Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  When he had first climbed slowly down into the control room, Hopper met him and exclaimed “Christ Almighty!” Once he had showered, and shaved, and changed clothes, he understood why. He had arrived aboard Treat’s sparkling ship calicoed in blood, with two days of beard on a visibly thinned face. His dark eyes were hooded above bags of skin almost as dark. And he stank—as did all of them—of blood, sweat, piss, cordite, smoke, and salt water. He cleaned up, saw the boat’s surgeon—who dug into his calf and removed a mangled bullet, probably a ricochet from the cliffs of the fjord—and saw to his men’s billets, and to the storage of their gear in the same forward compartment, and to Stallings’s body, laid carefully in the torpedo room. Then he was finished. The mission was over.

  He went with Treat to the signal room and transmitted a message to headquarters: objectives completed loss of one team member kia, followed by his codename. After half a hour, a response came from the Colonel himself. One word, McKay’s own word: outstanding. He stared expressionless at the message for a long while after the wireless operator handed it to him, and finally crumpled it, thanked the operator and Treat, and left.

  Still he could not sleep.

  Mostly he watched the time pass. Ollila and Graves snored in their racks—both at least twelve hours, Graves fourteen—and McKay stared and rubbed his eyes. He passed a day trying to read his Thucydides, which, though waterlogged and bent and battered, still survived the job. He spent half an hour over the same page, multiple minutes on the same line, and read nothing. He cleaned his weapons again and tried to outline a report. He paced the submarine. Treat tried to put him to work interrogating the prisoners, but McKay did not even respond. He realized just hours before he would have machine gunned the men in the water. He would have to come down from that, and would take some time. He thought of the Australian, coldcocked in the pub, and wondered how long, exactly.

  After twenty-four hours, he approached Treat about burying Stallings.

  Treat had balked at bringing the body aboard, but Graves had done the talking for McKay and made it clear the Captain would not accept a no. Still, the Commander insisted that the body could not remain aboard for the entire journey home to Scapa Flow. Graves had insisted as well, and when the haggard leader came aboard and looked at Treat, Treat said nothing.

  Now it was time, McKay told him. They had reached or would soon pass south of the Arctic Circle, and McKay wanted his man buried at sea in the light of the sun.

  “Impossible,” Treat said, and, when McKay seemed to coil, “Impossible now, that is. It’s not yet 0600. The sun will not rise until even later.”

  McKay nodded and returned to lie awake in his rack.

  Six more hours, and they did have sunlight, a precious sliver of northern winter sun that scudded low across the horizon. Treat had Hopper assemble an honor guard to bear the body topside, and then Treat followed and McKay and Graves and Ollila climbed the tower too.

  The sunlight blinded him. He stood in the freezing air with his eyes shut fast against the light. His head ached with it. He fought his eyes open and managed to watch the service on the submarine’s deck. They draped no flag over the body, and accompanied it with no squad bearing rifles. The sailors had weighted the blanket-shrouded body and lain it on a plank, improvising like good soldiers. Treat presided and read from a book—The Book of Common Prayer, McKay assumed, or else the Bible—but McKay could not hear him above the cut of the bow through the sea, the wash of the turned and piling waves, and the wind. Treat stopped speaking, the sailors upended the plank, and the long swaddled body disappeared into the Viking’s wake.

  Hopper and Treat went belowdecks and nodded to McKay as they passed, and then the sailors, who saluted, and finally Ollila and Graves. McKay remained topside a moment, looked north to the horizon, then south to the sun. It stood low, very low for noon, and though he felt for its warmth his face remained cold. If he remained much longer his nose and cheeks would numb, sunshine be damned. He looked once more behind at the wide dark sea.

  “Reckon I’ll see you, Grove,” he said, and went below.

  He limped through the control room and into the narrow passage to the bunks. He passed Treat and Hopper, and the sailors he met squeezed aside to make way. He reached the bunks, the same they had occupied on the trip north, and climbed up into his rack. Graves was telling Ollila a story, a story featuring both women and South Africa, and McKay felt himself drowse. His muscles relaxed, his face loosened. He looked down at Graves, who lay with his eyes closed, rambling, and then across at Ollila. The Finn smiled as he listened to Graves, but when McKay looked at him, he grew serious. After a moment, he nodded to McKay as if in benediction, closed his eyes, and lay back against his pillow. Graves talked on.

