The Saboteur

by Andrew Gross

  “Me either,” Larsen spoke up. Einar and Nordstrum stared at him. “Just in case you were wondering.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that, Agent Larsen. You came so highly recommended.”

  Larsen shrugged meekly. “I just thought I’d say.”

  Nordstrum said to Einar, “Ask England. They must have people. There has to be someone available.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  A day later, via return message, SOE had approved their plan. And they informed Einar that yes, there was someone local around who fit the description of the person they needed.

  It turned out to be someone Nordstrum already knew well.

  PART THREE

  The Ferry

  65

  Nordstrum and Ox met at the Swansu cabin where the Gunnerside team spent their first night after the raid at Norsk Hydro. “You said you wanted to do more than just send messages,” Nordstrum appealed to him.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Do you know how to use a gun?”

  Ox’s heavy beard parted into a grin. “Does ice melt in July?”

  Together they dug up Stromsheim’s pack, which contained the excess explosives and fuses they’d brought with them and buried near the cabin’s cistern after the raid, a year ago.

  Nordstrum knew they’d have to jerry-rig something more intricate, as the original fuses were only two minutes long.

  They brought the explosives back into town and stored them at Alf Larsen’s house. He was now a full-time member of the crew. “Can you find me an alarm clock from somewhere?” Nordstrum asked.

  “I might have one somewhere,” the engineer volunteered.

  “I’ll need two. And that violin case over there…” It was propped against the wall in a storage area where they hid the explosives.

  The chief engineer shrugged sheepishly. “I used to play when I was a tyke.”

  “I can use that too.”

  “You played as well?” Larsen asked.

  “No.” Nordstrum eyed his Sten gun. “You can keep the violin.”

  * * *

  The next day, Thursday, in old work clothes and with Larsen’s violin case in hand, Nordstrum took the bus to Mael to the ferry landing.

  There were three ferries that piloted the lake. Nordstrum checked the schedule posted outside the ticket counter and saw that the one Sunday morning at 10 A.M. was the Hydro, an old screw-driven vessel with twin smokestacks that dated back to the 1920s. He had ridden it many times.

  The Hydro was also scheduled to make the 3 P.M. crossing that day.

  The flatcar that would bear the heavy water drums from Vemork would be offloaded from the train at the rail terminus adjacent to the wharf, shunted by a switch engine onto the bow of the Hydro, and then offloaded again in Tinnoset. Nordstrum had no idea, at this point, whether it would be brought down from Vemork that very morning or the night before. Either way, there was no doubt it would be heavily guarded.

  “Ferry to Tinnoset,” Nordstrum said to the ticket master, a man with a scruffy white beard and a navy cap who looked like he’d been manning the window for decades.

  “One way?”

  “No. Round trip.”

  “Four kroner.”

  Nordstrum pushed through four one-crown coins.

  “Nyt turen,” the agent said, stamping his ticket. Enjoy your ride.

  The time was twenty of and Nordstrum took his violin case and waited on the dock while some of the passengers began to board. He was hungry, so he bought himself a bite from a vendor, a local sugar pastry filled with cream. It was a clear day and the crowd was large—families, workmen; even a party of four German officers who pulled up in a car and went on board, moving past the ticket collector with simply an entitled wave—a major, a captain, and two lieutenants.

  At three minutes of, the ferry master sounded his horn three times and yelled, “All onboard!”

  Nordstrum balled up the pastry wrapper and tossed it in a bin. He showed his ticket to the crewman at the gangplank and went on board.

  It took about eight or nine minutes while some last-minute freight was loaded on and a few latecomers scrambled aboard. There was time, and then there was ferry time, it was known, and the two didn’t often coincide. Nordstrum took a seat in the upper compartment as far away from the party of German officers as he could. He’d heard how people were being stopped lately for ID checks and for inspection of large bundles. All they had to do was ask what was in his case and he’d have no choice but to come out shooting.

