The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [167]
He opened his eyes, unsure.
Then the tossed-off words came back. "Moxie'll be along later, he's getting dressed up." Moxie hated dressing up. He had barely managed it for Purcell's funeral. His deliberately careless fashion was that of an unmade bed.
Ben jerked upright on the bunk, put his shoes on in a hurry, and went out into the bunker corridor. He asked the officer next door: "Did the lights blink just now?"
"Same like always," came the reply in a used-to-it voice. "The buzz bomb dimmer switch."
He hurried down the corridor to Moxie's room. Empty. Okay, he must be hanging around the Wonder Bar watching them set things up, is all. Showing Inez the glamorous life. He couldn't quite convince himself. Moxie was not the kind to sit in a corner watching other people be in charge.
This time he stuck his head in the room across the hall, the senior enlisted men's side. A grizzled gunnery sergeant at the wall niche desk writing a letter home looked around in surprise and started to get to his feet. "At ease, Guns," Ben said quickly. "Any idea where Captain Stamper's wandered off to?"
"Sure thing. Him and that nurse went to the flicks, in town. Some newsreel guys wanted shots of his squiring her somewhere and you know him, he wouldn't pass up—"
Ben set off for the wire room at a run.
The entire section was a din of teletypes clacking and phones jangling. WRENs with messages in hand scurried off into the HQ staff's warren of offices. Forging his way through the traffic of messengers, Ben latched on to the owl-eyed clerk blinking up at him in alarm from his keyboard. "Sir, we're on emergency priority, we can't send to TPWP without the commander's—"
"To hell with that. The buzz bomb that hit—where?"
"In the city, right in the center. Bad one, sir. There's a call out for ambulances from units all the way to Brussels." The clerk skimmed the message pad he was transcribing from. "The Belgian authorities keep calling the place a 'cinema' but our regs say 'movie'—"
Ben whirled, searching the room. Where was Maurice with the damn jeep when needed? Up to his tonsils in there with the commander and the intelligence dummies who blew this, that's where.
Abandoning the wire room, he wove his way back to his quarters at a trot, grabbed his flight jacket and crush hat and the pistol belt, and plunged out into the long maze of corridors to the hospital bunker. The scene there was the confusion of the wire room multiplied. Stretcher bearers were bringing in a steady bloodied stream of men, women, children—some so blackened with blast dust and dried blood you could not tell which they were. Army doctors and nurses swarmed around the stretcher cases, scissoring off clothing, shunting the prone patients into surgery or wards. Constantly dodging out of the way, Ben hunted down the medical staffer keeping track of the military wounded and dead, learned most of the victims were Antwerp civilians so far, and Moxie's and Inez's dog tags were not among those the staffer had copied onto his clipboard list. Okay, they're among the missing, Ben tried to reason himself into, that's a different list. They could still be at the theater, Moxie by nature would take over any rescue task he could, she was a nurse—
The decision churning within him, Ben zeroed in on an ambulance driver outside under the archway smoking a cigarette. Throat dry—Comparatively few direct hits compared to what?—he stepped out into the wintry Antwerp night, calling to the driver: "Sarge, the movie theater that caught it—are you going back in?"
The driver stiffened but the cigarette stayed cupped in his saluting hand. "Probably all night, Captain, why?"
"I'm riding with you."
The driver shrugged, not wanting any more trouble on the night. "If you want, you can hop in back. Hang on to something, we give it the gas going in."
Out the back windows of the jouncing ambulance he could see spikes of light driven into the blackness, searchlights on the hunt for buzz bombs. Whenever one was found, tracer bullets streaked toward it,