Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  The turbulence worsened. For ten minutes he watched the wings wobble and listened to the plane’s fuselage complain and groan. He sat, closed his eyes, and prayed.

  They dropped out of the cloud cover into snow. McKay looked out the window. Dawn had already come and gone, even at these latitudes, but the clouds and snow hung so thick overhead that the land and see beneath them looked like dusk without a sunset. Snow lanced across the wings. Below them lay Sullom Voe, one of the long, thin bays traced across the confusion of land known as Shetland. Someone in the cockpit swore. The crewman leaned into the cargo bay.

  “We’re over the water—we’ve got to go around.”

  The bay swept by dark and rippling three hundred feet below, then snowy land and a road and the airfield appeared underneath and pitched and yawed and turned beyond the tip of the wing.

  McKay felt his stomach lurch and looked at the team again. Graves had his eyes closed, Stallings stared across the hold and out the windows at the whirling ground, a look McKay had seen before on the faces of his Marines, crouched in their holes on Guadalcanal, watching onrushing waves of Japs. Only Ollila seemed calm. He had braced himself against the bench and bulkhead and watched everything as passively as a film. The guy has guts, McKay thought, and absurdly wondered how Ollila would handle climbing the cliffs of Tallulah Gorge.

  The plane swung level and banked again. The bay reappeared on the starboard side of the plane, a dark expanse in the windows behind Ollila, Stallings, and Graves, and the plane descended.

  Here we go, McKay thought.

  He looked out the window—the black water sharpened into waves and breakers and grew blacker and choppier as they dropped through the whirling snow. Up it came. The pilots lowered the flaps and throttled back. In one moment McKay felt the heat drain from his face and he threw his arms against the bulkhead to brace for impact—the plane was going to hit the water. The craft fishtailed, hung a moment, and fell. The hold tricked them, dropped out from under them and came back up a few feet to the left. Land appeared beneath them at the same moment that the wheels shrieked against the tarmac. McKay came down in the middle of his gear and his men slammed against the roof and fell in a heap beside him. The plane groaned a final time and the tail settled toward the earth.

  Somewhere in the pile, Stallings’s voice leaked out, “—a bitch.”

  McKay lifted himself from the deck, sat, and checked himself for injuries. The others slowly did the same as the plane slowed and taxied through the snow.

  “Y’all okay?”

  They grunted yeses and began untangling their gear.

  The C-47 pressed through the wind-driven snowflakes—a light snow that, McKay thought, looked beautiful now that they were out of danger—and stopped before a hangar. Ground crews in heavy coats and gloves were just finishing the job of tying down a line of RAF fighters. The pilot idled the engines and the crewman moved back through the hold and opened the rear door.

  “Sorry about the landing, boys,” he said, and before he could go on, Stallings bolted past him, not even waiting for help, pitched onto the tarmac and vomited. The crewman said, “Well, damn.”

  McKay pulled on his gear and stood. The crewman helped him down and he stood over Stallings. Snow skittered across his back like cotton lint.

  “You all right, Grove?”

  Stallings nodded. “Peachy,” he said, and retched again.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, dammit. Just glad I didn’t—didn’t shit myself.”

  McKay grinned and shook his head and bent to help him up.

  Graves and Ollila handed Stallings’s equipment down and began to unload themselves. The crewman stood in the door, offering jokes.

  “You guys know that was a great landing, huh? You know what the difference is between a good landing and a great landing?”

  Everyone but Ollila ignored him.

  “What is the difference?” said Ollila.

  “After a great landing you can use the plane again.”

  Ollila stared at him, lit a cigarette, and looked at him again. The crewman shivered and blanched, and McKay realized the man had been just as terrified as Stallings. The pilot, disembarking with them and a little pale himself now, said, “Shut up, Wentworth.”

  Stallings hefted his gear and the four of them walked through the wind and snow toward the hangar. Three jeeps and their drivers waited, and from them a thin man in a Royal Navy uniform strode forward to meet McKay.

