Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  At first no one appeared. He heard low voices, and then “Piss off.” The door slammed and a man in a navy coat and boat cap stepped out into the lane. He took a moment to light a smoke, waved out the match, and walked down the lane to the latrine.

  Petersen would have to kill this man. He had come from the same barracks as the earlier sailor, and if he did not see the first sailor, now dead, in the latrine, he would become suspicious. Petersen thought about how to do it, and moved around the back of the building into the alley between it and the next. He waited.

  The sailor returned at a quicker pace than he had left—Petersen listened to his tread. When the footsteps reached the alley, Petersen wheeled out in front of the man. The man’s cigarette dropped from his lips and he drew his hands uselessly from his pockets. Petersen swung his Sten and struck him in the temple with the sharp angle of the metal stock. The man reeled back and sat in the snow. Petersen swung again. The man raised his hand and Petersen hit it. He fell back onto one elbow. He looked up at the buildings around him and opened his mouth to call out. Petersen pointed without aiming at the man’s body and fired, tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk. An invisible first rapped the man’s chest and he sagged.

  Petersen slung his Sten and grabbed the man’s ankles. He gurgled softly as Petersen dragged him through the alley into the darkness behind the barracks. When Petersen stopped, the sailor looked at him. He had brown hair smashed down by his pillow on one side and standing on the other, with the outline of his cap traced across the side of his head, a greasy slob. He tried to sit up. He had one hand at his chest, trying to bring it to his throat. Blood ran from his mouth. In the death throes and the cold, his face had already blanched white. Petersen watched him. The sailor worried his brow, trying to keep his eyelids open like a drowsing student. His other hand rose toward Petersen.

  Petersen’s chest tightened. He gritted his teeth. He knelt over the sailor’s body, pulled him up to a sitting position, and pressed the muzzle of the Sten to his face. The sailor choked out red droplets. Petersen fired two rounds and shattered his skull.

  Petersen did not enjoy his revenge. He heard the bullets, after passing through the German’s face and brain, rap into the side of the building, as clear as a neighbor knocking. Something stirred on the other side.

  Petersen looked at the German, at the collapsed mess of bone under the greasy hair. The cap, he thought, and Shit.

  He jumped up and ran into the alley as the door of the barracks opened again. Two men stepped out into the lane and looked around. Petersen ducked behind the next barracks and watched with one eye around the corner.

  “Damned fool,” one German said. “What the devil does he think he’s playing at?”

  “I don’t care—he’s always been worthless. He’s probably in the shitter asleep with Rottmann.”

  “If we weren’t getting ready I’d just say piss off again and let the skipper—what’s this?”

  Petersen watched the German cross in front of the alley and bend down.

  “Rottmann’s cap?” the first said.

  “Or Dieter’s, the little shit. That must have been him tapping on the walls. Come on.”

  They started down the alley.

  Petersen decided not to wait until they had seen the body. He stepped around the corner with the Sten at his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The shots caught the first German in the stomach and chest as the barrel rose. The German fell to the side with his hands on his stomach and Petersen steadied and aimed for the second.

  The man had not even watched his friend fall—he turned to run and slipped in the snow. Petersen fired and the bullets cleft empty air. He stepped forward and aimed at the man’s back, but he scrambled up and ran out into the bright barracks lane.

  “Help!” the man screamed, and Petersen killed him.

  Ollila watched it. The German, struck in the hip and back, fell forward onto his face and started crawling. He raised his head to shout once more and Petersen, standing full in the open space between the barracks, stepped up behind him and shot him in the back of the head. The German twitched and lay still.

  Ollila swore. He thumbed down the Mauser’s safety. He pressed his finger against the cold steel trigger guard until the knuckle ached.

