Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  “Are they fucking stupid?”

  “It’s a long way away,” McKay said. “And we’re sending them the best equipment we got.”

  “Don’t sound too hard,” Stallings said.

  “There’s more to it—that’s not even the main objective—but I can’t tell you anything else unless you agree to come. And I’m not kidding about needing an answer now—we’re leaving in about six hours.”

  “I see. Well, looks like everybody needs me on their radios.”

  “You’re good.”

  “Don’t I know it. I joined the army to shoot Krauts, not keep doing the shit I was at Clemson. Vacuum tubes and wavelengths. Don’t take nobody too long to discover my abilities, though, huh?”

  “Your mama calls it a talent.”

  Stallings smiled but did not argue. “What else is there to this?”

  “I’ve told you all I can for now. It’s either yes or no—your choice. We need you, but I’m not gonna drag you away from your unit. But if you want to do this I’ve got to warn you—it’s dangerous.”

  “I figured.”

  “You need to know. I’ve already known a lot of men who got killed doing this. If we get caught, the Germans will shoot us. If they don’t shoot us on the spot it’ll just be so they can take us somewhere and torture us for intel.”

  “All right.” Stallings stared at the floor. McKay looked at him.

  “Grove?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Stallings said, and sat up. “So what—if you’ll pardon the question—what’s in it for me?”

  McKay nodded to the radios on the desk. “I know you. I don’t think toting that thing around for your CO is your idea of a good time, especially where y’all are fixing to head off to.”

  Stallings listened.

  “What I do is dangerous, and don’t you forget it for a minute,” McKay said, and he heard Keener speaking to him in a cold white hospital ward a year before. “It’ll get you out of this line of work and into something I think you’ll do good at. And you’ll have a chance to make a difference, to do something important. To raise the kind of hell you were born to in a place where you can. No more chickenshit.”

  Stallings said nothing, but his face had brightened. He looked like he was ready to leap from his chair and go on the spot. But something held him back.

  McKay sat back and took in the Quonset hut.

  “Or you can stay here and bounce back and forth between private and sergeant for the duration.”

  “How much—”

  “We can talk about pay later.”

  “No, uh,” Stallings bit his lip and looked at the floor. He flicked ash from his cigarette and ground it with the toe of his boot. “How much more dangerous?”

  McKay blinked. This was the last question he had expected from Grover Stallings. Stallings went on.

  “I know what you do is dangerous, and I respect you for it, Joe. I do. And I know what y’all did, fighting the Japs—that wasn’t no cake walk neither. But I—we ain’t exactly been laying around on the job, you know.”

  McKay was stung, and regretted his condescension. He knew what Stallings’s division had been through in Sicily.

  “Grove, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know, I know you didn’t, and I wasn’t trying to say you did. I just—” Stallings looked McKay in the eye. His body was still. McKay thought he saw his eyes well up. That bothered him. “Will it be worse than Sicily?”

  McKay thought a moment. He could only answer honestly.

  “I don’t know.”

  Stallings looked at the floor again, and McKay thought of the nighttime landing at Gela, the Army infantry huddled in landing craft ferried shivering and puking into a darkness full of enemies.

  “I do know what y’all are preparing for, Grove, and that will be worse than Sicily. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be damned if I ever see the inside of a landing craft again.”

  He waited. After a while, Stallings said, “You know, I seen this newsreel a while back about the Marines landing on some island somewhere. The Japs killed thousands. And the whole time I sat there watching it, I kept thinking—You know, I might see McKay up there. Dead, floating in the water. I don’t think I coulda handled that. Not now.”

  McKay said nothing. Stallings rubbed his forehead and sat up.

  “Okay. I’m in.”

  “Just like that.”

  Stallings waved his hand as if the desks and hut and the entire camp were smoke he wanted out of his face. “The hell with it. Sign me up.”

  They laughed and stood and walked toward the outer office.

  “You have ten minutes,” McKay said. “Get anything you don’t want to leave behind. You’ve got weapons and gear waiting for you.”

  “All right. Can I bring my own sidearm?”

