and even Sherman tanks. All of it, everything, is heading southeast.

At last the truck pulls into a new camp with well-ordered tents in endless rows. It looks remarkably like the last camp, and the one before that. The army, Lupé notes, owns a lot of tents.

“Last stop! Everyone off,” the driver yells.

They are met by a woman corporal who appears to be in a permanent state of irritation, rather like Sergeant Bonemaker. The corporal snatches paperwork, glances, and says, “All right, you three are going to Fifth Platoon. Report to Sergeant Sticklin.” In response to their blank, sheepish stares the corporal points and says, “Go that way till you come to the company road, turn right. You know your rights from your lefts, don’t you? Go right till you see a tent with a sign that says Fifth Platoon. Got it? Good. Now get lost.”

The three detailed to Fifth Platoon are Lupé, Hank and the eager fellow with the baby face who is named Rudy J. Chester. He makes a point of the “J.” He’s from Main Line, Philadelphia, and he says that as if it’s supposed to mean something special.

They find the company road, and after some questioning of busy noncoms they find the right tent. Sitting in a camp chair outside the tent are a male staff sergeant with a prominent widow’s peak, pale skin and intelligent eyes, and a woman buck sergeant with her mud-caked boots up on an empty C-ration crate and a tin canteen cup of steaming coffee in her hand.

“Here they are,” the staff sergeant says, at once weary and amused.

“Those are mine?” the woman buck sergeant asks. There is no attempt to disguise a critical, dubious look. “These are what I get in exchange for Cat Preeling?”

“Look at it this way, it’s three for one.”

“Except Cat can handle a BAR and won’t wet herself the first time she hears an 88.” The woman sergeant stands up and now Lupé sees that she has a long, curved knife strapped to her thigh—definitely not army issue.

“Line up,” the woman sergeant says. “No, not at attention, do I look like an officer? Is this a parade ground? I’m Sergeant Richlin. You can call me Sarge or you can call me Sergeant Richlin.”

Lupé looks closely and sees that amazingly the sergeant is quite young, probably no older than she is herself. Sergeant Richlin is a bit taller than Lupé, paled by weeks living with British weather, dark hair chopped man-short, blue eyes alert and probing.

“How about I call you sweetheart?”

This from the big boy from Philadelphia, Rudy J. Chester. He’s grinning, and for a moment Lupé is convinced that Sergeant Richlin will let it go. Then she sees the way Sticklin draws a sharp breath, starts to grin, looks down to hide it, shakes his head slowly side-to-side and in a loud stage whisper says, “The replacements are here.”

There’s the sound of cots being overturned and a rush of feet. A pretty blonde corporal bursts through the tent flap, blinking at the gray light as if she’s just woken up, glances around and says, “Uh oh.” And then, “Geer! Beebee! Get out here. I believe one of the replacements just back-talked Richlin.”

There’s a second flurry of movement and a young man with shrewd eyes, and a big galoot with an impressive forehead come piling out, faces alight with anticipation.

“What’s your name?” Sergeant Richlin asks.

“Rudy J. Chester. Sweetheart.” He grins left, grins right, sees faces that are either appalled or giddy with expectation, and then slowly, slowly seems to guess that maybe, just maybe, he’s said the wrong thing.

Rio Richlin steps up close to him, her face inches from his. He is at least four inches taller and outweighs her by better than fifty pounds. Which is why it’s so surprising that in less time than it takes to blink twice he is on the ground, face down, with his right wrist in Richlin’s grip, his arm stretched backward and twisted, and Richlin’s weight on her knee pressed against his back-bent elbow.

“Oh, come on, Richlin!” the big galoot says. “Should of used the knife!”

The pretty blonde shakes her head in mock disgust. “She’s gone soft, Geer. It’s all this high living.”

Richlin lets Rudy J. Chester writhe and struggle for a few seconds before explaining, “The average human elbow can be broken with just fourteen pounds of pressure, Private Sweetheart. How many pounds of pressure would you guess I can apply against your elbow?”

Chester struggles a bit more before finally saying, “More than fourteen pounds, I guess.”

“More than fourteen pounds I guess, Sergeant Richlin.” She gives his arm a twist that threatens to pop his shoulder out of its socket.

“More than fourteen pounds I guess, Sergeant Richlin!”

Rio releases him. The blonde corporal mimes applause. The big corporal named Geer goes back under cover. Beebee shakes his head and mutters, “I missed the first part. Can we do it over?”

Private Rudy J. Chester gets to his feet.

“Now listen to me, the three of you,” Richlin says. “This is Second Squad, Fifth Platoon, Able Company, 119th Division. This is a veteran division, a veteran platoon. Everyone in this squad has been in combat. You have not. Therefore everyone in this squad outranks you. Are we clear on that?”

Three voices say, “Yes, Sergeant.”

“Okay.” Now Richlin allows her voice to soften. “We have a few days, at best a week, to get you ready for the real thing. The real thing will be like nothing you learned at basic. Whatever ideas you have, get them out of your head, because you know nothing.”

Three heads nod. Lupé thinks, I should have mouthed off and maybe she’d break my arm and send me home.

At the same time she thinks she’s never before met any woman who could convincingly threaten to break a man’s arm. Let alone a freckle-faced gringa who can’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds.

“This is Sergeant Sticklin, the platoon sergeant,” Richlin goes on, explaining in a tone that suggests she’s talking to the slow-witted. “Here’s the way it goes: Franklin Delano Roosevelt gives an order to General Marshall who gives an order to General Eisenhower who gives an order to General O’Callaghan, who gives an order to Colonel Brace, who gives an order to Captain Passey, who gives an order to Lieutenant Horne who gives an order to Stick—Sergeant Sticklin—and then Sergeant Sticklin and I try to figure out how to carry out that order without getting you people killed. Is that about right, Stick?”

“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.

She pulls up to the parking area and spots a tall, young officer trotting toward her. He looks serious until he notices that she is watching him and then breaks out a big grin.

Strand Braxton throws his arms around Rio, lifts her off her feet and swings her around. They kiss once, quickly, then a second time more slowly.

Yes, Rio notes, I do still like that.

“Gosh, it’s great to see you!” Strand says. “The MPs called me from the gate and I thought they were pulling my leg.”

“Sorry I didn’t give you any warning, but a pass came up and I grabbed it.”

“How long can you stay?”

“Well, I have temporary possession of a major’s jeep, so I’ve promised to have it back to his driver within twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours! But . . . but we’re on.”

The phrase confuses Rio for a moment. “You’ve got a mission?”

He nods and for a moment his smile crumbles before being replaced with some effort by a less-convincing smile. “Probably a milk run. We haven’t been briefed yet. Come on, I’ll get you a cup of tea and you can meet some of the boys.”

“I thought you fly-boys spent all your spare time drinking and carousing,” Rio teases as they walk arm in arm, taking exaggeratedly long, synchronized strides.

“I don’t know where that idea got started,” Strand says, shaking his head. “No one would want to be hungover. Or even low on sleep. Now, once you get past the Channel and the Messerschmitts start coming up . . .” He laughs, but the laugh is as off as his smile. “Well, then you might want a drink.”

Rio looks at his profile, but can’t read anything in particular, beyond the fact that Strand looks tired. Tired and older.

I suppose I do too.

“Hey, are you taking me to officer country?” Rio asks, hesitating at the door to what is labeled “Officers’ Dining Club and Dance Emporium.” The sign is in official block letters, but is also obviously not the official army designation. Below it a second, smaller, hand-lettered sign: “God’s Waiting Room.”

Strand waves off her concern. “We don’t stand on ceremony much. And we sure don’t get enough pretty girls dropping by to push one away!”

Inside, Rio finds a long, rectangular room with a grab bag of chairs ranging from stern metal office chairs to plush parlor chairs and a scattering of low tables. The room smells of tea—a habit some flyers have picked up from the RAF, the Royal Air Force—as well as the usual coffee and the inevitable smoke. Perhaps two dozen flyers are present, sprawled or sitting upright, many with books in their hands and attentive expressions on their faces. A radio plays Glenn Miller’s ‘Sunrise Serenade.’

“We just came from briefing,” Strand says apologetically. “We’ll be heading off soon.”

A very pretty redheaded pilot gives Rio a nod. Recognition? Comradeship?

Guilt?

“I know I should have waited till we had a time set, but you know how it is,” Rio says. “Bad timing. But your letter did say as soon as possible.”

“Well, I was hoping we’d have a few days in London,” he says. Addressing the room in a loud voice he says, “Boys, this is Rio, my girl, so watch your language and keep the wolf whistles to yourselves.”

Rio doubts that she is worth a wolf whistle. She hasn’t worn makeup or fingernail polish in a very long time. She’s dressed in a uniform that does not leave a lot of possibilities for showing leg, and her hair is the now-regulation two inches long.

And then there’s her koummya, which she should certainly have left with Jenou. But the koummya, a curved ceremonial-but-quite-functional dagger she’d picked up in the Tunis bazaar, has become something more than just a knife; it has acquired the status of talisman. It is her lucky rabbit’s foot. She knows it’s superstitious, but without it she feels vulnerable. Even in camp, where she shares a tent with three other NCOs, she keeps it by her cot, always within reach.

Many eyes in the room go straight to the koummya, but then they move on, checking out her face and her figure, neither of which Rio thinks likely to please anyone, but smiles break out, and waves and nods.

And one wolf whistle.

“How long do you have?”

Strand glances at a wall clock and says, “If I trust my first officer and crew to handle loading and fueling, I’ve got four hours free.”

Rio’s heart sinks. Four hours ? It’s too long for a chat, too short a time for anything deeper. She has come here to reach a decision. To reach it with Strand, hopefully. To decide what exactly they are to each other.

No promises have been made, no proposal offered or accepted. But somehow Rio has felt that it was there, implied, assumed. An understanding. But she’s not sure that’s how Strand sees it. Maybe what he understands is different from what she thinks.

More importantly, Rio has changed.

When she first enlisted it had almost been a whim. Yes, her big sister Rachel had died fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, and yes, that formed part of her motivation, but when she is honest with herself Rio knows that she really joined because Jenou was joining, and because like Jenou she was bored with life in Gedwell Falls, California. And because she’d felt swept up. Like the great tide of history had risen around her and carried her off, a piece of flotsam in a flood.

She had never meant to be near the front. No one thought when the Supreme Court handed down its decision making women subject to the draft and eligible for enlistment that women and girls would end up in the thick of the action. But the army, with much internal fighting and several high-profile resignations, decided to treat female recruits just like the men. Some of that was male generals hoping to see women fail. Some of it was women (and some men) interested in equality of the sexes. Much of it was just a rigid bureaucracy not accustomed to dividing assignments by gender.

