Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  He remembered his book, but there was no light. He considered bringing out his flashlight but decided to stay ready for Jørgen’s return. He would finish Thucydides later, if he could. He doubted the Germans would let him keep it. He settled further against the wall and felt very far from the sunny Greek seas.

  He looked at the others. Petersen had gone out to wait on the dock with Magnus. Ollila knelt, one hand on the shrouded Mauser, carefully finishing off his pork and bread. Graves sat beside him. McKay could not tell, but he seemed to sleep. Lucky man.

  He looked at Stallings. Stallings looked at him.

  “How you doing, Grove?” Stallings lowered his head. McKay could not tell for sure, but he looked sick. “Grove?”

  “I’m all right, I’m all right.” He took a breath ridged with tremors and fought to hold it in. He sighed it all out anyway. “I’m all right.”

  The man was not all right. “What’s up?”

  Stallings shook his head. “Just the jitters, is all.”

  “I understand.”

  “I haven’t much liked nighttime, you know, since Sicily. And heading out like this? I meant what I said—I asked to be here. No more chickenshit duty, you wasn’t lying. But…” He shook his head again. “I just don’t like the dark.”

  Don’t nobody change, he had said when they met again. You’ve just proved yourself wrong, Grove, McKay thought. He remembered a Grover Stallings whose waking hours were the witching hours—carousing from dusk until his fellow cadets doused him in icewater at the break of day. He would sneak anywhere at night, had suggested climbing mountains in the dark, never once entered a tent at night during any camping trip they had been on. No matter where they went—Clemson, out for the holidays, camping, mountaineering—Stallings would disappear at night. It was his time, he would say, and grin and leer, and make clear without words that the night was made for his flesh. Booze, women, a werewolf tromp through the woods.

  McKay looked hard at him. Stallings held his stare a moment but looked away. McKay looked into the dark, too.

  “You know about Guadalcanal?” McKay said.

  “What about it?”

  “The Japs, how they would attack at night?” He found himself describing a rolling wave of screaming men with one slow sweep of his hand. “They’d charge, en masse.”

  “Shit. Yeah, I heard about that.”

  McKay looked for words. “Every night, it seemed like. Something always happened. Probes, patrols—even if they didn’t mount a full-on attack. They even had this son of a—this fighter pilot. He’d buzz Henderson Field, the airfield, and our positions all night long. Kept us up all hours, thinking we were about to get bombed.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Not by him. But we got acquainted with the Jap navy real good.”

  McKay waited.

  Stallings took off his cap and ran his hand over his scalp. He exhaled. “Shit, I know you been through hell. I’m not trying to be down in the mouth.”

  “Didn’t say you were.”

  Stallings was quiet a moment. “We landed under fire, ya know. Opposed landing.”

  “I heard.”

  “Looking back, it wasn’t too bad, but in the pitch dark? Coming in after puking your guts out in those fucking landing craft for hours? I’ve—I’ve never been so goddam scared in my life. Tracers fucking everywhere. We moved inland pretty quick but it was hard to figure out what was going on in the dark. I thought I’d got lost a couple times, and dammit if I—if I didn’t have to shit. Well, you know I wasn’t gonna shit my pants. I was scared but for some reason I got even more scared of shitting my pants and wallering around in it for God knows how long. I didn’t even think I was gonna live but I was gonna take a crap come hell or high water, and I’d already been through the high water, so, you know. So I squatted down right there on the beach with the tracers going around me like I was taking a shit inside a fireworks show. It seemed like it took forever, and then I was up and buckling my britches as I was running God knows where.

  “And then—then I got really scared. What the hell was you thinking, Grove, squatting down like that in the middle of a war. That’s when I thought I’d got good and lost. I was wandering around the beach in the dark with every Nazi on the island shooting at me but at least I had clean britches. Hell.

