He leaned around the corner of the building and looked down toward the shore and the dam. The sergeant had just ended his walk and turned, heading back for the dock. McKay drew the Welrod. He seated the magazine and worked the bolt. Behind him, he heard footsteps. New snow crunched as someone hurried toward him.
“Forgive me, Sergeant, but I had to take a piss—”
The footsteps stopped. McKay turned. A German in steel helmet and heavy winter overcoat stood fifteen feet away, goggling at him. The other guard had arrived.
McKay aimed and fired into his face—tok—then lunged forward and caught the man by the straps of his gear. The man choked and gargled and tried to feel his face. McKay lowered him to the snow by the foot of the barracks and worked the Welrod’s bolt again. He looked back to the wire. The sergeant approached the tower, looking up at the private, speaking. McKay rose and pressed himself against the barrack wall, planted his heel on the German’s throat, raised the Welrod and took a breath.
“You should change your name from Frühauf if you cannot stay awake.”
“But it’s noon, Sergeant.”
“Shut up, Frühauf.”
The sergeant had not broken stride. He came steadily up the fenceline, watching. McKay waited. The sergeant had almost reached the angle when he spotted the tracks in the shadow. He stopped. McKay breathed and fired.
The sergeant stood farther off than the guard had, and the Welrod’s weaknesses showed. The bullet McKay had aimed for the head caught the sergeant in the front of the throat. It must have struck the man’s spine—his body unstrung, he toppled onto his face in the dark angle of the fence.
As McKay worked the bolt he heard Frühauf call the sergeant’s name. He looked up. Not yet, not so quickly.
“Sergeant Bäuml?” The voice was very young.
The sergeant made a noise, a low hiss, and McKay remembered the first guard. He looked down. The man’s face lay a bloody mess—a neat black hole at the joint of cheek and nose had caved in a handbreadth of bone and leaked thick black out of the body. The man lay still. McKay raised his foot.
Private Frühauf leaned out of the tower almost past his ability to balance and looked toward the sergeant. “Sergeant Bäuml, everything good?”
The sergeant made the noise again. He was trying to speak.
Frühauf went to the ladder and climbed down. He had his rifle at port arms as he came, but slung it as he neared. He laughed. “Sergeant, you think I am the one who is asleep on his feet?”
The sergeant did not respond.
Frühauf’s smile vanished and he jogged to the body. He knelt and his rifle swung around him, in his way. He shrugged it off into the snow and knelt beside the sergeant. Green recruit, McKay thought, with a faint pinch of remorse, and drew his ka-bar.
He killed the private and waved his team forward from the darkness. They came at a jog and crawled through the wire. McKay pointed to Stallings and Petersen and then at the bodies. They lifted and dragged and McKay led them into the lee of the barracks again, where the sergeant and private joined the shatter-faced guard. They laid the bodies end to end by the wall and kicked snow over them, over the bloody patches. McKay looked himself over. He already had blood on his boots—the second guard had apparently coughed blood onto him—and both arms of his jacket, especially after cutting the private’s throat. He wiped the excess off with snow and moved along the side of the barracks. He stopped at the corner, checked the Welrod, and edged around until one eye could see down the lane between the buildings. Beyond, just this side of the dam, stood the entrance to the galleries. The target.
Two guards stood in the lighted lane, smoking. They had slung rifles and spoke in low voices. One chuckled. They stood at their ease, unaware. McKay leaned back and thought.
The guards stood together in the middle of the lane. Six barracks comprised the garrison on this side of the dam, and all stood with their porch lights burning. He could use the alleys between the buildings to move, but he worried that they were too wide to conceal his movements. And the guards stood in the light, in full view of the guards walking the dam.
No chance to practice, McKay thought, and tried to forget about it.
As he thought, one guard thanked the other for the light and started to move off. The other muttered something that caused the first to laugh. McKay peeked around again. The first guard went his way toward the dam. The other remained to finish off his cigarette. McKay looked at Graves and nodded toward the other side of the lane, to the shadow beside the facing barracks. Graves nodded and dashed lightly across the well-packed snow. McKay looked. The guard turned idly, glanced back, and then dropped and ground out the butt in the path. He started toward them.
