Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  “You, sir, and all your cloak and dagger chums, think on the time you’ve wasted with this rubbish. And the lives. That bastard will probably lose his eye, and not in an honest fight with Jerry but to a fucking gull in a blizzard.”

  Treat spoke the word like most English officers McKay had known—carefully enunciated to register maximum emphasis, dragging across the first letter, the vowel wrenched into an O or an A, the pair of hard sounds at the end clapping against each other. It was like the fissure in a boiler rupturing and exploding. McKay, a Marine, was unimpressed.

  He focused himself, stayed calm. He and Treat stood in silence for a moment, long enough for the men in the room to unfreeze and glance carefully at the pair, and for McKay to confirm that Treat had spoken his piece.

  Finally Treat said, “Shame, sir. This vessel has been used as a ferry barge for the last time.”

  “I’m sorry, Commander,” McKay said. “You have my sympathy.”

  “Damn your sympathy. We remain another hour. After that you may either row ashore in an inflatable boat or return with us.”

  McKay took a breath. “You have orders, Commander.”

  “Damn your orders. Jerry is thick as you bloody well please in these waters, and this vessel is of far better use sinking that lot to the bottom of the ice-choked ocean than busing your damned commandos back and forth. One hour, sir!”

  “Orders, Commander. You can patrol as much as you like between our arrival and departure. Until then—”

  “Until then what?” Treat said. He no longer raged, but his face had only grown redder. The phrase a fervent heat came to McKay’s mind.

  McKay said nothing. Treat waited. The radio operator coughed and spoke.

  “The code, sir—I’ve just received the codewords.”

  It took another hour and a half for the fishing boat to arrive, and McKay spent most of that time climbing up and down the conning tower ladder, watching for the Norwegians in the wind and snow.

  At 1720, the watchmen spotted the flash of a lamp through the dark and sleet and ice. They pointed it out to McKay and returned the signal. Visibility was poor—the boat must be within a quarter mile of the sub. McKay forgot the cold and watched a long, low shadow shape itself from the storm and dark and draw alongside the sub. The Norwegians had arrived.

  The boat sat restlessly in the water and rocked with every wave that washed below it. It was long, at least sixty feet, and inelegant, with a straight bow and a two-story cabin and wheelhouse at the stern. The word tub came to mind, along with knorr, the unlovely ships that had plied the north Atlantic for these Norwegians’ forebears. McKay peered at the windows of the boat but could not see the helmsman. The wheelhouse had a nameplate, an oaken plank with carved and painted letters—hardråde. McKay grinned. He knew the name of Harald Hardrada, the “hard-ruler,” the last Viking king.

  McKay slid down the ladder, caught himself at the bottom, and said, “Saddle up.”

  Stallings, Graves, and Ollila stood before him, ready. He grew even more excited. He liked his team. He thought, Now for the hard part.

  He left his gear for last and helped Stallings up the ladder first. They lifted the gear, bags, and equipment up like a bucket brigade, with McKay on the ladder, heaving Stallings’s gear overhead to Graves, who lifted it up to be received by the watchmen. When it had been collected at the top, McKay climbed up, Stallings followed, and they looked at the Hardråde.

  The boat lay broadside, barely ten yards off, and closing. The pilot—Petersen himself, McKay assumed—had skill. He could hear the boat’s engine now, barely, a low slow drumming under the wind. He saw men on deck. They shouted to McKay and the men in the tower but whatever they said was taken by the storm.

  McKay waved and shouted and lifted two of Stallings’s ammo cans. One of the fishermen, a big, bearded man in a peacoat and knit cap, who stood on deck with perfect indifference to the wind and cold and wet, waved back. He bent for a moment, then stood and held up a coil of rope. McKay shouted “Okay!” Treat had called three more sailors up to assist the team in transferring their equipment from his boat. These men stood on the sub’s deck, and when the Norwegian lifted the rope, they called for it. Three great swings of the Norwegian’s arm, and the coil lofted into the wind, caught and slowed, described slow circles, sloughing off lengths of itself in the air, and dropped into the arms of one of the sailors. McKay cheered and climbed down to the deck.