  Once away from the dock, it took about thirty-five minutes for the ferry to come about and chug its way to the middle of the lake. Here, and for the next ten minutes or so, it was over 1,300 feet to the bottom. He thought, if he could place the charges in the bow, once it blew and filled with water, the stern would rise out of the water, sending the railway cars on deck loaded with heavy water drums toppling into the lake. At this depth, there was no possible way they could ever be salvaged. He calculated he should set the timer for about forty-five minutes after departure, in order to account for five or ten minutes of possible delay. That would be 10:45 A.M. Five minutes either way, it would still be deep enough. He also noted that the Tinnsjo was a long, narrow lake shaped like a finger, and even at its center point it was not more than a couple of hundred yards to either shore, ensuring that if he could somehow slow the sinking of the ship, the locals should have no trouble rescuing the majority of those onboard. Yet not too slow, he made a note to himself, that the Germans could salvage their precious cargo.

  He took a look at the passengers onboard. People heading back from work or to families across the shore. Some keeping to themselves, smoking, reading. Others talking and laughing in groups. The crew just doing their job. They had no stake in any of this, other than on Sunday morning to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They would be faces just as these. Panic would take hold. Clearly some would die. He’d seen a lot of innocent people die in this war already. Anna-Lisette. His father. Still, the stakes demanded this be done. Even Einar saw there was no choice. It was either ten or twenty, or ten or twenty thousand. A hundred thousand. One day, would he be looked at not as a patriot, as someone who had done his duty, but as a murderer? A killer of innocent civilians no better than the Nazis? He wondered, if there was a God, are ten thousand innocent lives, even a hundred thousand, worth more than only ten or twenty? Or is one just the same as a thousand? Or ten thousand?

  It was hard to calculate things like that. He was just a soldier. He was under orders to destroy the cargo. Who knew, perhaps the Germans would do him a favor and close the Sunday ferry to outside traffic. He could hope.

  The ferry split the lake, heading closer to the Tinnoset side. Nordstrum checked the group of German officers who were chatting and laughing among themselves, oblivious to the rest, and got up. He took the stairs down, past the main deck, below. He made his way toward the bow. He heard the churning rumble of the engine room. He looked around. In the hold of the engine room he came across a water-tight compartment. If this would fill up with water, he calculated, the bow would dip and be brought under. It might take up to an hour for the ship to fully sink, but at some point, the pitch would send the train carriages of heavy water drums bursting through their bindings and plunging into the lake.

  Yes, many might perish, but there would be time enough for the rescue efforts on shore to save most, he hoped.

  “Excuse me, can I help you?” someone said from behind, startling him.

  Nordstrum went rigid. He expected to find himself face-to-face with one of the Germans, and gripped the handle of his “violin” case, but it was merely an engine room worker.

  “I must be in the wrong place,” Nordstrum said apologetically. “I was searching for the loo. Someone said it was down here.”

  “There’s toilets on the main deck. Near the gangplank. Nothing down here but the engine room.”

  “Sorry.” He feigned embarrassment. “I should have seen.”

/>   “By the café,” the crewman said again, pointing upward.

  “Yes. I’ll find it.”

  He went back upstairs, and just to cover his tracks, slipped inside the bathroom for a minute, in case the crewman happened to follow him. When he came back out, the ferry was almost at Tinnoset. The mountains gave way to flatter terrain. Here, the Nazis’ cargo would be loaded off and hooked up to one of two transport trains that would take it to Skien—one fake, the other real—on its path to the North Sea.

  Nordstrum stepped out on deck. Passengers had formed a queue, waiting to disembark. Travelers with suitcases; mothers and children holding hands. The ferry slowed as it approached the dock. People on the shore waved. A few German vehicles could be seen on the wharf. Tinnoset was a far larger town than Mael, with a commercial railway yard that linked it to the capital. Nordstrum’s plan was to stay out of sight for an hour and go back on the 5 P.M. ferry.

  He noticed that the group of German officers had come down and, as the ferry came about to dock, were edging their way to the front of the line.

