Kuykendall looked down into the fighting compartment from the commander's seat. "Sarge?" she said. "I—" and broke off when she realized Des Grieux was already alert.
"Get up front 'n drive," Des Grieux ordered curtly. "It's happening."
"It's maybe nothing," the driver said, but she knew Des Grieux. As Kuykendall spoke, she swung her legs out of the cupola. Hopping from the cupola and past the main gun was the fastest way to the driver's hatch in the bow. The tank commander blocked the internal passage anyway as he climbed up to his seat.
The Automatic Air Defense plate on
When the siege began, Lieutenant Lindgren ordered that one member of each two-man tank crew be on watch in the cupola at every moment. What the tankers did off-duty, and where they slept, was their own business.
Most of the off-duty troops slept beneath their vehicles, entering the plenum chamber through the access plate in the steel skirts. The chambers were roomy and better protection than anything cobbled together by shovels and sandbags could be. The only problem was the awareness before sleep came that the tank above you weighed 170 tonnes . . . but tankers tended not to be people who thought in those terms.
Lindgren insisted on a bunker next to his vehicle. He was sure that he would go mad if his whole existence, on duty and off, was bounded by the steel and iridium shell of his tank.
Des Grieux went the other way around. He slept in the fighting compartment while his driver kept watch in the cupola above. The deck was steel pressed with grip rosettes. He couldn't stretch out. His meter-ninety of height had to twist between the three-screen control console and the armored tube which fed ammunition to the autoloading 20cm main gun.
Nobody called the fighting compartment a comfortable place to sleep; but then, nobody called Des Grieux sane, either.
A storm of Republican artillery fire screamed toward Hill 541N. Some of the shells would have gotten through even if Des Grieux had left
