Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  He had not been able to find Petersen since leaving Grettisstad. Petersen found him.

  “We will make land here, under cover, and proceed on foot,” Petersen said.

  McKay turned and stopped. Petersen carried a weapon, a silenced Sten submachine gun.

  “Outstanding,” McKay said.

  “My crew will fish—actually fish, as we did briefly in Lofoten before picking you up. You understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “They will not be joining us.”

  “That’s all right. Scouting parties are better small.”

  Petersen slung his Sten and stuck a thumb in his pistol belt. McKay noted the German-issue holster and magazine pouch. Probably a Walther. Petersen eyed him for a moment.

  “You have done this before?”

  McKay smiled. “Not exactly like this, but yes. Scouting.”

  “In the Army, before you became a commando?”

  “Actually, I’m a Marine.” Petersen’s eyes narrowed. A fraction. “Shipborne assault troops. Technically part of the Navy. But only technically.”

  “I know what a Marine is.”

  “Sorry,” McKay said. “But yes—I have some scouting experience against the Japs.”

  “Hm. We will disembark shortly.”

  Petersen turned and climbed into the wheelhouse. McKay watched him go. He could not figure the man out. He looked at Ollila.

  Ollila had been smoking and now ground out his cigarette on the gunwale. He flicked the butt overboard. “I wondered about your uniform,” he said.

  “Everybody does.”

  “I have heard about your Marines.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A department of the Navy,” Ollila said. “The men’s department.”

  This was the last thing McKay had expected here, now, from the inscrutable Finn—a joke. It was an old one, but he could not help himself and began to laugh. He clapped a hand over his mouth and stifled it. He could not start laughing now. Just then, the engine shut off and the Hardråde settled into a glide across the haven.

  The boat touched shore just a moment, just long enough for McKay, Ollila, and Petersen to leap overboard into the snow, and then three crewmen with gaff hooks punted them away and the boat drifted into the black.

  McKay checked his timepiece—0010. The Hardråde would check for them at this spot every two hours until 0800, at which point it would return to the Petersen house and await either their return on foot or as corpses in the bed of a German army truck. Either way, if they did not return to the boat, they would be written off.

  McKay rose. They stood on a steep snow-covered bank. The fjord lapped at bare rock. He looked uphill and, faint and far, caught the dam’s electric glow above the hills. He looked at Petersen and nodded, tapped him on the shoulder. Petersen walked.

  They moved along the shore at first. Petersen seemed to be looking for something, taking his bearings on the dark terrain. After a while he held up a hand and they stopped. Petersen pointed ahead of them into the darkness and McKay looked. They neared the bottom of a narrow cove and ahead of them lay a short wharf and a guardhouse. A small boat moored to the pilings—what looked to McKay like a johnboat with an outboard motor—nodded on the waves.

  McKay raised his binoculars and looked at the guardhouse. He could see no one, but the entrance was on the other side. He lowered the glasses and moved ahead of Petersen.

  They moved at a careful trot along the shore and reached the wharf. McKay held up a hand to Ollila and Petersen—Stay here—and moved up the path from the wharf to the guardhouse. There were no footprints, not even the muted, snow-softened shapes of old prints. He stopped beside the little building and listened. Nothing. He raised the pistol and rounded the front of the shack. There was no one there.

  He waved the others forward to him and tapped Petersen on the shoulder again, and they moved on.

  Petersen led them away from the wharf, path, and guardhouse into the sloping foot of the fjord-side mountains. They moved among stunted trees, scrub pines frosted like storebought Christmas greenery. The snow yielded silently to their boots—no crunching, cracking, or, thank God, squeaking from this fresh powder—but the ground underneath was hard and scrabbly. McKay guessed at a layer of loose rock and scree.

  The night sky glowed here, too. McKay guessed that the dam’s support camp must lie nearby, but had no idea how close it may be. He found out when they moved uphill.