  With a smile, Nordstrum placed himself behind a woman and her boy of eight or nine as if to appear to be all together. A crewman threw a rope to a hand on the dock, who tied it to a post. A few people on the shore waved to those onboard.

  Then one of the Germans, the major, with SS bars on his lapel, seemed to notice Nordstrum’s case.

  “Die geige?” He looked at Nordstrum curiously.

  Nordstrum did his best to pretend he hadn’t heard. “Sorry?”

  “De geige. Die violine.” The officer pointed to the case and made a violin-playing motion with his hands.

  “Ah, ja.” Nordstrum nodded, his gut tightening inside. The crew was readying the ship for arrival. If the officer asked to see it, Nordstrum knew he would have to shoot it out and run.

  “I played myself,” the German indicated, tapping his chest with his index finger. “Zehn jahre.” Ten years. He drew his hands like a bow, humming the opening of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” with a laugh with to his fellow officers. “Bach, Beethoven. Handel. Skalen…” Scales. “Drei stunden, three hours, every day.” He rolled his eyes, as if to say, Such drudgery.

  Then he turned back to Nordstrum and smiled with curiosity. “May I see?”

  Nordstrum froze, his heart jabbing tremulously against his ribs. Once he opened the case there would be no choice what he would have to do. Besides the Germans, there were a lot of people waiting to disembark. Women, children. Smiling back, he looked to the dock, which he could now leap to if he had to, and went over what to do. There was only so much longer he could pretend he didn’t understand. The officer beckoned again with his fingers. “May I see it, please?”

  With a glance at the other officers, Nordstrum put the case on the ground. Each carried only a Luger in their belts. They’d be dead before they got them out of their holsters. He knelt and drew in a breath. He put his hands onto the clasps. “Of course, Herr Major, I’d be honored to—”

  At that moment the ferry glanced against the dock, sending a few in the line back a step to regain their balance. The boy next to Nordstrum fell back into him and, pretending to bolster the lad, Nordstrum sent the boy back over his foot onto the deck, virtually falling at the German officer’s feet.

  His mother cried out, “Jan!”

  “He’s all right, madame.” The German major bent down and helped the boy back up. “Just a little bump on his backside.”

  “I may have caused it, I fear,” Nordstrum said. He helped the lad up and back in line. “Sorry, young man.”

  “I’m all right,” said the boy, slightly embarrassed. “I just tripped.”

  One of the crewmen threw the gangplank to the dock and people began to move toward it.

  “Say danke,” the boy’s mother prodded her son, and the boy meekly complied. “Danke, sir.”

  “You are welcome.”

  One of the major’s fellow officers signaled to a fellow soldier on the dock. “We are disembarking, Major. Our driver is waiting.”

  “Ja, ja.” The major took one more glance at Nordstrum’s violin case and smiled. “Enjoy your play,” he said with a nod.

  “Danke,” Nordstrum replied, his heart settling back into his chest. “I will.”

  They moved ahead and Nordstrum hung back in the line, putting as much distance as he could between them.

  On the wharf, he immediately headed the other direction, merging in with the crowd. Only then did he allow himself to blow out his cheeks in relief. There had been four of them. Even if he had been able to surprise them, he would have been hunted down in the town. He would likely be dead. There would have been reprisals. The heavy water shipment would likely have gone as scheduled. All for a fucking glance at a violin, he thought.

  The ride back was uneventful.

  66

  Ox had a friend in Rjukan, John Diseth, a retired Norsk Hydro inspector, whose hobby now was repairing old clocks and watches. He kept a shop on the outskirts of town. Over a beer he said he would do what he could to help. By Wednesday, Ox had convinced him to supply the second alarm clock and to handle the complicated wiring.