  His name was Lieutenant Howarth, the second in command of the operation in Shetland. He had dark hair, the light frame of a runner, and seemed to be McKay’s age, perhaps a little older. He grinned and shook McKay’s hand, worried it like a terrier, and set about loading the team and its gear into the jeeps. Graves, Stallings, and Ollila piled into the second jeep, their gear filled the third. Howarth shooed his driver to the last jeep and insisted on driving McKay himself. They were bundled in and on their way in minutes.

  “Jolly glad to see you, Captain,” Howarth said as they turned onto the coastal road. “Imagine my anxiety as that storm blew in.”

  “Thanks for waiting on us,” McKay said, and Howarth laughed.

  “Not at all, not at all. Always glad to have guests in Shetland.”

  They drove north on a small road that followed the coast, then turned into a saddle in the low, treeless hills of Shetland’s interior. A few minutes later, the sea reappeared and they drove south. The land lay dark green and empty under a grey sky, and the snow seemed to settle nowhere. It reminded McKay of Iceland, where he had spent a few hours once waiting on a plane. Like Iceland and the Orkneys, and even England itself, Shetland had once played host to invaders, crossing the cold sea from Norway to kill and destroy. McKay felt himself smiling. They were going to return the favor.

  “Dales Voe,” Howarth said, and gestured at the water. “Have you ever seen a fjord, Captain?”

  “In books.”

  “These are nothing compared to those across the way, of course, but there’s nothing quite like a fjord, eh?”

  “It’s beautiful,” McKay said, and thought of home.

  “I understand you were picked on the basis of your studies?”

  McKay laughed.

  “Medieval history. I reckon I’m the only man in our outfit to have read the sagas. Don’t know whether it was that or the engineering. I sure wasn’t good at the engineering.”

  Howarth laughed again, said “Jolly good,” and changed gears.

  They left the sea behind—though not for long—and drove past low hills and scattered houses. McKay saw only one small village. The island lay dark and quiet. The sea reappeared ahead of them, and they turned left, putting the sea on their right as they drove onto another splayed arm of the island.

  “You can’t get away from the water for long here, can you?” McKay said.

  Howarth laughed.

  “Quite right! A hundred islands, dozens of bays, sixteen-hundred miles of coastline—lovely desolation. But hardly the place for a hydrophobe.”

  At last, they came around a gentle bend in the road, a rocky shoulder of hill moved aside, and their destination lay in sight.

  The island narrowed suddenly to an isthmus barely two hundred yards wide, a neck crisscrossed by stone walls and dotted with stone buildings—the shell of a long-derelict house, a pier, a church and its acre of gravestones—and across the neck, on a boulder-strewn swell of land rising above the sea on either side, a grey house. They dipped across the isthmus and approached it from beneath like supplicants, its crow-stepped gables and chimney pots reared against the dark sky.

  “Welcome to Lunna House, Captain.”

  The road bore left past the house, then brought them uphill and behind it to a large outbuilding and a stone wall with an open gate. They turned through the gate and stopped in the drive behind the house. A pair of guards sheltering from the wind behind the outbuilding approached.

  “I brought a few lads along to help out,” Howarth said. “You
needn’t worry—they’re cleared for Most Secret work. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all—thanks.”

  They unloaded the jeeps and brought the gear inside. Howarth led them through the dark house to the main hall. The house echoed with its size and emptiness. Wind-driven snow pecked the windowpanes. A third guard had, with bits of kindling and shreds of newspaper, coaxed a guttering fire to life on the hall’s hearth, but the house stood otherwise sepulchral cold and full of grey winter light. McKay looked at the walls and ceilings. Everything needed repair. Howarth noticed him looking around.

  “Reminds me of Baskerville Hall,” McKay said.

  Howarth seemed mortified.

  “Yes, I’m frightfully sorry about this. We’ve broken camp, you see—moved our base to Scalloway. Another bit of the island. Your people did ask for isolation, I’m afraid.”

  “No apologies necessary, Lieutenant,” McKay said, and held out his hand. “Thanks.”