  “You have one?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right, then, go get it.”

  Stallings laughed, saluted Lieutenant Roberts as he passed—“Sir”—and stepped out into the dark. He was grinning and joking again, and McKay laughed with him. But the joking, or something beneath the joking, barely hidden, bothered him. Of all the responses he had expected and prepared for Stallings to give him, he had not planned for the one he actually got—fear.

  When Stallings climbed into the jeep McKay inspected his pistol. It was a standard issue sidearm—a Colt .45, in a leather holster marked u.s. on a webbed belt, with a canvas snap pouch for two spare magazines. The pistol’s action was smooth, its parts clean and well-oiled, and the magazine and chamber both empty. McKay nodded, impressed. The Army had drilled some responsibility into Stallings.

  An hour later, while wending back northward through the trucks and jeeps of the Allied Expeditionary Force, he realized the pistol belonged to Lieutenant Roberts.

  Stallings laughed when McKay asked about it.

  “It’s something for him to remember me by. Or the lack of something to remember me by, anyways.” McKay laughed despite himself, and Stallings said, “So when can you tell me what this is all about? You mind?” He held a cigarette forward so McKay could see it.

  “Go ahead. We’re heading straight to the plane. Our gear and the rest of the team will already be there. I’ll brief all of you on the specifics later.”

  “The hell with the specifics, just give me an idea what I stole the Lieutenant’s Colt for.”

  McKay pulled the most recent photo of the dam out of his file and handed it back. Stallings flicked his lighter, lit his cigarette, and held the lighter up over the photo.

  “A dam?”

  “In Norway,” McKay said, and then, after a moment to consider how much to say, “We’re going to blow it up.”

  Stallings whistled and handed back the photo. McKay could not see him, but he could imagine Stallings’s grin.

  “Sounds like a helluva party.”

  McKay left Stallings to his cigarette—and idle chatter with Heyward—and pored over the file again. He had less than four hours now to absorb all he could. He would have no other intelligence until he met his contact in Norway.

  Petersen’s dossier barely filled a half-page, double-spaced. The file described him as a fisherman, but he had also been a sub-lieutenant in the Norwegian Navy before the war. Upon invasion the Germans had captured him but released him almost immediately on condition that he return to civilian life. McKay wondered if there had been other conditions. He knew that the British had double-agents scattered all over Europe, feeding the Germans falsehood and aiding the underground. He looked at the photograph clipped to the sheet. The grainy picture, enlarged from some old group portrait snapped in hard, midday sunlight, told McKay little about the man’s appearance—strong jaw, bull-neck, raffish grin. He hoped the man was a brawler.

  Petersen, piloting his fishing boat, would pick the team up from the submarine well off the coast. That, so far, was McKay’s biggest worry. He had no fear of tight spaces but hated the ocean—he pondered, again, his decision to join a bran
ch dedicated to amphibious war, and laughed—and the move from the sub to the fishing boat with all their gear. He shook his head. He would work on that later. But the gear he would inspect before takeoff—thoroughly.

  He had chosen the small arms himself. Each man would take a Thompson submachine gun, the newest model, lighter and less complicated, easier to maintain, than the beast he had carried on Tulagi and Guadalcanal. The newer model did not accept the fifty-round drum that the old one did, but McKay did not care. The drum was heavy and hard to load and, in McKay’s experience, the only people who wanted it were boys who had seen too many gangster movies. He had seen that tough guy, gangster romanticism wear off, drip off with sweat and pour out through profanity as once-eager gyrenes lugged the thing through the jungle. Thirty-round stick magazines were enough. They had been enough on the ridge on Guadalcanal, when no one had time to reload the drums.

  His sidearm he already had with him, strapped to his hip on a webbed belt. Stallings would be the only man on the team with a Colt. He probably should have insisted Stallings leave it, but he had assumed the pistol was a gift or something he had bought with his pay for extra security. He should have known.

