Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  13

  Captain Fass called his men off as soon as the boat had reached speed and wheeled about for the escape. He had radioed the Navy in Narvik—let them handle it.

  He entered the dam stairwell, the one the bandits, the gangsters, had used. He had detailed some of the squads crossing the lake to enter the dam immediately, not bothering with the escaping saboteurs, and start inspecting the dam. He had sent them below early in the confusion to cross the dam belowground, through the galleries, and to surprise the enemy from the dam itself. They had found the doors to all three galleries welded shut.

  He assigned three men with sledgehammers to work on the uppermost gallery’s door and tried to think of something else. The dam complex had descended into chaos. The Naval contingent, the Schnellboot’s crew and officers and support personnel, had panicked and scattered, chasing one—no, two—no, a dozen—armed men around their barracks, losing men constantly. Then the lights had gone out—one of his men reported seeing a man hacking at the power cables—and the lot of them had made for the dam and the safety of the garrison. Now he stepped over them everywhere he turned. Undisciplined sailors.

  He leaned over the well and looked down. Men stood crammed together on every landing, all the way down. Their voices echoed up in a babble. He shouted down to the dam’s chief engineer, a fat reservist named Küster. The man climbed up and stood panting before him.

  “All welded, Captain, just like the others. Well, the lowest gallery is still open. The door has been jammed—well, since I got here.”

  “Then concentrate on the middle and upper galleries. Get in those doors—God knows how much time we have.”

  “Time, Captain?”

  “The Americans did not come here to weld our doors shut, Küster.”

  “Yes, Captain. There is little we can do without blowtorches, special tools—”

  “Do you have blowtorches?”

  “No, Captain.”

  Fass looked at him and left the entrance.

  Lieutenant Pfaff had been killed, and at least twenty others. Twice that many carried wounds of varying severity. The camp surgeon and a pair of volunteers with a little medical experience—a veterinarian, a college dropout—moved among the bodies to look for more wounded and perform triage. Fass had pulled his infantry back from the stairs and had them search the Schnellboot barracks for traps, mines, enemy bodies. The reports were all confused, as always in the instants after battle. Some of his men reported saboteurs in white winter gear like the Russians of the winter before, ghosts in the snow. A few reported men disguised in Navy uniforms, peacoats and officer’s caps. Those men who had not been killed or wounded fleeing the Navy camp had cowered indoors and waited for the fire to stop. He discounted anything they said. He had gotten a different estimation of strength from every man he spoke with and did not care to formulate an estimate of his own until later. Perhaps days later.

  He walked toward the barracks and Sergeant Zeichen, one of the surviving squad leaders, met him. Zeichen saluted and fidgeted. Fass waited. It was unlike Zeichen to show nerves.

  “Herr Captain,” Zeichen said, and began crying. Fass knew—this was not nerves. “Captain, we have found Sergeant Bäuml.”

  The blood left Fass’s face. His stomach knotted. “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  He followed Zeichen to the rear of the naval huts and there lay Bäuml in a line with a few others—the boy Private Frühauf, Lance Corporal Wissen, a couple of sailors in long underwear and overcoats. Killed going to the latrine. Fass handed Zeichen his torch and knelt by Bäuml. The sergeant had a neat dark hole in one side of his neck and a tattered hollow in the other. Frozen blood crusted his neck, face, and the entire left side of his chest. After Russia, the partisans and bandits, after Kursk, he had bled to death in the snow.

  “Damned shit,” he shouted. He wrung his cap and hurled it into the darkness. He stood and walked back among the barracks. “Zeichen, this makes you my second in command at the dam. Understood?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Where the devil is Bachhuber?”

  “I’ll find out, Captain.”

  “Get me that Bavarian pig immediately.”

  Lieutenant Bachhuber, the former garrison commander, had led the reinforcements up from the headquarters camp. Zeichen brought a runner to him a minute later, a private in Bachhuber’s group, as Fass stood watching the tiny flicker of muzzle flashes on the cliffs. The firing reached him as dull pops, divided and diminished by their echoes. Bachhuber’s men had at least given chase to the saboteurs.

