Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  “There is more,” Petersen said. “We came—we did what we did, because you had no time, you see. The Germans are sailing for somewhere. Your submarine will depart without you. Well, look toward Narvik if you can.”

  McKay glassed the distant twinkling port and watched. He saw nothing unexpected at first, just the lights of the town, heaped up above the dark waters of Ofotfjord. Then he caught it, some darkness crossing the others, moving over the lights spread across the water, the still lights on the hills. He watched, and finally recognized the shadow on the bay—the silhouette of a battle cruiser.

  McKay swore.

  “The patrol boats are all out looking for us, and we must also avoid the cruisers. My guess is that they weighed anchor an hour ago, ready to sail north. Excellent timing.”

  McKay looked at Petersen, and the hard, bearded face broke into a smile. Wry humor—black humor. Petersen continued to surprise him. McKay nodded.

  “Do what you have to.” He checked his timepiece. 1525—they had fourteen hours to reach the Viking in the Vestfjorden, and it had taken how long going the opposite way? Thirteen, fourteen hours? Their new rendezvous point lay nearer by several hours, but… McKay looked back at the bay. “What do you want us to do if boarded?”

  Petersen grinned again. “Follow me.”

  McKay did and walked favoring his leg, which burned and throbbed beneath the bandage. Petersen led him behind the cabin and wheelhouse to the pair of oildrums he had seen them loading into the boat before they left for the dam. They stood at the stern, one lashed to the gunwales at each corner of the deck. Petersen laid a hand on one.

  “Our friends in Shetland built these for us. I have yet to use them—I have kept them in the shed with our nets. Look.”

  His gently outspread hand clutched at the corner of the drum’s lid, found a space McKay had not seen, and yanked up. The lid came off in his hand and he whisked it aside like a magician, and from the barrel sprang a mounted pair of machine guns. They jolted up into view and shuddered, awaiting magazines and gunners.

  McKay raised his eyebrows. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Lewis guns,” Petersen said. “We have the magazines hidden aboard. We will load them and put them back, just in case.”

  “Outstanding.”

  Petersen took him to the ammunition cache. They had several hundred rounds in the filmcan magazines of the Lewis guns, and they loaded all four, compressed the springloaded mounts back into the oil drums, and made the lids fast. When they had finished, McKay nodded to the engine hatch.

  “We need to make way as quickly as we can.”

  “I will speak to Jørgen. We are trying to hide.”

  “I understand. But we can fight now if we have to.”

  “We will get you to the submarine, Captain,” Petersen said. He stood silent a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  Petersen made a helpless gesture toward the boat’s low wake, back, into Grettisfjord and up the narrow waters to the dam.

  “We got it done,” McKay said, and felt embarrassed. “I should be thanking you.”

  Petersen nodded.

  “I am sorry.”

  McKay shook his head. They stood for a moment and then parted, Petersen to the wheelhouse with his brother and McKay to the cabin. He reached for the door handle and it opened before him. Graves stood there in the dim light. He looked at McKay.

  “Stallings is dead.”

  They stripped the body of its remaining gear and the heavy winter coat and pants, down to the Army trousers and stocking feet. They wrapped the body in a blanket and laid the bundle out of the way, against one bulkhead. He had bled too much, yes, Graves said, but it was all too much. The lung wound, the cracked or broken ribs, the shock to the entire abdomen from the final gut shot, a rifle round that struck him above the kidney and jellied his insides as it passed through. Graves had not even expected the man to wake up. McKay took the bloodied uniform and threw it overboard.

  They sailed for ten hours without incident and no perceptible change of speed. Jørgen piloted them along the edge of the fjord, sometimes within a stone’s throw of houses and docks and barking dogs, behind the channel islands, slowing almost to a powerless glide when a beam shone elsewhere on the waters. They parted the night slowly, leaving little wake or sound. They could do nothing but wait. McKay thought he would go mad.

  He could not sleep. His eyes had stopped burning—now they felt as if the sockets would crumble and the sore globes roll out into his lap, and he looked forward to that. Anything to stop the ache.