  McKay preferred the Browning Hi-Power. It fired the smaller 9-millimeter slug instead of the Colt’s .45, but it left the barrel a hundred meters per second faster. Resistance fighters and other special operations units liked it, so ammunition on his previous assignments had proven plentiful. He had even, once or twice, looted dead Germans of their ammo. The Browning’s magazine also held thirteen rounds, almost twice as many as the Colt. McKay was comfortable trading off the older, heavier, more complicated Thompson and its fifty-round drum but if a fight ever came down to pistols, he wanted a bigger magazine.

  His last weapon, one of his specialized tools, lay safely in a black Bakelite box among the rest of his gear.

  So much for armament. In addition to the Thompsons and Brownings, not only Graves, the engineer, but every member of his team would carry explosives. Graves had selected a doughy plastic explosive that smelled like almonds and could only be ignited with a detonator. He had seen it dropped, stepped on, run over, and even dropped into a fire once, but without a blasting cap and a little electrical current, the stuff lay inert. Its explosive property did not in itself concern McKay, but the forty pounds of it allotted for each man did. This gave McKay pause when thinking of the transfer from sub to fishing boat. He thought of the long climb down the cargo net toward a roiling sea and a tiny gray craft full of Marines, and of the eighty pounds on his back and the ninety or hundred pounds on others’. Maybe it was the seasickness or the nervousness of going to battle for the first time, but McKay could swear the gear pulled at them as they climbed lower. It had pulled at least one man down. He fell between the pitching boat and the ship, cried out once, and sank.

  McKay shuddered and blinked.

  He had been staring at the same sheet in the file for a long time. He looked up and rubbed his eyes. The jeep hummed along the dark road and rocked in cross-currents of wind. Stallings and Heyward swapped bawdy stories. Both had strong opinions about the quality of women in England. McKay smiled and put thoughts of landing craft out of his mind. He took up his flashlight, pointed it at the file again, and read.

  The gear awaited them in a closed and blacked-out hangar at an airfield north of London. The Major was there with Barnes, a sergeant and a corporal that McKay recognized from the quartermaster and supply section, and the other two members of the team. The Major met McKay, Stallings, and Heyward at the door and introduced them.

  McKay was not a short man, but Graves hulked over him. He stood six and a half feet tall and had broad shoulders. He wore British Army khaki battle dress and had a confusion of patches on his sleeves—in addition to the chevrons and crown of his colour sergeant’s stripes, he had the Royal Marines flash and the tommy gun and anchor patch of a true British Commando. He wore the green commando beret and had pinned to it the Long Range Desert Group badge, a brass scorpion. McKay wondered how a Royal Marine had ended up driving machine gun trucks in the Sahara. It must be some story, he thought.

  “A pleasure, Captain,” Graves said, and shook McKay’s hand. He smiled warmly, a smile belied by wolfish eyes. He looked mischievous, but not sinister. McKay imagined him toying with explosives, and believed it.

  “I’ve heard tell of you,” Graves said. “Damned proud to be on this job.”

  “Thank you, Colour Sergeant.”

  “And you’ve seen Sergeant Ollila’s file as well,” the Major said.

  The Finn stepped up and saluted. The file photo had done the man no justice—he looked boyish even among the young men who fought this war, apple-cheeked and bright-eyed with a cheery smile. He had reddish-brown hair that was over regulation length and had begun to curl. McKay tried to imagine him prone, hidden in the primeval Finnish holt, awaiting a chance to shoot Russians in the head.

  McKay returned Ollila’s salute and held out his hand. “Sergeant.”

  Ollila shook his hand and nodded. McKay waited a moment but Ollila said nothing. The Major spoke up.

  “This is Private Stallings. McKay has brought him along to handle the radio equipment.”

  More nods and handshakes. Graves sensed kindred mischief in Stallings and pumped his hand hard. “Just come up from the infantry, eh?”

  “Yep.”

  “Bloody marvelous,” Graves said.

  “The plane arrives in half an hour,” the Major said, “and departs ten minutes later. Captain?”

  McKay looked at the assembled team. “Go through your gear one more time. If you’ve forgotten anything, we’ll get it. If you don’t need something, leave it. I’ll be checking, too.”