McKay looked across at Graves. Graves already had his knife out. McKay held up a hand—Wait. The guard hummed to himself as he rounded the corner and ran into McKay.
McKay took him by the throat and squeezed and with his right hand drove his ka-bar into the back of his knee. The man sagged but did not go down. He struggled, put up a fight. McKay kicked at the hamstrung leg and the man dropped onto his back. McKay leaned into the man’s throat and held.
The door of the barracks across the lane opened. McKay looked up—a sailor in a dark blue overcoat staggered out and slammed the door behind him. He had both hands at his throat, holding the upturned collar shut. Hair stuck out from beneath his garrison cap like old straw. A half-awake man on the way to the latrine. Graves got him before he had time to look up and see McKay, reached out from the shadows and dragged him in.
The guard, still alive, had heard and begun kicking, driving his heels into the snow, anything to make noise. The man’s throat fought against McKay’s weight, focused in the curve between thumb and index finger. McKay felt him trying to swallow. He thought of the Gestapo man in Denmark and felt his gorge rise, choked back the nausea and gripped harder. He shifted across the man’s body to make way for his right arm and the man’s eyes found the ka-bar and bugged. McKay drove the knife into him beneath the sternum and twisted. After another minute with his hand pressed down hard on the guard’s throat, and sweat dripping from his chin and nose, he stood. He wiped his face and eyes.
“Christ,” he gasped, and thought, Help me.
He checked the lane again, then walked across to Graves. Petersen and Stallings followed. McKay looked at them—both had paled, but had their jaws set. They would stick with it. He looked closely at Stallings and saw the man, scared shitless, who had nonetheless earned a sergeant’s stripe and Bronze Star in Sicily. Places no one cares about, people no one cares about, he thought, and could not believe that had convinced anyone to fight the Nazis.
He nodded to each of them and they nodded back. He led them along behind the barracks until he could lean around the corner of the last one and see the little concrete shed that housed the stairwell to the guts of the dam.
Ollila watched them movement by movement. He also watched the guards, anticipated McKay’s movements and theirs, readied himself for the moment he would need to move his finger to the trigger and squeeze. As much as he enjoyed the skill of it, of lofting a slug at great range and speed through the soft unyielding air into a small, swift target, and as much as he enjoyed killing Nazis, he dreaded that moment. If the team had not been discovered before, that shot would end their stealth.
Ollila lay still under the ragged fronds of the ghillie suit, wedged in the gap between two snow-covered rocks above the dam. He had a clear line of sight up the barracks lane, up a long sweep of the dam’s curved pathway, and into the command post compound on the opposite side. The view through five hundred yards in the light-yellowed frost was not perfect, but he could see movement and could fire if he had to and ther glare from the dam’s lights would make it hard for the guards below to spot him. He had found a good spot—had noted it even during their reconnaissance and made sure to remember it.
He watched McKay through the sight. He stood watching the guards on the bridge. Ollila moved the crosshai
rs over them and watched. His intention became clear—he wanted a moment when the nearest guards had their backs turned. He looked at the path from barracks to entrance. McKay had chosen well—the little building itself would hide most of their movement, but he wanted to make sure. Ollila hoped that would not be McKay’s undoing.
He liked McKay—a hard name, very unFinnish, so he preferred to address him as “Captain” if at all. The man had gone through difficult fights, like himself, and Ollila had begun to find he could not respect anyone who had not. He wondered how the Japanese compared to the Russians in brutality, then stopped. He could not let his mind wander.
But McKay and the others had done well. So far they had killed four guards and the sailor, reacting instantly to every surprise. Ollila had seen men freeze the moment something with the plan went wrong. It got people killed. That was why the Colonel had chosen him, at the British officer’s insistence, to come along. If Petersen had turned, had gone to work for the Nazis, if it was Petersen who had handed the first team of saboteurs over to destruction, and McKay could not take care of it, they knew that Ollila could. He was glad he had not had to—yet.