  McKay settled into his rack, drifted, and slept.

  Author’s Note & Acknowledgements

  The events and almost all of the characters in this book are fictional, but the characters know about and allude to many real events from the Nazi occupation of Norway.

  Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, the same day that it invaded and conquered Denmark. Norway’s King Haakon VII refused to capitulate, and the Norwegians and their British, French, and Polish allies held out for two months, putting up an unexpectedly tough fight against the Nazis, who took over 5,000 casualties in the invasion. Narvik, stoutly defended and one of the Allies’ last redoubts in the country, was only abandoned by the British—over Churchill’s objections—beginning June 3. The Nazi conquest of Norway ended a week later with the surrender of the last remaining Norwegian division to the Germans. Haakon escaped to Britain with his government-in-exile, and became a living symbol of resistance to his people.

  The Nazis ruled their supposed fellow Aryans in Scandinavia with ruthless brutality. They installed Vidkun Quisling, whose name became a byword for national traitors everywhere, as head of a collaborationist puppet government, but exercised real power through the Reichskommissariat Norwegen, headed by SS Reichskommissar Josef Terboven. Within months they had built concentration camps and begun eliminating the country’s 2,100 Jews.

  In part because of its proximity to Britain, just across the North Sea, Churchill’s broad streak of romanticism and firm belief in the efficacy of special operations, and the steadfast example of resistance offered by men like King Haakon, Norway was a hive of clandestine anti-Nazi activity. The most famous—and successful—example is the sabotage of the Nazi nuclear program’s heavy water facility at Norsk Hydro in Rjukan in early 1943.

  Resistance activity and commando operations, whether successful or not, provoked savage reprisals. The Gestapo and military counterintelligence units investigated and rooted out resistance using every means necessary, and showed no qualms about using torture to extract intelligence. In April 1942, after two Gestapo officers were killed at Televåg, a fishing village where two Norwegian commandos were suspected of hiding, the Germans rounded up the locals, razed the village, sunk its fishing boats, shot or deported to concentration camps every adult man, and jailed the women and children for two years. The Germans carried out similar reprisals in other locations, including the Lofoten archipelago, throughout the war, and executed hostages and political prisoners in retaliation as well. Meanwhile, the Allies continued to launch special operations into the country.

  Norway was not a priority to the Allies, who—on the grand strategic scale—had to balance their goals with pleasing Stalin, whose demands for a new front became more and more shrill as the war continued. Eisenhower eventually opened this front in Normandy, in June 1944, which led to the liberation of France, the Low Countries, and a sizable portion of Germany itself. Norway’s ordeal only ended with the final German surrender in May 1945, by which time over 10,000 Norwegians had died as a result of the occupation.

  I am indebted to Max Hastings’s book Winston’s War, which first awakened me to the cost and moral questionability of special operations in Nazi-occupied Europe, and to Admiral William McRaven’s Special Ops, a series
of case studies—many, like the mini-sub attack on the Tirpitz, drawn from this period of World War II—that served as an inspiration as I worked on this book. I owe a special debt to the late David Howarth, whose book The Shetland Bus is a monument both to the ferrying operation he helped to organize and lead, and to the courageous fishermen who crisscrossed the North Sea at enormous risk to themselves for the sake of their countrymen. Greater love hath no man.

  I’m grateful to the Friendos—Dave Newell, Jim Blanchard, and Andrew Graves—who first read this novel in rough draft nearly five years ago and offered helpful critiques, as always. Alex Crunkleton’s time working for our alma mater’s university historian provided valuable insight into Clemson in the 1930s. I also want to thank my early readers, including Jared Wahl, John Chiafos, Jay Eldred, and especially my father-in-law, Steve Methvin, whose veteran thriller-reading sensibilities were a help and support as I began serious revisions last summer.

  I wrote Dark Full of Enemies in the spring of 2013. In the four and a half years since, I have gotten married, moved away from my home state, gone from unemployed to adjunct to full-time college instructor, and had two children. The through-line in all of these events is Sarah, a brave and steadfast wife, mother, and friend, and it is to her that I dedicate this novel.

  About the Author

  Jordan M. Poss is a native of Rabun County, Georgia, and a graduate of Clemson University, where he studied Anglo-Saxon England and military history. He currently teaches history at a community college in upstate South Carolina, where he lives with his wife and children. He is also the author of No Snakes in Iceland and Griswoldville.