Treat grunted and Hopper led McKay out of the control room, through a low door in the bulkhead, and into a passage barely shoulder-wide. McKay heard the engines rumble somewhere in the back of the boat and felt the floor and walls tremble and move around him. He understood, for a moment, why some people succumbed to motion-sickness.
Hopper squeezed aside after a moment and ahead McKay saw the team. They stood beside or lay on their bunks, talking, but turned and waited as McKay approached.
“We have all your equipment stowed in the forward torpedo room, Captain,” Hopper said.
“Outstanding,” McKay said, and to the team, “Y’all squared away?”
They were. McKay told them to relax, then turned to Hopper and asked him to show the way to the captain’s dining room.
They returned forward from the bunks.
“Commander Treat said y’all are shorthanded?” McKay said to Hopper.
“Yes, sir. Depth-charged by a German destroyer a few weeks ago off the North Cape. Three men with severe concussions—one nearly got his packet. Bally glad we won’t be steaming that far north on this job.” They entered the control room and Hopper knuckled his brow as he passed Treat, then bowed through the forward hatch and continued. “Another three got their packet in port.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Oh! Christ—I mean they contracted, eh, venereal disease. They’ll be back once the surgeon’s put them right.”
“I see what you mean.”
Hopper chuckled and shook his head. They stopped and Hopper drew aside a curtain. Behind it stood a table and wooden booth, with little more space than a hole scraped out of the wall of a slit trench.
“The captain’s mess, sir,” Hopper said.
McKay nodded. “It’ll do, thanks. Can you keep a secret, Lieutenant?”
Hopper flushed and shifted his weight. He looked like a schoolboy out of Dickens, called onto the carpet by some shrill headmaster. He might well have been a schoolboy a year ago, McKay thought.
“Sir?”
“I’ll have to brief my team on the assignment ahead of us,” McKay said. “Several times, preferably. Can you keep watch outside this curtain while I do?”
“Watch, sir?”
“I need someone trustworthy to guard our discussions. I’m asking you to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Hopper said, brightening. “Of course, sir. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”
McKay thanked him and turned to walk back to the bunks. Hopper followed. After passing through the control room again, Hopper said, “Don’t mind the skipper, Captain. He’s abrupt, to be certain, but that’s his way.”
McKay smiled. “Don’t bother me in the least.”
“Aye, sir. I think the old man’s a bit impatient with the job, sir. Thinks it’s a bit of a doddle.”
McKay stopped and looked back at Hopper. “A doddle?”
“Ah—a milk run, sir. Something impossible to cock up—if you’ll pardon the—”
“Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“That’s all right.” They had reached the bunks. “Just let me know when we’ve reached open sea and I’ll brief my team.”
Hopper, sweaty now, saluted and hurried forward.
“The hell?” Stallings said.
“Nothing,” McKay said. He knew better than to tell the rank and file that another officer took offense at being used as a taxi service. “Like I said, relax—but be ready. Once we’re underway we need to go over the mission as a team.”
The men looked at each other. Graves grinned, and even Ollila allowed himself a half-smile. Stallings paled and inspected a hangnail.
Hopper came for them two and a half hours later, saying they had just passed out of sight of the Bound Skerry lighthouse and were well into the North Sea. McKay thanked him and roused the team.
They packed into the captain’s booth and Hopper drew the curtain. A single bulb in a wire grille lit the interior. McKay collected his thoughts a moment, then began.
“The objective is a dam, which we’ll disable or destroy by any means necessary.”
He took the pencil and blank white notepad he had brought with him and drew a rough hourglass shape in scraggly lines. Across the neck, with two strong, hard strokes, he described parallel arcs, bowed upward. He tapped the arcs.
