The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [146]
"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