Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  McKay nodded and walked out. That was another man he admired.

  He went to the head, where he took his time and finished his apple, which had browned at the bite marks. He moved aft again, heard Treat talking to another officer in the curtained booth, and entered the control room. He wandered aimlessly back and forth through the confines of the boat and watched the British at work, the greatest navy in history going through the mundane daily tasks that allowed it to operate in every ocean on earth. He could not let the boredom take over—boredom was the enemy of all success. He stopped to thank Hopper again for guarding their discussion, and continued aft. Graves and Stallings both lay full back on their racks now, still talking about hunting.

  “No, we ain’t got anything that dangerous,” Stallings said. “Just bears, mostly. Supposedly there’s painters in the mountains—”

  Graves sat up. “Painters?”

  “Panthers,” McKay said.

  “Painters, panthers—shit. Anyways, I don’t think it’s true. McKay—uh, Captain, any painters up your way?”

  McKay hauled himself into the rack and picked up Thucydides. “Not in living memory, I don’t think.”

  “But there used to be?”

  “That’s what I’ve always heard. Loggers probably killed them off. Course, everybody knows someone who knows someone who’s seen one, but I think they’re long gone.”

  “My granny says she seen one, but so has everybody’s granny.”

  “A panther,” Graves said. “Like a leopard? Bagheera?”

  McKay understood, but if Stallings did, he did not show it.

  “Naw, a catamount. Mountain lion. Come to think of it, it does look like a lion without a mane.”

  “Hm.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” McKay said. “Everybody’s granny’s seen a painter.”

  “You hush. Sir. Anyway, I’ve hunt bears once or twice. Didn’t really like it. They look too much like folks.”

  Graves and McKay laughed.

  “Don’t have that problem in the bush,” Graves said. “Only thing there looks like a man, is a man. He might be naked and black, but a man.”

  “I hunt deer more often than not,” Stallings said. “The only thing I don’t like about deer hunting is getting up so damn early. I know some boys hunt hogs, but I didn’t like that neither. Scare the shit outta me. I kindly prefer something that’s not going to hunt me back.”

  Graves laughed.

  “Now, that is a problem we have on the veldt. Everything there will hunt you back. What you said about deer, rising early? You know, we go out in the day and hunt. You ever think about why we get back in before dark? That’s their time to hunt us, mate.”

  McKay had put Thucydides down again.

  “Hadn’t thought of it just that way,” Stallings said.

  “The last lion I bagged before I left South Africa was a male,” Graves said, and McKay grinned—another story. “A lion, mate. Lionesses do most of the hunting, you know. But we’d had a big veldt fire and I suppose this lion and his lionesses had got cut off from most of their food, maybe their prey had run north from the fire and they had made south and rum luck for them, you know. But we had four hundred head of cattle in our kraal and slaughter was just a week off. They were fat and slow as you please, laziest buggers you’ve ever seen. So what’s a lion to do when the quick stuff he’s used to has scarpered and the slow, fat stuff, the stuff he gets shot at when he skulks about it, is all there is?” He paused, as if in thought. “God, I wish I could have a fag. Captain?”

  “Smoking lamp’s out. Sorry, Graves.”

  “Eh, soon enough.” He lay back and seemed to drift away, somewhere over southern grasslands. “Well, lions hunt at night, you know. It’s a funny thing, night. Everything wants to hunt but everything’s on its guard. Everything except cattle, dumb, fat buggers. That’s what we’re there for. Well, before that lion came about a lioness got after the cattle. Probably one of the lion’s ladies, we figured later. One of our Boer lads shot her. Next night, the same thing. Bloody middle of the night, black as pitch, and we shoot down another lioness. Now, lions are always about, and you have to be aware of them, right? But two in two nights—well… The next night the big fella came.

  “When the second lioness got after the cattle we doubled the guard, you know. I was out with the Boer lad who shot the first one and a colored lad. All of us raised in the bush—dead shots, eyes like hawks, and good ears. But not good enough. We had a good fire going and were on our guard, but the next thing we knew that big hairy bastard had got that Boer boy and dragged him off into the night. He’d just got up to make water. We could hear him out there eating him in the dark.”