  Petersen reached for the dead man’s body but stopped and backed into the alley and out of sight. He reappeared behind the building where he had ambushed the pair of Germans. Petersen watched him reload on one side of the barracks, while on the other doors opened and the E-boat’s crew stepped out into the night. Ollila counted—seven at first, crowding immediately around the dead man. Three more lingered in the doorways. One man stood and rushed to another of the buildings and knocked. Ollila saw him shouting to be heard through the door. A moment later, an officer came out. At the same time the Germans spotted the man who, Ollila assumed, Petersen had shot in the alley.

  The cluster of Germans surrounding the body in the lane broke apart and a few of them rushed into the alley. Ollila looked at Petersen. He stood with his back pressed against the building. He seemed to have just finished changing the magazine in his Sten.

  Ollila lowered his finger to the trigger and breathed.

  Petersen put the Sten to his shoulder and wheeled into the alley. The Germans in the lane looked up, startled. Ollila sighted on the officer and fired. Something plucked at the man’s coat and he fell over.

  Poor first shot, Ollila thought.

  The sound of the shot reached the rest of the Germans and they jumped and began to scatter. Shouts of surprise and terror drifted up to him and he worked the Mauser’s bolt. German sailors dropped or clutched themselves and staggered out of the alley. The officer tried to leverage himself up on an elbow and collapsed. One sailor ran to the open door of the officers’ barracks and hid. Ollila followed him and waited. The sailor ran out, followed by an officer. Ollila fired and struck the officer in the head.

  “Bullseye.”

  Petersen appeared in the lane, changing magazines again. He looked left and right. From both directions, the sailors came out of their barracks with pistols and submachine guns, frantically seating magazines in them as they ran. Ollila glanced up to the dam and saw the guards there staring, uncertain. He wondered how far Graves had gotten in mining the dam.

  Gunshots popped in the E-boat compound. Ollila swung down into the barracks, where Petersen was dashing between the buildings, shooting from the hip, found a German sailor raising his submachine gun, sighted, breathed, and fired.

  McKay leaned into the gallery door, shouted, “How long?”

  Down the passageway he heard Graves answer, “Five minutes.”

  “Hurry up, they found us.”

  He dropped the tin of thermite by the door, shouted “Seal this one and come up!” and climbed.

  He found Stallings at the top squatting behind the door, peeking out through a crack.

  “What’s going on?”

  “They’re shooting—at Petersen.”

  McKay grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled open the door. “Come on.”

  He stepped outside and two guards ran past from the dam. McKay cocked and raised his Thompson and squeezed the trigger. He caught the guards in the back and they fell.

  “Shit!” A voice in German, behind him.

  He turned and shot another guard, tangled in the strap of his own rifle as he tried to bring it up. A fourth guard saw and stopped, fell backwards trying to turn. McKay squeezed his left eye shut and aimed, but before he fired the man’s helmet bent and rang and his head snapped to the side. He straightened and slumped, one foot twitching. Ollila.

  McKay lowered the Thompson and looked up the dam. At the far end he could see men running, milling back and forth. They would come across the dam in force, soon. He looked at the barracks. The Germans seemed to run in circles, occasionally firing into the darkness or between the buildings.

  “Grove—” he said, and something clapped the air beside his head.

  McKay dropped and behind hi
m. The guards from the dock, below the dam, had topped the stairs and opened fire. McKay sprayed the rest of his magazine at them and reloaded. He looked at Stallings, who lay beside him in the snow.

  “Grove—grenade!”

  Stallings blinked. McKay swore, pushed himself up to a crouch, and fired at the guards, who scuttled for cover against the cliff. One popped back up and raised his submachine gun and McKay fired again. The rock shattered in his face and the man covered his eyes. McKay shot him. The other appeared, already firing. McKay felt rather than heard his bullets snap past him and smash into concrete and snow. McKay raised his Thompson and squeezed the trigger and the bolt shot forward and stuck—jammed.

  “Shit.”

