AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Panicked, Richlin kicks and swings to the right just as the Kraut fires, and as she swings and the Kraut readies to fire again, Rio stuffs her grenade in her blouse and pulls my daddy’s Colt. Then she drops it from her sweaty hands!
It lands in the dirt beside the German, who must think it’s a grenade because he shouts something and leaps away.
Rio Richlin is still twenty feet in the air and now armed with only her grenade. She fumbles for it, retrieves it, gets the pin in her teeth and drops it just as the German realizes his mistake and fires.
His shot is hurried and it burns a crease up Rio’s left thigh and now the Kraut sees the real grenade, sees his peril and dives back inside the cave opening.
Crumpf!
The grenade lands just ten feet to the side and the upward blast pelts Rio with gravel.
“Stick! Down fast!” Richlin yells, gagging on the words, and Sticklin accelerates her descent to something just short of a dead fall. Richlin hits the ground hard, and for a moment she’s tangled in the rope and can’t reach her remaining grenades. But what she can reach . . . is Daddy’s Colt.
Ladies, please take a moment to picture the scene, with details relayed to me after the fact, as from my angle I could see little. Before Rio is the cave, nothing but a hollow in the rock. She is completely alone facing three German soldiers, only one of whom appears to have collected his wits following the grenade explosion.
This Kraut raises his rifle and fires. A miss! But Rio knows he won’t miss a second time, not at this range. He aims, and Rio can do nothing. Nothing but sit in the dust, tangled in rope, with a heavy pistol she raises far too slowly to outpace the German’s trigger finger.
He pulls the trigger.
Click!
Empty!
Rio takes what aim she can, thumbs back the hammer, and fires the Colt, which gives a tremendous blast and jerks up and back like a living thing.
Rio has missed as well. The two remaining Germans are experienced combat soldiers, and they’ve shaken off the concussion and grabbed a rifle in one case and a Schmeisser submachine gun in the other as the first German fumbles a clip into his gun and Rio cocks and fires again.
The first German falls straight back with a red hole in his belly. He screams, and I hear from Rio a shout of fear and fury that surely no milkmaid ever had reason to utter.
She fires again, and the Kraut with the Schmeisser goes down on one knee, a red flower blooming in the center of his chest. He’s pawing at it, fingers coming away red.
The last German throws down his rifle and screams, “Nein, nein, bitte nein! Kamerad, kamerad!”
But it is too late. Richlin shoots him.
Ladies, I will spare you the description of that bullet’s effects, suffice to say that her bullet lifted the helmet off his head and took much of his head with it.
Scratch another Nazi superman.
Rio gets to her feet, legs shaking, and kicks her way clear of the rope. She aims the Colt at the Kraut with the stomach wound. He may yet live.
“Bitte, bitte, kamerad,” he whispers in agony as she stands triumphantly over him.
Stomach wound. There are few things worse. The pain is enough to make any man beg for morphine. Even if the Kraut lives, he’ll never be whole. It would be a mercy to finish him off, but later Richlin explains, “I was done shooting. He was no threat.”
From the bottom of the stone bowl, now stained with the blood of Kraut soldiers, we hear Rio yell, “I’m okay! I’m okay!”
“I’m okay,” in the voice of a terrified girl, a shaky alto. But there’s another emotion in that voice as well, and it is unmistakable. It is the age-old sound of a warrior victorious. There is blood in the farm girl’s voice.
There is triumph.
Ladies, did I feel relief? Yes. Did I feel pride in this young woman? Pride to the bursting point.
By the time Sticklin and I get back down the ravine and climb over the ridge to drop down into the Kraut encampment, the rest of the squad is there.
It is indeed a mirror image of the bowl the American GIs had occupied, but this is a slaughterhouse. The GIs have dragged eleven German bodies to form a rough lineup in the dust, a horizontal parade line of Herr Hitler’s vaunted Afrika Korps.