Rio had lied about her age and signed up in the autumn of 1942, at the same time as her . . . what to call it? Friendship? Her friendship with Strand Braxton? Autumn of 1942 was almost two years ago. She’d been an average, barely-seventeen-year-old girl, a girl with homework assignments and chores. Then had come basic training. And a brief sojourn in Britain for more training. Followed by Rio’s first encounter with combat during the fiasco of Kasserine Pass in North Africa.

Since then she had been to Sicily and Italy and been shot at, shelled, strafed and bombed. She had marched many miles, carried many loads, dug many holes. She had used slit trenches and bushes, bathed in her helmet, changed sanitary pads in burning buildings.

Most profoundly she had gone from heart-stopping panic the first time she lined the sights of her M1 up on a human target and taken his life, to becoming a professional combat soldier. A professional killer.

And she had moved from a private, with no responsibility but to obey orders, to a sergeant, with her own squad of eleven soldiers to look after.

Any baby fat she’d ever had was long gone. She was tall, lean and strong, with calloused hands and stubby, broken nails. When she moved it was with quick economy, efficient, wasting not a calorie of energy. And something had happened to her voice: it was still hers, but now it carried undertones that spoke of confidence, control and command.

She had also acquired several unladylike habits. She still smoked less than many, but smoke she did because when it was cold in a foxhole a cigarette was life’s only small pleasure. And she drank on occasion, not usually to excess, but with enough devotion that there was now a flask of whiskey in her pack. When she ate it was like a starved wolf. When she spoke it was with less and less concern for curse words.

And then there was the fact that she had slept with Strand.

Yes.

That fact had never quite been . . . what? Figured out? Adjudicated? Processed?

The next time she’d seen Strand she had been leading a patrol that ended up rescuing a wounded Strand after his plane was shot down over Sicily.

And that too had not been processed.

War was hell on relationships.

“Four hours?” Rio says. “Well, let’s make the most of them.” Only when the words are out of her mouth does it occur to her that he may take this as a suggestion of sex. She blushes, but at the same time, would it be such a terrible way to spend the four hours? It would distract them both from the weightier questions. A pleasant way to avoid . . . well, to avoid the very reason she had come here.

“Listen, there’s a sort of gazebo behind the building, it’s a place where couples sometimes go to be . . . to have privacy.” He winces, obviously concerned that she is misreading his intentions just as she is concerned about him misreading hers.

The gazebo is more of a lean-to, a shelter enclosed on three sides but open to the airfield. Rio sees crew working on the planes, low tractors hauling trailers loaded with bombs, boxes of machine-gun ammunition being handed up through the belly hatches. Hoses crisscross the ground, pulsing with aviation fuel.

They sit side by side on a little bench, pastoral quiet contrasting with the feverish activity on the field.

“You know, Rio, I was quite proud of you when I heard about the Silver Star. Why didn’t you tell me? I had to read about it in Stars and Stripes ! One of the fellows showed it to me.”

“It’s not such an important thing,” Rio says.

“Nonsense, it’s a very important thing. It seems you are rather brave.” He smiles. But again, it’s not quite the right smile.

Rio shakes her head. “You know how it is. Everyone does their job as best they can, and one person gets singled out for a medal.”

“You saved my life,” he says flatly. He holds up a hand to silence her protest. “I won’t deny that I’ve taken some ribbing over that. How I had to be rescued by my girl. How my girl has a Silver Star.”

There is an awkward silence. Rio doesn’t know what to say. Is she supposed to be ashamed of having carried off her mission? She glances at him and tries to read his mood from the set of his jaw. Yes, she realizes with amazement, he does actually seem to resent her, a little at least.

Or am I just imagining things?

“Should I have left you there?” Rio asks.

He shakes his head slowly. “No, sweetheart, of course not. It’s just . . .”

“Just what?”

“Well, it’s hard, that’s all. See, I’ve missed the last two missions because of mechanical problems, all perfectly proper, I was following standing orders. But on top of, well, you, there’s that, and some of the fellows take the joke a bit too far is all.”

“I’m sorry, Strand. But there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“The story in Stars and Stripes even mentioned that I was delirious and singing Christmas carols.”

True enough. When Rio’s patrol had found Strand’s plane, he had been wounded and out of his head. But the detail rankles Strand. His mouth twists at the memory.

“I should think people would find that funny and endearing,” Rio says. She frowns at the sound of her own words. Is this how she speaks? In this diffident, apologetic tone? She has the sense that “endearing” may be the first three syllable word she’s spoken in months. Her sergeant’s vocabulary tends toward words of one syllable, generally either expressed in a low mutter or an irritated shout.

Jenou’s right: I have changed.

“I’m a B-17 pilot,” Strand says heatedly. “I’m not meant to be endearing or funny, Rio. I’m the youngest officer here, even my radioman is older, so, you can imagine.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“I never should have let you enlist,” Strand mutters.

“It wasn’t your decision.”

“Oh, believe me, I know that! I let Jenou talk you into this madness. I can’t imagine why they haven’t sent you home to sell war bonds, you’d be a natural.” He looks at her, forces a grin and adds, “Of course, they’d doll you up.”

“They offered,” Rio says.

He stares at her. “What? You mean they offered to send you home? Did you refuse?”

Rio shrugs. “I thought I’d be more useful here looking after my squad.”

That’s not quite the whole truth. She had been tempted to go stateside and had thought especially hard of refusing the promotion to sergeant, until an Army Intelligence sergeant named Rainy Schulterman, one of her fellow medal recipients, had guilted her into it. After painting a word picture of Nazi oppression, Schulterman had talked about green kids from Nebraska landing on French beaches and going up against the Wehrmacht.

“They’ll need people who know how to fight and how to keep guys from getting killed. What do we call those people, Richlin? What do we call those people, Rio Richlin from Cow Paddy or Bugtussle or wherever the hell you’re from?”

Schulterman had supplied her own answer.

“Honey, I hate to tell you, but they call those people sergeants.”

Now here I am, Rio thinks, Sergeant Rio Richlin, sitting awkwardly with her resentful . . . boyfriend? Beau?

Fiancé?

Strand looks down and shakes his head. “Do you have any idea how many of the flyers here would go home tomorrow if they could? You don’t . . . I mean, sure, I know you’ve been in the fighting, but you can’t imagine what it’s like for us.”

“You’re right,” Rio snaps, turning more sergeantly by degrees. “I don’t know what it’s like to come back at the end of a patrol to find a comfy bed and a hot shower.”

Strand waves a hand dismissively. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just . . . we lose men on almost every mission. You remember Lefty? You met him. Me 109, you know, Kraut fighter plane, caught him over Germany. Six of his crew were killed or injured in the first pass, two engines out. Lefty shot through the cheek but still trying to get his bird home. He went down in the Channel. Three of his crew bailed out and were picked up, but not Lefty.”

Rio is on the point of retorting that she knows quite well what an Me 109 is, having been strafed more than once, and with a list of the deaths of her own friends, but that’s nuts; surely, this is not some competition to see who is having the worst war?

“I’m sorry to hear about Lefty.”

“You’ll be sorry to hear about me soon,” he says with surprising savagery. He clasps his hands together and Rio sees that he is trembling. “Sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Never mind me. I’m usually in a foul mood before a mission.”

“There’s nothing wrong in being afraid,” Rio says. “In fact—”

“Who says I’m afraid?” he snaps.

“Everyone is afraid, Strand.”

He snorts derisively. “Everyone but you, Rio. Look at you. What would your mother have to say about that wicked knife? Have you sent them a copy of your citation? You charged a squad of Wehrmacht by yourself !” His voice rises toward shrill. “You blew up my old plane and saved the Norden bomb sight and came near to being blown up yourself. My God, Rio, you’ve become the very model for all the rabble-rousers who support this whole crazy notion!”

“Crazy notion?” The strange thing is that as she speaks those two words, she recognizes the silky menace in her tone. It’s pure Mackie, her sergeant during basic training. If things were not so tense she might laugh at the comparison. Mackie could terrify a recruit just by the way she walked.

“Yes!” Strand says. “Yes! I’ll say it: crazy notion. Just because you’ve become a good soldier does not mean that it makes any sense for women to be in this war!”

“You have women pilots, women air crew. I saw a rather pretty redhead . . .”

“Sally? At least she would have the sense to go home if the opportunity came up. She agrees with me, with, well, everyone really. Women are meant to be the gentler sex. That’s the grand design. Women aren’t meant to . . . to . . .”

“Kill Germans?” The same Mackie menace.

“My God, Rio, listen to yourself. You positively sound as if you are threatening me!”

Rio jumps to her feet. “You’re shouting at me, Strand.”

His look is cold. His hands remain clasped, squeezing to stop the trembling. “You’ve made me a laughing stock. Fellows ask me when we’re married whether I’ll be doing the cooking and cleaning.”

When we are married?

“I don’t recall agreeing to marry you. For that matter, I don’t recall you asking.”

He frowns, puzzled. “It’s understood, surely? You gave yourself to me; did you think I wouldn’t do the right thing?”

“So . . . you would marry me from a sense of obligation? Duty?”

“No, no, of course I didn’t mean that.” He retreats quickly, but the resentment still comes through. “I love you. Of course I love you. I just sometimes wish . . .” He hangs his head. “I just wish sometimes you were still the sweet, innocent young beauty I gave a ride to in my uncle’s old Jenny.”

“That was a long time ago,” Rio says. Her voice gentles at the memory. Strand’s uncle had a Jenny, a Curtiss JN-4 biplane he used as a crop duster. Strand had already known how to fly and he took her up over Gedwell Falls in what was the most thrilling moment of her life. Up till then.

She had squeezed into a single cockpit with Strand, leaning back against him, feeling for the first time what a man’s body felt like.

She wouldn’t, couldn’t lie to herself: many times she had wished she was back there, back then, being that version of herself. It wasn’t her lost virginal naiveté that made her nostalgic, but rather the feeling that she had changed so much there was no longer any going back. The male soldiers would return home some day and would be seen as more than they had been, stronger, braver. But the women? No one knew how women who had been to war would be received.

Strand pictured her in an apron. So had she, once. And who knew, maybe she would see herself that way again.

Mrs. Strand Braxton?

Mommy?

Baking cupcakes for the PTA fundraiser? Wearing a nice summer dress to church? Excusing herself from men’s conversation after dinner to go to the parlor with the other ladies to talk about hairstyles and movie stars and brag about little Strand Jr.’s A-plus in algebra?

That had been her mother’s life, a life that had once been inevitable, but now felt very, very far away.

But even as she drifts toward those melancholy thoughts, a part of her mind is elsewhere, wondering if she could transfer Rudy J. Chester out of her squad; wondering if Lupé was as tough as she acted; wondering whether Geer is working them hard in her absence.

The silence stretches on too long.

“I guess we won’t figure out what’s what until it’s all over,” she says.

Strand snorts derisively. “There probably won’t be an after, Rio. The Old Man says the Luftwaffe isn’t what it used to be, but just about every mission a bird goes down. It’s a matter of mathematics. Every mission . . . a Kraut fighter, ack-ack, mechanical breakdowns . . .”

