"Rog Philips - The Phantom Truck Driver" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phillips Rog)

distinctive bap. A couple of feet of solid dirt will protect you against it. That's why the trench. In open
field combat an atom grenade would be suicide if you were within a quarter of a mile of it.

The phantom truckdriver. That had been about six months ago at Lost Hope Ridge. The situation had
been about the same as now, except that it wasn't due to radio trouble, but a sudden wave of Junies that
kept us trapped in our trench while the rest of the front fell back.
At the last minute this truck came through with a load of supplies, mostly atom grenades. It saved the
day. But afterwards it turned out that no truck had been dispatched to us, and the two thousand atom
grenades he delivered had never been released to us and, to make it even more puzzling, had never
existed.
You have to understand about atom grenades to know the significance of that. The counter registers
every grenade explosion. When it's over you have so many grenades left and so many explosions on the
counter. They add up to the figure of grenades assigned to you. There's more chance of a bank having
two thousand dollars too much at the end of the day than there is of having two thousand extra grenades.
It was the only one who had gotten a close-up look at the driver of the truck. I was shown the
picture of every truckdriver in our sector, and he wasn't any of them.
The medics gave me two months away from the front, in a nice quiet place with gardens and, clean
sheets and leisurely meals, for which I was grateful. The story of the phantom truckdriver spread over the
whole front, with my name tagged to it. You know how those things go. Hush-hush around me, but
whisper-whisper and fingers pointing at me behind my back.
But, regardless of the medics, I had seen that phantom truck-driver.

The messenger from the radio dugout was coming along the trench again. When he got to me he
reported, "They're sending a load of grenades to us. Five thousand. Welded some scrapers onto the
truck body to peel off the goo on the tires."
"Good," I said. "How long do they think it'll be before it gets here?"
"An hour. Unless it stalls."
I nodded. We'd know if it stalled. The driver would touch off his load to keep the Junies from getting
it.
I watched the kid go back along the trench, pausing here and there to tell the men about the truck. I
could see the mud-covered faces split into grins.
Would it get through? I stared into the curtain of rain, and so tricky is the imagination that I was sure I
could see it out there, a vague shadow that seemed to come closer, stop, come on. . . . But it couldn't be.
It would be at least another hour before it could arrive.
I started to turn away, then jerked my eyes back. It was definitely the truck. For an instant there had
been clear vision for a hundred yards, and I saw the truck. I did some mental arithmetic. The messenger
had taken maybe five minutes from the radio dugout. It could be that the truck had already started when
the message came through. Also, the truck could be making much better time than they had hoped for тАФ
or they could have purposely said an hour so we wouldn't get our hopes too high and then too low if it
didn't arrive in a shorter time.
I relaxed. It was the truck they had sent out. And it was close enough now so that I could see it
plainly. I passed the command down the trench to lay off the grenades and use fire power only.
I sent word down the lines for five husky men to come forward for the unloading.
They were behind me as I climbed out of the trench and struggled to my feet, bringing heavy chunks
of glue-mud with me. We went around to the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate. The men
started unloading, passing the boxes of grenades from hand to hand to waiting hands in the trench. An
occasional Juny bullet spattered against the truck, fired blindly from a distance.
I went around to the truck cab and opened the door, then froze. The driver was the same one. The
phantom truckdriver.
"Hi," he greeted me casually.