  Using Diseth’s workshop, late the next night Nordstrum and Ox prepared the plastic explosives while the sixty-year-old repairman configured the two alarm clocks. They calculated just how large the hole should be in the ferry’s exterior. Not so large that the ship would immediately sink and cause more people to die. But not so small, either, that the rail cars carrying the deuterium oxide wouldn’t slide into the lake until after help arrived. Einar, the engineer, used the Hydro’s tonnage and estimated its displacement of water, and arrived at the figure of five feet across. Working together, Nordstrum and Ox kneaded the nineteen pounds of plastic explosives into a sausage some nine feet long and wrapped it in burlap for easier handling. The fuses would be inserted on the ship at the last minute, once the alarm clock and detonators were set and wired.

  Meanwhile, Diseth removed the bell, but not the bell hammer, from each clock. Determining the exact contact point of each hammer’s swing, he attached an electric insulator from an old telephone receiver, a tiny strip of Bakelite, and ran a wire into it. When it all was correctly wired and the clocks set, the bell hammer, at the moment the “alarm” rang, would strike the metal contact, complete the electric circuit, and activate the percussion caps in the detonators, which would set off the bomb. The repairman used four flashlight batteries to power the entire mechanism, soldering the terminals so that the wires would not come loose. The only worry was that the distance between the hammer and the contact point was so razor thin—merely a third of an inch—that an unsteady hand, or even a wayward movement of the ship, could set it off prematurely.

  “Be very careful when you connect it to the plastic,” Diseth instructed Nordstrum. “If your hands are unsteady and the contact points touch, then, boom!” He snapped his fingers. “You won’t have to worry about if it works or not. You may want to take a gulp of whisky before you go.”

  “Not to worry,” Nordstrum replied, extending his hands. “Why would anyone be nervous setting nineteen pounds of explosives with a hundred Germans close by outside? Still, good advice,” he said with a smile. “We may want that drink anyway.”

  * * *

  Nordstrum and Ox packed the equipment and, in the dead of night, climbed back up to the hut they’d been staying in atop the mountains. It was a three-hour trek in the dark, up a winding, icy path, and they arrived exhausted. To be absolutely sure that the clocks would work as planned, they set them for 10 A.M., later that morning. Then they went to sleep.

  Six hours later two sharp cracks made them jump out of bed. Ox took his rifle and went to the window; Nordstrum grabbed his Sten and held it against the door, sure that the Germans had found their hiding spot.

  There found no one there.

  Suddenly the two men looked at themselves in embarrassment and began to laugh. It was the detonators—going off on schedule, the percussion caps s
ounding exactly like rifle shots.

  Diseth had done his job well.

  67

  The next day they came back into town to go over a few more details and convey that the clocks had worked to perfection—almost too perfectly.

  Larsen was at work at the factory. Einar took the afternoon off from his job at the dam. They met at Diseth’s place. As Einar came through the door, he had someone with him. The person SOE had sent in to join the team.

  “I believe you two already know each other,” Einar said to Nordstrum.

  As Nordstrum looked through the stubbly beard and the no-longer callow eyes, he lit up with surprise. It was the last person in the world he expected to see. In fact, he thought that person was dead.

  “Yank!” His face split into a wide grin.

  It was Eric Gutterson.

  “I was told you didn’t make it.” Nordstrum went up and threw his arms around him.

  “I almost didn’t,” the Yank admitted. “I got separated from the team. It’s quite a tale.”

  “Well, let’s hear it,” Nordstrum said. “Here’s a beer. There’s no time like now.”

  * * *

  “Two days after we left you on the vidda on our way to Sweden,” Gutterson started in, “we stopped near the Skrykken hut where we had all taken refuge from the terrible blizzard we encountered after we parachuted into Norway.

  “Ronneberg pushed us to move farther east. The Germans were known to be in pursuit. He wanted to put as much distance as he could between them and the Telemark region. But you remember we had buried that cache of arms, as well as sleeping bags and tents back at the cabin. Olf Pedersen and I volunteered to ski down and dig them up. The others continued on a few miles east to set up camp. It was far too risky to sleep in the huts at night.

  “Upon digging up the equipment and getting ready to rejoin the boys, I spotted four skiers in white suits coming down the slope toward us,” Gutterson said.

  “‘What do you think, Olf?’ I asked. I admit I was pretty concerned.