“You can’t think about that,” Rio says. “You just have to focus on your objective.” She very nearly pronounces it OB-jective, the way Sergeant Cole always did.

Suddenly Strand stands too. He turns cold eyes on Rio. “No, that’s you, Rio. Not me. Me, I think about it. I’m not a machine.” He makes an effort to end things pleasantly. “Speaking of machines, I need to go and see to mine. It’s good to see you, Rio.”

“Yes. Take care of yourself, Strand. Goodbye.”

That last word is to his back.

3

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—FOURAS, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

Rainy Schulterman—very recently commissioned Second Lieutenant Rainy Schulterman—parallels the shore in an inflatable boat paddled through the misty night by four American sailors, one of whom is seething and muttering to himself, while the other three stifle laughter beneath broad, conspiratorial grins.

Rainy is not laughing. Landing on French soil in the summer of 1944 is about as dangerous a thing as you can do short of actual combat. This is her second mission into enemy territory. The first one had been a fiasco—unqualified officers making foolish plans had landed her in the last place on earth she or any other member of Army Intelligence wished to be: a Gestapo jail.

Rainy had been afraid then. She is afraid now. Fear often speaks in her mother’s voice, asking why? Why are you doing this, Rainy? You’ll get hurt, Rainy. You’ll die, Rainy.

But she has learned something about fear: you must always listen to it, but you need not give in to it.

Rainy grits her teeth and wishes the sailors would act a little less like, well, boys. Maybe they aren’t worried about being picked up by the Gestapo or the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) or even the Abwehr, but she is. The Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence arm of the SS, are animals like the Gestapo. From the Abwehr she would have expected firm but proper treatment—if she were wearing a uniform—the Abwehr are soldiers, after all. But Rainy is not wearing a uniform, she is dressed in widow’s weeds, a worn old black dress shaped as stylishly as a potato sack, an obviously hand-knitted black sweater, a droopy, patched overcoat and chunky black oxfords. The Abwehr might hang her on the spot as a spy, while the Gestapo or the SD would torture her and then put her up against a wall.

That thought comes with vivid memories of men and women who she had not known, shoved against a wall she had not been able to see. She had heard their cries, their pleas for mercy, and their brave patriotic songs cut short by the crash of rifle fire. But all she had been able to see from her vantage point was their blood running down over the filthy window of her cell.

The remaining member of the little boat’s crew is an older man. He’s the one seething and, from time to time, shaking his head. Rainy shifts down the bench.

“Don’t let it trouble you,” she says in a barely audible whisper near the older rower’s ear. “I don’t.”

“This new captain’s a . . .” the sailor pauses, searching for the appropriate insult before coming up with, “. . . a landsman.”

It amuses and even touches Rainy that the old petty officer is concerned for her feelings. The trip down from Southampton to this insignificant town on the Bay of Biscay has not been pleasant. An undisciplined and all-male crew had run through every version of leer, wolf whistle and mangled French proposition. The phrase “voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soir, ”—would you sleep with me this evening—had been carefully learned by every serviceman with even a slight chance of reaching France, where the women were reputed to be plentiful and plenty ready. The line had been repeatedly tried out on Rainy.

There had also been a couple of unfunny practical jokes, the sort of pranks no one would have dreamed of playing on a male officer, not even a lowly second lieutenant. Not even a lowly army second lieutenant aboard a naval vessel.

Just before Rainy had gone over the side and climbed down to the waiting rubber boat, half a dozen sailors had said a cheery “farewell” by exposing themselves.

Yes. Definitely not the sort of thing enlisted men would have pulled on a male officer.

But then, Rainy reminds herself, they are boys, mostly. For most of them it is their first time at sea aside from training, the closest they have come to the war. In many cases it is their first time away from home, certainly their first time abroad.

Anyway, she has bigger worries.

They come to shallow water, with the waves piling up a bit, seizing and surging the boat forward. A single light shines in the dark village, perhaps over the church door. Off to the left Rainy sees the old Napoleonic-era Vauban fort, just like she’s seen in the aerial photographs. It is a square with stumpy towers at the corners and a squat stone keep rising in the middle. It even has a moat according to the photos.

They are to pass the fort then turn toward shore. A smaller beach will be there and—she profoundly hopes—a member of the FFI, the French Forces of the Interior, which people mostly called the French Resistance, or the maquis.

If there is no one waiting for her, the orders say she is to abort the mission and return to the destroyer. This makes sense unless the ship you’re returning to is like some disreputable fraternity house.

The contact had better be there.

The rowers are no longer thinking of giggling by the time the bow scrapes sand—it has been a long, hard row. The destroyer captain, in addition to being no disciplinarian and a landsman, is not overly brave and has kept his ship well out of sight of the shore.

To her left now a bluff blocks her view of the Vauban fort. To her right the beach curves in a perfect crescent. There are trees along the shore, but of the sort that shade homes, not of the sort that conceal machine-gun emplacements.

She hopes.

One of the sailors is panting far too loudly.

“Silence!” Rainy snaps in an urgent whisper.

“Who the fug do you think—” the sailor says in a nearly normal speaking voice which anyone—French or German—anyone within a hundred yards could hear.

Rainy puts the barrel of her Walther PPK—a German weapon, a souvenir—against the bridge of his nose. He goes cross-eyed to focus on it.

She puts a finger to her lips and says, “Shhh.”

Silence. It extends. Nothing but the soft shush shush s-i-i-i-g-h of the waves and the flapping of a decorative flag on the short pole that marks the rendezvous.

Then comes the crunch of footsteps on sand. Rainy strains to hear. Yes, just one set of feet. One person.

He appears as formless movement within shadow, then comes at last to where the fluorescence of the hissing surf illuminates his . . . no, her face.

In French Rainy says, “Où est la tortue? ” Which in English means, “Where is the tortoise?”

A girl’s voice, high-pitched despite her attempt to lower it to a husky whisper, says, “Allée à la mer. ” Gone to sea.

“Is it the season for it?”

“Tortoise is always in season.”

With the exchange of code phrases concluded, Rainy exhales. “All right, Navy. Put my gear ashore and you are free to go.” There’s some grumbling, but it’s very, very quiet grumbling.

Rainy slips the automatic pistol into the leather holster sewn into the back lining of her formless black coat.

“I’m Lieutenant Jones. Alice Jones.” She extends her hand.

The girl, a rather lovely young woman of maybe seventeen, shakes her hand firmly. “Marie DuPont.”

This, like Alice Jones, is most likely an alias.

“I have some things to carry, if you don’t mind helping,” Rainy says.

“Of course!”

They divide the weight: a radio encased in a rubberized, waterproof container; a locked tin box containing five thousand dollars’ worth of counterfeit Vichy French francs and German Reichsmarks; a satchel containing thirty-two pounds of TNT in half-pound blocks helpfully labeled, “High Explosive” and “TNT” in red block letters on tan cardboard, and, “Dangerous;” a separate, smaller canvas pouch with thirty-two fuses; and a broken-down-for-easier-shipping Fusil Mitrailleur Modèle 1924 M29, the standard French infantry light machine gun, with two hundred rounds of ammunition.

All told it is something like a hundred and twenty-five pounds of gear and it is a struggle for the two of them to drag and haul most of it across the beach to the road. Waiting there is an aged Renault, still with wooden spoked wheels, which has been somewhat crudely remodeled as a panel truck.

Seeing them struggling, a man emerges from the Renault to help, gathering what they’ve left. A burning cigarette butt illuminates a craggy, whiskered face. They dispense with introductions and quickly load the gear into the back and drive off.

They go through town which takes very little time, Fouras being no metropolis, then they head east, keeping near to the north bank of the Charente River, and come at last to a small wood and tin shack beside a tiny jetty.

They unload the gear onto dirt and the Renault promptly drives away.

“Do not move, mademoiselle,” Marie says. “They will wish to look at you.”

Rainy nods. She raises her hands above her head and slowly turns a complete circle. She can’t imagine what the unseen watchers will be looking for, but she generally applauds caution.

The door of the shed opens. It is dark within.

“After you,” Marie says.

Rainy hesitates for a moment to let her senses take in the scene, the area, the placement of a row boat at the jetty, a second shed a few dozen feet away. She notes deep tire tracks in the mud at her feet, too big to be the little Renault. Then, satisfied, she steps into the shack.

Hands grab her, twist her around to face the wall, and begin a rude examination of her body. The searching hand quickly finds her Walther and draws it out. Then they find the knife strapped to her thigh beneath the dress.

A match flares and a flame glows from an oil lamp set on a small table. The dim light reveals two people. One is an older man, short, dark complexion, pitted as if by smallpox or an adolescent bout of severe acne. He wears a shabby gray suit that looks as if it was cut for a man two sizes larger. His eyes are yellowed but alert, suspicious, cautious, skeptical.

Rainy is obscurely gratified to see that he is wearing a dark blue beret, just exactly what she expects of a maquis fighter.

The second man is younger, perhaps midtwenties, a bare inch taller than Rainy herself. He has an impressive pile of dark hair, clear dark eyes, an idealist’s wide brow, and a nose that looks as if its lines were drawn by an artist. He’s a good-looking fellow, or would be if not for the surly expression on his lips. He strikes Rainy as wishing to convey that he is not impressed by her. Which is fine, since she’s not bowled over by him either.

Marie does introductions. The younger man is her big brother, Étienne. The older man is called Monsieur Faisan, literally Mr. Pheasant, yet another cover name presumably.

Faisan jerks his head at Étienne and Marie and they scuttle off to haul the boxes of weapons and explosives inside. Rainy keeps the box of currency with her. She eyes the Walther on the table, noting the way the butt is turned, rehearsing a desperate grab, should it be necessary. Passwords are all well and good, but many an agent has been picked up in this region. She can assume nothing.

No one has yet spoken directly to Rainy and she’s content to leave it that way as Marie and Étienne unwind oilcloth and take out weapons and explosives and the precious radio.

Faisan when he speaks, speaks only French.

“Des beaux cadeaux,” Faisan says. Nice presents.

Rainy’s French is not as good as her German. Good enough to fool the average Wehrmacht soldier manning a checkpoint, but not a true Frenchman.

“You’re welcome,” she says in French.

“You’re a woman,” Faisan says, looking as though he’d like to spit.

“And you’re a smuggler,” Rainy says.

Faisan’s brow rises. Étienne moves slightly forward as if he’s going to do something, then subsides.

“Why do you say that?” Faisan asks.

Rainy shrugs. “Isolated shack by a river, a second shack with a padlocked door, tracks made by a heavy truck. And you seem cautious but not paranoid, meaning you feel fairly safe here. So you are a smuggler, and I’m guessing the Germans know it.”

“Why would you guess that?”