  The German stopped firing and leapt up another three or four steps, then bore down on McKay again. McKay let go of his Thompson and let it swing down and around him and drew his Browning. He dropped to one knee as the German fired again, and jammed. McKay aimed and fired off five, six, seven shots and the German, goggle-eyed, startled to have been shot, dropped his gun and fell away. McKay heard him clattering down the stairs as he lifted his Thompson again, cleared the cartridge crumpled in the breach, and changed magazines.

  He looked at Stallings.

  “Grove.”

  Stallings stared at him. His lip trembled.

  “Grove, dammit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I coulda used you just now.”

  Stallings stared at him.

  McKay looked at the barracks. He spotted Petersen ducking behind one of them, changing magazines. Ollila’s rifle echoed twice, three times in the rock-walled fjord. He looked at the brightly lit barracks again, at the cables looping down from the pole near the latrine. He shook Stallings.

  “I need you, Grove. I need you to cover me.”

  Stallings nodded.

  “Get up. Throw a grenade at those Krauts up there, then open fire with your Thompson.” He thumped Stallings on the back, hard. “Do it.”

  And he leapt and ran.

  He ran past the barracks and heard the Germans shout. He slid to a stop behind the building nearest the dam and looked at the terminal where the power line stopped and fed electricity to the barracks. He heard shouts and footsteps. He drew his ka-bar again, gritted his teeth, and jumped. In the barracks lane, Stallings’s grenade exploded. McKay slashed at the cables. He heard shouts and the blade caught. Sparks fell like motes in a sunbeam and the knife torqued from his hand. he lost his balance and fell to the snow. Every light on that side of the dam went black.

  He raised himself and edged into the cover at the back of the building. He looked around but could see almost nothing. He listened and could hear only the Germans shouting, moaning, an officer directing the men. Ollila’s rifle cracked. The officer swore.

  McKay stood and did not bother looking for his knife in the snow. He looked for Stallings and spotted him huddled against the concrete stairwell, reloading. Good man. All he had needed was a yell. He waved and Stallings spotted him. McKay signaled to stay put. Stallings nodded and watched the barracks and the dam.

  McKay wondered what had become of Petersen, how much longer Graves would take. He listened to the Germans again. How had the Colonel put it back in London? He would make as much trouble as he could.

  He put his Thompson to his shoulder and prepared to sweep the alleys. He heard the music stop.

  Graves pressed home the last of his blasting caps and stood. He cracked his head on the ceiling, swore, and knelt again. But he had no time to nurse his skull, still less the ropeburns on his palms, which had started by stinging and aching and now bled freely in the cold. He shook his head and gave his work one last inspection—he had spread his first blocks of explosive in a tight grid across the left, outer wall of the gallery, roughly three feet by three feet. The rest he had simply stacked on the originals and taped together. And he had taken no chances on setting the stuff off—he hooked three timers to the lot and set them for thirty second intervals forty-five minutes distant. Now from the wall hung a great blocky barnacle of plastic, tape, and wire. Graves felt proud of this work. He had one last job to do, a snare to lay.

  He had a third detonation device, a pair of them—tin boxes with wire drawstrings. He set them in place and took four climbing pitons and a hammer from his coat. Six feet from the charge, he knelt and drove a piton into the wall at shin height. Frozen blood crackled in the wrinkles of his palms as he worked. He drove its mate into the opposite wall. He hooked his great callused finger into the loop of one device and pulled its drawstring out, clicking, to the first piton. He hooked the line underneath and drew it across to the second piton, where the hooked the drawstring’s loop and left it. He did the same with the second device. With the tripwires in place, he flicked switches on both boxes and, minding the wire, left the gallery.

  When he reached the door he could hear the shooting, what sounded like a grenade.

  “Shit.”

  He looked back and confirmed that he had placed the tripwires out of sight in the curve of the dam. He took out his knife and reached above him to the pipe that guarded the electrical wires, pried it free of the ceiling, exposed the wire, and cut it. The gallery went dark.

  He shut the door applied the last of his thermite to the lock, hinges, and jamb, and mounted the ladder before the stuff had stopped sputtering its glowing drops of steel.