  “Well, right about then I just up and stumbled into some guys from a squad in my platoon. I was the platoon radio man and the looey in charge was panicking, thought I’d been killed and left them without contact with the rest of the company. Chewed me out when I come in. When the sun come up we saw we’d lost a few guys in the landing, but by then we was in position and ready to go.”

  Stallings stopped. “We can smoke, right?”

  “Sure thing,” McKay said.

  Stallings drew a cigarette and lighter and lit up as he continued talking. “You ever seen a Tiger tank?”

  “Not in combat,” McKay said. He had seen them in Germany, on flatbed rail cars. He may as well not have seen them, given what he knew Stallings would say next.

  Stallings offered him one of his cigarettes. McKay hesitated, looked at Stallings, thought of Sicily, of Guadalcanal, and took one. He took out his own lighter and lit it. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Stallings dragged at the cigarette a long time and exhaled slowly. “The SS—they was on the island, right back of the little town where we landed. Tank division, panzers and everything. When the sun come up they hit us with artillery and tanks and the Italians attacked us. We beat them back but it wasn’t pretty. We heard about the Tigers through the grapevine that night. Bunch of them overran some positions. I had kind of got used to being scared by the end of that day, kind of numb? But when I heard about that… I didn’t stop being scared until after we got to England. I thought I’d die of it, Joe.”

  McKay looked at him. Stallings had spoken barely above a whisper, but now his voice rose and quavered. He sounded like a child. McKay thought of Stallings’s mother, the lumber man’s widow, in her shack in North Carolina.

  Stallings took a drag on the smoke and held it away. The glowing tip shook in the dark. He cleared his throat.

  “Anyways, we locked horns with them Tigers sure enough. I can’t remember when, but we’d been on the island several days, and they come down on us. A night attack, like those Japs. You could hear those bastards for miles. I mean loud. We wasn’t in a very good position but we were good and dug in. They come down on us with infantry and armor in the dark. I didn’t have a clue what was going on. Still don’t. Farmer—that looey—got hit and the platoon sergeant took over. I zipped through every bit of my M-one ammo and picked up Farmer’s tommy gun and finished that off too, all the time talking to company and battalion and repeating everything they said to me to the sergeant.

  “Then the tanks came on us. They had been pushing farther to the left of us and we’d just been getting a lot of machine gun fire and the infantry had pressed us pretty hard, but then come the tanks. God, I—I never. I don’t remember none of it, Joe. That’s it.”

  “You don’t remember what happened.”

  “Not a damn thing. Just noise is all, and then I was helping with dogtags. That’s when I made sergeant, ya know. Got a Bronze Star, too. I guess I did something during all that mess that caught somebody’s eye.”

  McKay grinned. “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  Stallings waved. “Go to hell. Well, I, uh—I got busted, you know. It was after the fighting had kind of died down. Chickenshit, like I said. We had a coupla days out of the line and I got ahold of some good liquor. Not surprised about that either, huh?”

  McKay said nothing. Stallings looked at him, his face guilty.

  “Sorry. I know you didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

  “I didn’t even know what you’d been doing weekends.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t want to get involved, and I didn’t want to—I don’t know—let you down. Or something.”

  “What?”
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  “I never thanked you, for helping me get that far. I wanted to quit, ya know. All the time I wanted to quit. If it hadn’t been for you and my mama I would’ve. And if it hadn’t been for me, I would’ve made it. Just another damn semester.”

  You made your choices, McKay thought, and felt badly—Grove had just acknowledged as much.

  “Anyways, I did a little time once the authorities got done fighting over me and then I got the chance to get out if I joined up. Well, hell, what would you’a done?”

  “I don’t blame ya.”

  “Like I said, didn’t take long for somebody to discover my abilities. The Army’s like that, I reckon. Put ya where you can do the most damage. Good aim and no fallen arches—infantry. Mechanical skill—motor pool. Not a goddam bit of brains in your head—officer school. Sorry.”

  McKay laughed. “We do things different in the Marines. Don’t one of us start off with any brains.”