Rainy shrugs. “You’re not nervous enough. The Germans know you’re a smuggler, and they don’t mind because I’m guessing they get a cut.”

Suddenly Faisan’s face transforms. He smiles, revealing various nicotine-stained teeth interrupted by gaps. “A woman, but not a stupid woman. Welcome to France, madame . . .”

“Mademoiselle,” Rainy corrects. “But more to the point, Lieutenant Alice Jones, US Army.”

“Where is the rest of the invasion force, did you forget to bring them?” Étienne says.

“Never fear, monsieur, they are coming.”

Faisan shrugs as if to say he hopes so, but will believe it when he sees it.

Marie fetches a bottle of cognac and four small glasses. She pours and hands them around.

“La France libre,” Rainy says, and they drink a toast. To a free France.

“Aux alliés,” Faisan counters. To the Allies.

Faisan sits in a rickety chair, suddenly looking tired. Rainy wonders if Faisan has been sick recently. He does not look well.

Étienne takes over the conversation. “And now, with all pleasantries aside, Lieutenant—”

“Alice will do,” Rainy interrupts.

“As you wish. Mademoiselle Alice. We welcome you, and we welcome your gifts, but why are you come?”

“The Das Reich division.”

None of the three French people are surprised. Waffen SS tank divisions often carry names as well as numbers, and the Das Reich, also known as the Second SS Panzer Division, is a name all-too familiar to the resistance as well as to Allied war planners.

“They aren’t here,” Étienne says.

“No, they’re spread between Limoges and Valence D’Agen, three hundred kilometers from here,” Rainy says.

“Then you know all that we know.”

“The brass would like to know more: morale, the condition of their equipment, fuel supplies, ammunition on hand . . .”

“They wish to see how quickly the Das Reich can head north,” Étienne says smugly.

Rainy shrugs a non-committal confirmation. It is no secret that the Allies are planning an invasion, the whole world knows it. And it’s no secret that it will come somewhere in Brittany. When the invasion comes, the Das Reich division will be moved north to counterattack. Panzer divisions, tank divisions, are an obsession of Allied war planners, especially the well-equipped, well-indoctrinated Waffen SS panzer divisions. The Das Reich may have as many as 20,000 men and 200 tanks as well as artillery. The Das Reich is a big, strong, brutal weapon, a massive iron fist, and if it reaches the invasion beaches it could literally grind vulnerable Allied troops under its tank treads.

Étienne arrives at a decision after a quick glance at Faisan. “We cannot deliver you to Valence, we have no . . . connections . . . there. But we can get you to Limoges. The woods southwest of there are full of panzers under cover.”

Rainy nods. One step at a time. “All right.”

“We travel by boat up the river to Cognac. There we will meet a lorry that makes regular runs to Paris and can make a stop in Limoges. Do you have identity papers?”

Rainy produces a forged identity document naming her Madame Nicole Amadou, French war widow. Étienne looks at the document carefully. “This is good work.”

“I’ll pass that along to the SOE—they made it for us.” The SOE, British Special Operations Executive, are far more experienced at forging French documents than US Army Intelligence.

“We will travel as fiancés, engaged to be married. Marie will accompany us as chaperone, so have no concern on that score.” He waves her away, as if she had been hoping for a romantic interlude with him. “We will say that we are en route to Limoges where our mother lives and where the ceremony will be held.”

“You’re a little old to play my fiancé,” Rainy says bluntly.

Étienne makes a rude noise. “We lost almost two million men in the first war, mademoiselle, and two hundred thousand plus more than a million prisoners in this war; most of the able-bodied men have been sent off to work in German factories as little better than slaves. There are not so many French men left that you can be choosy.”

Rainy nods acceptance.

“It will be very dangerous,” Étienne says. “If we are caught . . . well, you cannot imagine what the Gestapo do to prisoners.”

Rainy doesn’t like his superior tone at all. And she does not wish to spend the next week or more being condescended to—she’s had quite enough of being treated like a second-class citizen because of her sex. She raises the little gas lantern from the table and holds it close to her face. The light picks out the small scar that bisects her lower lip, and the scar where surgeons went in to mend her broken jaw. She pulls back her hair to reveal a scar on the side of her neck. Then she unfastens the top buttons of her dress and pulls the collar aside to show the crooked collarbone beneath a mass of scar tissue. There’s more, much more, but this much will do.

“I know exactly what the Gestapo does to prisoners,” Rainy says.

Étienne falls silent and withdraws from the circle of light. Marie edges closer, fascinated and horrified. But it is Faison who rises, comes near, and with surprising tenderness touches the bump of her badly-healed collarbone.

He then raises his hand from her shoulder and turns it so she can see that there are no nails on his fingers. Tearing out fingernails is a favorite of Nazi torturers.

“Pour us two glasses,” Faisan says and Marie complies. Faisan hands one to Rainy, takes the other himself. He makes no toast, says nothing at all, but their eyes meet, his old and sick, hers young and still vital. The old French smuggler and the young female US Army lieutenant have nothing to say to each other that can be turned into words.

They drink. He lifts the Walther from the table and hands it back to Rainy.

“Et bien,” Faisan says with a sigh. “Dépêchez vous.”

Get going.

4

FRANGIE MARR—LST 86, PORTSMOUTH HARBOR, UK

“You’re killing me, Doc. You’re killing me dead.”

Sergeant Frangie Marr, frequently known as “Doc,” stands before a tier of bunks six high. The lowest one is occupied by a black man with the extravagant name of Vanderbilt DeRay, who looks like someone who has crawled to hell, spent a week, and just got back.

Frangie Marr has seen many a combat wound in her time as an army medic, but even gut-shot GIs often looked better than a GI who’d been desperately seasick for forty-eight hours. Seasick without even leaving port, except for a false launch that had to be called back due to bad weather.

The air in the hold of the LST reeks of gasoline, engine fumes, human feces from a malfunctioning bathroom—called a “head” aboard ship—human sweat and human vomit, and it is so thick with cigarette smoke that Frangie doubts it contains enough oxygen to sustain human life. That is bad enough.

Worse, far worse, is the fact that no part of the big steel box designated Landing Ship Tank 86 is standing still. The flat-bottomed LST rises and falls on every swell, rocks and rolls on the wake of every passing ship. The floor is alive beneath her feet, a surging, heaving, sliding funhouse ride that has every single susceptible person aboard spewing seemingly endless buckets of vomit.

Some are blessedly immune, and are cordially hated by the sufferers. Some are in a sort of middle zone: queasy at times, maybe needing a relatively decorous and controlled vomit once or twice a day. Others . . . well, others lie prostrate in their own bodily fluids, weak, pathetic, fragrant, and a burden to themselves and everyone else.

“Did you take your pills?” Frangie demands in her Official Medical Voice.

“I did, Doc. You gotta get me a dose of that medical bourbon you got.”

“It’s rum, not bourbon, and—”

“Well, that’s just foolish,” Vanderbilt DeRay says, frowning and shaking his head. “You don’t want rum if you got decent corn whiskey. Maybe something with some age on it, to mellow the flavor . . .”

“Sergeant DeRay,” Frangie says sternly. “Alcohol is not a cure for seasickness. In fact, given your condition, and the fact that you stink of moonshine, I’d say you have been treating yourself with homemade hooch. And it does not seem to have worked, because you are the greenest black man I’ve ever seen.”

This brings laughter from soldiers bunked above, and to the left, and the right, and behind. Of course only the immune can laugh, and since Frangie herself is Category Two: queasy and barely maintaining, she is not fond of soldiers who can ride this sluggish roller coaster night and day and still laugh.

She snarls at them over her shoulder, but while Frangie commands respect for her skills, she is still the smallest person in the battalion, and known for being kind and easy-going besides, and her snarl scares no one.

Frangie has been assigned to an all-black tank battalion—all colored troops aside from some of the most senior officers. The battalion is comprised of seven Sherman M4 medium tanks, six Sherman DDs (the amphibious version of the Sherman fitted with a flotation skirt), five Stuart light tanks, an independent squad of assault guns (modified Shermans), four Tank Recovery Vehicles (Shermans with cranes welded on) and three half-tracks mounting 81-millimeter mortars and machine guns. In addition to all those killing tools, the battalion had a long trail of supply trucks and maintenance and repair squads with their own specialized gear, and a gaggle of jeeps, one of which will be Frangie’s.

And of course two extra-nice Sherman M4s for the battalion commander and his operations chief.

Frangie is a medic, not a nurse, and definitely not a doctor, and she is not in any way specially qualified to treat seasickness (no one really is) but what sick GIs want most—aside from medical booze—is attention from someone with at least some medical standing, and Frangie is happy to play the part. However powerless she might be.

Frangie leaves the sickly sergeant and winds her way up on deck into lashing rain and blustery wind. The upper deck is covered with trucks and jeeps, with the much heavier tanks down below on the tank deck. Canvas covers on the trucks snap in the wind. Sailors haul ropes and push with rough geniality through gaggles of time-killing soldiers.

Frangie checks the wind, walks over to the lee side, and carefully vomits up her dinner. The next LST is moored just a few feet away, and over there, on that LST, Frangie sees a white sailor doing exactly what she’s doing. They exchange grim nods.

LSTs are so thick in the harbor that Frangie could literally walk for half a mile just jumping from ship to ship. It’s as if a rolling gray steel blanket has been drawn over the water. LST 86 has an unenviable position on the outer edge of one long row of LSTs, exposing it more directly to the bumptious sea.

This is no way to go to war.

“So you got it too, huh, Doc?”

Frangie wipes her mouth and reflects on the fact that once upon a time she would have been mortified to vomit in front of another person, let alone a man. But it’s one of the funny things about war—it tends to force you to focus on what really matters: staying alive, doing your job, staying alive . . .

“Yes,” she says, gritting her teeth. “I’ve got it too, though not so bad as many do.”

“Reminds me of my wife when she was pregnant with our first.”

This is safer territory for conversation. Better than talking about sickness when Frangie’s stomach is still far from settled. But Frangie is not interested in conversation; she’d hoped to have a quick puke and then have time to reread a disturbing letter from home.

But politeness rules. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy,” he says proudly. “Thomas Moore the Third, me being Thomas Moore Jr. He was our first. Then we had Elizabeth and Franklin. For FDR.”

He’s a staff sergeant, one of the tank commanders in “her” squad, Sergeant Tommy Moore of Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. He’s in his mid-twenties, but looks older because his hairline is beating a fast and premature retreat. He’s smaller than average, like a lot of tankers—the interior of a Sherman not being congenial to large folks—a garrulous, opinionated father of three who volunteered after Pearl Harbor but had been assigned to a maintenance battalion to be permanently in the rear. It had taken a fight for him to be reassigned to the battalion.