  This proved heavier going, and he had to resist grabbing at the trees for support. A moving tree on the hillside could have drawn unwanted attention—even a bored German guard hoping to poach a deer for extra meat would have doomed them. At last, they reached a shelf and moved along it, and McKay saw below them the German headquarters camp.

  It looked at first like a small rail station. It did have a small station house and platform along the railway, but the platform had no roof and he saw nothing else that might indicate an important stop along a rail line. He thought of the smaller stations along the route running through his county, the ones that fed small-time farmers into the towns and brought goods from the towns to the farmers. This station did nothing but consume—supplies arrived for the Germans, and Germans left on leave.

  They stopped and McKay glassed the camp proper. Behind the station stood a few buildings, all neatly lain down on a grid and surrounded by barbed wire. Watchtowers stood at opposite corners, but no searchlights swept the perimeter. Four long buildings were certainly barracks. A fifth looked like one as well, possibly for officers. He wondered how many officers were necessary for this assignment. Along the back of the camp sat a long, low building with bay doors. McKay guessed that it was a motor pool. A larger, squat building beside the rail station looked like the headquarters, and here McKay saw the first German of that long night—a guard standing beside a striped boom, guarding the entrance to the camp. McKay watched him a moment. Even from a distance—McKay gauged it at half a mile or so—the man looked miserable. He stamped his feet, but barely, trying to maintain a semblance of discipline and indifference to the cold.

  McKay smiled.

  They moved on. Soon they came to the rail tunnel. Here the pines ended at the embankment thrown up to raise the tracks to the level of the tunnel and bridge across the fjord. They climbed the crook where the earthen trestle joined the ridge and sprinted across the opening of the tunnel. They reentered the brush and kept climbing.

  McKay had warmed to the hike. He had not quite begun to sweat, but his armpits, chest, and groin were hot and growing hotter and the constant movement generated damp in the thick folds of clothing. The heat had climbed his neck and his face and nose were no longer numb. He breathed deep of the cold air. He found himself grinning, and tried to forget Ollila’s joke. He had made a reputation for himself for laughing in the thick of things, but that had been in the chaos of the Canal. This demanded stealth, which increased his excitement the more.

  They crested the ridge and McKay shielded his eyes. The dam lay beneath them, lighted bright as day.

  McKay knelt in the snow. Directly below them the railway bridge, a steel bridge wider even than the dam, spanned the fjord. It was 250 feet tall, at least, and stood on one spindly steel piling thrust down into the black depths of the fjord. McKay thought idly of a sleeping flamingo, and wondered how much damage the bridge could take from the dam’s destruction.

  He looked up the fjord at his real target. There it stood, bigger in life than the figures, estimates, and photos had suggested. His guesses about its dimensions had been correct—he saw that immediately—but to see it himself… He suppressed an oath, and then a grin. He rose and gestured to Petersen. Closer.

  Petersen looked at him for a moment, showing nothing, then rose and led them on.

  They dropped behind the ridge again, moving in the dark, and soon dipped into a saddle. Here there was a footpath with tracks in it. McKay stopped to look. No one had used the path in some time. Wind and further snowfall had spoiled the prints, but
there were a lot of them. McKay looked downhill where the camp glowed beyond the scree and scrub pines, and then at Petersen. Petersen nodded. German troops rotating between the dam and the camp followed this path. McKay nodded and Petersen led them on.

  They climbed again and reached a point almost above the dam before they crossed the ridgeline again. The ridge here was cragged and sharp enough for them to grab onto like the top rail of a fence and haul themselves over. They came down on their bellies and crawled to the edge of a flat space below the ridge. The view was perfect. McKay raised his binoculars again.

  The dam was much thinner than he had thought. He had compared it repeatedly to the Tallulah Dam, a dam he had worked on and knew well. This dam, though twice as high and wide, was no thicker than the smaller one back home.

  He allowed himself one sound: “Hm.”