  The runner was a private, sweaty-faced, panting. He saluted and Fass waved it off.

  “What’s the situation?”

  “We are still securing the pass, Captain. The Norwegians planted many mines.”

  “Norwegians?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “What makes Bachhuber believe they were Norwegian?”

  “During the fight we overheard them shouting to each other in Norwegian.”

  Fass thought on that. He wondered whether the Norwegians, after what the Gestapo had done to that village, had come back to finish the job. Unlikely—partisans had too little discipline, at least in this part of Europe.

  “How many?”

  “The Lieutenant is unsure, Captain. Perhaps a squad.”

  “Did you capture any? Kill any?”

  The private hesitated. Fass had his answer.

  “Tell Bachhuber to keep sweeping the heights, and to get his fat ass down here. I want a prisoner or a body and I want to talk to him personally.”

  The private ran. Fass and Zeichen walked toward the stairwell.

  “We found this by the munitions hut,” Zeichen said. He handed Fass a knife. Fass turned the weapon over in his hands. It had a broad heavy blade, pointed at the end and single-edged, and a stubby leather-wrapped handle. He held the blade up in the light from the dam—stamped into the tang near the crossguard were four letters, u.s.m.c.

  “We counted four men escaping by boat, Captain. We have yet to find bodies or any men in hiding here. That is…”

  “Four men sneaked into our camp and caused all this,” Fass said. He handed the knife back to Zeichen. “I am an even bigger failure than Bachhuber.”

  Zeichen said nothing. They entered the stairwell again and looked down the shaft. Küster was below, on the first landing, the top gallery. The sounds of hammers and grunts and curses echoed up. Fass checked his watch.

  “Sergeant, how long since the bandits—the—since the enemy departed?”

  “Perhaps twenty minutes, a half-hour, Captain.”

  Fass looked down the shaft again, then at Zeichen. The Americans—Norwegians, whomever—had sealed a bomb in the dam. He knew it.

  “Tell them to hurry up.”

  The men did. With sledgehammers, wedges, chisels, and crowbars they pried a gap between the top gallery’s door and the jamb. Five minutes later they had pulled it down and flooded the passage with armed engineers. They had not discounted wounded and desperate enemies hiding in the galleries, waiting to kill them. Two minutes after that they finished the inspection—nothing.

  “It’s in the inspection gallery,” Fass said. “Put everything into opening it. Hurry.”

  The door took longer—its seal held tighter, its landing was narrower, its concrete thicker. Fass called up all unnecessary personnel from the shaft and climbed down to oversee the end of the thing himself. Four minutes after the top gallery had been cleared, the men broke through—a crack at the top left corner. Fass dripped sweat. His heart raced. He watched the men pry and loosen, break concrete from the steel frame in chunks and toss them down the shaft. They could clean up later. This was no the time for guardhouse discipline—this was combat, the moment for which he had been preparing them for weeks.

  A big man, a Silesian corporal named Maurer, roared and his crowbar scraped against the doorframe and then through. The entire door juddered loose. The men on the platform gasped and cheered
. As a team they hauled the door away from the black tunnel mouth and Fass flicked on his torch and called for the dam engineers. They came down the ladder one on top of the other and Fass waved them forward into the gallery with his flashlight, then followed.

  McKay knelt beside Stallings on the deck of the Hardråde and tore open his white jacket and the layers of Army fatigues underneath. Stallings steamed where he lay opened to the cold. At the bottom his field shirt glistened black, like oilcloth. He pulled it open and the undershirt showed dark as well. McKay lifted the undershirt. It smeared aside the blood and the belly showed white in the darkness, a tear the size of a baseball rent ragged above the navel. The belly spasmed and blood pulsed out.

  “Does he live?”

  McKay looked up. The mechanic, Magnus, stood there, already shivering, already covered in crackling ice.

  “Barely.” Stallings was breathing, but his face and skin had become wan and fishlike. “Help me get him in the cabin.”