This could succeed, he thought. He had not held out such a hope before.
McKay moved. Ollila laid the sight on him. He had risen from his squat, half-kneeling now, legs coiled to spring. Ollila looked at the dam—two guards in the middle talking, lighting cigarettes, the one nearest them had just turned to walk away. He swung back to McKay and saw him running for the entrance.
12
McKay reached the door and dropped to one knee and looked around—at the barracks, the latrine, down the stairs marked zum Dammfuß. No one in sight. Graves and Stallings came to a stop beside him, pressed close in the narrow lee of the concrete building. He looked back to the barracks, at the shadowed corner where he had left Petersen. He raised fingers to his eyes and pointed them in a wide arc across the barracks grounds. He turned to the door.
He had left Petersen behind to cover their rear. Any trouble and Petersen would be in a position to cover them—the silenced Sten would help. Stallings he would leave inside the entrance building, once they got in.
He tested the doorknob and found it open. He turned slowly, awaited and felt the bolt come free of the doorpost, then shifted out of the door’s way and slowly pulled. Its hinges squeaked once, and he stopped. He waited and listened. Stallings fidgeted, Graves placed a hand near his Thompson’s bolt. After a moment, McKay, satisfied, pulled further. The door opened without another sound and the team slipped in.
The inside of the building gave them six feet of width and twelve of depth to work in. Beyond the small foyer or landing stood a railing, and then a concrete aperture leading down, down, with a block and tackle suspended over the pit. McKay leaned over. A row of yellow lights merged with the rungs of the ladder hundreds of feet below. He checked the block and tackle. He turned and nodded and they all dropped their packs.
He leaned close to Stallings. “We’re going down, Grove. I’ll whistle once when we’re ready and then you lower Graves’s gear down. Got it?”
“No problem.”
McKay slung his Thompson across his back, watched Graves grip the rungs and climb, and followed.
He did not like the well, not at all. The air felt colder and wetter even than outside, the cold and wet of rock in permanent shadow. He had found places like that in the mountains, rocky spots that never saw the sun and smelt of granite, earth, and moss. Worse was the sound—a dull hum, too low and slow and evenly pitched to hint at rhythm or tune. It did not sound like machinery. It sounded like the concrete itself intoning its massiveness, like the long weary outbreath of a mountain god long since unworshiped.
McKay tried for a moment to remember which god caused disasters with his breath and pushed it from his mind.
The rungs were bent iron rods, rusted and—McKay stopped and looked closer—frosted. He looked below to Graves. His breath clouded thick. He whispered Graves’s name. Graves looked up.
“Careful—ice.”
“Right, sir.”
They kept down. After a while, Graves whispered up. “We’re here.”
They had reached the inspection gallery. McKay guessed they had climbed one hundred and fifty feet down. They stood on a narrow landing with a steel door set in the concrete, hoarfrost like marbling paper across its entire surface. McKay tried the handle. The door opened.
“Colder down here than up top,” Graves said.
McKay held up a hand and entered the gallery. It was totally dark, another patch of underworld blackness hiding in the northern winter. McKay lit his flashlight and played it across the walls. He found a switch in a box behind the door, turned it, and the passage echoed as the lights in the ceiling cracked on. The dim lights hung in mesh cages, all stemming from a steel pipe that ran along the gallery ceiling. They flickered in a row that curved into the distance and out of sight. McKay looked at Graves and nodded.
Graves leaned out and whistled softly up the shaft and McKay heard faint movement at the top. He checked the Welrod and tapped Graves on the shoulder, pointed at himself and the tunnel, and moved forward.
He walked the gallery from end to end. The passage was small—McKay’s toboggan almost brushed the lights, and Graves would almost have to squat—and narrow. McKay had six inches of space at either shoulder. Some of the lights had burned out near the center. He guessed the crew had been cutting corners. At the opposite end he found another steel door. He opened it, slowly, leaned out and looked up at a well identical to the one they had come down. He closed the door and returned, first at a walk, then a jog—he did not like the sound of the dam.