  He reached the top and found darkness there as well—all the lights in the barracks had been doused, and from there the shapes of men in coats streamed toward him, toward the dam, in the darkness.

  Behind him, Stallings shouted, “Graves—down! Fire!”

  He threw himself to the ground before the concrete building and they fired without aiming into the crowd. The group—five, six, seven of them—reacted at the once, some buckling and falling, some raising weapons toward nothing, or scattering, breaking into a faster run, but all reacted. He thought of a herd of antelope moving in close order to avoid lionesses in the grass. He grinned and rolled onto his side to reload, opened fire before he had even returned to prone.

  The last of the group ducked into the pathway at the top of the dam and were gone. For a moment there was silence, and then Graves heard a single rifle shot, high on the air.

  He rose and looked back at the dam. The lights still burned there. He could see the humped backs of the men scrambling low across the dam toward their comrades. He looked farther, at the far camp, and saw Germans watching him. He grinned again, and fire flickered like sparks from two, three of them. Pop pop, pop.

  The shots zipped overhead, not near enough to scare him, but Graves still ducked into the cover offered by the stairwell and looked at Stallings.

  “Cover, Stallings, cover.”

  Stallings did not move. He turned his head, looked at Graves, and mumbled something.

  “Bloody shit, it’s happened.” The concussion had finally gotten to Stallings. He even seemed to be drooling. Graves reached for him and shook his shoulder. Stallings coughed blood.

  Graves pulled his hand away, started to speak, and McKay arrived with Petersen.

  As soon as they had heard shooting, Magnus and the others delved deeper into the snow, burrowed farther behind their rocks, readied to ambush the reinforcements sure to come from the headquarters camp. Magnus waited and counted. The Germans responded in two minutes.

  In the lights of the camp he saw a figure run from the headquarters beside the railhead to a barracks and, within thirty seconds of that, the soldiers poured out into the open ground and formed up. Another thirty seconds, and they were moving. Magnus could not be sure at such a distance, but there were probably a platoon—thirty men. Behind them in the camp, more fell in and began to hoist on coats and gear.

  Along the face of the ridge, spread across the saddle on both sides of the path, safety catches clicked off, bolts slid home.

  The Germans left the light of the camp quickly and in good order. For a few minutes someone in the van of the column shone a torc
h on the path, but doused it as they reached the uphill slope. They suspect, Magnus thought. They remember. The Germans would come on in combat formation, spread out, ready for the ambush. Suddenly his body cooled and he felt the sweat standing out on his face, greasing the palms of his aching hands. He tried to breathe steadily.

  Long minutes passed. The firing at the dam increased, and he thought he heard grenades exploding. Above it all, from somewhere farther along the ridge, came the steady crack of the Finn sharpshooter’s rifle.

  Suddenly, the shooting ebbed. Magnus wanted to raise his head, turn, and look, but he could have seen nothing, and the Germans were out there. The night lay silent for a moment. Then he saw them coming.

  The Germans had sent forward half a squad, five men, to bait the ambushers. Petersen had trained them well, taught them to look for this. They held their fire. The Germans moved up the path slowly. They wore heavy grey overcoats and white winter smocks, though one had forgotten or did not have time to reverse his and it still showed green and brown camouflage. In the darkness it hardly mattered. All but their leader carried Mausers. The Germans had held back the cream of the squad, the machine gun and its support. They neared the pass, and Magnus’s body tensed. His muscles bunched against themselves and he tried to shrink into the earth without moving. He closed his eyes as the leader hit the first booby trap.

  It was an American fragmentation grenade that they had rigged to a tripwire. Magnus heard the metal handle spring away, and one of the Germans spoke. The grenade exploded and one man screamed. Magnus looked. Three bodies lay scattered in the path. Two more had fallen and rolled downhill. They tried to stand and winced and cried with the pain.

  Magnus waited for the storm of fire, but he held. The rest of the group did, too. That was the proudest night of his life.