  They looped the rope through a rung of the tower’s ladder and threw the coil back to the Norwegians. McKay asked Stallings for his pack—not the radio—and Stallings handed it down to him. McKay hooked two of his karabiners to the rope first and then the straps of Stallings’s pack. He took two lengths of cord he had cut for the occasion and linked the karabiners with both, leaving the cord on the Hardråde’s side coiled and tied. He waved to the Norwegians, the bearded one waved back, and McKay shoved the pack across the gap and the slopping waves to the boat.

  The Norwegians understood. They brought in and freed Stallings’s pack and the bearded man waved. McKay pulled the karabiners back across.

  “Good thinking,” Stallings said.

  “The radio now,” McKay said.

  The radio was mummified, wrapped in a waterproof tarp inside a pack inside another tarp and bound with nylon parachute cord. McKay checked its wrappings and the ropes around it. He imagined, for a moment, the ropes untangling themselves from the burden, the tarps unwinding around the radio until it plunged unshrouded into the sea. He shook his head and ignored the idea. They sent the radio across, and McKay felt relieved. If these were the Norwegians for whom the radio was intended, they had just completed one objective.

  They sent the rest of Stallings’s equipment across and McKay called for Graves. First the radio, then the explosives. He wanted to get the important gear into the fishing boat before they tired and numbed and started making mistakes. The men would go last.

  They sent Graves’s explosives—also wrapped in tarps and rubberized blankets—across without incident, and followed with Ollila’s simple pack and weapons. Finally came McKay’s own gear.

  “All right,” McKay said. He called up to Stallings and Graves on the conning tower: “Ammo boxes!”

  The boxes came up one at a time, and McKay added two karabiners to the rope pulley. He clipped three boxes on at a time, by their carrying handles, and sent them across.

  He almost lost the rope on the first run. His hands, even through two pairs of gloves, had gone almost numb, and the weight of three ammo boxes rushed the rope through his hands and toward the sea. He gripped hard and stopped the boxes a few feet above the waves.

  McKay found himself lying on the deck. He had not even noticed himself falling with the rope. He looked up to the conning tower.

  “Grove, get down here!”

  He sat halfway up and braced his feet wide apart and wound the rope around his arms until Stallings and a few nearby sailors had climbed down and taken hold behind him. They took hold of the rope above and below McKay’s hands and hauled up to keep the ammo from the deep. McKay looked up at the fishing boat. The bearded Norwegian stood at the gunwales shouting, calling more hands to the rope on his end. McKay could see the man more clearly now, hearty and grey bearded. He found himself thinking of Poseidon and shook himself. He had to focus.

  When both sides looked ready, McKay raised his voice above the wind, shouted “All right,” and the ammo cans swung their way across and out of danger.

  “Dammit,” Stallings said. He looked at the last two cans. “Maybe make that one can at a time.”

  “If we do it like this we’ll get it in fewer trips.”

  “If we lose half the ammo we’ll get it in fewer trips.”

  McKay was too tired to laugh. “That’s enough.” The Norwegians waved and they drew the rope back. “We’ve just got two left, anyway.”

  All of them ready now, they sent the last two boxes across. McKay felt relieved again. All gear, ammunition, and explosives.
McKay removed the cord and karabiners, and the sailors unlooped the rope from the tower ladder. McKay spooled and tied the cord and looked at the gap between the boats. Now all that remained were bodies, the men themselves.

  “What now?” Stallings said.

  McKay waved to the Norwegians, both arms overhead like the deck crew on an aircraft carrier. He caught the grey-bearded man’s attention and kept waving as if lifting the Hardråde whole from the sea and tossing it over his head. McKay stopped to gesture at Stallings, at Graves and Ollila, and shouted, “Closer!”

  The Norwegian did not respond. He seemed to watch McKay, then turned on his heel and climbed into the wheelhouse, out of sight.

  “Sorry son of a bitch,” Stallings said.

  The fishing boat’s engine, for the last half hour clanking away beneath the wind and waves, pitched higher and faster. Above the other sounds, McKay first heard the noise that he would have cause to remember as long as he lived—a quickening tonk-tonk-tonk.

