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Jack strips down to just his boxer shorts, and Rio down to her identical pair plus her army bra. The night is cold, and they are shivering violently before they even touch the icy water.
“Nothing for it but to j-j-jump in,” Jack says, his teeth chattering.
“Yep,” Rio acknowledges with equal dread.
They hesitate at the water’s edge, but a machine gun opens up just fifty yards upstream and that motivates them. The water is brutally cold, just short of turning solid. They each keep a hand on the soggy raft and paddle with the other hand, but it is soon clear that paddling is irrelevant—the river will decide where they go. So t
hey roll onto their backs, extend their legs downstream, and are carried along, pushing water rather than paddling, pushing themselves, willing themselves out of the faster current toward the onrushing far bank.
They land, teeth chattering so badly neither can speak. They empty the raft, put soaking-wet uniforms on over soaking-wet bodies, fill their canteens from the river, drop in water purification tablets, send up silent prayers that their ammo is not all waterlogged. Then they head back east, back toward the sound of guns.
Rio’s watch has stopped, and she sees condensation under the crystal. “W-w-what time you th-think?”
Jack shakes his head violently. “No idea.” His face is as white as a cotton sheet, his lips blue. Rio imagines she looks much the same—like a walking corpse.
Ahead they see distant orange and yellow flashes and hear the short, sharp explosions, the sound flattened by distance.
“That way,” Jack says, and chops the air. “If we d-d-don’t f-f-f-f, shit. Can’t t-t-alk.”
They set off across a plowed field, furrows all but invisible underfoot so they must step high and heel first or else trip.
“Fug!” Jack yells. “Freeze!”
“Already freezing,” Rio snaps in a cold-rattled voice.
“Mines.”
“What?”
“My foot hit something metal.”
The cold is forgotten. Rio looks around, considers where they are, considers that the engineers have cleared only those minefields along the main line of attack—which will not include this field—and says, “Bad.”
Jack, about ten paces ahead, kneels slowly and feels in the dark. “Yeah. Bloody hell, we’re in a minefield.”
They can try to perfectly retrace their steps—not likely to work in the dark—or sit still and hope for help when the sun comes up.
“Stay there,” Rio says. “I’ll feel my way to you.” She, too, squats down and begins to feel through the mud for the telltale touch of steel. Once her immediate circle is cleared, she sets off crawling toward Jack, who has likewise cleared his immediate area—except for the mine he’s already found.
Rio’s little finger brushes something hard and too smooth to be rock. She says, “Got one.” She carefully feels her way past it and places her helmet gently over the mine to mark it. At last she reaches Jack, and now the cold has overcome the warming effect of adrenaline, and both are shaking so badly they can barely speak.
“I think it doesn’t go off until I lift my foot,” Jack says.
“I heard that was bullshit,” Rio says as calmly as she can. She lowers herself to the ground and begins to probe with numb fingers. Jack’s mine is not hard to locate. It is a cylinder about six inches tall, topped by a stem that adds a couple more inches and holds the trigger.
“You didn’t step on the trigger,” Rio says, exhaling relief. “Your toes are just up against it. Don’t move, and I’ll disarm it.”
For this she needs a pin of some sort, and the only pin she can find is one from her own grenades. “I gotta toss it,” she says to Jack. “So squat down but don’t move your foot yet.”
“You think you know how to—” Jack begins, but Rio has pulled the pin and whips her grenade away, as far as she can throw it. It lands, they wait, counting, then . . .
“Dud,” Jack says. “Possibly a result of us drowning the lousy thing.”
Rio awkwardly slips the pin into the hole on the mine’s stem, just as she’d been taught to do a million years ago in basic training.
“Thank you, Sergeant Mackie,” she chatters under her breath. “It’s safe, Stafford. You can move.”
But of course they can’t move far, not in a minefield. And anyway their small reserve of ambition to move on is now all used up. Rio lies down in the mud and Jack lies beside her, and without needing to discuss it they press their bodies together to hold on to what body heat there is.