  Stallings laughed.

  “Hell. Well,” he said, and, for a long moment, seemed far away, “just as long as I don’t shit my pants.”

  McKay laughed again. Stallings did not.

  Outside, the Hardråde’s engine turned over, caught, revved. Someone knocked twice on the door. McKay stood and inched the door open. Petersen stood outside. When he spoke, his words misted. The humidity had thickened the air.

  “They come,” he said.

  McKay ground out his cigarette and turned and gestured to the others to stand. They rose, slinging on packs as they did, already walking as they buckled straps and catches. McKay stood aside. They pulled white scarves like balaclavas over their noses as they stepped out into the night. Stallings came out last. McKay slapped him on the shoulder, and Stallings was gone. McKay looked once around the room for forgotten equipment and left the Petersen house for the last time.

  11

  The dark of the moon had come and a new bank of cloud scudded in from the sea. Norway lay under triple darkness. They would have no moonlight to help them pick their way in the brilliant snow, and no stars to spread even the tiniest glow across the landscape. They moved in darkness, pure dark, blacker even than jungle night. McKay shuddered.

  When he stepped out onto the dock, Magnus and Jørgen had wrestled the second of a pair of oil drums onto the Hardråde’s deck. The boat, its mooring lines already cast off, idled by the wharf, ready to go. The team climbed aboard. McKay nodded at the drums and looked at Petersen.

  “Extra fuel? For the Vestfjorden?”

  Petersen stroked his beard and, to McKay’s surprise, smiled. “No.”

  McKay left it at that. He went straight to the cabin below the wheelhouse and found it packed. He had not thought such a small room could hold so many men or so much equipment. Petersen’s crew had removed the table and chairs to hold all of them.

  Stallings, Graves, and Ollila stood there with five others, all in heavy coats and the intricately knitted sweaters of the Norwegians, with scarves bundling their necks and fisherman’s caps or toboggans on their heads. Two wore oilskins. All of them wore leather cartridge belts on the British or German pattern and carried hand grenades and guns.

  The boat throttled up and its tonk-tonk-tonk began. McKay and his team lurched and caught themselves. The Norwegians, showing their sealegs, rocked and held steady.

  Petersen and Magnus squeezed in behind McKay and shut the door. He spoke briefly in Norwegian—McKay understood this as his introduction—and led McKay to the first man—tall, rangy, a face like handmedown leather. He carried a German Mauser and a Walther PP in a mismatched holster. Petersen introduced him as Fredrik. McKay shook his hand.

  “The pistol he got from a Gestapo officer,” Petersen said.

  “You kill him?”

  Petersen translated. The man laughed.

  “Unfortunately, no, but he doubts the theft has ever been reported.”

  McKay laughed.

  “You know Magnus, of course,” Petersen said, “and this is Håkon.”

  McKay shook his hand. Håkon stood eight inches shorter than McKay and carried an unsilenced Sten, a puny weapon even for a submachine gun. But the man looked tough and uncompromising, with a face weathered by the sea and a nose broken at least twice. McKay had seen the look before—a certain set of the jaw, a glint in the eyes—in about half the Marines that left Parris Island. We can use that, he thought.

  Bjørn came next, a bigger man, as his name—Bear, familiar to McKay from his Viking history—implied. He carried a Mauser and a British revolver, a Webley.

  The next men, Einar and Amund, were brothers. Both carried P-38 pistols taken from dead Germans in the fighting of 1940. Like Fredrik, Einar carried a Mauser. Amund, a bigger man than his brother, carried the prize.

  “I love the gun,” Amund said, and slapped the receiver of the big Bren gun. The Bren was Czech light machine gun, fed from an upside-down magazine on the top. The British had adopted it and had airdropped them, along with thousands of Stens, to resistance groups all over Europe. McKay had never seen one in action, and doubted it could equal the Browning Automatic Rifle that his Marine squads relied upon, but he was glad to find more firepower than rifles and stolen pistols.