  He glassed the dam complex. Flat spaces had been hacked and blasted from the rock on each end of the dam, and barbed wired fenced the buildings there. The old buildings on the far side still stood there—barracks, a building with a small aerial, small outbuildings, one of which looked like a latrine. Miserable, he thought. At least in the Solomons it had not been freezing when it came time to take a crap. He watched the buildings. Smoke drifted from chimneys, lit from underneath by the dam lights. He lowered the glasses. The place looked like a ghost in a fever dream.

  He relaxed his grip on his Thompson and opened a hand toward Ollila. Ollila understood. He removed the lens covers from the Mauser’s sight and handed the rifle to him. Petersen, he saw from the corner of his eye, shifted in the snow and looked from him to the dam and back.

  McKay ignored him and settled into position. He braced the rifle butt against his shoulder and put his eye to the scope. The crosshairs swam into view and he settled his cheek against the stock.

  He swept the opposite side of the dam again, the barracks, outbuildings, and headquarters. He saw one guard tower and could just make out a dark figure standing in it. As with the camp, there was no searchlight. Another guard stood outside the command post. A Volkswagen Kübelwagen, roof up and sagging under the snow, sat beside the building. McKay wondered who had gotten the vehicle up there and whether they had gotten a medal for it. Then he wondered whether the path between the dam and camp were passable for vehicles, and stopped grinning. They would have to mine the path—just in case.

  The command post was the oldest permanent building there—he remembered it from the photos the Colonel had shown him—and looked like it was made of concrete. A bunker. The barracks were of the same clapboard and timber as those downhill at the camp. A few of the outbuildings looked like stone or brick. The latrine was plywood. He commiserated again with any man using it.

  He breathed steadily, just like on the ranges, and passed the gunsight down from the opposite side onto the dam itself. At the end of the dam stood a small concrete building the size of an outhouse. He caught a guard in the crosshairs and followed him. The lights like drooping sun-forgotten flowers bowed their yellow bulbs to the concrete pathway. The lake behind the dam, McKay noticed, seemed to be frozen for a hundred yards beyond its wall. He passed from guard to guard at their posts on the dam, counted four of them, and came to rest on the buildings below them, the newest of the lot.

  This side of the dam had another small concrete building—a stairwell to the guts of the dam, McKay thought—and four wooden buildings, long and narrow like barracks. McKay did not like that. The building nearest the dam had electrical lines running from its rear to a pole near the water. Smoke rose from the stovepipes of three of the buildings. Two guards patrolled the perimeter, alone but with overlapping paths, and a single guard tower stood beside the lake behind the dam. There, on the water, was another wharf and another small boat. McKay guessed that the terrain forced the Germans to move about by water as much as possible.

  He brought the sight back to the new buildings and looked for signs or placards. He saw nothing, just one posted beside a handrail near the dam—zum Dammfuß, to the base of the dam, marking a staircase. That helped him not at all.

  McKay lowered the rifle, and Petersen seemed to go slack. McKay looked at him for a moment, then tapped a finger on the upright safety at the back of the rifle’s bolt. Petersen glowered and looked away.

  He handed the rifle back to Ollila and looked at him. Ollila, though McKay could not have detected a specific movement, seemed to shrug. McKay thought a moment and looked again at Petersen. Petersen seemed to mull something. He bit his lip and stared into the light of the dam. Finally, he rose to hands and knees and jerked his head toward the ridge. McKay and Ollila followed.

  They crossed into the shadows of the mountains again and moved back the way they had come. McKay watched Petersen carefully. As they walked, he felt for the bolt of his Thompson in the darkness and, slowly, eased it back with the heel of his hand, just to be sure it had not frozen shut. Behind him, he heard a soft click. Ollila had seen, and had unsafed the Mauser.

  Petersen led them back to the footpath in the saddle. They turned onto the path, crossed the ridge, and left the path again, climbing.

  Finally, they stopped. They had reached a flat knob in the rock faces, a bluff jut of rock above the quiet waters of the fjord. They crawled again into the light of the dam, eased themselves on thighs and elbows into position. They stopped, and McKay knew. Petersen did not even have to point. McKay did not allow himself his next words—he had no control over them.

