needed more warmth. The twelve-hour troops simply couldn’t be sent to Ganymede.
TET consisted of two GIs just sitting in one foxhole in a line of foxholes dug along a wind-scoured ridge at twelve thousand feet. Chill factor was equivalent to eighty below zero, Fahrenheit. You stayed in your hole for a solid day while your fatigues kept you right on the edge of misery. It was the one test you couldn’t retake, except in case of verifiable mechanical breakdown. If you made the day, you stayed in. If you were cold-sensitive and sucked off your battery juice in twelve hours, you went hypothermic and washed out of GEF permanently. Simple, pragmatic, and a bitch.
Each GI wore a finger clip so the instructor could test body-core temperature periodically. If a soldier went hypothermic, the soldier washed out but lived.
As they trucked us up to the ridge, my soon-to-be foxhole mate swayed against me. She shrank away, as she had a week ago.
If I had harbored romantic notions about Munchkin, as Ari had called her, they died a week before. We were at the range, testing to rank machine gunners for division assignments. Munchkin and I tied for top score. We would both be assigned to HQ Battalion, which I was, already. But we had to have a shoot-off to determine who would be gunner and who would be loader. Gunner was not only boss, gunner humped the gun, not the heavier ammo load.
The rest of the failed competitors stood behind us. She, in turn, stood behind the gun, tight-lipped and shak- ing tension from her fingers as she gazed downrange at the targets six hundred meters out.
“Good luck,” I had said, as she wriggled down prone behind the gun and adjusted the sights. “I won’t need it.”
And I didn’t need a snotty Egyptian Princess. Maybe she was just covering her nervousness. I wanted to say something diplomatic to former Lieutenant Munshara. I really did. Not something personal that might upset her concentration. But what actually spewed out was, “What you need is a spanking, Munchkin.”
Somebody laughed, then somebody else. It was the kind of nickname that stuck. Especially if the nicknamed hated it.
She turned as red as a cafe-au-lait complexion can turn, and fixed me with a stare as cold as Camp Hale. Then she laid her cheek alongside the gunstock, and the range went silent.
Never, ever piss off a shrimp. The competition was over before it started.
Munchkin nailed every target, then begged another ammo belt and drilled a batch of leftover tank-gun targets a thousand meters out.
I didn’t even bother shooting. So a week ago she had stood and brushed off her fatigues. “How’s that for a spanking, Wander?” She had waved her hand at the gun on the ground. “Clean that up, Wander!”
“Wander!” The voice snapped me back to the present as the TET truck squealed to a stop. My still-pissed gunner jolted against me again.
“I said first pair out now. Wander and Munchkin.” Mr.
Wire, the chief of this exercise, was a US Navy SEAL. As old as Ord and of equivalent noncommissioned rank, a master chief petty officer. He screamed to be heard over the wind.
Thirty seconds later the woman I had forever dubbed “Munchkin” and I stood together on a gale-swept ridge. The truck disappeared as wind needled snow into the bits of skin that our face masks didn’t cover.
I tapped my mitten on her padded shoulder, pointed at our snow-swirled hole, and screamed, “Out of this wind!”
She nodded. By the time we wedged ourselves in she shook so hard her voice trembled. “God tests me.”
“Yeah. It’s cold.”
“I mean putting me together with you.”
“The feeling’s mutual.” Not really. If you have to freeze your butt off better to do it with a babe. “Look, I was just kidding the other day.”
“You were just arrogant!” She hugged her torso and turned her face to the rock wall.
“Attitude won’t keep you warmer. Take it from a Col-oradan. Neither will the fact that they dropped us off first. We’ll be out here longer than anybody else. Bad luck.”
“No. Not luck. For this single thing I apologize to you, Wander. It’s my fault. We are placed near the command post so the instructors can watch me closer.”
“Huh?”
“I’m the smallest person in the entire Ganymede Expeditionary Force. Their charts say it is physically impossible for me to retain adequate body heat. They already asked me to withdraw, voluntarily.”
“The weather isn’t that bad.” Actually, it was horrible. I was freezing my ass off already, batteries or no.
“It isn’t the cold. It’s the unknown. I’ve never been cold. In Egypt it never even approaches zero degrees.”
“Zero’s damn cold.”
“Zero Centigrade. Where water freezes. Egypt never even gets close to that . This is beyond imagination.”
“And I suppose having to go through it all with me makes it worse?” I’d read all the propaganda about superior female judgment and endurance and the sheer justice of including female soldiers in this Force. But here I was having a prom-night spat in a foxhole.
She twisted to look at me as I pulled my face mask up and blew my nose into my mitten.
She rolled her eyes and turned away again.
I peeled my mitten down and looked at my ‘puter. “Only twenty-three hours and fifty minutes to go. As the cold-weather expert in this team I have a suggestion. Huddle together for warmth. I think they expect us to do that.” I spread my arms. “Come to Papa.”
“God willing, I shall freeze to death first.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
It felt like she sat with her face to the foxhole wall for hours. My ‘puter insisted it was thirty minutes. I alligator-clipped my finger. Body temperature 98.6, battery drawdown 4 percent I was chilled, but I’d make it through with juice to spare.
“Okay, Munchkin. Time for your physical.”
“Fuck off.”
I uncoiled the wire for the fingertip sensor from the monitor box. “It’s not gynecology. Hold out your finger.”
She grumbled but extended her hand back to me, poking her trigger finger out through the firing slit in her right mitten.
I slipped the alligator clip on. Her hand was as delicate as a child’s. And shaking.
“Well?”
“It’s 98.5. So far so good. But your battery dropped 9 percent in the first hour. You’ll be cold meat in ten hours.”
She didn’t say a word. She just turned and hugged herself to me, burying her face against my chest.
After a couple minutes, she said, “Don’t think I’m enjoying this.”
“Me either. This sucks.” I thought it was a credible lie. She smelled wonderful.
Four hours after we were dropped off, Mr. Wire emerged from swirling snow and squatted alongside our hole, wind whipping fur parka trim around his bare face. He was just an instructor, not part of GEF, which meant he had the bad fortune to have a living family. SEALS drew this duty because being cold was their business. Well, okay, much as it pains me to admit it about squids, they’re also probably the world’s best troops.
He motioned us to hold up fingers and took his own readings on each of us. “Mr. Wander, you seem just dandy.”
“Hooya, Mr. Wire.” The SEALs may be good, but they are as full of crap as any unit. They insisted we say “Hooya” in place of “yes.” It built esprit de corps. They thought
Wire turned to the Munchkin. “Ma’am, I’m not gonna bullshit you. Your body temp’s sketchy, and it looks like you’re gonna run out of battery juice sometime middle of tonight. I can’t make you drop out, but I really don’t see the point in your continuing this exercise. No reflection on you personally. It’s just physics. You sure you want to hang in?”
“Hooya!” Her voice quavered already, and we had twenty hours to go.