  Stallings swore but Graves seemed not to notice. McKay lay unmoving, listening.

  “Well, that was a long night. After a bit we could tell the lion was pretty much finished, and then the bush got quiet again. And that was worse than hearing him eating that poor lad, because where was he? By then we knew we’d never hear him if he got after us, and I sat there by the fire with my Mauser thinking back on every time I’d shot a lion, and I realized that I had only been able to because some other thing had died. And I’d heard it.

  “We sat like that for hours. If we had to tend the fire, one of us did it with one hand on the rifle and the other on the firewood, and the other with both hands on his bloody rifle. It got along to dawn. The sun wasn’t up yet, right, but the sky was lightening. Still dark enough for the lion, though. I’d heard about maneaters, mate, and I knew once they’d got a taste for man, they’d be damned if they went back to springbok. Well, all of a sudden I caught a glimpse of him, just a peek, you know, but enough. I can’t even tell you what it was I saw—I just knew where he was. And then I heard his paws, slapping the ground like great bloody mittens, so hard and quiet, and I had my rifle up just as he broke cover and came for the colored boy. I shot.” He took a breath. “I don’t know how I hit him, mate, but I did. It wasn’t enough though. I charged the rifle again and fired, hit him square in the heart, and that finished him. But he’d had enough time to gut that other lad.”

  They said nothing for some time. Finally, Graves spoke again.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, and his voice had changed, had lightened like the sky that morning on the veldt. “I never thought of it before, but if I’d been using that damned .577, I would have brought that bastard down on the first shot.”

  McKay and Stallings said nothing. Graves sat up and dropped to the deck. He patted absently at his shirt, still craving a smoke. “Anyway, like I said—lion hunting. Very sporting,” and he walked forward from the racks, hunched to fit the corridor.

  The sub entered the storm six hours later. McKay did not know if it was the same storm that had almost crashed them on Shetland, or if it was part of the same system, but that morning as he lay reading in the narrow rack he noticed the deep chopping of the sub grow deeper, its rearing higher and slower and its downward crashes more violent. Stallings made his first visit to the head for nonstandard purposes at 0800. By 1100 he wore a grey-green pallor like a specter out of Poe.

  “Less than twenty-four hours, now,” McKay told him, and grinned as if to say, You can make it; this will end soon.

  “Go to hell,” Stallings said, and McKay could tell he meant it this time.

  He held another briefing—only to go over essentially the same thin material, barely expanded by his glosses—and talked with Graves about the explosives and the dam. They checked their weapons and gear again. He read. Ollila slept, hummed to himself, and explored the boat. Stallings and Graves swapped stories. Both told stories about women now.

  McKay shaved as often as he thought of it. Routine did not just regiment the day and ensure things got done, routine kept a man sane. He had only thought the boredom of the jungle, of digging trenches, of typing reports and waiting on planes and requisitioning materiel were bad. The boredom of the submarine was worse. He had heard about submariners going insane. He could understand
, now. The lights, the hum of the engine—all remained the same. All that changed was the roll of the boat as it cut through the sea, but that did not make up for the unchanging scenery. Beautiful evening, the submarine in the motor launch had said to him at 0400 in the morning, and McKay thought ahead to the arctic night, always the same for weeks, like a submarine the size of the northern hemisphere. He tried not to think about the perpetual dark they were steaming toward, which they had probably already reached. That dark was unchanging, too, but at least he knew what lurked in it. Or thought he did.

  They had planned on fifty-six hours sailing time to reach their rendezvous, ten miles west of Eggum, a village in the sprawling Lofoten islands. It took fifty-seven, but McKay was satisfied. At 1200 on their third day aboard, they ate lunch alone in the sub’s galley. At 1230 they put on their winter gear and waited. At 1400 Sub-lieutenant Hopper came for them.

  “We’ve arrived, sir.”