  “Quite welcome, I’m sure.” He nodded to the guards. “I’m leaving you these men until tomorrow. I understand you’re to travel to Norway by submarine.”

  “That’s right,” McKay said, and thought, That’s classified.

  Howarth seemed to guess his thoughts.

  “Not to worry, Captain, I know how to keep a secret. If you’ll step outside with me a moment…”

  McKay told the team to check their gear and set up for an overnight stay in the hall. He walked outside. Howarth led him around to the front of the house.

  Lunna House may have looked imposing from the road, but its view of the isthmus, the black bays on either side of it and the dips and folds of bare, rocky land across the waters was even more impressive. Below McKay and Howarth stood the squat stone buildings and pens they had driven past, and a handful of cold-stunned sheep huddling in the lee of the walls. The stone walls and buildings looked less like they had been quarried and set by man and more like they had been weathered into existence by the winds and rains of the north. The wind whipped the thin snow around them without bringing it to rest on anything. McKay’s nose burned and began to run. He turned up the collar of his coat and pulled his scarf up to his chin. Howarth appeared unfazed by the chill.

  “We’re looking south, you see,” Howarth said. He waved to the left, the east. “East Lunna Voe. Open to the North Sea and unprotected by these splendid promontories. You needn’t worry about it. But West Lunna Voe—” and he gestured to the right, toward the sheltered cove where the pier struck out into the water, “—that’s where you’ll rendezvous. Sheltered. Calm and tranquil. We used to bring all our boats into that water, until we moved. Unfortunately it’s only suitable for vessels drawing less than thirteen feet, so your sub will meet you farther out, in the deepest channel of that bay.”

  “Understood.”

  “We’re bringing a motor launch round from Scalloway to assist you when it arrives. I don’t expect you’d like swimming that water.”

  McKay laughed. Howarth laughed with him, and crossed his arms and seemed to lose himself in thought.

  “You’ve heard, I suppose, about the frogman attack on the Tirpitz?”

  McKay had. Just three months before, British sailors in miniature submarines had breached the defenses of a German naval base in the far northern reaches of Norway, at Altafjord. The battleships Scharnhorst and Tirpitz were moored there, within striking distance of the northern Atlantic and the arctic shipping lanes running from North America to Russia. Over several painstaking hours, the British navigated the defenses of the fjord, attached mines to the hull of the Tirpitz, and attempted to flee. The explosions crippled the Tirpitz, but the mini-subs’ crews—or what was left of them—were captured. And the Scharnhorst still roamed the sea lanes. Failure may have been too harsh a word for the mission, but success was far too kind.

  Regardless, McKay admired that kind of guts.

  Howarth nodded toward the sea.

  “Those lads trained for the job here.”

  McKay looked at the sea, imagined the brave but ill-fated crews practicing their attacks over and over until they had mastered each step and contingency, and thought again of how under-prepared his team was for this mission. He wanted to ask Howarth how long the frogmen had trained, diving into the black icewater below, but did not. He rubbed his eyes.

  Howarth bestirred himself, sighed, and checked his watch.

  “Nearly 1200. You’ll be wanting rest. Sunset comes by 1500 at this time of year, you know.”

  “Of course,” McKay said, and held out his hand. Howarth took it. “Thanks again.”

  “Not at all.”

  They turned against the wind and went inside.

  Howarth left the three guards with them and departed with his jeeps. McKay doublechecked the team’s gear, then went over his own. Stallings stretched out and slept. Ollila cleaned his rifle. Graves poked at the fire until it roared in the grate. When McKay had finished with his gear, he prepared a place to sleep near the fire, laid himself slowly down, and closed his eyes. Within minutes, he had checked his timepiece, turned over, and lay thinking, eyes open. He would go over the details—what details he had—with the team once aboard the sub. They would check their weapons, ammo, explosives, and other gear again. And again. He would try to sleep.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyelids shut. Sunset in two hours, when it had risen less than three hours and 700 miles ago. He opened his eyes once more, took in the snow and wan dusklight outside the windows, and slept.

