First published in Great Britain in 2017

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

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

Dead of Night © 2017 by Michael Grant

I Have No Secrets © 2017 by Penny Joelson

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

First e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978 1 7803 1813 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1818 9

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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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

1

2

3

4

5

6

Back series promotional page

About the author

1

SOMEWHERE IN WALES, DECEMBER 24, 1942

‘Help! Help, I’m sinking!’

Jillion Magraff is indeed sinking. She is up to her knees in mud and will in short order be up to her thighs.

How Magraff has managed to get quite so stuck is a mystery to Rio Richlin and everyone else in the squad with the possible exception of Sergeant Cole, and that’s only because Cole has a very low opinion of the green troops in his squad.

Luther Geer, a big twenty-year-old with a crushing brow beneath buzz-cut brown hair, slings his pack onto a lichen-scarred rock. ‘Best just to let her sink. Held up by a woman soldier. Again.’

‘Knock it off, Geer,’ Rio says, but without much conviction in her voice. Magraff is an embarrassment to all the women in the squad and the platoon. Cat Preeling carries her weight and then some; Jenou Castain . . . well, she has a way to go to become a soldier, but at least she’s not quite the whiny, helpless mess Magraff is.

The worst thing is that Rio intensely dislikes Geer, who for his part seems threatened by Rio. So Magraff giving Geer yet another opportunity to sneer at the women in the squad doubly irritates Rio – a sweet-tempered girl who until she joined the army had never had an unkind thought or cast a harsh look at anyone.

At least that’s her version.

Rio’s best friend Jenou would agree that Rio is essentially sweet, generous, kind and certainly innocent. But she would not agree that Rio is incapable of becoming annoyed. No, Rio, in Jenou’s estimation, has a stubborn streak a mile wide, and with it just a very slight hint of a temper. That temper came out back at basic training on one of the early occasions when Geer annoyed Rio. Rio marched after him into the men’s shower room and demanded his apology. Since then Geer has been just a bit leery of the sweet-tempered milkmaid from northern California, and the incident – Richlin’s Raid – has become legendary in the platoon, and Geer has not forgiven Rio.

‘Since time began, it was men that went to war,’ Geer says. ‘And that –’ He points at Magraff, then lets his accusing finger drift toward Rio – ‘is why.’

The squad are twelve American soldiers with a total of about six months of combat experience, and all that experience – one hundred percent of it – belongs to just one person: Buck Sergeant Jedron Cole. The rest of them are as green as a spring leaf, with a grand total of thirteen weeks basic training each. They are in the zone between civilian and soldier: too heavily armed to be civilians, too ignorant to really be soldiers.

At the moment they are a miserable, cranky bunch, filled with a righteous hatred for the United States Army and the brass hat who scheduled this training exercise for Christmas Eve. They are cold, wet and unless Rio is mistaken, after five hours slogging around in freezing rain followed now by dense fog, quite lost.

‘Anyone got any rope?’ Geer asks. ‘It’s not for Magraff, it’s for me in case I want to hang myself.’

No rope is to be found. But by tying their webbing belts together they get a line to Magraff who is hauled, weeping and minus one boot, onto dryer ground.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Jack Stafford joins Rio squatting on a rock while Magraff cleans herself off using a tuft of moss dipped in chilly rainwater as a sponge.

There’s a tear in the fog and for a moment it is indeed beautiful, though in a gloomy, oppressive and disturbing way. At least it feels that way to Rio who comes from Sonoma County where it rains seldom and snows never, though she’d have to admit to some fog, especially closer to the Pacific coast.

Steel-gray clouds hang low overhead, a big gray comforter pulled over a rugged country of well-sunken rocks and strange mushrooms, tiny streams, seemingly random stone walls and not a tree to be seen. Puzzled sheep stare from the side of a low hill.

Rio has good eyesight and spots a fantastically antlered deer of some variety a couple hundred yards off. They must not be too far from the coast, she reasons, because a pair of seagulls are riding the breeze overhead, looking down at the squad to estimate its potential for providing food.

‘Beautiful,’ Rio answers belatedly. ‘Bit damp.’ Rio’s feet are wet and freezing. Her fingers are numb. She can no longer feel her nose and both ears ache. And she’s angry at several members of the squad: Magraff for being a helpless nincompoop, Tilo Suarez because he cannot manage to turn off his tedious leering Lothario act and yes, Jenou for draining her own canteen and then begging sips off Rio. She’s even irritated at Kerwin Cassel, who she generally likes, because he insists on chewing gum and blowing bubbles and this is meant to be a patrol, not a party. But mostly, as usual, she’s angry at the big hillbilly, Luther Geer.

Christmas Eve? This is Christmas Eve? This foot-soaking, sweaty-cold march to nowhere in full battle dress?

‘Damp? Wales?’ Jack teases.

