The Eleventh Man (44 page)

The streets began to show more life near the market squares in the center of the city. Ben stared up at the Old World guildhalls, ornamented to a frenzy. He couldn't tell if the architecture was meant to be baroque or rococo—perhaps baroco—and there were constant glimpses of a stone-lace cathedral spiked atop it all. Everything with the crust of centuries on it. "All older than dirt, isn't it," Maurice read his thoughts. "Just think," he expanded on that, "a hundred and fifty years before the first four ships made port in New Zealand and while red Indians still ruled over Montana, Rubens was in there"—another indicative sweep of the hand—"painting fleshy maidens and grazing as he went."

"What, there?" The tall-standing house with a stepped peak looked like any of Antwerp's others worn down by time and grime. "That was his passion pit?"

"Hypothetically," Maurice threw into the air, and drove onward through the petrified streets.

Shortly they were going past emplacements of heavy automatic weapons every few blocks, sighted toward the sky and crews at the ready. Ben recognized British Polsten guns, basic and lethal with the telescope-like barrel and prominent fin of magazine, from the air base outside London where he had last spent time with Moxie.
Two years ago already. If "already" means anything in this war.
He remarked on how numerous the anti-aircraft gunners suddenly were, and Maurice allowed as how there were quite a few assigned to Antwerp, twenty thousand or so.

Ben's head snapped around. "An entire army
division
of ack-ack troops?"

"Quite. It's about the port, of course." Maurice simultaneously blew his nose, steered through another avalanche of rubble laying in the street from a set of destroyed buildings, and talked on. "The Huns are damnably serious about putting it out of commission with their buzz bombs. So, the official thinking is, those must be shot down. However much gunnery it takes."

The anti-aircraft guns grew in size and number as Antwerp began to dwindle into villages and countryside. To Ben it all had the feel of a city-size castle, half as old as time, with catapults set at the outskirts to keep invaders at a distance. The strategy, as Maurice laid it out, was to have belts of artillery across the approach path of the flying bombs, which the Germans luckily were only able to launch one by one. If the first arc of ack-ack fire didn't bring down the rocket bomb, the next semicircle of guns a mile or so farther in still had a crack at it, and last of all, those swarms of heavy automatic weapons they had seen at the near side of the city. The gun battery Moxie commanded was in the outermost belt, the one that had to take on incoming buzz bombs headfirst—
oh hell yes, that's where he would be,
Ben resigned himself to. Open exposed country lay between Moxie's flak alley and the middle one they had just driven through, and Maurice considerately announced: "Hold on to your seat—we go flat to the boards here across this bit." He floored the accelerator and the jeep hurtled across the stretch of smudgy damp landscape.

In the rush of bitterly chill air Ben huddled in his flight jacket, wishing he had the horse-blanket overcoat on. Maurice Overby was burning red with cold but seemed unperturbed as he aimed the jeep at a roadblock out from a line of long gun barrels poking out of sandbagged pits.

They were looked over by tommy gun-carrying American GIs, obviously primed for business, and let through. Maurice parked the jeep in the shelter of what he hoped aloud was a parts shed and not a munitions dump. They had no more than climbed out when a figure with a certain familiar slouchy grace detached itself from the crew in the nearest gun pit and approached them.

Even when you knew it was coming, the voice went right under the skin.

"Well, well, the famous Captain Reinking. That what brings you here, Ben buddy? To be Rhine King when we whip the Krauts, write up the last chapter for the folks back home?"

Ben caught up with the other familiarities: the glint in the eyes as if reflecting off something hard; the complexion like steel dust; and Moxie Stamper still wore a helmet, albeit one meant to withstand falling flak fragments, the same way he had in football, tipped back just a trifle enough to look cocky.

"You know for a fact that we've about got them whipped," Ben refused to be nettled before they even shook hands, "do you, Mox?"

"I sure as shit don't," the voice momentarily lost its edge. On fuller inspection, Moxie looked as tired as a man could and still be on his feet. There was a tic where a dimple would have been on a face less sharp than his. Never one to fuss with clothes, he had let his uniform become a size too big for his war-worn frame. He jerked his head to the province of dim sky over the ack-ack guns. "It gets your attention that the SOBs in Berlin don't seem to run out of these overgrown fireworks."