Frangie respects that. But she does not like Moore, having been on the receiving end of one too many slights or insults directed at her sex. Two years into the big change and the overwhelming majority of male soldiers still resent the presence of women as anything other than nurses or what might euphemistically be called “dance partners.” And many of the women, some like Frangie with extensive combat experience, are becoming increasingly impatient with those attitudes. The pecking order is still painfully clear: white men, then colored men, who are more or less equal with white women, and at the very bottom, colored women.

Moore, despite never having fired a shot in anger or felt the concussion wave of a German 88, feels himself inherently superior to Sergeant Francine “Frangie” Marr, Purple Heart, Silver Star, campaign ribbons for North Africa, Sicily and Italy. And though Moore is a tank commander, a husband and father, and a man who fought for the right to fight, he is treated as inherently inferior to any random white draftee.

Overlaid on the structure of race and sex is the system of rank. A white draftee private with a sixth-grade education will salute a black lieutenant, but still consider that colored man his inferior, regardless of his accomplishments.

But there is also a deeper, less obvious dividing line. It runs between those who have been in ‘the shit’ and those who have not. Frangie Marr lives within a series of overlapping structures of race, sex, rank and the unnamable but undeniable awareness that marks those who have, from those who have not . . . yet.

“You reckon we’re ever going to go?” Moore asks. There has been more than one false alarm on that score, and the eternal scuttlebutt comes up with a different D-Day and landing area every five minutes.

Frangie shrugs. “Not in this weather, but I hear the same latrine rumors you do, Moore.” It’s perhaps more curt than she intends—she is feeling better . . . better, but not exactly fresh as a daisy. Her mouth tastes like a dead squirrel. And while the rain has slowed, the wind is still whipping water off the deck to sting Frangie’s cheeks.

“Yeah.” Moore is silent for a long while. “Some of the boys are worried. Not scared, exactly, just worried. They’ve heard stories about panzers. How our 76s just bounce off their armor and their 88s go right through ours.”

Frangie looks at him in surprise. Not because worry is unusual—a GI who doesn’t worry about going into battle should be Section Eight, mustered out as crazy. No, it’s the fact that he is confiding this to her. Is it because she’s a woman, or because she’s a medic?

Then it dawns on her: despite carrying a medical bag rather than a rifle, Frangie is a veteran. And Moore is not. He’s seeking reassurance. And not just for “some of the boys.”

“I suppose the air corps will have destroyed a lot of the panzers by the time we even get there,” Frangie says.

Moore snorts derisively. “Air corps. We’ll be lucky if they don’t bomb us.” Another silence. “They’re just nervous is all. Some of the boys. They don’t know what it will be like.”

Neither do you, Moore.

“I guess it’s better to have all that armor plate around you than just be walking along like infantry,” Frangie suggests.

Moore shakes his head. “Infantry can dig a hole. A tank? See, Doc, a tank is a big fat bull’s-eye. A prize! No Kraut tank driver goes around bragging about how many infantry he killed; he wants to kill tanks. Heck, I want to kill tanks! I want to go home someday, prop Tom Trey—that’s his nickname—up on my knee and tell him how Daddy wiped out all these panzers and saved the day! Problem is, old Fritz over in that panzer has better armor and a heavier gun than I do.”

And more experience.

And his own children to whom he too would like to brag.

“They teach us that most wounds are superficial, and most fellows don’t get hurt at all,” Frangie says, squeegeeing rainwater from her eyes.

She doesn’t know how to reassure Moore. In her first artillery barrage she had seen her friend, Doon Acey, a boy from back home, spill his intestines like fat sausages falling from a split grocery bag. She’s seen traumatic amputations, chest wounds, head wounds, and the bullet to the left foot that is the signature of a soldier looking to escape the war by any means available. She knows the statistics and they’re true enough, but she’s held the hands of the dying, and she is all out of optimism.

“They say this new Tiger tank the Krauts have . . .” Moore makes a low whistle.

“They say lots of things.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s so. The only thing is, Doc, I’m . . . some of the boys are real scared of burning.”

“Burning?”

Moore shrugs. “You know what the Limeys say? They call it a ‘brew up.’”

“That’s when they’re making tea,” Frangie says. “They call that a brew up.”

Moore shakes his head. “Not when they’re talking about a tank battle. Your tank catches fire, that’s a brew up. Men trying to get out of the hatches. Maybe our own Willy Pete going off.”

“Who’s Willy Pete?”

“Willy Pete. WP. White phosphorous. We carry some white phosphorous rounds, you know, to make smoke. But if the Willy Pete gets on you, you can’t put it out, see. It’s like glue that just burns and burns and burns, all the way down to the bone.”

Now Frangie definitely wants out of this conversation. She cannot reassure him because of all wounds it is burning that frightens her the most as well. The very thought of it makes her heart race with fear. She glances around, hoping for an easy escape.

“I wouldn’t want to live if I got burned bad,” Moore says.

And suddenly Frangie has the feeling the floor is slipping away for a whole different reason.

“We give you morphine and—”

“I don’t want to burn in a tank, Doc. None of the boys do. I mean, if you find me in that, you know, condition, I wouldn’t mind at all if maybe I got too much morphine. If you understand me.” He laughs insincerely as if it’s a joke.

“Sergeant Moore,” Frangie says firmly, “I’m just a bedpan commando, I’m not God. My job is to keep you alive, not to kill you.”

Moore stiffens and tilts his head back to look down his nose at her. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re a woman.”

“Right. Goodbye, Moore,” Frangie says and walks away.

The conversation is disturbing, but what strikes her now is how she had the nerve to just turn her back and walk away. That is definitely not typical of Frangie Marr. All her life she has been soft-spoken, kind to animals, deferential to older people, deferential to men, and above all, deferential to white folks. That’s just common sense and decency, with that last bit being simple self-preservation—no colored girl growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma talks back to a white person, not if she wants to reach old age.

Deference has in many ways defined Frangie’s life. She has ambitions, but can’t speak about them because it isn’t her place to have high and mighty aspirations. All her life Frangie has given way to her parents, her pastor, her elders, her teachers, men and white people.

Moore is a colored man, not white, but he is older and he is a man. And yet, Frangie just turned her back and walked away. The realization adds a little swagger to her step, which causes her to trip and very nearly plunge down one of the many steel stairs.

She heads below to the main hold, the bright-lit steel cube at the heart of the LST, with its cargo of tanks. There are seven hulking Shermans, parked with trucks and half-tracks and jeeps between so as to distribute the weight.

Most of the tanks have slogans or names painted on the side or in some cases on the main gun. Harley’s Harlots. GI Jane. Red Hot. One is named Nat Turner. Frangie wonders if the white generals know that Nat Turner launched a slave rebellion that ended up killing a whole bunch of white people. One of the tank commanders is being a smart aleck, and it brings a sneaky smile to Frangie’s lips which, once upon a time, might have pursed in disapproval.

Weeks spent listening to her radical big brother Harder have not turned her into a Communist—they are atheists after all, and Frangie goes nowhere without her Bible — but it has forced her to see things a bit differently. All her life Frangie has moved to the back of the bus or trolley. All her life Frangie has known to look for the signs that say, “No Colored,” or signs that designate special colored drinking fountains, colored bathrooms. This giving way, this automatic acceptance of white superiority, will have to resume when she goes home. The medic with the Silver Star for bravery, the young woman who time and again has run into the line of fire to save a life, will have to be . . . meek.

That meekness had always come naturally to Frangie. But meekness cannot be a part of what she does now, what she will soon have to do. There is no such creature as a meek combat medic.

On the LST are multiple holds on either side of the main deck, each a version of the puke-reeking box where she had made her rounds earlier. Her own niche is a small space that is the seagoing barracks of the medics, nurses and assorted medical technicians assigned to go ashore with the battalion and establish a field aid station, once the beach is secure.

Frangie has volunteered to move up with the advance elements rather than be stuck working with supercilious doctors and bossy nurses at an aid station or field hospital. It’s more dangerous, but it’s also more independent, and she’s come to value independence. She will trail the advance in her own jeep with a driver, Corporal Rosemary Manning. Manning is nearly six feet tall, taller than most of the men, and makes an unlikely sight alongside the diminutive Frangie. The jeep has red crosses against white circles painted on the sides and the hood, a very different sort of armor that relies on the enemy to honor the sanctity of the medicos.

Since Frangie is small, young and reasonably agile she’s been assigned a top bunk—just three high in this particular space. She unlaces and kicks off her boots, lies back on her wool blanket and runs a mental inventory through her supplies. Bandages, plasma, tourniquets, splints, salves, sulfa powder, tape, scalpel, scissors, needle and thread and yes, morphine.

She has never dealt with a serious burn injury. And now that Moore is no longer there to annoy her, his worries and questions persist.

What will it be like?

How will I do?

And just what exactly am I supposed to do to help a man inside a burning tank?

She draws out and unfolds her most recent letter from home. It’s all the usual chit-chat, all but one paragraph:

Your father has been feeling poorly of late and has had to skip some work this week. But he’s going to see Dr. Teller if he doesn’t feel better.

It doesn’t sound like much, but her dad generally has to be missing a limb to even consider going to the doctor. Frangie rolls onto her side, closes her eyes and prays fervently.

Please, Lord, if it is Your will, care for my father.

She then asks divine protection for Harder, for her little brother, Obal, and above all, and most fervently, for her mother.

She has too much to carry, Lord. Harder exiled from the family, me here, and . . . and the other things You know of, Lord.

The prayer brings terrible, sickening images to her mind. She was not born when it happened, and she grew up never knowing, but she knows now, and her imagination will not cease supplying lurid mental images of the great Tulsa riot, of colored men and women fleeing as white folk fired down at them from biplanes and threw gasoline bombs on black businesses.

But now, added to those images, come imagined scenes of Sergeant Moore burning alive.

Please, Lord, if it is Your will, care for Sergeant Moore.

For the last almost two days she’s been dealing with seasickness, venereal disease and various psychosomatic illnesses, each accompanied by some version of, “I gotta go home, Doc! I can’t be fighting Germans with this back pain!” This is not strictly her job, but the day-in, day-out of dealing with soldiers has kept her distracted from what is coming.

Coming eventually.

Coming soon.

The suspense is killing everyone. It’s almost as bad for morale as the seasickness. Everyone wants to go, and everyone is afraid—anxious to get on with something that frightens them. In a hurry to discover whether they will live or die.

Though of course Frangie knows the majority of them simply do not believe in their own mortality. The men and the women, the average GIs, the ones who will soon be driving Shermans and being hunted by Tigers, just want to get it all over with.

And then, go home. Because if the American army has a single, unifying thought that runs through every division, every battalion, every platoon, white or black, it is: Let’s get this over with and go home.

Frangie is not in a hurry, though she shares the general annoyance at the delays. She has been on the front line in Italy. She’d been badly wounded, though she has only hazy memories of being hurt. She had a long spell in recovery from her wounds, a pleasant spell once her pain was mostly gone, during which time she had worked in an unofficial capacity in the same hospital that treated her. There she spent some time with her brother, Harder Marr, now working as an army orderly.