  He stood and bent to lift Stallings, but his knee buckled and he caught himself on the gunwale. He swore.

  “You too, Captain?” Graves said.

  “Looks that way.” He stood carefully and was about to try lifting Stallings again when he looked at the dam.

  It looked small now, about a mile away up the fjord, standing in its glow beneath the clearing starry sky. Then the dam flashed and a black pillar of dust and smoke burst silent from its middle, to the side, and water geysered in a white column from behind its wall. The noise reached them a few seconds later, a thunderclap boom that rocked them on their feet and made the wounded cry out. The boat shook with it. Its echo bellowed in the hollow of the cliffs for what seemed like minutes after. McKay watched, awed. The concrete wall buckled and calved a great piece into the fjord and a dark frothing torrent spilled forth. The last lights on the dam flickered and went out. A moment later, the sound of the waters filled the canyon.

  McKay listened as the hammering of the engine diminished beneath the roar.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Another flash, and the rail bridge stood brilliantly cast in silhouette for one moment, then the night boomed again and hundreds of feet of bursting rivets and twisting steel added a chorus of howls to the noise.

  “Bally good work,” Graves shouted to the Norwegians, who cheered.

  “Dammit, come on,” McKay said. He ignored the pain in his leg and compensated for it, hauled up under Stallings’s armpits with Magnus gripping his legs. They carried him bodily into the cabin and laid him on the floor, and Magnus returned to the deck. McKay dropped beside Stallings as the others crowded in from the cold.

  “Graves?”

  “Working on it, Captain.” Graves dug for his medical gear and looked at McKay. “You might look at your leg while I work at this lot.”

  Graves bent to his work and got the Norwegians to help him—they applied pressure, opened bandages, spread sulfa powder. McKay leaned back against the wall and pulled his knee up to himself. The pain made him wince. He saw a hole in the back of his right pants leg, ragged and bloodied at the edges, and no second hole. McKay pulled the leg of his pants up out of his boot and thickening blood dribbled out. His whole calf was streaked with it, all the way up to a gash a few inches below the knee. He shook his head and got to his feet.

  “I’m all right. I’ll be back. Take care of Grove.”

  McKay left the cabin and limped across the deck. The water roared somewhere behind them. The sound grew in strength as it drew nearer. He moved around to the ladder and climbed up, held the wounded leg up free of the ladder like a hobbled dog and put the effort into his arms and back. He knocked on the door and Petersen opened it.

  “The water.”

  “I have the engine at full speed, Captain,” Jørgen said.

  “Which is?”

  Petersen answered. “About fifteen knots.”

  McKay looked behind them into the darkness. A pale line had formed on the surface of the fjord far back in the dark and rippled and fussed over itself as it piled forward into the open.

  “Y’all sail in a lot of storms before?”

  Jørgen only looked at him and grinned.

  McKay went below and grabbed the handle of the cabin door when the waters reached them.

  The boat lurched up from underneath him and McKay fell flat on his back. Water crashed across the deck. He choked in it, swallowed the freezing brine, felt himself pressed against the deck and pushed and dragged across its planks. The boat lifted from stern to bow and rocked and yawed in the white surf. The waters on the deck sloshed and he lifted himself out of them. He coughed the water from his throat and the pitching of the boat knocked him down again. He lay still and let the icewater wash over him as the wave passed and they settled on the rushing aftercurrent.

  Someone helped him to his feet, and he rubbed his eyes and coughed and thanked him. It was Petersen.

  They stood looking at each other on the rocking deck, both blank, both sagging. After a time, McKay said, “Two of your men?”

  “We shall see. They are well trained, and smart.”

  McKay said nothing.

  “One of yours.”

  McKay nodded. He admitted, and was surprised at how thick his voice sounded, “I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

  “We are hurrying. It will still take several hours to rendezvous with the submarine.”

  “I understand.”

  “You are wounded, too, and the Finn.”

  “Ollila?”

  Petersen nodded. “In the shoulder. I noticed when we brought him aboard.”