  A moment of acceleration and the engine backed off, the noise falling again to its dull tinny rhythm. The boat had the motion it needed. It edged forward and slowly shimmied crabwise to the hull of the Viking. It settled against the sub with a scraping noise, and Treat cried out from the conning tower. McKay had not even known he was there. He turned to the team.

  “All aboard. I’ll be with you shortly.”

  The team stepped onto the curved hull below the deck and the sailors of both vessels reached to help them. McKay reckoned on only a few moments of contact, but he had to bid Treat farewell. Even if he did not want to.

  He climbed the tower, grasped Treat’s shoulder, and extended his hand. Treat, surprised, took it.

  “Thanks for your hospitality,” McKay said. He had to shout above the wind.

  Treat had begun to recover. “Cheeky—”

  McKay squeezed Treat’s shoulder and pumped his hand one more time, hard. “No. Thanks. We’ll see you again real soon.”

  “I should hope so.”

  McKay nodded to Hopper, who stood, soaked but apparently back in good standing, and turned to climb down the ladder. Before he had reached the bottom, he heard, above the wind, Hopper shout, “Good God!”

  McKay let go of the ladder and dropped to the deck. Men from both boats were shouting, the different tongues blended with the wind and the sea into mere noise. The submariners had someone by the shoulders, pulling him up. McKay ran across the deck, slipping as he went, and grabbed the fallen man’s belt. It was Stallings.

  McKay, in the wind and snow and needle spray of the north Atlantic in winter, stood soaked on the pitching deck. His arms slowly numbed from the wrists upward, the palms and first joints of his fingers all he could feel below that. The only feeling he had in his face was the continuous burning of his eyes, and an ache in his forehead from an hour of squinting. When Stallings, half sitting on the deck surrounded by sailors, blinked and swore and asked what had happened, McKay almost failed to laugh.

  “Leggo,” Stallings said. He pushed one of the sailors away and staggered up. He swore again. “The hell are you laughing at?”

  McKay ignored him. He asked one of the sailors what had happened.

  “Bugger missed the boat, sir. Cracked his head on the gunwale there.”

  Another said, “Damned lucky we were helping, sir.”

  The third sailor still held onto Stallings, prepared to catch him, and Stallings shoved him.

  “Go to hell.”

  Blood ran in wind-thinned sheets from under Stallings’s cap. He did not seem to notice. McKay said nothing. He noticed that Stallings had ice in his eyebrows—and so did the sailors—and feeling absently at his own face, felt his own fingertips like a stranger’s and found ice in his nostrils and rimming his eyes.

  “Thanks,” McKay said to the sailors. He grabbed Stallings. “Come on.”

  They turned to the Hardråde. The rest of the team and the Norwegians leaned against the gunwales, and when McKay and Stallings turned and stepped toward them, they reached.

  Waves lifted the boat, rubbed it lengthwise across the Viking with a ghostly howl. Stallings reached for the gunwale and four pairs of hands took his arms and shoulders. He pulled, they lifted, and he was aboard. McKay took a short, bouncing step and jumped. He reached for the crew and the Hardråde groaned once more and washed down and away from the submarine.

  He fell. He saw from the corner of his eye the sea open choppy and black between the vessels, and felt himself fall toward it. He thought of the man who had plunged into the sea at Guadalcanal and understood how he felt in that last moment in the light and air. His eyes drifted from the boat and the crew and were halfway to the water when they caught him.

  He gripped the arms that had reached him and swung down hard against the hull. He grunted. Someone above him swore. He kicked to get leverage but felt nothing but black cold. He was in the water. The arms were pulling. He pulled himself up with them.

  They fanned backward on the deck and lay sprawled, panting in the ice and snow. Two men swore, one in English, one in Norwegian. McKay knew next to nothing of the language but understood an obscenity when he heard it. He laughed and a choking sound came out.

  Stalling staggered up again for the second time in as many minutes and said, “Well I’m goddam glad somebody’s having a good time,” and fell, unstrung, flat on his face.

  McKay stopped laughing. He crawled to Stallings. The others had already knelt beside him. One Norwegian tried to help McKay up, but he waved him away. Stallings sat up again, swore, and asked—again, obscenely—what had happened.