  He cleared the jam and stripped and cleaned his Thompson, emptied and cleaned the Welrod and put it away. He doubted he could sink an E-boat with the thing. He went to clean his ka-bar but remembered he had left it behind. He wondered when he could get another one, but gave up the thought in despair. He sat in silence and stared. Stallings’s body lay wrapped in the corner, bound like Lazarus but not going to come forth.

  The Germans spotted them at 0130.

  The voice hailed them on the loudspeaker, the engine of the great swift craft growled nearer, and McKay rose and loaded his Thompson and said to Graves and Ollila, as if resigned, “All right, let’s go.” The Norwegians stood and followed.

  They filed onto the deck and the spotlight found them. The boat lay perhaps thirty feet off, still moving, idling past, threatening. Someone aboard the E-boat swore and McKay and the others opened fire.

  The spotlight shattered and both boats fell into darkness again. The flak cannon pivoted at the rear of the E-boat as it motored slowly past, and McKay reloaded, aimed for the gunner’s legs, and fired a burst. The gunner fell to the deck and the flak guns swung up to the sky. Another German ran for the mount and McKay cut him down. They lay squirming and McKay reloaded and the others kept firing, at the sailors, at the boat, at nothing but the night.

  He turned to Graves and shouted for his thermite grenades, two of them. Graves ducked into the cabin and came back with them. They pulled the pins and hurled them into the boat. The grenades flashed and white hot light poured out of the engine hatch, the little bunker-like bridge, and men poured out into the night on fire. Flame licked at the wooden hull.

  They stopped shooting and McKay shouted at the wheelhouse. Jørgen throttled up. The Hardråde lurched and billowed smoke and the engine found its old tonk-tonk-tonk and surpassed it. They left the E-boat behind, aflame on the waters. McKay thought of the drifting pyres of Hallensnes and started laughing.

  They were two miles off when the fire caught the E-boat’s torpedos. The sinking boat exploded. The fire burst from the wrecked and listing shape in the distance and shook the earth, lit up the fjord, the land, the uncalmed waves in the opening sea. McKay and the others staggered and covered their eyes, then stood and watched the pillar of fire in the dark. They had not moved from the deck since they left the boat burning, the sailors leaping into the fjord to escape. The flames rolled up into themselves and rose on the black air until the fireball darkened and disappeared. Behind them lay only a burning ring, nodding on the sea. The Hardråde strained onward.

  “They know where we are, now,” McKay said. “Or at least where we been. Stand ready.”

  The Germans came again an hour later, after they had left the land behind and sailed out into the open waters of the Vestfjorden, bearing southwest. The spotlight came on a great way off, swept the waters and found them. The light moved a moment later, and soon the loudhailer repeated the first boat’s message—cut your engine, prepare to be boarded. Ollila shot out the spotlight and the fishing boat pressed on.

  The third boat came half an hour after that. This time, Jørgen cut the engine and the boat coasted, all hands on deck and armed, silent on the waves. McKay squatted in the chill and listened. The E-boat’s motor growled deep and purred in the night. It circled them, beginning at their stern and arcing wide to starboard, the engine noise fading only a moment, before looping to port again and crossing their bow.
He thought of the lions in Graves’s story, stalking by night, of the young South African waiting by the fire with a rifle. McKay realized he sat grinning in the dark, awaiting the clash. He fought to control himself. The E-boat veered to starboard again, farther ahead now and tacked across their route as if looking for submarines.

  Then something flickered in the sky, and McKay looked up. Slowly the aurora appeared in a wide sheet, pale green and transparent against the loft of space, barely showing against the black above. It unrolled into sight and wavered, and faded again. McKay stood watching, and realized the E-boat had gone. The night was silent. Only the waves splashing the fishing boat’s hull made any sound. Jørgen revved the motor, pushed it up to full throttle—and further—and they pressed into the deepening troughs.

  The captain of the E-boat, somewhere ahead on the waters, had thought of the same trick.

  At 0345 the spotlight reappeared directly astern, less than two hundred yards off. This time the boat hailed them in English, and gave them one chance—show themselves, surrender, or be fired upon.

