The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [143]
An officer, stubby and bright-eyed, stepped in front of him. Amid the wardrobe explosion of uniforms it took Ben a moment to identify this one as British, the sainted Royal Air Force.
"Captain Reinking, is it?"
The mellifluous accent issued from a boyish ruddy face with a nose on it like the round end of a hammer. From that ball-peen nose on down, the blue-clad officer was built about as square as a man could be without a loading pallet under him. "I trust you had a good flight? I'm Leftenant Overby. Assigned to you, it seems. Your liaison to the sector communications branch."
Ben did not like the looks of this. By this stage of the war, he had caught the enlisted men's aversion to fresh-faced lieutenants; that first syllable dangerously rhymed with "new" and green looeys were trouble in combat. He wasn't looking for combat, but he wasn't looking for whatever trouble might come with this British version of shavetail, either. "Lieut—Leftenant," he acknowledged this one with a dubious nod.
"I'm instructed to see to your needs," the pleasant tumble of words ensued again, "show you the ins and outs of the ticker room, and all that. Oh, and your mother branch—TPWP, if I have the alphabet mix right?—sends its regards. Let's see, I copied it off: 'End zone in sight. Brief time-out. Huddle up, scoring play is on way.'" The RAF man glanced up at him with polite reserve. "A bit over our heads in the code department, I'm afraid, and we do hope we managed to decipher it correctly. Make sense to you, does it, Captain?"
Nothing they ever do does, but I get the gist. "It's their sweet way of saying hurry up and wait."
"Ah, well, then, military business as usual, isn't it. Shall we?" Overby swept the travel pack out of Ben's grasp, hovered the merest instant over the etiquette of grabbing the typewriter case too, and left that untouched. "I'll drive you to your billet."
Ben did not budge. "Let me catch up with what we're doing—where is it?" He was determined not to be dumped in some Antwerp hotel the Nazis had pillaged for four years.
"Not to worry, Captain, we're in bunkers," Overby replied patiently. "It would require a direct hit to do a person in, and there have been comparatively few of those here on the airfield."
Bunkers? Here? The inconspicuous airfield looked like a hastily transformed cow pasture—the runway the plane had trundled in on was composed of the metal mats that engineers could lay down in a hurry and the buildings were drab military prefabs—but now that Ben looked again, the open flat uncamouflaged terrain all around left the place as exposed as a beached aircraft carrier. Direct hits were a topic worth pursuing. "Comparatively few compared to what?"
"The city, of course." Overby indicated the low rough skyline of Antwerp barely visible through the gray air some little distance away. "Poor old Antwerpen town," his tone dropped to tragic, "is receiving a battering about like London's was."
About like—? Suspicious of being hazed as a newcomer, Ben fixed a dead-level gaze on the RAF officer. "You better spell that out for me, too. Where's the battering come from?" He knew any bombardment in this sector could not be from artillery, the German ground forces had been driven back nearly into Germany itself, the fighting front the last he'd heard was in the Ardennes forest over a hundred miles away. And while the German air command no doubt could crank up occasional nuisance air raids or Moxie's anti-aircraft battery wouldn't have been sent here, everyone knew Allied fighter planes ruled the skies of Europe by the time of D-Day. "I thought the Luftwaffe was supposed to be on its last legs."
"Quite," came the bland response. "The buzz bombs are ever with us, however. Fifty-some flying bombs in one day, in the worst of last week."
For a marginal few seconds, Ben wondered if it was too late to get back on the plane.
"Not that we censors,"