“It’s an arch dam, meaning it’s concave, bowed back into the water behind it. Does the same job as an old-fashioned gravity dam, the ones that look like a big concrete bank, but it takes less concrete. That makes it ideal for damming narrow spaces like gorges, which is exactly what we have in this case. Now—” He jotted a negative sign above the crest of the arcs, and positive signs where they joined the uneven lines marking the gorge. “—arch dams are designed to shift the pressure of the water behind them to the outer edges of the dam, where it joins the cliffs or mountains or whatever gap they’re damming. The intake for the hydro plants at an arch dam are usually at one corner or the other. In this case, we think they’re here.” He marked an x on the lefthand side of the dam. “Those intakes, with all that pressure behind them, funnel water through the cliffs on this side of the gorge to a hydro plant about a mile away and several hundred feet lower than the top of the dam. Water pressure and gravity combine to get the turbines going as fast as possible.”
“This sounds kinda familiar,” Stallings said.
McKay nodded. He leaned over the paper again and drew a cross section of the dam, like a steep-sided right triangle. From near the top of the vertical side he drew a wavy line—the lake. He drew a flat-topped superstructure at the peak and curved an arrow through it and down the sloping hypotenuse. He tapped the superstructure.
“At the top are the floodgates. Ever so often they’ll open the gates to release some water. That floods down the backside of the dam. Pretty simple. What we’re interested in, though—” and at regularly spaced intervals down the vertical side, inside the triangle of the dam, he drew small boxes like far-off, empty windows, “—are the galleries.”
“Galleries?” Graves said.
“Passageways. Interior passages in the dam. Arch dams usually have three.” He brought the finely sharpened point of the pencil down on the box nearest the top of the dam, said, “The crest gallery,” the box near the center of the vertical line, “the inspection gallery,” the bottommost, slightly larger than the others, “and the bottom gallery, at the base, near bedrock. They’re used for different things, like repairing gates for the hydro intake. Don’t worry about that. Now, this dam, like some of the ones I’ve worked on, has a hydro station somewhere else instead of directly below it, so we don’t have to worry about slipways or anything inside the dam. Just the galleries. What we’re going to use them for is destroying the dam. Graves?”
“Sir.”
“We need to consult specifically about that. But generally speaking, what I plan to do is move in with all our explosives, plant them at a point somewhere in the inspection gallery—about halfway down the dam, where the concrete isn’t too thick but where we can still hope to do permanent damage—and detonate them with a timer.”
Graves thrust out his chin and nodded. “Damned good, sir.”
“Simple, right?” McKay grinned. “Well, that part is. It’s the Germans at the dam that complicate matters.”
Stallings and Graves chuckled. Ollila nodded.
“Unfortunately,” McKay paused to work over the wording, to choose with precision, “we’ve embarked with limited intelligence, especially regarding the resistance we’re likely to encounter. What we do know is this.”
He took his first sketch, the simple schematic of the gorge and dam, and added a handful of boxes to the lefthand side of the gorge, a large one near the dam and four smaller ones beside it. He sketched in two more on the right and slid the paper to the center of the table.
“We’re not sure how many there are, but there is a German garrison. Some of the higher ups seemed to th
ink it’d be guarded by old men and Russian POWs in German uniforms, but we should plan for the worst. Based on the photos I’ve seen, their HQ and barracks are here, on the north side of the dam, but there are a few buildings on the south side, too.”
“More barracks?” Graves said.
“Possibly. Could be storage. Could be a mess hall. No way to know given the quality of our intelligence.”
Graves gave Ollila an unsure look, and McKay raged at himself for a moment. He continued before they had too long to ponder what he meant by the quality of their intel. “At any rate, our plans for the infiltration, attack, and escape will all depend on what we find out when we arrive. Our Norwegian contacts will have a better idea of the dam’s guard and the ways in and out than we can get from photos. And how we assault the complex will depend on how many men the Norwegians have at their disposal.”
“Very good, sir,” Graves said.
“Now, Graves and Ollila, y’all have done this kind of thing before, but I want to go over something for Stallings, here.”
Stallings laughed. “Go to hell.”
