The Valhalla Exchange - Jack Higgins [6]
'Heh, the captain's up and he don't look too good.'
'Why don't you try a mirror?' Garland inquired. 'You think you look like a daisy or something?'
'Stinkweed - that's the only flower he ever resembled,' O'Grady said.
'That's it, hotshot,' Finebaum told him. 'You're out. From here on in you find your own beans.' He turned to Hoover. 'I ask you, Sarge. I appeal to your better nature. Is that the best these mothers can offer after all I've done for them?'
'That's a truly lousy act, Finebaum, did I ever tell you that?' Hoover poured coffee into an aluminium cup. 'You're going to need plenty of practice, boy, if you're ever going to get back into vaudeville.'
'Well, I'll tell you,' Finebaum said. 'I've had kind of a special problem lately. I ran out of audience. Most of them died on me.'
Hoover took the coffee across to the truck and gave it to Howard without a word. Somewhere thunder rumbled on the horizon.
'Eighty-eights?' the captain said.
Hoover nodded. 'Don't they ever give up? It don't make any kind of sense to me. Every time we turn on the radio they tell us this war's as good as finished.'
'Maybe they forgot to tell the Germans.'
'That makes sense. Any chance of submitting it through channels?'
Howard shook his head. 'It wouldn't do any good, Harry. Those krauts don't intend to give in until they get you. That's what it's all about.'
Hoover grunted. 'Those mothers better be quick or they're going to miss out, that's all I can say. You want to eat now? We still got plenty of K-rations and Finebaum traded some smokes last night for half a dozen cans of beans from some of those Limey tank guys up the column.'
'The coffee's just fine, Harry,' Howard said. 'Maybe later.'
The sergeant moved back to the fire and Howard paced up and down beside the truck, stamping his feet and clutching the hot cup tightly in mittened fingers. He was twenty-three years of age, young to be a captain of Rangers, but that was the circumstances of war. He wore a crumpled Mackinaw coat, woolknit muffler at his throat and a knitted cap. There were times when he could have passed for nineteen, but this was not one of them, not with the four-day growth of dark beard on his chin, the sunken eyes.
But once he had been nineteen, an Ohio farmer's son with some pretensions to being a poet and the desire to write for a living which had sent him to Columbia to study journalism. That was a long time ago - before the flood. Before the further circumstances of war which had brought him to his present situation in charge of the reconnaissance element for a column of the British 7th Armoured Division, probing into Bavaria towards Berchtesgaden.
Hoover squatted beside the fire. Finebaum passed him a plate of beans. 'The captain not eating?'
'Not right now.'
'Jesus,' Finebaum said. 'What kind of way is that to carry on?'
'Respect, Finebaum.' Hoover prodded him with his knife. 'Just a little more respect when you speak about him.'
'Sure, I respect him,' Finebaum said. 'I respect him like crazy and I know how you and he went in at Salerno together and how those Krauts jumped you outside Anzio with those machine guns flat zeroed in and took out three-quarters of the battalion and how our gracious captain saved the rest. So he's God's gift to soldiery; so he should eat occasionally. He ain't swallowed more than a couple of mouthfuls since Sunday.'
'Sunday he lost nine men,' Hoover said. 'Maybe you're forgetting.'
'Those guys are dead - so they're dead - right? He don't keep his strength up, he might lose a few more, including me. I mean, look at him! He's got so skinny, that stinking coat he wears is two sizes too big for him. He looks like some fresh kid in his first year at college.'
'I know,' Hoover said. 'The kind they give the Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster to.'
The others laughed and