  The men hauled out their gear and spread it across a row of tables in the middle of the hangar. In addition to the weapons, ammunition, and explosives, there were ropes and climbing gear, grenades, commando knives—McKay also carried his Marine ka-bar on his belt—cleaning kits, entrenching tools, an assortment of hardtack and jerky for emergency rations, bandages, alcohol, sulfa powder, and a syrette of morphine for each man. There was also the winter gear, heavy white coats and overall pants and thick gloves, plus sweaters, knit caps—what McKay knew as a toboggan—balaclavas, and wool scarves. They were already wearing long underwear under their utilities.

  McKay checked his own gear and went through the team’s, one by one. Each man had his own special gear. Stallings was already fiddling with the radio, probing, experimenting with it before he even looked at a manual. Graves had a seabag with explosive ordnance hands off you buggers stenciled across the canvas in red. The contents of Graves’s seabag took up most of his table. McKay looked over it.

  “You’ve got surplus explosives,” he said.

  “Aye, sir,” Graves said. “This lot, explosive 808. We were each of us issued forty pounds of it. I took the liberty of requesting another twenty pounds for myself, sir. I have the back for it.”

  McKay nodded. He looked through Graves’s grenades and picked up a cylindrical one, one of four, each with the pins and spoons taped in place.

  “Thermite?”

  Graves nodded. “Comes in bally handy, especially on sabotage jobs like this.” He held up a small metal can, like a snuffbox, taped around the edges. “I’m rather fond of thermite, sir. Carry a tinned bit like this for smaller jobs. Again, sir, comes in handy.”

  “Good. They tell me you’ve got medical experience.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Good. Carry on.”

  Ollila, now—McKay appraised him. Ollila carried the bare minimum. His only special gear was a ragged looking white bundle and a case for his rifle and telescopic sight. Somehow he even made the sixty or seventy pounds of standard gear look as though it had been carefully winnowed to the essentials. It had, of course, but there would still be things they would discard or leave unused. McKay could foresee no use for the thick gloves packed with their winter gear. Not when they had reached the dam, anyway.


  “Sergeant Oll—” he faltered on the name. He had still not heard the man say it himself and did not trust the Colonel’s version.

  “Ollila, Captain,” the man said. The accent fell on the first syllable, McKay noted. The Finn’s voice surprised him—light and reedy, his speech clipped and lilting.

  McKay nodded to the equipment on the table. “Mind telling me about some of this gear?”

  Ollila touched the rifle first. He brushed his fingertips across it like an archivist with some precious vellum codex. “My rifle, I like the Mauser. The Germans, I hate them, but they make a fine weapon.” He touched the sight. “I use for long shots, but within two hundred meters I use these.” He touched the rear iron sight. “With the telescope sight, you raise the head up. You become easy to spot.”

  McKay had known one sniper, a Marine, but had never seen him work. They had spoken about sharpshooting only once on Guadalcanal, squatting by a jungle road eating a half-ration of chow. The man had impressed him—softspoken, plainspoken, refusing to talk about his job in any detail, much less exaggerate his war stories. Ollila reminded McKay of that man.

  McKay pointed at the bundle of rags. “And that?”

  Ollila struggled with the word, but McKay understood—“Ghillie suit. Burlap and rags. Camouflage. White for the snow.”

  “Good.”

  He inspected the equipment quickly. When he had finished the men repacked their gear and the Major took McKay aside.

  “That Aussie you decked? I explained to the Colonel. Don’t worry—you’re not bound for the brig when you get back. Nothing to fret about.”

  “Well, I might just fret a little.”

  The Major looked at him and finally nodded. “I’m sorry about the briefing.”

  “Commander Bagwell?”

  “Yes, we hadn’t expected that. Thing is, he and some other limeys dreamt this thing up. He insisted we have him at the briefing this time.”

  “This time?”

  The Major looked away. “If anyone can get this done, it’s you.”

  McKay felt embarrassed, looked at the floor. He had never grown accustomed to praise—even a little felt fulsome. And the Major had sidestepped his question.