She had also spent an unreal interlude with Rio Richlin and Rainy Schulterman, two women she knew as acquaintances, when the three of them were awarded the Silver Star. The three then had leave for a week and, joined by Richlin’s friend Jenou Castain, they had enjoyed themselves in London, going to shows and dining in restaurants like nothing Frangie had experienced.

The strangest experience for Frangie was simply being able to go into restaurants and pubs with three white girls, sit at the same table, and be served by white or brown waiters indifferent to her race. That was not the sort of thing that went on in Tulsa.

But that pleasant coffee break is now over. The war is coming back. Soon this LST will sail to meet it. Soon, very soon, the guns will erupt, the shells will fly, and men and women on both sides will be blown apart.

And some will burn.

Not that, Lord. Gentle Jesus, not that.

She should sleep. But sleep won’t come.

A loudspeaker squawks, but she can’t make out the words through steel bulkheads.

And then she hears the sound of running feet—sailors called to their stations. And the LST’s engines come to life, sending vibrations reverberating through the deck.

Frangie checks her watch. Midnight has come and gone.

It is the morning of June 6, 1944.

5

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEAR ANGOULÊME, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

The boat ride up the Charente had been pleasant and mostly problem-free. Rainy and her two French companions had been stopped and their boat boarded by the milice, the French police supposedly under the control of the treasonous Vichy regime, but effectively now under direct Nazi control. But this had been handled with some of the currency Rainy had brought with her.

At the dock in Cognac there had been another offer of currency and another cursory look around the boat before its cargo—mostly oysters, but some black market cigarettes as well—could be off-loaded.

The truck had been where the truck was supposed to be, already loaded with three big barrels of Cognac, the local brandy named for the town. It was just under a hundred miles from Cognac to Limoges, and the first part of that had been easy as well.

Rainy found herself almost relaxing, or relaxing to the extent she could, while crammed onto the narrow bench between Étienne and Marie. The seat had a loose spring that seemed determined to dig a hole into Rainy’s tailbone.

The countryside outside the truck’s dirty windows is beautiful, though bleakly empty to Rainy’s New York City sensibilities. From time to time Rainy asks Marie what is growing in a particular field.

“Grapevines, of course.”

“Ah. Right. I’ve seen grapevines before.” She has, but not being very interested in agriculture Rainy has not quite made the connection between the stunted, misshapen vines and grapes. Or wine. “And what’s this now?”

“That? Why that is maïs—corn—to feed the geese and the ducks and the pigs.”

“Huh.”

It is a boring drive. The only interesting bits come when the road winds through a village, but after a while all the villages look the same. Stone houses, tile roofs, small windows, narrow doors opening directly onto barely-there sidewalks; a baker, a butcher, a grocery store, a café, a shoe store, a dress store, all with small display windows, many with no sign to indicate their function because this area does not get many tourists, certainly not since war came.

“Okay, what’s going on there?” Rainy sits forward, suddenly alert. The field beside the road has armed civilians slouching before it.

“Ah, that is tobacco. It must be guarded.”

“We have a choice,” Étienne says. “We are coming to La Rochefoucauld. There we have a split. We can go left which avoids the town and goes most directly to Limoges. Or we can go through the town and then pass through the forest, where we may come upon elements of our friends, the Das Reich. The Boche hide their tanks under the trees, fearing the RAF.”

“That sounds good,” Rainy says. But she senses something in the way Marie glances at her brother and makes a face.

Sure enough, as they enter the town, Étienne suddenly announces a need to stop off and check on a friend.

“A friend?”

Étienne shrugs. “A person I know.”

“A woman,” Marie says with sudden heat. “A woman who is a collaboratrice horizontale.”

“A what?”

“A horizontal collaborator, a woman who sleeps with Germans.” She spits dramatically out of the window and makes a gesture with her hand like she’s trying to fling her chin at Étienne.

“She sometimes provides useful information,” Étienne says defensively.

“Yes, but to whom?” Marie demands sourly.

Étienne shrugs. “Marianne is a patriot.”

Marie’s response is a snort.

“She may be able to give me information about the Das Reich. It is true that one of her . . . friends . . . is a Sturmbannführer, what you would call a major.”

In the end the decision comes down to Rainy’s need to use the toilet and her desire to stretch her legs. The stop is approved.

Étienne parks in a narrow street near a small, arched bridge over the River Tardoire. The street is walled by limestone and stucco homes built right to the edge of the road. Windows are mostly shuttered, though Rainy hears a child singing through one open second story window.

“There is a café just over the bridge,” Marie says, leading the way as a somewhat embarrassed Étienne knocks on one of the doors. They cross the bridge and Rainy is delighted to see an impressive chateau looming over the town. It is like something from a fairy tale, something a princess might inhabit while pining for her Prince Charming.

So this is France, Rainy thinks. She’d always hoped to visit France, but not like this.

They find the café, a small, dark room smelling of damp limestone, garlic and red wine. There are six tables, only two occupied, and a small bar with no stools.

At the threshold Marie freezes for a moment and Rainy plows into her. It is immediately clear what has made Marie hesitate: one of the tables is occupied by a middle-aged French couple; the other is occupied by three German soldiers, junior officers by the look of their youthful faces, and confirmed by collar-boards with three silver pips. They are the equivalent of lieutenants, Rainy’s own rank.

And they are Waffen SS, as clearly indicated by the twin lightning-flash insignia. They wear camouflage uniforms, not the formal black, and Rainy notes a grease stain on one man’s trouser leg, evidence that they are not on leave or enjoying a day pass, but have managed to escape some sort of field maneuver for a quick bite in town. No doubt the food is better in the café than in the field kitchen.

Three Schmeisser submachine guns lean against the wall by the table.

One of the men, an Untersturmführer with prominent brows and a mangled left ear, looks up. He grins wolfishly at Marie. Then sees Rainy, sees the widow’s black, and nods politely. He tears off a chunk of bread and goes back to his plate of langoustines.

Sitting too far from the SS men will be a signal. So will sitting too close. Marie guides them to the one table that is neither.

Rainy sees a hand-lettered sign pointing to “WC,” the toilets, which are outside in an alley, a Turkish-style squat toilet with privacy provided only by a short, greasy draw curtain. Rainy does what is necessary, all the while in a sort of fugue state, half paralyzed with fear, half working through the odds.

Every part of Rainy resists going back into the café. Of course she knows she must, she can hardly abandon Marie, let alone her mission, but it will not be pleasant eating within a few feet of the Germans.

Back inside, Rainy listens while Marie orders a dozen oysters, two cheval steaks—horse meat, the only meat on the menu—and fried potatoes, as well as white wine and a bottle of mineral water. All perfectly normal and perfectly unremarkable.

Rainy has her back to the Germans and listens intently while seeming to carry on a sort of minimalist, whispered exchange with Marie.

Water, wine and a baguette arrive, and are plopped on the table by the proprietor, who is the only visible staff.

The Germans discuss prostitutes in ways that make Rainy glad Marie does not speak German. Though some notion of what they are so crudely talking about must have penetrated Marie’s consciousness, because she blushes and bites her lip.

The oysters arrive.

The Germans move on to talking about someone named Burkhart, who is apparently a drunk, a loafer, and utterly useless, but knows all the best jokes. The Germans begin repeating jokes and laughing in a deliberately noisy, demonstrative way that makes the older French couple cringe.

The Germans call for another bottle of wine. Their second? Their third?

The atmosphere in the room, never exactly convivial, grows increasingly tense and menacing. Drunk German soldiers are never a good thing; drunk SS are worse. Drunk members of the Das Reich are worse still. Rainy has read the dossiers: the Das Reich fought on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Red Army, where even among the brutal forces in that pitiless fight, the Das Reich stood out for its monstrous treatment of prisoners, civilians, and especially Jews.

The Untersturmführer with the mangled ear is clearly looking at Marie, but also, increasingly, at Rainy.

The oysters are cleared away and the steaks arrive.

In ten minutes they can be finished and on their way. Ten minutes. Ten minutes in which Marie and Rainy must mimic an innocent pair of young Frenchwomen who have stopped for a quick lunch. Two women who are aware of the Germans, but not overly aware.

Suddenly Mangled Ear pushes back from the table, wobbles a bit to the hooting enjoyment of his compatriots, demands to know where the toilet is, and lurches right into Rainy and Marie’s table.

Rainy glances at Marie and sees fear in her eyes.

“Pardonnez moi,” the German says in barely-decipherable French.

“Pas de quoi,” Marie says in a whisper. She looks down at her plate.

“Untersturmführer Fritz Weiss, a votre service, mesdemoiselles. Zwei, er, deux jolies mademoiselles. Pourquoi toute seul? ”

It’s mostly French, not grammatical, but comprehensible. He’s asking why two pretty young women are there alone.

Marie offers their cover story. They are traveling to a wedding, the madame’s wedding, in fact, in the company of Marie’s brother, Étienne, who will be back at any moment.

At this the German grabs a chair, pulls it close and sits down with them. “You don’t mind? More wine here! The ladies are parched!” He leers openly at Marie’s chest and she pulls back. Then he turns shrewd eyes on Rainy and asks, “Where are you from?”

“Fouras,” she lies in a hoarse whisper she hopes will disguise her accent.

The Walther is hard against her back. A suicide pill is sewn into the collar of her dress. She can feel the knife strapped to her leg.

The German waves that off. “I mean your family. You’re not French.”

Rainy offers a baffled smile. Marie steps in and says of course she is French, they are cousins.

The German tilts his head to the side. Then he reaches over, takes Rainy’s chin and turns her face sideways in profile.

“No Frenchie ever had a nose like that,” he says, and now the other two Germans are quiet and attentive, sensing their companion is up to something.

Rainy allows the hand, then, with disdain, pushes it away.

“I know a Jew when I see one,” the Untersturmführer says, his voice silky but slurred with drink.

Rainy puts on a baffled look.

The German rests both his elbows on the table and leans close, his breath stinking of red wine and cigarettes. “I’ve seen many a Jew,” he says, watching Rainy closely. “I know the look of a Jew. I know the smell of a Jew.” He has a sudden idea. “Patron! Bring us ham!”

“Ham, monsieur?”

“Something pork. Ham. Bacon. A snout, a trotter, it doesn’t matter.”

As they wait, the air is so tense it vibrates. A small slice of ham appears on a plate. The German tears open a piece of the baguette and carefully folds the ham into it, making a sandwich.

“Eat it, Jew.”

Rainy picks up the ham sandwich and takes a bite.

Jewish, but not kosher, you stupid Nazi asshole.

Rainy smiles and renders her hoarse whisper again. “Merci.” Thank you. And proceeds to eat the rest of the sandwich.

The other two Germans now erupt in guffaws, yelling good-natured taunts to their fellow, who smiles and nods a sort of apology to Rainy. He gets up unsteadily and heads for the back door, toward the toilet.