Ben made up for lost time with a hasty introduction of Maurice, Moxie sizing him up from the brim of his tommy helmet to the shiny RAF blue trousers. He barked a laugh. "Overby, hey? So I finally get to meet the devil with the red pencil—the intelligence briefers about piss their pants when they talk about 'Baldy the censor.'"

Letting that sail by, Maurice said: "Ah, HQ's ignorance branch, also known as the intelligence branch. We do have our differences on occasion." He smiled at Moxie in a reserved way. "Better to be bald on the outside than on the in, I remind myself."

Moxie scowled. Ben jumped in with: "Before we all get carried away with teatime manners—do you know about Jake?"

The expression on Moxie darkened some more. "You start off that way, it doesn't sound like the Iceman is in good health."

"His plane—" When Ben finished the telling, Moxie turned away a step or two and gazed into the gray distance.

"Damn it all," he said over his shoulder. "Who would've thought the whole smear of us would end up you and me? I hope you're carrying a good luck piece, Rhine King. Because," he swung around to Ben, the gaze hardening, "you have more balls than brains for hauling yourself over here into this."

Thanks all to hell, Moxie. Remind me to try to save your life-okay, mine along with it—again sometime.
Caught flat-footed by Moxie's accusing glower, he tried to read what was behind it and was not coming up with anything.
What, you don't get it that we're each other's ticket out of the war?

Patient as pudding, Maurice had stood aside during all this, but now moved in before Ben could say anything. "Captain Stamper, I believe you're being beckoned."

A gunnery sergeant was poking his head out of the pit. "One incoming, Cap," he called out. "Five minutes."

Moxie took charge before the words were out of the air. "Acknowledged, Smitty. Get on the horn to fire control and the spotters"—Ben could not help but hear come into the voice the snap of cadence used for good effect in football huddles—"tell them smoke break and grab-ass is over. And chew out the loaders on Charlie gun while you're at it, yesterday they were slower than a three-legged race." He glanced at Ben and Maurice as though they were an afterthought. "It's time to shoot something down. If I was you two, I'd get my butt in back of those sandbags over there."

The pair of them hustled behind the head-high stack between gun pits, Ben asking: "They can track the things that far out?"

"Radar, yes, but it's not so much that," Maurice replied, checking his wristwatch. "When the Germans are at this, they launch one every quarter of an hour. They're quite Teutonic about that habit, in the worst sense. Oh, right, that prods the old memory box. Here," he dug in a flap pocket of his uniform for something, "as a healthy measure, carry this with you when you're out and about."

Ben looked in bafflement at what he had been handed. It appeared to be a pocket watch, but with only one hand and no crystal.

"It's a cocotte clock, in case you're wondering," the explanation was diplomatically put. "A chef's timer, actually, but French prostitutes use these to keep track of the various phases of their services. I have done the necessary research." Maurice paused dreamily. "Ah, Paris. What was that term you used—passion pit?" His brow cleared and he returned to the business at hand. "Set it for ten minutes after each buzz bomb. Gives you five to look around for shelter before the next one arrives."

"Swell, Maurice. I'll see if I can get used to kissing myself good-bye on short notice." Ben sagged against the sandbags to wait, and took stock. In the same opalescent Belgian sky that had looked down on the foot soldiers of Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, a robot bomb was on its way. After it blindly fell and did its killing or not, the next one could be tracked in by a timepiece that ordinarily ticked off sessions of bed games. This was a war like no other. Or did writers always say that.

Ducking lower and yanking at Ben's sleeve for him to do the same, Maurice wordlessly pointed to a metal sliver cutting the sky. Unable to take his eyes off the object clipping toward them at six miles a minute, Ben had the sensation of everything in him pausing, waiting helplessly for the blind bomb with a tail of flame to pass over or not. Then the roars of the anti-aircraft artillery slammed through him.