‘I don’t know how you people stand it.’

‘Well, we don’t . . . quite. The south, London, my country, is a veritable desert compared with Wales.’

Jack is the sole Briton in this American army company. Perhaps the only one in the entire US army. He was evacuated from England during the Blitz and in an excess of affection and caution his parents had sent him to live with American relatives in Montana. Sadly, his parents had later been killed by a German bomb and Jack’s only way home was to enlist in the US Army as soon as he reached legal age.

Now he is back in Britain and wearing, if not an enemy uniform, not exactly the uniform expected of a boy from Croydon.

He is not terribly tall, just a couple of inches taller than Rio, with ginger hair and the kind of blue eyes that are often amused, just as often devilish, and occasionally, when caught off-guard, touchingly sincere.

‘All right, people, off your rear ends, we got some distance to cover,’ Sergeant Cole says. ‘That is if everyone can manage not to stumble into quicksand, or break their legs on a rock, or who knows what else.’

They form up, a ragged, muddy, uninspiring bunch. Since arriving from the States, they’d been part of a division that was shuffled from overstuffed camps to rustic bivouacs, marched from borrowed barns to village school houses, on and off the eternal deuce-and-a-half trucks, moving as if the US army has no real idea where to put them or what to do with them. Which, as Cole knows and Rio is starting to figure out, is essentially the truth. The British have been at this war for two years already, but it is all still new to the Americans and they are making it up as they go along.

‘Okay, I’m going over this again in the forlorn hope that it may penetrate this time. This little walk in the rain is a squad tactical exercise,’ Cole lectures. The word ‘squad’ and indeed all words containing the letter ‘s’ come out a bit mangled because Sergeant Cole has a nice, fresh new cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth. ‘The three elements of the squad are Able, Baker and Charlie.’

Jillion Magraff raises her hand. Like she’s in school. Rio knows for a fact that Cole has told Magraff, oh, at least a dozen times not to do that, but rather to simply state her question, but Magraff is not what anyone, anywhere, in any army since Hannibal crossed the Alps, would call a soldier.

‘Magraff,’ Cole says, rolling his eyes only a little and suppressing a weary sigh.

‘Why are they called that?’

‘A, B and C,’ Rio stage whispers. And adds a silent, Isn’t that obvious?

Cole says, ‘Oh, it’s just a matter of preference, Magraff. Would you like to make up some other names? Freddie, Joe and Carmelita, maybe?’

Cole is not usually sarcastic. He is a patient man, a good sergeant. But on this training exercise in a sodden, oppressive landscape in the ass-end of nowhere, with a dozen green soldiers he has already had to pull one soldier (Magraff) out of the mud, stopped another one (Geer) from attempting to shoot down a Merlin, had to backtrack to find a lost rifle (Suarez) and – though he refuses to admit it – become fairly well lost in fog so wet and penetrating he’s simultaneously clammy and freezing.

And Magraff only has one boot.

Jesus wept, Cole thinks.

The usual American army squad consists of twelve soldiers. The usual squad consists of a sergeant, a corporal, and ten privates, all men. This particular squad consists of eight men and four women, because for the first time in American history, thanks to a meddling (to Cole’s mind) Supreme Court, women have been made subject to the draft and eligible for enlistment. And because Cole has annoyed his captain by failing to get some paperwork filed in a timely manner, Cole has been given not one, not two, not even three, but four of them. Four women. And, to top it off, an Englishman and some sort of Asian who no one trusts because he sure looks Japanese.

‘Able, Baker, Charlie,’ Cole repeats. ‘A, B, C. It’s in the tactical manual which I know you’ve all committed to memory.’

Eight of the soldiers adopt eight similarly blank expressions meant to convey nothing, but in fact sending the very clear message that no, of course they have not read the manual. The exceptions are Corporal Millican, Sergeant Cole, a serious young man with a prominent widow’s peak named Dain Sticklin (inevitably called Stick) and Rio Richlin.

Rio is young and looks younger. She’s tall, willowy but strong, with the square shoulders and ropy arms of a hard-working farm girl used to slinging bales of hay, milking cows and shoveling manure. She’s pretty but not a beauty, with dark hair, blue eyes and pale skin dotted with freckles. And she has in fact read the manual on small unit tactics. Rio has had serious doubts about her hasty decision to enlist along with her friend, Jenou, but she figures her best chance of coming through it all in one piece is to learn her job.

In fact, she’s decided to become a good soldier, and is already a better soldier (in her own inexpert opinion) than anyone in the squad aside from Stick. And Cole, of course.

Rio is quite aware that the Tommies – the British – have a low opinion of American soldiers and are frankly appalled at the very notion of women in uniform. One of the more common snide remarks is that, ‘The only problem with the Americans is that they’re overpaid, over-sexed and over here.’