At that moment, Étienne comes rushing in the front door and in an agitated voice says, “We must go!” and only then spots the Germans.

Étienne freezes. The Untersturmführer with the mangled ear stops. Marie’s eyes go wide. And from outside on the street comes the shrill sound of a furious Frenchwoman shouting, “Liar! Bastard!”

It all looks like a domestic row of some sort and the Germans are grinning again in anticipation. Until the woman bursts in through the door, still yelling curses at Étienne and then turns to the Germans and says, “Il est maquis, lui, ce bâtard! ”

He’s maquis, the bastard.

There is a frozen moment when the entire scene is an oil painting. Two Germans are seated. One German is turning back toward them. Étienne is blushing, already embarrassed and now appalled. Marie stares at her brother, her expression torn between rage and fear.

Rainy does the math.

Three Germans.

Truck down the street.

A long way still to go.

And then: no choice.

She pulls the Walther from her back, points it at the two seated Germans, BANG! shoots the one on the left, then BANG! the one on the right. Mangled ear is caught off-guard, but after a split second’s hesitation, rushes at Rainy. She fires.

Jammed!

Marie pushes the German and he stumbles, but in the wrong direction: toward the stacked submachine guns.

Rainy is up, knocking the table over. She slams the Walther down on the German’s head, hitting him on the crown of his head, stunning but not killing him. He staggers to one knee. The cutlery and glasses and bottles have all fallen to the floor. She dives for a broken water glass, cutting her own palm, seizing the glass by its base and plunging a pointed shard into the German’s neck.

But his collar-board turns the glass shard aside, and now, drunk or not, the German’s training kicks in. He twists and drives a fist into Rainy’s belly, doubling her over. The glass drops from her hand.

The German is bigger, stronger and more experienced at hand-to-hand combat. Rainy knows she will lose if she doesn’t end this quickly. But how? With what?

But then a knife appears, one of the fallen steak knives. Rainy dives. The German dives atop her, hands scrabbling to grab hers. Rainy stabs the knife at his side, but the blade is too weak to penetrate his uniform and the tip breaks off. He shifts his grip, wrapping big hands around her neck. She stabs the broken blade into his neck, not a fatal cut, but enough to cause him to rear back, roaring curses.

Rainy kicks wildly, rolls away, uses a table to pull herself up, grabs a chair and slams it against him, like something out of a western barroom brawl. It does not break, rather it bounces away, having done no real damage.

Rainy grabs a wine bottle from the German’s table and smashes it against his shoulder, meaning to go for his head. He kicks, hitting her shin. She swings again and this time catches the German on the bridge of his nose. Blood gushes, filling his mouth and spilling out.

He is stunned but still dangerous. Rainy takes her time with the next blow, bringing the bottle hard against his temple. He drops to his knees and Rainy pushes him onto his back, straddles him, fights past his flailing hands, finds the handle of the knife and begins sawing the short blade back and forth across his throat. Like she’s trying to slice a tough roast.

The last of the cheap blade snaps off and she tosses the hilt across the room.

The German is bleeding profusely from several wounds, but he is not dead. He crawls across the floor now, trying to reach his Schmeisser, but his way is blocked by one of his companions, lying on his side and trying to get at the hole Rainy’s bullet left in his chest.

Rainy smashes the bottle against the back of Mangled Ear’s head, and this time it breaks, leaving the mouth of the bottle intact, and with a single long, pointed shard of heavy green glass.

Rainy straddles the German from behind, awkward in her bulky black dress, and stabs the shard into his jugular, then twists it back and forth, cutting deeper and deeper as warm blood flows over her hand.

She feels the way his muscles no longer seem to be acting under conscious control. Still she saws and digs and twists until she is sure, absolutely sure, that he is dead.

She stands back and tosses the bloody bottle aside.

The French couple, the patron, Marie, Étienne, and Étienne’s prostitute, Marianne, all stare at her.

Rainy retrieves her Walther, works the slide to eject the jammed round, and in French says, “Messieurs, dames, I am going to tell you what happened here. These Germans got drunk and picked a fight with a truck driver who is heading west, toward Cognac. There was a fight, the truck driver had two friends, and they killed the Germans. Is that clear?”

No one answers.

“Is that clear?” Rainy demands. The patron and the French couple all nod yes. Étienne’s friend is backing toward the door, looking very much as if she might scream.

Rainy aims the Walther and BANG! shoots her in the heart. Étienne lets loose a whinny of protest.

“Going west,” Rainy says, her voice genuinely ragged now. “Truck drivers going west toward Cognac. Stick to that story and you’ll be all right. This is maquis business, not yours. But if you betray the Resistance . . .” She lets the threat hang.

Three minutes later they are panting and gasping in the truck and driving at an average, unremarkable speed toward the east, toward the pleasant woods of the Périgord Limousin.

“We should have taken their guns,” Étienne says, speaking for the first time.

“No, you imbecile,” Marie rages. “We should not have stopped to see your mistress and you should not have found a way to make her angry!”

“If we took the guns it’d look like maquis to the Krauts for sure,” Rainy says, her voice far calmer than her heart or brain. “Drunk truck drivers getting in a bar fight don’t take Schmeissers.”

Silence. Then Étienne says, “You didn’t have to kill Marianne.”

An even longer silence. Then in slow, measured but furious tones, like slow-motion violence, Rainy says, “Your arrogance ends right here, right now, Étienne. You screwed up. You could have gotten us all arrested or killed.”

“You have no—”

“Shut up!” Rainy snaps. “This is my operation from here on in.”

“We do not take orders from the American—”

“Stop it, Étienne.” Marie’s voice, like Rainy’s, is tense and barely under control. “She’s right. You were careless. That woman died because of you. And we all nearly ended up in an SD interrogation cell! Because of you and your . . . your needs.”

Étienne does not argue further. He continues driving and stares straight ahead.

Rainy uses the silence to put herself back together. The crisis is always easier than the aftermath, she has learned that. In a crisis it is all about speed and decisiveness. The aftermath, the sick feeling that comes with each obsessive mental replay of digging broken glass into a man’s neck, feeling his blood, smelling it . . .

And the hole that appeared not quite perfectly centered in the mistress’s chest.

Her hands tremble so she sticks them in her coat pockets. How long will it take the milice to show up on the scene? Would the SD get there first? Did the patron and the French couple have the nerve to lie to the SD?

No. But they might just repeat what she’d said about heading west. That very small ruse might just work.

But deep inside her a voice says, “No.”

No, they would not convince the SD, not for five minutes. So, make a plan, Rainy! They had a good ten minutes’ head start, but the SD could radio ahead, they could call in planes, they could mobilize the entire French police force as well.

Which meant the likelihood was they were not going to make it to Limoges. That was just the reality.

Time to hide.

And what better place than the middle of the Das Reich division?

“We’ve got a cargo of cognac,” Rainy says, “and a bunch of thirsty Germans somewhere around here, right? So let’s go make a sales call.”

6

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEAR LIMOGES, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

They drive the truck-load of cognac and black market cigarettes around for a full day. Rainy’s thought had been to use the cognac as proof of innocence, as proof that they were just smugglers, black marketeers. Surely, she figured, surely they would be stopped at a roadblock and then could negotiate a deal for the cargo. It had seemed so terribly clever when she’d thought of it.

They have three transport barrels of cognac, three hundred and fifty liters or roughly ninety gallons each, plus two hundred cartons of cigarettes of ten packs each. The Das Reich might be Nazi fanatics, but in war no one ever has enough alcohol or smokes, and Rainy is reasonably sure that an offer to sell and, crucially, a promise to return with more, will get the attention of any divisional quartermaster.

There is only one flaw in the plan: they encounter no roadblocks. Twice they pull off the road to avoid German staff cars racing by, perhaps in pursuit of them, perhaps not.

The first night after killing the soldiers Rainy, Étienne and Marie sleep rough, driving the truck down a dirt track deep into the Limousin forest. Étienne and Marie sleep cramped in the truck’s cabin, and Rainy wedges herself into a place between two of the barrels in back. It is not comfortable, not even by army standards, and she sleeps very little. When she does sleep she is kneeling beside a river of blood, washing her hands in it.

The next morning, chilled, aching and frowzy, they stop at a small café for coffee and croissants.

“The croissants are good,” Rainy observes, politely saying nothing about the coffee.

Marie says, “The coffee is merde. Chicory and roasted grain.”

“It’s hot,” Étienne says. “Coffee is not the highest priority.”

Rainy is not at all certain about that. She’d have paid a month’s salary—a hundred and fifty dollars—for a decent cup. But Étienne has been distant and defensive since the incident with his mistress or girlfriend or prostitute, whatever she was—his stories varied—and Rainy does not want to argue with him. He has not yet chosen to share with them the reason Marianne ended up chasing him down the street yelling that he was maquis.

The people who join Resistance groups and risk death are a mixed bag, according to Colonel Herkemeier’s briefing in London. Some are committed Communists. Some are followers of General DeGaulle’s Free French. Most joined the maquis only after the Germans began shipping French citizens off to forced labor in Germany. There are dozens of groups under dozens of leaders, some quietly effective, some noisily useless. All are brave, that at least is clear: only a very brave person defies the Nazis.

But as Rainy watches Étienne fuss with the croissant crumbs he’s scattered she knows that some are also informers working either for the Germans or the collaborationist traitors of the Vichy government.

“We should get going,” Marie says.

“In a minute,” Étienne answers. He has taken to overruling Marie on everything, asserting his now-questionable authority, though he has not yet challenged Rainy, who has carefully avoided antagonizing him. But his continued high-handedness is definitely getting on her nerves.

She tries to imagine a scenario in which Étienne is a traitor. Had he provoked Marianne into giving him up? Is she his contact with the Nazis? Had the two of them cooked up the little demonstration that had resulted in her death?

But why? Why not just walk in and tell the three SS men? Why the subterfuge?

Of course the answer is obvious: Marie. She is his sister after all, and he might not want her to know that he’s a traitor. He could stand her thinking him a fool, but not a traitor.

You’re talking yourself into it, Rainy, she chides herself, and you have no proof.

They spend the morning driving along a road that is the dividing line between the Limousin forest and farm fields, and again, despite seeing unmistakable evidence of tank tracks on the side of the road, they are not stopped.

“Any other time the Boche would have roadblocks every kilometer,” Étienne grumbles.

“It’s an unusual situation,” Rainy allows. “Driving around and hoping to be—”

They hit a pothole in the road and the truck swerves. When Étienne wrestles the rickety vehicle back on the road they hear the unmistakable flapping sound of a popped tire. They pull off and sure enough the right front tire is blown, worn rubber mangled around the rim.

“Do you have a spare?” Rainy asks.

Étienne laughs bitterly. “Spare tire? Why not ask for a golden chariot?”

Rainy suppresses her irritation. Again. “Can you find a spare tire?”

