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Rio fumbles for a smoke grenade of her own and throws it as Stick yells, “More smoke!”
And this time, as soon as the smoke pours forth, Rio jumps to her feet and runs, hunched over, trips—another body—rolls away, gets up again, and runs. Jack is ahead of her with Pang and now, in a tear in the smoke, she sees plain as day the muzzle protruding from beneath a log roof piled high with dirt.
The opening is narrow, tough to get a grenade in, so she drops to one knee, aims, and fires off a whole clip at that muzzle.
Pang slams into the bunker, just to the right of the hole. In a desperate voice he cries, “Fire in the hole!” and twists to almost gently roll a grenade inside.
It’s an incendiary and explodes in a shower of white phosphorous, so the firing hole is suddenly a brilliant greenish-white gash of mouth. Rio tries to push a fresh clip in her M1, but it jams from grit amid the mud.
A German soldier, screaming, pushes out through the firing hole. He’s been hit by the white phosphorous, which burns without regard to water, burns like acid through the German’s uniform.
Rio sees his face. A fright mask of agony as the chemical eats into his body in a dozen places. He sees her. He looks at her, pleading and crying something in a begging voice.
He wants me to shoot him.
Geer shoots the burning man in the neck, turns a savage grin to Rio, and shouts, “My turn!”
Rio climbs to her feet and follows Geer forward, a dark shape wreathed in smoke and rain and darkness.
Suddenly Geer falls into the earth, and Rio realizes there’s a trench ahead. Geer is bellowing and guns are blazing and Rio raises her rifle, remembers it’s jammed, and stares helplessly as Geer faces three German soldiers, the four of them blazing away at close quarters. Jenou is standing at the lip of the trench behind the three Krauts, and she fires carbine rounds pop-pop-pop-pop! into their backs and necks and heads. Geer, miraculously unhurt, clambers up out of the trench raging at the top of his lungs. Jenou jumps the trench, Rio just behind her, Pang and Stick off to the right.
They’ve broken through the first line of defenses, but there’s no one coming up from behind to strengthen them. Now the Krauts are to their left and right as well as ahead, and the air is practically a solid object, a ceiling of lead as the squad hugs the ground, shaking, and Geer continues to rave, “I’m comin’ to kill you! I’m comin’ to kill you!”
For long minutes they are paralyzed there, unable to so much as lift their heads. Then Sergeant Cole is trudging up from the river, leading two squads, all firing into the darkness over Rio’s head.
But it’s no good, it’s no good, the Germans are too strong, too dug in, too determined. Cole yells, “Fall back!” and then twists wildly and drops to his knees.
Rio yells, “Cole!” while crawling to him, and then pushes him down as tracers arc toward him. “Where are you hit?” she demands.
“Leg. My goddamned leg.”
Blood pours from his calf, the red stain joining rainwater as Rio tears the fabric away from the bullet hole. She practically faints from relief.
“Through the meat!” she tells Cole. “You’ll live.”
“Tell Stick to fall back,” Cole says through gritted teeth.
“We are,” Rio assures him. “Come on, you can crawl.”
And they do crawl. Back to the riverbank, not onto the bridge that is clogged with dead and wounded, but pulling themselves along through the water by gripping the sagging hand rope.
Back across the river. Again.
There is no respite from the far shore, with continual German fire, so they crawl and then stand and run hunched over, Pang and Rio each with an arm around the hobbling Cole.
Behind them, the Americans draw back from the river and call in artillery, which now blasts the water and the mud and makes the ground tremble, but it does not force the stubborn Germans to fall back.
An ambulance sits with engine idling behind the scant cover of a stone wall. Medics are working feverishly to bandage and splint and pile their charges into the steaming, overstuffed ambulance.
Rio sends Pang to fetch ammo and haul it back forward. “We got plenty of .30 cal, get all the smoke grenades you can carry! And see if they have any more of those limey phosphorous grenades.”
The medics offer Cole a syrette of morphine as they quickly bandage his leg, but he waves it off. “Later. Listen to me, Richlin, Stick’s got his hands full, so get your ass back up there.”
Rio nods, overwhelmed by the stark fact that they are piling Cole into a newly arrived jeep. “You’ll be okay, Sarge,” Rio tells him. “You’ll be okay.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” he says. He feels in his pocket for a fresh cigar, but what appears is a swollen, soggy mass of brown leaves. “Well, hell.”
He’s leaving us.