For something that sought its target by falling from the sky, a V-1 rocket was oddly nautical, built like an oversize torpedo and traveling with the rumble of a loud motorboat. When that throb stopped, terror began. Any V-1 in its silent dive to the ground brought with it a two-thousand-pound warhead primed to go off on impact. During the long weeks of V-1 ordeal, that feeling of the heart skipping its beats while awaiting doom or survival was the erratic pulse of Antwerp.

Puffs of blue smoke clouded the air over the gun pits, the long snouts firing, firing, firing as the crews worked madly. Flak bursts dotted the sky behind the flying bomb, then suddenly nearer as the gunners began to get the range and aim off in front of it, leading it as a hunter would a fast-flying duck. The ack-ack noise was unceasing yet somehow everyone knew to the instant when the throb, the buzz, of the bomb cut off and it began to dive. Right at that moment, a proximity shell exploded alongside it and the V-1 faltered in its trajectory, falling away into a field where it burst with a flash of orange flame.

One more time, Ben felt the moving wall of oblivion shift away, and with the tremor of the exploding buzz bomb, settle to a stop. At least temporarily. Another tug on his sleeve. Maurice was setting his cocotte clock and reminding him to do the same.

They scrambled out from behind the sandbags and over to where Moxie had emerged from the gun pit. Helmet off, running a hand through his thatch of wiry black hair, he looked drained. To their accolades of "Well done" and "Nice shooting," he simply stood there, all the swagger gone, eyes fixed on the distant bright spot of burning rocket wreckage. "We get nine out of ten of them," he said tonelessly. "About as good as can be done." He glanced down at his steel helmet as though it held something he did not want to see, then put it on and shifted his focus to Ben. "Night control takes over at 0500, it gets dark so Christly early here. I'll meet you at the O Club after chow. I've got a bone to pick with you, don't I." He turned his back on them and strode off, yelling for the ordnance sergeant to hurry up with the ammunition supply.

"Rough as guts, isn't he," Maurice Overby said mildly. "Shall we return to the charms of Antwerp?"

Now you hear it, now you don't.
The bomb, the bomb, the abominable flying bomb.
If it hits you, then you won't.
The bomb, the bomb, the bastardly buzzing bomb.

The gathering of British officers around the piano warbled more closely in tune than any Officers' Club songsters Ben had ever experienced.
Must be all those boy choirs.
Despite the Brit monopoly on the music, the crowd in the cavernous bunker had a more American flavor than the one in the airdrome, including an occasional heart-quickening note of feminine laughter from scattered flocks of Army nurses and such. Some wag had painted up an over-the-door sign in Germanic letters christening the place the wonder bar. It made Ben wonder, all right. Sitting isolated amid the hubbub fifteen feet underground, wrung out from the double journey through Antwerp's circles of buzz bomb hell—
Why can't the glee club stay to "The White Cliffs of Dover"?—he
felt as if this had been the longest day of his life. Overlapping with that was the awareness that he had thought the same thing trekking out of the Canadian woods with Jake. And wading ashore at Guam with Animal. And healing on the hospital ship off New Guinea after the ambush with Carl. The list could go on, nearly as long as the war.
Not that anyone other than you is keeping track, Reinking, but how many longest days can a guy stand in one life?
Beer helped, luckily. Trying to force yourself to relax is much like pouring into the wrong end of a funnel, but sip by sip in the vaulted concrete room full of strangers' racket, he took refuge in that sensation of a place where nobody knows you're you.
Yet.

He was on his second beer, and the Brits were going operatic about how many balls Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels had in total, when Moxie joined him at the table, scowling toward the piano crowd. "That pissant Noel Coward has a lot to answer for, if you ask me—they all think they're him." He checked his watch and slumped down into the chair opposite Ben.

"Here." Ben shoved across a bottle he had put aside for him. "Beer is known to settle the nerves."

"Who said they need settling?" Well, thought Ben, the facial tic, for one. Moxie in the old days had the nerves of a snake handler. He was always the holder for point-after kicks, unfazed by linemen half again his size hurtling at him as he delicately set the ball in place for Vic Rennie's foot. He had commendations and captain's bars to show for courage under those England years of air raids. Now as he did quick damage to the beer and kept darting glances around the room, with a special dose of contempt for the singing piano warriors, it was all too clear that what had been Moxie's ornery bravado had turned into just ornery.