McKay grinned, waved a hand at him, and looked at the table. “We have no hope of overcoming a German garrison, not by direct assault. What we have on our side are stealth, surprise, and speed. We move up on them, catch them unawares. By the time they realize—if they realize—what’s going on, the balance has already tipped in our favor. The trick is preventing them from realizing that until the last possible moment. From that point on, during any given mission, we have about thirty minutes to get out before we’ve lost the initiative and are killed. Or worse.”
Stallings had stopped laughing. “Got it.”
“Focus on the task, move quickly and silently,” McKay said. “Until then, rest up, rehearse the plan—as good as we’ve got it, anyway—and maintain your weapons.”
McKay went over his weapons a few hours later. He had the storage area to himself as long as he needed it. He had made it clear to Hopper that they carried classified material and that his men and their equipment were sacrosanct—the only case in which they could be interrupted was enemy contact. Hopper would relay the message to Treat. McKay would be polite. He had met enough rank-pullers before to know how unpleasant they could be, and he wanted to avoid conflict.
He cleaned and oiled the Thompson first, brought the weapon from the ready to his shoulder several times, somehow comforted by the familiar motion, and put it away in its case. Next was his Browning. He had strapped it on that morning at Lunna House—Commander Treat had given the pistol belt a glare or two on McKay’s trips through the control room—and would wear it until he was safely back in England, if that day came. He removed it from the leather holster, stripped and cleaned it, and, when he had reassembled it and thumbed on the safety, returned it to the holster. His knives, the Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger and his Marine ka-bar, he wiped down, checking for rust, and whetted aimlessly for a few minutes before packing them away.
The last lay in a black Bakelite case. He opened the top like a jeweler presenting something fine to a nervous young customer. Inside on the velvet padding rested not a selection of rings, but a pistol.
McKay had fought hard in many places and killed enemies with many things—he had killed at least one person with every weapon he had already checked and cleaned—even down to his bare hands on Guadalcanal. The Marines had trained him to kill and he had done so, many times, with both them and the OSS. But he did not like to strangle.
In Denmark, one of his first assignments, he had been discovered by a Danish informer to the Gestapo. He intercepted the man on a quiet street, two blocks from the police station, and they grappled in an alley. McKay had the Browning under his armpit but could not risk the noise of the shot or even releasing his grip to draw the weapon, and he had no knife. He strangled the man with his own necktie, an imitation silk tie with paisleys, a pattern he knew intimately, stitch by stitch, before he released the man and let him sag onto the ground. It had taken twelve minutes.
When he returned to England he had asked the Major for a silenced pistol. A few days later, just in time for his next trip abroad, the Major had brought to him the Bakelite box. Inside lay the Welrod.
The Welrod was the ugliest weapon he had ever seen. It looked like a footlong piece of parkerized pipe with a grip and trigger unbeautifully welded to the bottom. The ejection port on top looked like it had been hacked out slantwise with a hatchet. Another oddity—it was a bolt-action pistol. The back end of the pipe was a knurl-edged knob that, with a twist, a pull, a push forward, and another twist, brought a round up from the grip and chambered it. It had iron sights tipped in fluorescent paint—the Welrod’s designers knew how often their customers moved in darkness. The pistol was not completely silent—no “silenced” pistol really was—but between the long suppressor and the small, slow .32 caliber pistol rounds it fired, it did the job, and quietly. When loaded and sighted McKay could drop a man with little more noise than a sharp cough. McKay had not strangled anyone since.
He cleaned the Welrod carefully and repacked it, then returned to the bunkroom.
He had a narrow rack with a bulkhead at one arm and a drop to the iron deck at the other. When he lay down and took out his copy of Thucydides, he noticed the movement of the sub—really noticed it—for the first time. Already they were in the open ocean. The sub cruised on the surface to make better speed and chopped up and down in the troughs.
He read. He imagined the Greeks in the book’s pages rolling across warmer seas, but sailing from battle to battle just the same. He had been reading ten minutes when the boat rocked him to sleep.