  He awoke again deep in the night. The fire guttered and the team snored around him. He drifted in and out and, finally, slept again. He did not realize until later, deep into the long winter darkness of those islands, that, once they sailed, he would not see the sun again.

  4

  He could see the conning tower and men moving on it, the moon shone so bright. The light in the cloudless black rimmed tower, deck, and sharklike prow blue-white against the twinkling bay. McKay ground his chin deeper into his scarf and checked his timepiece. It was 0400.

  He stood on the pier and watched the motor launch return from the sub. He had checked the house once more to make sure they had left nothing behind, and as soon as he boarded the Viking, the sub would reverse engines out of the bay, make for open water, and once in the sea beyond, cruise northward. They would have fifty-six hours aboard the Viking to rest and make ready. McKay had already prepared his brief for the men.

  The launch throttled back and the sailor at the helm slid up parallel to the dock. McKay stepped in, sat beside him, and they were off.

  “Beautiful evening, eh, sir?”

  McKay had not considered it, but he looked around now and realized that it was. The storm had cleared sometime in the night. He awoke after a few hours of good sleep to hear the wind—even feel it—blow against the creaking house and see moonlight brighten the smudged and dusty windows of the hall. He rose then and paced and watched the moon-silvered isthmus. The submarine glid slowly into view beyond a low, sheltering arm of land at 0230.

  McKay nodded to the sailor and put his head down. The storm may have gone, but the wind had remained.

  The launch came broadside to the sub and McKay stood, planted one foot on the gunwale and jumped aboard. The sailor saluted and gunned the engine to return to the pier.

  Two sailors in peacoats waited with a young Royal Navy officer in a great coat and peak cap. The officer saluted and McKay returned it.

  “Sub-lieutenant Hopper, sir. Everything in order?”

  “Captain McKay. We’re squared away, Lieutenant.”

  They climbed the tower and Hopper stood beside the hatch, awaiting McKay. McKay glanced up at the sky, the moon, and climbed down.

  As often as McKay had traveled and in as wide a variety of vehicles, he had never been aboard a submarine before. The silence and bright darkness of the night gave way to crowd, din, and the glare of warning lights, instrument panels, and naked bulbs. Sailors came and went in the cramped chamber, a
nd banks of instruments, dials, and switches—each with a sailor or two bowed over it in concentration—lined the bulkheads. In one corner near a hatch stood a waist-high desk like a sideboard, around which a few gold-braided officers had gathered. In the center stood the great steel trunk of the periscope, the point at which the commander could stand and direct the entire sub as a single weapon and send enemy vessels to the black bottom of the sea. Even as he admired the power of a such a narrow and compact boat and the industry and skill of its crew, McKay shuddered.

  As the sub-lieutenant reached the bottom of the ladder behind McKay the knot of officers broke apart and an older man, craggy-faced and standing over six feet tall, unbent himself from the chart table and extended his hand to McKay. The cuff of his sleeve was circled and knotted with gold.

  “Commander Treat,” he said. “Officer Commanding on this vessel. Welcome aboard, sir.”

  McKay shook his hand. The man had the kind of grip McKay had always imagined a sailor would—sinews of salt-dried rope. “Captain McKay, OSS. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  Commander Treat did not roll his eyes, which made his disdain the more devastating. He gave McKay’s hand a final squeeze with an ounce more force than necessary and turned toward the control room.

  “If you require anything, you’ll likely find me here.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” McKay said. “I’m going to see to my men, and then, if possible, I’d like to have a word with them in private. Do you have a place we could use?”

  “Mister Hopper,” Treat said, and the sub-lieutenant appeared. “Reserve my dining compartment for the use of Captain McKay and his men indefinitely. See they know where to go.”

  “Aye, sir,” Hopper said.

  “Your men are billeted aft. We had just the amount of bunks for you. It’s most fortunate for you we’re shorthanded at the moment.”

  “I’m sure we would’ve arranged something,” McKay said, and saluted. “Thanks again, Commander.”