  “Glad to hear it,” McKay said. “We can use that.”

  “And you have already seen this,” Petersen said, and held up his Sten. McKay had—a Mark II, with a built-in silencer—and McKay had also noted the Enfield revolver on Petersen’s belt—a solid, reliable pistol.

  “Y’all have enough ammunition for everything?”

  “We have enough.”

  “Explosives?”

  “We have given them to Sergeant Graves.”

  “Outstanding.” McKay nodded to Graves. “The Colour Sergeant has a special assignment for your men—any pair who are willing to climb down the rail bridge to the waterline.”

  Graves, after a moment of surprise, took on his most wolfish, hungry look.

  “You have what you need to mine the bridge?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Outstanding.” McKay looked once more over the group crowded into the dingy-aired cabin. “You’ve brought a party of seven. Thank you.”

  “You are welcome, but no—my men are six. I am coming with you, to the dam.”

  McKay was too tired to be surprised. He said, “Why?”

  “I escaped Keener’s attempt because I was on the heights, fighting. I do not know why Keener failed or what went wrong, but I want some role in controlling this raid.”

  McKay looked at him. Petersen’s face was set. He stood stony and huge, seemed to fill and possess the cabin entire. His cap, McKay noticed for the first time, almost brushed the ceiling. The yellow bulb shone full in his face, and Petersen did not blink. His mind brought forth eagles staring into the sun, something from his medieval reading, but he pushed the thought aside.

  “All right,” McKay said. “But you take orders from me.”

  “Gladly,” Petersen said, and broke into a smile. He almost looked cheery.

  McKay turned to the others in the cabin and said, “How many can speak English?”

  Håkon and Amund raised their hands, and Amund said, timidly, “Only little.”

  “That’s fine. Na gut, wie viele Deutsch kann?”

  Håkon kept his hand up, and Fredrik and Bjørn raised theirs.

  “I work at the shipyards with the Germans,” Bjørn said.

  “All right, but no more. The less I know you the better.”

  Bjørn nodded, glanced at Petersen and nodded thoughtfully again. McKay had hoped for a few days or even weeks in which to pick up a smattering of Norwegian. He preferred to talk directly to his contacts, either in English or their own language, but this would be good enough—better than he had expected. He continued in German.

  “Have you been given your orders? The plans?”

  The men nodded.

  “Sub-lieutenant Petersen has explained the situation to me. The other raid, the reprisals. None of you had to come but you did.
” He looked at them all one by one. They understood that he was thanking them.

  He nodded, stepped back, and looked at Petersen. Petersen nodded to him, stepped toward his men and raised his Sten to the ceiling in the dim light.

  McKay saw a change come over Petersen, like the face of a statue emerging from a caul of snow and ice. The practiced stoniness fell away. His eyes shone in the light, he flushed and grew animated. He raised his Sten to the ceiling in one hand and cried out:

  “Alt for Norge!”

  The other six men thrust their weapons as high as they could and shouted once with him. “Alt for Norge!”

  All for Norway.

  They passed Hallensnes in the deep dark and sailed the still and quiet fjord to the dam. After talking to the Norwegians and going over the changes that Petersen would bring to the infiltration, McKay stayed on deck for the whole trip. He watched the dam form from a point of light, fixed above a thin and wobbly pillar stretched down across the waters, and grow from the middle of the point to a distant glowing wall reared high in the surrounding black. When the glow had parted into particular lights strung through the haze, Jørgen steered the Hardråde to starboard and the wall of the gorge edged forward and between them.

  McKay, alone in the dark, breathed deep of the frost air and went to the cabin. He felt awake, had grown more and more awake since boarding the boat. The excitement, the excitement he had felt in the Colonel’s office and boarding the Viking—the excitement of a task to overcome had taken hold. He sucked in the cold air again, savored it, and climbed into the wheelhouse.