  “Ollila,” McKay said. “Shoot out their spotlight.”

  Ollila raised his rifle into the hard, blinding shaft and the Germans fired.

  McKay and the men dived to cover as the light arms of the E-boat’s crew rattled across the gunwales and cabin. The spotlight shifted to starboard, cast the boat in new relief, and the broadside weapons opened fire. Machine gun rounds rapped on the cabin and the wheelhouse and shattered the windows in front of Jørgen, who dropped out of sight, with only his hands still visible on the helm.

  The wheelhouse door slid open and Petersen dropped out onto the deck. McKay shouted to him: “The drums!”

  Petersen nodded and they crawled aft. The others rose and fired bursts at the big patrol boat as it slowly circled and harried and reduced its prey. McKay reached his drum just as the E-boat’s 20 millimeter cannons opened fire. He clapped his hands over his ears against the booming report. The big shells tore the air, blew planks whole from the gunwales, splintered the deck, shot the cabin through with foot-wide holes. Someone screamed. The boat circled and kept firing. An entire corner of the wheelhouse cracked and buckled and the roof sagged in. Jørgen’s hands held steady at the tiller with the superstructure coming apart around him.

  The E-boat ceased fire, revved, and crossed the Hardråde’s bow. The boat’s engine banged away, and McKay noticed a new knock in its rhythm, something out of place, a murmur. The German motor rumbled past, and with his ear to the deck McKay could hear its propeller bite the ocean, the sound of its engine bound far into the deep. He thought of how far they would sink, how black and permanent the night would be at the bottom.

  McKay leapt to his oildrum and pulled the lid away. The twin guns sprang up and McKay grasped and leveled them at the E-boat. The boat had focused its spotlight on the prow, was sweeping back toward him. He squeezed the triggers.

  He did not aim, not consciously. He started at the stern and caught the machine cannons in his sights, held there until the pair of sailors fell away, and swept forward. The spotlight swung to him and the guns locked open, empty. He hit the deck.

  The Germans fired on the stern with machine guns and submachine guns and McKay heard them shouting to bring the cannon back into action. He thought of crawling to the Lewis guns’ pile of magazines, to the cabin for Graves’s remaining thermite grenades, of hopping up to fire a burst. He thought he would die. Then he looked across the stern and saw Petersen looking at him. The big bearded Norwegian nodded, said something McKay could not hear, and stood to open his oil drum.

  McKay crawled to the magazines.

  Petersen pulled open his drum and the guns leapt up to him. He reached for the grips and was bringing the guns around when the machine cannon opened fire again. The gun hammered boomboomboom over the sounds of both boats’ engines and all the other weapons, and the shells blasted at the cabin, the wheelhouse, the gunwales and stern, and Petersen clung to the triggers in a storm of splinters and chunks of his boat, and then both stopped firing and Petersen had disappeared.

  All was silent for a moment. McKay looked. Petersen’s guns stood on their mount—one dangled broken beside the other—the drum stood in the ruined corner of the stern, but Petersen had disappeared. McKay looked at the E-boat. The spotlight pointed at the sky. Dark figures moved toward it, toward the guns at the rear, and McKay stood and reloaded his guns and aimed.

  But the E-boat fell behind. He listened to the engine idle and grow fainter as the Hardråde tonked away.

  He watched and finally looked at the opposite corner. Petersen’s drum stood twisted and holed. Water splashed in through gaps in the hull as the waves lapped at it. McKay lowered the guns, stepped around to Petersen’s corner, and found him.

  He lay on his stomach between the cabin and the gunwale. One leg was twisted twice at the knee and his peacoat rent open along one side. He heaved one great breath and tried to lift himself and something bubbled out through the coat. Liquid—blood and seawater—pooled and ebbed around his body, reflected the vast night sky. There, the aurora returned.

  McKay called his name and turned him over. The others heard and the Norwegian crew crowded near—they had not noticed Petersen after the hail of cannon rounds.

  “Petersen,” McKay said.

  Petersen choked and coughed. He looked at McKay, swallowed, and died.

