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“Get up,” Rainy orders herself. “Move!”
Direction is easy enough: she can see the sun. And she remembers seeing a road on her way down. East. That’s right, east. She walks a few steps, collapses to her knees, pushes herself back up, and heads on again.
The unit she’s looking for is out there somewhere, a somewhere that looks a whole lot larger from ground level than it did on a map.
She has survived the jump, she reminds herself, and that was the hard part, surely. How hard can it be to find fifty or so soldiers in a million miles of trackless emptiness?
It takes a half an hour just to find the road. She flops beside it, nervous and scared as hell, but alive. If only she knew . . . anything, really, about the survival skills a soldier should have. If only . . . The plan had been to spot the platoon, fly low, give them a wing wag to get their attention, then jump.
That did not happen. But the fortunes of war that had turned against her and dropped her here, lost and abandoned, now capriciously come to her rescue.
There is a jeep coming down the road, hell-for-leather, a single soldier at the wheel.
Rainy climbs heavily to her feet and then, composing her face into a calm and, she hopes, authoritative expression, steps out into the middle of the road.
32
FRANGIE MARR—TUNISIAN DESERT, NORTH AFRICA
Two fears vie for the upper hand in Frangie’s mind. First, that she might do something stupid and kill the wounded captain. He’s almost certainly dying anyway, but the Hippocratic oath is pretty clear: first, do no harm. She has done what she can; now she can only offer comfort and morphine.
The second fear is simply of the sounds of trucks and men approaching.
She does not want to serve out the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp. It is inconceivable that the racist Germans would be any better than the racist Americans in their treatment of blacks.
She wants to flee. There would be n
o shame in it, not really; the captain is doomed. The sergeant who stayed to help finally leaves with a terse, “Thanks for taking care of my captain.”
Ren remains behind still.
“Ren, get the fug out. Seriously, go. Go! I’m ordering you, go!” It is the first time Frangie has ever cursed, and she marks it in an abstract sort of way as something she will later pray over.
The bottle of plasma hangs from a lanyard dropped from a seam in the tent. It joins the transfused whole blood and flows now into the captain’s arm, slightly more going in than comes out, though soon enough the plasma will be empty and there’s no more whole blood to be had.
“Am I dying?” the captain asks in a shaky but rational voice.
Frangie wants to tell the truth, maybe then he’ll order her to leave, to escape. But that isn’t how it’s done. A medic does not tell a soldier he is dying.
“You’ll be fine, Captain. Just sewing you up is all. Sew you up, bandage you up . . .”
“Okay, listen . . . I’m going, Doc,” Ren says, looking tortured but relieved.
“God keep you, Ren.”
“You, too, Doc. I’ll say a prayer for you.”
“I’ll need it.”
He grabs a canteen and runs for it. Frangie listens for the sound of gunfire and blessedly hears none. But the sound of truck engines and tank treads and the rattle of soldiers’ gear fill her hearing and her imagination.
Her hands are steady as she sutures, but tears flow and she is having difficulty swallowing. Maybe the Germans will see that she is a medic with a patient and do the decent thing and leave her to it. After all, they can’t really all be the monsters the propaganda makes them out to be. Surely there is something to the notion of soldiers’ honor, surely—
The tent flap flies open, and three German soldiers rush in yelling incomprehensibly, leveling their submachine guns. They look tired and dirty but keyed up, blue eyes searching every corner of the tent.
“Schwarze!” one says, his look contemptuous. He shoves the barrel of his machine pistol into her stomach, hard enough to double her over. The suture slips from her hand, she struggles to get it back, and the stock of the gun smashes against her forehead.
The whole world spins. Her knees collapse and she falls to the dirt, landing on her side, still struggling but unable to focus, unable to see anything but swirling, doubled reality. A blow to her kidneys, a kick, has the paradoxical effect of clearing her mind so she can focus on the agony that radiates up and down her spine. She lies on her side, panting, seeing in the dirt before her the bloody, twisted lead slug she took from the earlier patient. Bloody rags are all around. Some sort of rat is carrying one off.