Étienne shrugs. He rolls then lights a cigarette and stands thinking ostentatiously, as Marie and Rainy hike into the woods for a quick bathroom break. When they return Étienne has a map unfolded on the hood of the truck. “Tulle is not far. We have a contact there.”

“Maquis?” Rainy asks.

“Communists.” He spits on the ground. “But they may help us. In any case, we have no choice.”

They drive the truck into the forest, shredding the last of the tire in the process, and cut branches to pile against the sides as camouflage.

“It’s five kilometers,” Étienne says. “You two wait here.”

“I think I’d rather come with you,” Rainy says.

Étienne is quick to understand her motive. “Do you, mademoiselle, propose to distrust me? This is not England, still less America. This is France!”

Marie, Rainy notes, remains silent, watching.

“It’s not a question of trust,” Rainy lies blandly. “I just don’t like waiting in the forest and not knowing.”

In the end the three of them are able to hitch a ride on a trailer being pulled by a tractor. It means sharing a ride with a load of farm implements and sacks of manure, which does nothing to improve Rainy’s mood. They arrive at the outskirts of Tulle, wait until they are well past their destination, then jump off and double back to a small farm.

The farmer is a gnarled, whiskered old man with a total of three teeth. He sees them, says nothing, and jerks his head toward the barn before disappearing into the stone house.

In the barn they find two workmen: a thick-set middle-aged man, and a second man, this one in his early twenties, stripped to the waist and shoveling cow dung into a wheelbarrow held by the older man.

The older man sees them, glances at his companion, and without a word leaves the barn. The young man’s dark eyes narrow at the sight of Étienne, but widen in happy recognition of Marie.

He starts toward her, grinning, then stops, abashed, and snatches up his shirt. He is ready to call her by name, but stops himself. “Mademoiselle, it is good to see you.”

“Marie,” she says, making a deprecating face.

“Marie, is it?” His laugh says he knows it’s an alias. “Good choice, you could certainly be a Marie. And I suppose you must call me Philippe.”

Hands are shaken, introductions made.

Rainy is wary of judging a book by its cover, but her instinctive reaction is that she likes Philippe. He’s bright, alert, quick and not at all bad-looking, though he has eyes only for Marie. Still, she remembers Étienne’s remark about Communists. The Communists, whose primary loyalty is to the party and its Moscow overlords, is not technically an enemy of the United States. Quite the contrary, President Roosevelt bends over backward to excuse Stalin’s brutality in the interests of maintaining a shaky alliance with the communist dictator. But that, Rainy knows, is not the opinion of the military who see the Communists as the likely next enemy, once Hitler is destroyed.

“What brings you to Tulle?” Philippe asks, buttoning his shirt while Marie blushes.

“Our truck blew a tire,” Étienne says. “We hoped you might be able to help.”

“Indeed?” Philippe says. “Well, that is not so easily done. Come with me, please.”

He leads them out the back door of the barn to a crude lean-to with a piece of canvas for a door. The roof is low and slanted, there are no windows, and the candle that Philippe lights illuminates a collapsing cot, an empty crate used as a table, and one chair.

Philippe does not offer the chair. Instead he uses the side of his foot to scuff at the dirt floor and uncover a wooden trapdoor. He pries it up revealing rough-hewn wooden steps. They follow him down into a cool, damp-smelling, dirt-walled cellar. By the light of a single candle, Rainy sees two men.

And to her amazement, they are wearing uniforms. It takes her only a few seconds to realize that these are Royal Air Force uniforms, dirty, sweat-stained, and in one case blood-stained, but unmistakably RAF.

“Gentlemen,” Philippe says, “I have the honor to introduce Mademoiselle Marie, her brother . . .” He hesitates, and Étienne says his name. “Étienne, of course. And this is Lieutenant Alice Jones, of the American army.”

One of the Brits stands up and offers his hand. “Flight Lieutenant David Wickham, and this is my wireless operator, Sergeant Hooper. You’ll have to forgive Hooper, his knee is a bit wobbly.”

Rainy smiles at the inevitable British understatement: the ‘wobbly’ knee is clearly broken, and given the blood it’s a serious fracture. Hooper is not wobbly, he’s crippled.

Hands are shaken. Hooper remains lying on a duplicate of the cots above. Neither Wickham nor Hooper can be over twenty-one, maybe twenty-two years of age. The sergeant is a slight man, with a bent nose and nervous hands.

Flight Lieutenant Wickham looks like a recruiting poster model of an RAF flyer: tall for a pilot, with a wave of blond hair, blue eyes, a clear pale complexion, casual attitude, and an accent that speaks of good schools.

He reminds Rainy uncomfortably of her brother, Aryeh, a marine fighting in the South Pacific. Uncomfortable because any thought of Aryeh comes with anxiety. And uncomfortable too, because she finds herself attracted to Wickham, and that is not a thought that should occupy the same mental space as “reminds me of my brother.”

“They were shot down near Strasbourg,” Philippe says. “They have been brought this far, and now we await an opportunity to move them south into Spain, where they can be repatriated.”

Wickham grins sheepishly and says, “I’m very much afraid that I strayed right into the path of German ack-ack.” Then he frowns. “Everyone jumped, but we became separated after coming down. Our French friends have been sheltering us ever since. Three weeks now. May I ask, Lieutenant: what news of the war?”

The cellar is little more than a hole in the ground, with a plank ceiling low enough to force the six-foot-tall Wickham to crouch slightly. There is a wine rack holding a dozen bottles. A quarter of the room is filled with a pile of charcoal.

Rainy sits on the end of Wickham’s cot. Philippe gallantly brings a chair down from above for Marie. Étienne leans against a battered china cabinet that holds a radio on its top.

“I don’t know anything about the war that you don’t know,” Rainy says. “The Russians are on the move. General Clark took Rome.”

“And the invasion?” Wickham asks.

“We wait constantly on news of the war,” Philippe says. “We expect the signal any day now. Any hour.” He looks questioningly at Rainy.

Rainy shrugs. She has no specific information on the date or time of the invasion. But the fact that she has been sent to spy on the Das Reich, and that her operational plan involves exfiltrating in ten days, suggests strongly that it is coming very soon. “General Eisenhower seldom consults me for my advice,” she says dryly, earning a laugh from Wickham and a nod from Philippe.

“Information must always be compartmentalized,” Étienne says somewhat pompously. Rainy watches Philippe carefully for his reaction. He minimizes but cannot entirely conceal a dislike for Étienne. Is that because he does not trust Étienne? Is it because he simply does not like his tone of voice? Or is it perhaps that Étienne is a protective big brother to Marie in whom Philippe is clearly interested?

The old farmer who disappeared earlier now comes clumping down the steps to the cellar, carrying a mixed set of glasses. Behind him comes his wife, equally old but clearer of eye, carrying a tray of bread, cheese and a hunk of salami.

“Merci, madame et monsieur,” Wickham says in tortured French, obviously a phrase he has learned recently.

“Je vous en prie,” the old woman says.

The old couple leave. Philippe selects a dusty bottle from the rack and pops the cork.

“Who shall we drink to?” Hooper asks, sitting up, wincing in pain but trying gamely to be part of the conversation.

Wickham says, “To our American guest.”

They drink to Rainy, or rather to “Alice.”

Then Rainy raises her glass. “To the brave men and women who fight for the honor of France. And to the Royal Air Force.”

With that out of the way they portion out the bread and cheese and Marie slices the salami. There is nowhere near enough to go around, but each is content with what they have, aware that what they eat comes from the meager supplies of the old couple. Then Philippe checks his watch. “It is time. Marie?”

Marie goes to the radio and switches it on. The channel selector is already tuned to the BBC. It takes a while for it to warm up, but then at last comes crackly music, the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The clear beats of that Beethoven opener have long since come to be represented by the Morse code:

Dit dit dit . . . dah.

Morse code for the letter V. V for victory.

“Your watch runs fast,” Marie says to Philippe.

“Perhaps I am in a hurry,” Philippe says.

“Yes, men are often in a hurry.”

“Because pleasure delayed can become pleasure denied.”

“Pleasure worth having is pleasure worth waiting for,” Marie counters, with a small sniff of dismissal that earns a wry grin from Philippe.

There is subtext there, a flirtation, and Rainy conceals a smile, noting that Wickham too is charmed by young love.

Then . . . “Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français. ”

This is London. The French speak to the French.

“Two days ago we received the code to prepare. We await the final word,” Philippe says.

But first, the radio voice says, “some personal messages.”

He digs a slip of paper and a tiny pencil from his back pocket. Everyone—very much including the Nazis—knows that these “personal messages” are coded instructions to the Resistance. Owning an unauthorized radio, and especially tuning to the BBC, is forbidden and can be punished by deportation to camps in Germany, or forced labor more locally, or imprisonment or even death.

“Demain la mélasse deviendra du cognac.” Tomorrow, molasses will become Cognac.

Rainy looks at Philippe. Nothing.

“Jean a une longue moustache. ” John has a long mustache.

And Philippe’s eyes widen.

“Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne . . . ” The long sobs of the violins of autumn . . .

Philippe has stopped breathing.

“Blessent mon cœur d’une langueur monotone. ” . . . wound my heart with a monotonous languor.

It is Philippe’s utter stillness that cause chills to creep up Rainy’s spine. No one breathes. Rainy has the feeling, at once frightening and thrilling, that the entire human race has just come to a fork in the road. The great battle for the future of human liberty has come at last.

A Communist Philippe might be, but he crosses himself in a way that Comrade Stalin would definitely not approve of.

“What is it?” Marie asks, and every eye in the room is on Philippe. He does not answer at first. He is stiff, staring. Then he blinks.

“The wait is over,” Philippe says in an awed tone. “That is the final instruction to begin the uprising.”

Rainy watches Étienne. What exactly is that expression? Philippe is distracted, mentally processing the difficult, dangerous steps ahead. Marie is excited and perhaps worried about Philippe. Wickham is uncomplicatedly joyful and slaps Hooper on the back. But Étienne? His first reaction is unreadable.

Then, almost peevishly, Étienne says, “And what about our tire? We still have to deliver Lieutenant Jones to observe the Das Reich. Those are my instructions.”

Philippe grins. “Perhaps we can get you your tire. But first we must ask you for help. Two of my best men were arrested and deported last week. We are short-handed, and our assignment is . . . well, complicated.”

“But we cannot—” Étienne begins.

Rainy cuts him off. “What do you need?” she asks Philippe.

“People who can use a gun,” he says bluntly. Then, with a dubious shrug, he adds, “In a perfect world, someone who speaks German fluently. But that is . . .” He performs another Gallic shrug.

Rainy considers. Her objective is to find and shadow and report back on the Das Reich. On the other hand, she cannot do that without Philippe’s help. And her orders do after all include language instructing her to render assistance where possible to local elements of the maquis.

“I speak German,” Rainy says.

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