  “Any of y’all a doctor?” McKay said. The Norwegians looked at him. He pointed at Stallings. “Doctor?” He risked the hated German: “Artzt?”

  They nodded and helped him up and led him into the cabin below the wheelhouse.

  McKay stood. He looked around the boat. The deck already stood clear of their equipment, and with the team and most of the crew out of sight, one would never have suspected the Hardråde’s mission. He made to follow the men into the cabin, to check out Stallings—he had seen head trauma before—but someone stepped in front of him. He looked up.

  He had made a mistake about the grey-bearded Norwegian. Two, actually. The first was that he was an average sized man. He was wrong. And the second mistake was about the man’s beard—he had assumed his counterpart in the transfer of the gear from sub to fishing boat was an old man, a salt, the boat’s owner or a senior member of Petersen’s resistance group. He was wrong. This was Petersen, his beard frozen solid.

  “Bid them farewell,” Petersen said. He spoke perfect English, and McKay realized he was speaking normally, not shouting above the wind. He wondered at being able to hear him. When McKay did not respond, he lifted a hand toward the darkness. McKay turned.

  The Viking lay across the widening waves, disappearing into the dark. He saw two officers on the conning tower and deckhands scaling the metal rungs to disappear below. He waved. Neither officer waved back, and the submarine was gone.

  Petersen looked at him a long time. At last, he extended his hand.

  “Welcome to Norway.”

  He had been welcomed a lot of places the last few days, and cared about none of them now. He felt most welcome—happy to feel at all—in the wheelhouse, wrapped in a blanket. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and with the other rubbed his chest. Warmth returned from the inside out. He had never cared much for coffee, even prided himself on being able to do without, but clung to this bitter black cup. Petersen stood across from him in the little room, leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed.

  “Good?” he said.

  “Outstanding,” McKay said. “Thank you.”

  Petersen nodded. He released one arm and slapped the helmsman across the back.

  “My brother Jørgen does the brewing. Thank him. I do, often.”

  McKay laughed and raised the cup. “Thank you.”

  The other Petersen, certainly the younger of the two, looked back
from the wheel for a moment and grunted.

  His body returned bit by bit to life. As a child he had often rolled onto his arms in his sleep, only to wake up and try to shake the blood and feeling back into them. His whole body felt like that now, only clammy and wet to boot. He drank of the coffee again, and thanked Petersen again. This time Petersen only nodded.

  His beard now showed light brown. The photo in his file did him no justice. The real Petersen looked younger, sharper, and like Goliath. He stood at least six and a half feet tall—he had seven inches or more on McKay. The bull neck McKay had noted in the photo had told him nothing, either. Petersen was… big. Big all over, proportioned powerfully, not like the occasional lanky, six-foot-three oafs McKay had played basketball against. And above all, Petersen’s hard eyes stared. He looked like a man who missed nothing. McKay sensed that a great career in the Norwegian navy had been cut short.

  He finished the coffee and lifted the cup. “Mind if I get some more?”

  “That’s the last of it, I’m afraid,” Petersen said.

  They sat in silence again. He heard the boat’s engine, tonk-tonk-tonk, as tinny and weak-sounding as Jack Benny’s Maxwell.

  “How fast can you make way with that engine?” McKay said.

  “Ten knots in good weather. Slower in—this.”

  McKay laughed. Petersen did not.

  “How far to Narvik?”

  “We are not sailing to Narvik, but to my village, near there. We have to stay out of Narvik.”

  “Germans?”

  Petersen nodded. “I have a wharf. We will hide there until you return to the submarine.”

  “Outstanding. How far again?”

  “From here, about one hundred and thirty miles.”

  McKay blinked and looked into his empty tin cup. “So I guess we’d better get comfortable.”

  “Yes.”

  He had known Lofoten lay a good distance from Narvik, across the sheltered waters leading into the fjords around the city, but had not counted on thirteen hours of further sailing simply to reach their hiding place. He checked his timepiece. They had slipped away from the Viking a little after 2000. It was now 2032. They would arrive at Narvik between 0900 and 1000.