  McKay limped away to the cabin and stepped inside. The men huddled around Stallings. The copper smell of slaughter filled the room. The two Norwegians sat wrapped in blankets and their jackets lay in a puddle in the corner. Graves felt for Stallings’s pulse, murmured to himself, doublechecked the bindings covering Stallings’s belly. Ollila sat in another corner, tying off a bandage he had applied to himself.

  McKay walked over to Ollila and Petersen helped him to sit. “You all right?”

  Ollila nodded. “Shrapnel.”

  “How bad?”

  Ollila gave a dismissive frown. “They can cut it out on the submarine.”

  “I might just let them do that myself.” He raised his knee for inspection, then lowered it and nodded toward Stallings. “Him?”

  Ollila looked at Stallings, at McKay. He shook his head.

  Stallings woke a little later, as they passed the end of Grettisfjord and the wreckage of the dock, the torn and wreckage-littered road and yard of the Petersen house. A wall had caved, a corner of the roof sagged to cover its ruin, but the house still stood in the flood debris like the lone surviving column of a temple. Yet more wreckage had shoaled against the wharf. Beyond, the waters spread and dissipated in Ofotfjord, and did little more than rock the boats at anchor in Narvik a little harder.

  McKay sat tying off the bandage he had applied to the wound in his leg. He was about to go through his gear to see what remained to him and the team, when Stallings stirred and spoke.

  McKay moved himself across the cabin and sat beside Stallings. He lay pale and wet, wrapped shoulder to groin in gauze and tape. His eyes had opened, his lips moved.

  “Grove?” Stallings looked at him. McKay spoke without thinking. “How you doing, Grove?”

  Stallings choked. McKay realized that he was laughing.

  “Hell of a note,” Stallings said.

  “We did it,” McKay said. They had succeeded, they had achieved their objective. He shook his head and said it again to convince himself. “We blew it up.”

  “Hell of a note,” Stallings said.

  “You did good.”

  Stallings tried to nod. “I froze.”

  McKay had hoped he would not remember. “Don’t matter. You did what we needed you to.”

  “I got myself killed, didn’t I?”

  “Shut up, Grove. This wasn’t your fault.”

  “No—I picked th
is. You told me—you told me what to expect, and I picked it.”

  McKay said nothing.

  Stallings squeezed his eyelids shut and grimaced. “God, the tanks.”

  “This ain’t Sicily, Grove. That’s over.”

  “Uh huh.”

  The door opened and Petersen entered. He had left them earlier as they sailed past Grettisstad. His face had become inscrutable again, what McKay now recognized as his look of pain.

  “You must see this,” Petersen said.

  McKay pushed himself up and Stallings lurched from his pallet on the floor. He grasped McKay by the knees and sobbed.

  “Don’t let em bury me in the dark,” he said.

  McKay felt sick. He moved Stallings’s hands and shrank away, edged toward the door. “I’ll be back, Grove. Hang on.”

  Graves helped ease Stallings to the floor and McKay stepped out onto the deck with Petersen. He shut the door and said, “What is it?”

  Petersen pointed forward into the darkness, across the still troubled waters of the bay. A bright point, a moving beam of light, blinding even from a mile away, played across the waters and trembled in reflection up to their prow. McKay squinted, found his binoculars and looked. Far off in the light he saw the shape of a Norwegian fishing boat, one of the Hardråde’s thousands of kin. Tiny men moved on deck, picked out by the light. He saw then why the light was moving, rotating around the boat—the spotlight shone from the deck of an E-boat.

  “How many are there in Narvik fjord?”

  “I do not know,” Petersen said. “But they will all be looking for us.”

  McKay noticed then that the boat’s engine had dropped to a low gear, quieter and much slower, and that they sailed hard by the fjord’s southern edge, avoiding the open channels in the center. He wondered how long they could hide like that.

  Petersen spotted something and pointed. McKay looked. Farther away, on the rim of visibility and deeper in the bay, another spotlight had come on and another fishing boat, blinded, coasted in the beam.