He found Graves just unhooking his pack from the block and tackle. He took one of its straps and Graves the other, and together they carried it into the passage. McKay had paced off the distance and stopped one quarter of the way across, about two hundred and twenty feet. Graves looked up and down the passage.
“Here?”
“Here.”
Graves grinned and drew out the thermite tin.
“You remember this lot, sir?”
“Yeah.”
“Seal the doors, if you please.”
McKay took the tin and went to the end of the gallery. At the steel door he took out a wad of thermite, prepared by Graves at the Petersen house, and a match and squashed it into the gap in the jamb, just above the lock. He set the bolt and lit the thermite.
The little wad caught and burned white. Molten steel fizzled and guttered in sun-bright globs onto the floor. The tunnel lit up—McKay shut his eyes. He had not seen real light for days. Yellow metal coursed in runnels down the jamb, cooling as it went. A minute later, and only the lock still glowed. The rest of the door stood smoking, fused shut.
“I’ll be damned,” McKay said.
He set another pinch of thermite in the jamb above the lower hinge, set it aflame, and left.
“Bally good stuff, right?” Graves said as he squeezed past in the gallery.
McKay grinned. “Outstanding.”
He climbed to the top gallery and crossed the length of the dam again. He opened the far door carefully, listening again, then shut the door, locked it, and sealed it with the thermite. When he had returned to their side of the dam, he sealed that door.
He looked down the well to the darkness at the bottom, far below, beneath the waterline. He took a breath and started climbing.
The sound of the dam deepened the farther he descended. Below the inspection gallery frost grew like fur on the rungs, and he slowed so he would not fall. Here some of the lights had burned out, more and more of them the lower he climbed. He had never felt claustrophobic, even aboard the Viking, but the sound of the dam, the darkness of it, the weight of both—he hated this place. He hoped that, when Graves’s explosives went off, he could see it.
He reached the bottom. The steel door here stood open. He moved to go through it and slipped on the icy concrete. He swore and caught himself, turned
on his flashlight, and moved slowly into the lower gallery.
He understood why the dam’s personnel may have shirked the lowest gallery. It had no lights, and the air was so chilled and damp that his fingers began aching even inside his gloves. He knew the bottommost gallery of the dam could be no longer than the others, but it seemed to stretch ahead and to the left forever. He realized with surprise that he was fretting about the dark, like a child. He swore at himself. He just needed sleep. He quickened his step, slipping occasionally on the ice and not caring, and forced himself to look nowhere but into the splayed moonshape of his beam.
He reached the opposite door and did not bother trying the handle. He set thermite at the lock and both hinges and left as the white heat burned ice to steam for a yard in every direction around the door.
He came back into the well and looked up. Far above he saw the tiny point where Stallings waited. Somewhere between was Graves. He took a breath and tried to close the door. It would not move. He shone his flashlight on the hinges and saw thick ice, chipped at it with his ka-bar and tried the door again. It moved not an inch. He braced as much as he could against the floor and pushed. Nothing. He stepped back and looked at it. The doorframe seemed to be warped, but why the door would not close he could not determine. This door, in the dark and cold, had something it wanted to let out. It stood there open, like the mouth that breathed out the dam’s awful sound. He decided not to bother.
He climbed back up to Graves. He had just reached the landing and passed through the gallery door when he heard gunfire.
Petersen had lurked behind the barracks for five minutes, then took up a patrol of his own. He moved behind the buildings and around to the corner where they had entered the complex, and watched the dam. After a few minutes, he went back the way he came, crossed the lane between the barracks and swept each alley as he passed. Nothing happened for some time.
He went to cross the lane again when one of the barrack doors opened. He stepped back and pressed himself against the side of the building. He felt something beneath his feet and looked—he stood on the sailor Graves had killed earlier. After a moment, he stepped off of him and looked back toward the barracks.
Dark Full of Enemies Page 20