  5

  The sleet and ice hit McKay before he reached the top of the ladder and his head and shoulders streamed water and ice by the time he came up through the hatch into the howling night. He pulled himself up between Treat and Hopper and looked around. The sub rocked and yawed and made obeisance to the sea. McKay squinted into the darkness and could only make out the waves when they shattered against the hull. The wind caught the shards and drove them into the faces of the men in the tower. McKay raised his collar and pulled his scarf over his nose.

  “Cloak and dagger stuff,” Treat said. “Bloody rubbish.”

  Treat meant his muttering to be overhead, McKay decided, since he had to shout to do it.

  Hopper leaned to McKay’s ear and said, “What time were they meant to rendezvous?”

  “1300,” McKay shouted, and Treat roared “Rubbish!” into the gale.

  The plan called for both parties to arrive at the point ten miles off Lofoten by 1300. After that, the sub would await a radioed codeword from Petersen’s fishing boat. Once the Viking had received the codeword from Petersen, the sub would flash signals on an Aldis lamp until spotted by the fishermen, who would close and, once beside the submarine, effect the team’s transfer.

  “Perhaps they’ve returned to port?” Hopper said.

  McKay shook his head. “The plan is for either party to wait for the other at least six hours. If we fail to meet up in that time, we try again at 1300 the next day.”

  “Mister Hopper!” Treat said. “Hawkins and Mallory have the next watch. See to it.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  And Hopper and Treat descended.

  McKay remained topside. Just a few minutes there, and his face already felt like putty, his lips grossly oversized and numb. Two seamen layered thick with peacoats and oilskins, scarves and knit caps, arrived and set to looking for the Norwegian fishermen. Despite all their caution and planning, it was not impossible that they would simply bump into each other in the dark. He thanked the watchmen—the Viking’s crew had been manning the watch in ever-shortening shifts as they sailed north—and climbed down.

  Below, the team had assembled in the control room. Treat paced like an pampered animal finding its cage suddenly shared. McKay checked the time. 1425.

  “What’s it like?” Stallings asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Up top? Is it night?”

  “Black as pitch,” McKay said. He pulled his sleeve back over his timepiece and said, “That’ll take some getting used to.”

  “First time in the Arctic, eh?” Treat stood at parade rest by his map table and the team’s bags, in ready stacks in the center of the room.

  “Officially, yes,” McKay said. Treat had to mull that. McKay had never been north of the Arctic Circle—Iceland was as close as he had come—but he wanted to forestall whatever mischief Treat had in mind. It did not work.

  “Ah, unofficial work. Jolly good. Keeps us official lads on our toes.”

  McKay said nothing. They would be off Treat’s boat soon.

  At this latitude, in this cold and weather and wind and ice, Treat had assigned his men twenty minute watches. After the first watch returned with grey noses and frost-rimed eyebrows, he shortened them again to fifteen. After five watches, there had still been no signal.

  McKay and the team waited. Stallings made several trips to the head, and returned more than once with an apple or bit of cheese. The cook had proven a compassionate man. Graves nattered and even Ollila talked a bit. Hopper dawdled at the map table, making low small talk with the other officers, and occasionally moved through the submarine on errands. And Treat—the Commander paced the control room, slowly, stretching the time required to go the room from end to end out to a full minute. He kept his head down and arms folded, but McKay could feel the focus of the man’s mind upon him. The man wanted to be gone, wanted to buck this rider off and range. McKay was not worried—the sub was in frequent contact with its base and other Royal Navy vessels, so if Treat could have railed to someone and gotten his way, he would have by now—but he did not want there to be a scene. “Scenes” between leaders were never good.

  The sixth watch laddered up into the storm at 1545.

  The fifth watch had been the second trip topside for the sailors Hawkins and Mallory. McKay watched them peel away their oilskins and sou’westers with numb and glove-dulled fingers. The jackets had enough ice and sleet on them to crackle at the joints, and their frozen clothing dripped and steamed. They handed the raingear to the next pair of men and, relieved, shuffled aft to the bunkroom.