  McKay looked at him close. He could barely see his eyes in the darkness. One of the Norwegians sobbed and said something, and the spotlight found them again. Behind them, the E-boat’s engine roared. Bullets sought them, singing.

  McKay staggered back to his guns took them up, aimed for the spotlight, and fired. He noticed the rippling greens in the sky, the streaks and sheets. They wavered and billowed, caught hundreds of miles of nothing and furled around it, released it, disappeared and reappeared elsewhere, a light moving at will above all the darkness. He watched and emptied the magazines and ducked to find more, and the E-boat caught up, slowed, and turned itself broadside. McKay looked up from the deck to the E-boat as it cut through the waters under the aurora. The flak cannon at the back swiveled toward them. McKay felt for the Browning on his hip.

  Some other thing in the night cracked and boomed, and the E-boat exploded amidships. It rocked and its engine idled and died. The Hardråde’s engine stopped. Dead in the water, McKay thought, and drew his Browning, waiting for the final, tired round, when the boxers paw at each other until collapse. The night cracked again and the E-boat flashed and listed. McKay heard the crew shouting, screaming. When the noise came the third time, he recognized it—a deck gun, British artillery, a three-incher. The Viking had found them in the dark.

  He let himself go slack, fell, and lay still in the slurry on the deck, and watched the northern lights.

  14

  They transferred from the battered fishing boat to the submarine as the E-boat sank. Jørgen again maneuvered the boat up against and onto the sub’s hull, just long enough for Graves and Ollila to leap overboard, and for the Norwegians to pass them the long bundle that had lain quiet in the cabin all through the voyage out. The gear proved easier this time—they returned with much less of it. McKay oversaw the transfer and glanced up once to the conning tower, where Commander Treat waited, arms braced wide against the parapet. The man did not once look at the sinking E-boat.

  With the transfer complete, McKay went to the wheelhouse and pulled himself up. He looked in on Jørgen, who stood at the helm amid the ruined timber and metal and glass.

  “Thank you,” McKay said.

  Jørgen nodded.

  “Where will you go?”

  “Into Lofoten. We have relations in Leknes, cousins. I’ll repair the ship and go home—when it dies down.”

  McKay ran a hand across a splintered beam. “All this?”

  “Damaged when set adrift by the dam burst,” Jørgen said, and managed a smile.

  “I’m sorry about—Josef.” He had almost called him Petersen.<
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  Jørgen nodded again and thought. “So it was appointed,” he said. He looked at McKay and tried to maintain the smile. “Alt for Norge.”

  McKay nodded and dropped to the deck. He hobbled to the gunwales and the waiting submariners helped him across and up onto the sub. The iron deck astonished McKay with its solidity and strength after the hours he had spent aboard the old fishing boat. They helped him into the tower and he looked down to wave to the Norwegians, a final farewell, but Jørgen had edged the boat off and already put the Viking at its stern, its engine pitching weakly up, and bore away from the wreckage and the fighting for the islands to the west.

  Hopper explained to him later. The German Navy had gone after a convoy off the North Cape, far up on the bald crown of the earth in the open waters between Norway and Svalbard. The Scharnhorst, repaired and undaunted by the frogman attacks, had steamed out before Christmas and attacked the morning after. It was an unfair fight, the pride of the Nazis’ Norwegian fleet against a convoy and its escorts. The convoy’s cruisers and destroyers sent the Scharnhorst to the bottom.

  As the Naval command in Narvik received news from the battle, Hopper said, they had scrambled help to the north from every port on the coast, but too late. The convoy sailed on to the Russians.

  “Naturally,” Hopper told him, “the scramble spooked us a bit. Bloody great increase in activity right where we were patrolling.”

  “Ain’t that what you’re here for?”

  Hopper grinned. “Might tell that to the skipper.”

  But Treat had slunk underwater around the islands of Lofoten and into the Vestfjorden, and waited. McKay would not think ill of him again.

  The E-boat’s survivors had not cared to wait for help. They swam for the sub, and of fifteen who took to the water ten came aboard. The rest succumbed to the cold in the few hundred yards between. McKay ignored the prisoners.