He awoke to Stallings and Graves talking. He had rolled onto his side, and the first thing he saw was a doodle of Chad, the British Kilroy. Chad peeked at him from the bulkhead and asked Wot, no birds? Underneath, another artist had added an anatomical graffito that would not have passed muster among cave painters.
McKay rolled over. Graves lay in his rack, near the deck, and Stalling sat on the edge of his own above Graves and across from McKay. Graves was talking about lion hunting again.
“Nah, you use an elephant gun for, well, elephants,” Graves said. “We had one of those, an old Mauser, belonged to my granddad. Held two rounds—.577 Nitro Express. Bullets the size of your tadger.”
“Must’ve been a cannon,” Stallings said.
“Pfft. You hang on to this story, you can use that on the ladies when we get home. No, for the lions, I used our other Mauser. Another one belonged to granddad—got it offa this Boer basher fifty years ago.”
McKay sat up and lowered himself to the deck. Graves looked up, said, “Evening, Captain,” and continued.
McKay stretched and checked his timepiece. Midnight approached. They had been underway for nearly twenty hours, enough time to put them two hundred nautical miles north of Shetland—a third of the way. They would be sailing parallel to the Norwegian coast by now.
He did not feel like reading and knew that he would sleep no more tonight, so McKay excused himself from Graves’s excursus and moved forward. The worst thing about commando operations, the thing he had never seen depicted in the movies, was the boredom. That was also, he thought, the worst thing about war.
One of the boat’s cooks offered him an apple—a luxury. McKay took it and thanked him. He passed through the control room. Commander Treat gave the apple a disapproving look but said nothing and McKay nodded to him and Hopper. Treat, like most of the old sailors McKay had known, never seemed to sleep. McKay admired that.
He entered the storage area. Ollila sat on the floor in front of the stack of bags and boxes with his rifle across his lap and looked up as McKay entered.
“Sir.”
“Sergeant.”
McKay shut the door and Ollila went back to work on his rifle. McKay took up his Thompson and sat, idly checking its action, the polish of its parts. After a while, Ollila spoke without looking up.
“Just cleaning the rifle, sir.”
“Good man,” McKay said.
“No more sleep, sir?”
McKay shook his head. “I guess not.”
“I thought that maybe Graves, he would wake you. He woke me.”
McKay laughed. “Telling his stories.”
“They are good stories, but a man must sleep.”
“I’m going to have to remember that.”
Ollila chuckled as if to himself and looked up from his rifle. “You do not tell stories, Captain?”
“What do you mean?”
Ollila went back to his rifle. With a fine brush he went over all the surfaces of the bolt with short, sharp strokes, like a painter.
“Graves tells his stories, lots of them. Stallings—Stallings? He tells a story or two, none like Graves though. Graves talks about shooting, about lions and Germans in the desert. Stallings tells about women.” McKay laughed. Stallings had been right about one thing—don’t nobody change. “You tell none at all.”
“I still don’t—”
Ollila shook his head. “I understand this. I understand. We have both killed terrible enemies, and terribly. I think Stallings has too.”
McKay thought again of Sicily, of the long ride shoreward in the darkness. He thought of Italians with machine guns and cannon at the shore and legions of German tanks inland. He looked at Ollila, who held the rifle up at arm’s length, bolt open, and squinted into its action.
“And you?”
“Me?”
“I haven’t heard you tell any stories either.”
Ollila shrugged. “You have seen snipers before. Imagine my story, and tell it two hundred times.”
McKay laughed. “Damn.”
Ollila smiled his boyish smile. McKay dry-fired his Thompson and returned it to his gear. He stood and walked to the door, opened it, and stopped.
“Two hundred?”
Ollila did not turn around. “They tell you one hundred fifty, eh?”
“Yeah.”
Ollila shrugged. “No one believes the number. I know one man, he killed seven hundred Russians. I killed two hundred and five. Now I kill Nazis. Is all the same.” He stopped brushing for a moment, then turned and looked McKay in the eye. “I have one story, and I enjoy it very much.”
Dark Full of Enemies Page 7