  Treat followed and stopped them outside the hatch. McKay heard him muttering to them, could see him take each of them by the shoulder. They said, “Aye, sir. Thank you, sir,” and went away. Treat bowed back through the hatch and paused. He looked at McKay, and McKay caught something like kindness in his eyes.

  McKay said, “You got a tough crew, Commander.”

  Treat looked away, nodded, and returned to his pacing.

  An hour, four more pairs of watchmen, and all the while the sub swayed and dipped as the surface of the sea bore it uncertainly up. At 1700 Treat asked the radio operator whether he had heard anything.

  “Not a thing, sir.”

  Treat paced.

  McKay fought the boredom. Treat’s pacing did not help. He wanted to do something—take out his battered Thucydides and read, or strip and clean his Browning—but he had to be ready the moment the Norwegians signaled. What he had learned from the drill instructors at Quantico had been reinforced ever since, by the Japs at Tulagi and Guadalcanal, and by the Germans on every assignment the OSS had given him—be ready, pay attention. He focused and kept himself ready, but could not have prepared for what came next.

  It had been just a few minutes since the new watch had gone up and Treat had talked with the radio man when the tower filled with the roar of the wind like a tornado heard through a bean can and water and ice rained down onto the deck of the control room. Someone topside shouted.

  Treat pushed past Hopper and the other officers and stood in the showering water under the ladder.

  “What the bloody devil is going on?”

  Someone shouted again and Treat leapt aside. One of the watchmen slid down and dropped to his side, still gripping the ladder. Treat pried his hand from the base of the ladder and rolled him over. His face lay open from jawline to brow and one eye looked like fishguts. Blood streamed.

  The second man came down, white and sick-looking but in better control, and sagged against the bulkhead, gasping. It was he who had been shouting.

  “Don’t know, sir, don’t know. A fuuu—a bloody—a bloody great bird, a petrel or something, sir—”

  Treat shouted for the ship’s surgeon. McKay waved his men out of the way as the doctor dashed in. The doctor looked at him, swore the way only an Englishman can, and with a few other crewmen and Hopper stooped and lifted the man from the control room. Treat caught the second watchman as he prepared to go back up the ladder.

  “No, my boy, that’ll not be necessary. Hopper—p
ut up the next watch.” The next pair of men, already standing by, looked at each other and hurried to the ladder and up. The hatch slammed shut above and the dripping stopped. Treat took the watchman by the shoulder and said, “Now, then, calm now. Tell me what happened, Quayle.”

  “We was just come on watch, sir, I don’t know how long, and it’s fuu—bloody windy up there, sir. Well, we heard something, we thought, and thought it must be a seabird caught in the storm, and right then it come up and struck old Smith, right out of the wind, sir. Hit him, right in the face, and he went down like he was shot, sir, I swear by all—”

  Treat gripped his shoulder and patted several times. “Take off those oilskins, Quayle. You’re relieved for the rest of the watch. Dry yourself and rest. You did well.”

  Quayle, calmer and pinker in the face, nodded and thanked him, then left the control room, trailing water. Treat waited until the seaman had gone before exploding.

  He did not gesture, storm, throw things, or strike anyone. He simply tensed, drew up his entire body until it pulled against itself like a bowstring, and his face furnaced from the neck up. McKay sensed his team draw back and brace, and saw that this was a man in control of even his rage. He steadied himself. He must be ready for this, too.

  “God damn it!” Treat shouted, and his voice was like a cannon shot in the metal chamber. “God damn it to bloody hell! Where are these bloody damned contacts of yours? Have they turned Quisling on you, sir?”

  McKay said nothing.

  “Commander, sir,” Hopper said, but Treat turned on him.

  “That will be all, Mister Hopper. You’ve been party to this bog-up, this damned clandestine horse shit from the beginning. You may retire to your quarters.”

  Hopper sagged, seeming somehow to have physically shrunk, faced about and left the room. Treat looked at McKay. The team stood frozen.