  He whispered, “Son of a bitch.”

  Below the dam, at the foot of the staircase cut into the rocky bank, a third wharf reached along the cliffs and extended an arm into the black water. There lay moored and under the watch of three guards a German E-boat.

  They watched the dam for three hours, long enough for McKay to discern some of the rhythms of its routine. The perimeter guards on his side of the fjord, at the new barracks, moved in overlapping rounds. They passed each other every few minutes. If they had to kill one of them in order to infiltrate, McKay saw, they would have to kill both.

  He watched the guards in their patrols long enough to gather something of their personalities. At least two were visibly overweight, even beneath their winter coats. Several smoked continuously. McKay noted this indiscipline, and noted again when an officer—a lieutenant, he thought—chewed a pair of guards out for smoking on duty. They waited until he had returned to the command post and lit new smokes for each other.

  He watched long enough to see the guard change. He could tell the hour approached for some time—an hour after McKay had started watching them, the guards began checking their watches and did so more frequently—he could have charted it like shortening radio waves—until the moment they were relieved. The new guards filed out of a single barracks on the far side of the dam, near the command post. They took up their positions in a military manner, the outbound watchmen waiting for their replacements, though visibly impatient. The General Orders sprang to McKay’s mind as he watched. There was discipline here, he decided, but not much. Whether the guards were learning it or losing he could not tell.

  The new batch took over the posts and made an impressive show. Even from a distance they appeared younger, trimmer, wore more sharply maintained uniforms, and carried themselves more like soldiers. McKay did not like that. He wondered whether there were two groups of guards mixed in the garrison, and wished he had noted how the guards had responded to their relief—familiarly, like old buddies, or otherwise.

  Something was up.

  And there were the lights. It had not surprised McKay, after he had seen Narvik and Grettisstad lit up in the arctic night, that the Germans did not maintain blackout here, well out of range of Allied bombing. But to have every light on—all the lamps along the top of the dam, lights in every window of every building, and lamps over the doors of every barracks building—it was strange. Like so much else, he did not like it.

  They lingered long enough to watch an officer make the rounds. The first officer, so concerned with
smoking on duty, trailed this one, a superior. McKay made out silver epaulets, possibly a gold pip—he could not be sure. The man was anything from a first lieutenant to a colonel.

  By the time he decided to end the reconnaissance and make for the Hardråde, McKay’s excitement had gone. He had felt exhilarated, after the long journey and the hours in Petersen’s basement, to move into the field, weapon in hand. At least, he would remedy the skimpy intelligence, see the dam for himself, and begin to lay plans. But remedying the intelligence had only worsened his problems by making them clearer. On one side of the dam there were barracks for at least forty men, multiple perimeter patrols, guards pacing 250-foot segments of the dam itself, and the E-boat.

  The E-boat, the greatest blow. The new buildings were barracks, all right—for the boat’s crew, and the seemingly uninhabited building probably held mechanical supplies and a stock of ammunition for its weaponry. Like the boat that had tried to search them in the Vestfjorden, the E-boat at the dam had an anti-aircraft machine cannon in its stern. Were McKay to plan his attack, execute it, and be caught in the act, the Germans could pour rifle fire on them from one end of the dam while the E-boat machine gunned them with 20-millimeter shells. McKay had seen what happened when a slug that size hit a man. And worse—he imagined the E-boat catching the Hardråde.

  His face hardened. He would have to plan carefully. He knew convincing Petersen would be difficult, but he thought he might need a second reconnaissance. If they could establish when the less disciplined guards had the watch, and when the E-boat was on patrol elsewhere…

  McKay tapped Petersen and Ollila on the shoulder and nodded. Time to go. They crawled into the lightless lee of the ridge and followed their path back down the mountains, past the footpath, the rail line, the brightly lit headquarters camp, and finally to the cove. They found their tracks in the snow by the shore and followed them to where the Jørgen had dropped them off. They waited. They sat in the darkness, in the silent snow, for an hour before the boat returned.