“Sir, what’s going on here? Really.”
The Major answered absently, like a child reciting his lessons. “You’re making trouble for the Krauts in an out of the way place. If you can deprive them of electricity in that area, all the better. Whatever draws troops away from western Europe and keeps them away for a while.”
The answer did not satisfy McKay, but he saw that he would get no further if he continued to question him. He said, “All right.”
The Major looked at him, and then away again.
It was nearly time. The men gathered their gear, slung on packs and webbed belts and looped the straps of duffel bags over their shoulders. McKay led them from the hangar onto the tarmac under the surrounding night. Dawn at this time of winter would not come for another two hours. Somewhere overhead a flight of British bombers droned back from Germany. McKay and his team waited in the stinging wind and snow and, five minutes before 0600, the plane arrived.
The C-47 landed and chugged up out of the night onto the tarmac, gunned its engines once, and pivoted back toward the darkness. Heyward and Barnes ran forward and opened the fuselage door. McKay and his team moved forward.
He helped Stallings up into the plane and stood aside. Graves, draped with bags and gear, hauled himself aboard easily and Ollila climbed in after him. McKay turned to follow when the Major stopped him.
They stood in the prop blast, the Major with his cover clapped to his head with one hand. He held out the other. McKay looked at it, at the Major’s face, and shook. The Major slapped him on the shoulder.
“Bust hell out of that dam, Joe,” he said. He nodded, as if affirming some truth only he had heard, and said, “Don’t let anything stop you. Good luck.”
He walked away.
McKay climbed in. He set his gear on the floor and sat on one of the benches running the length of the fuselage. A crewman shut the door behind him and walked back up to the cockpit. The plane trembled and vibrated as the pilots taxied into position for takeoff. The engines revved and strained and the plane bumped a few times on the grassy field before lifting off and settling into a smooth climb. Graves, Ollila, and Stallings all lit cigarettes and started talking. Graves offered one to McKay, who declined. He smoked to alleviate tension, and he had flown in cargo planes before.
McKay still had his copy of Thucydides in his coat pocket, but the bay of the plane was lightless—there would be no reading. He held the book in his hands and ran his thumbs over the pilled and threadbare cover. He thought about the Major. He had praised and encouraged him, slapped him on the shoulder, wished him luck. But he had looked at McKay as though he would never see him again.
McKay shut his eyes and rested his hands on his book. Something was wrong, he knew. He would think about it later.
A moment later, he sat up and took out his cigarettes and his lighter.
3
The plane had flown quietly for ten minutes when the crewman smelled the cigarette smoke. He came aft from the cockpit and chewed Stallings, Graves, and Ollila out. He did not turn toward McKay, the ranking officer, but McKay felt himself included in the blistering harangue. They could have the cabin light on, the crewman said, or they could smoke, but they would have to open the cargo door and there was no damn way they were opening the cargo door. The three men ground out their smokes and the crewman returned to the cockpit, where he switched on the dim yellow light. McKay ground out his cigarette but did not otherwise stir.
He forced his worries from his mind, concentrated on the details, the logistics. The flight would take a little over four hours, and he planned to spend all of it sleeping. Despite the team’s chatter—Stallings was already indulging Graves and Ollila in stories—the dull light, and the thought of the dam, he dropped off and slept.
Sometime later, his grip on Thucydides loosened and the book slid off his lap. He jerked and blinked.
“Have a good nap?” Stallings said.
“How long have I been out?”
Stallings shrugged. “About fifteen minutes.”
McKay swore and closed his eyes. He had begun having trouble sleeping in college, despite his exhaustion from drill, classes, baseball practice, and work. Among the reasons he had joined the Marine Corps during graduate school was the faint and desperate hope that real fatigue would give him a good night’s rest, every night. Despite the early days of OCS, when his terror of the drill instructors kept him awake despite twenty hours of drill and training, it had worked out. He had graduated, been commissioned second lieutenant, and trained for infantry. He was waiting for an assignment when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Within a few months he had gotten a platoon in the 1st Marine Raiders under Lieutenant Colonel Edson. He had seen his first combat with the Raiders, an awkward, galumphing scrabble to expel the Japanese from an island off Guadalcanal before the invasion proper. Once on the Canal, he saw a solid month of patrol, ambush, and combat in the jungle with the Raiders, and lived through one long, long night on the ridge overlooking the airfield. And he had, finally, caught malaria with the Raiders.
He had never been sickly—as a child he caught a mild cold once a winter, but had never had the flu, measles, or any of the other ailments his peers seemed to catch from spring and fall, year in and year out. He decided later, in hospital, that his body had saved up all its capacity for illness for his time on Guadalcanal.
It came on a week or so after the battle on the grassy lump of land they were already calling Edson’s Ridge. First a headache, a dull one that he ignored. That was on a morning that passed for cool on that island, where it grew so hot and muggy that one could hardly breathe in the heat of the day and a man’s utilities blackened and rotted at the crotch and armpits and finally disintegrated on his body. By that evening he had a fever. Again, he ignored it. He assumed he was not getting enough to drink, and so during a break from digging slit trenches with his surviving Marines he drank four canteens of water, and another four within three hours. But with sunset the heat in his forehead remained. That night he shivered himself awake, wrapped himself in his blanket, and got no sleep. It had abandoned him again. The following morning he vomited twice, and he knew. He never threw up. It was malaria.
The corpsman gave him quinine tablets and aspirin and he stayed on. He went a week and a half on what sleep he could get in fifteen-minute stretches. Then, during a pitiful raid by no more than a squad of Japanese riflemen starving, half-wild skeletons even more pitiful looking than McKay and his ragged Marines, a bullet cut the cross-strap on his Sam Browne pistol belt, veered between three ribs—breaking two—nicked his left lung and left through his lower back. He passed out and the fever took him.
When he awoke and regained his bearing on time, on sunrise and sunset and the day of the week, he lay in a whitewashed ward. The next day, Keener visited.
The malaria had returned only once, four months ago, during the late summer. The deep sleep he had known early in his Marine days had not. He slept fitfully, or if he slept seven or eight hours at a time, he dreamt so much that he woke already depleted. A medical officer under the Colonel had offered him sleeping pills. He refused. He could not afford and would not risk dependence on medicine for sleep, not in this outfit and not with his job.
He jerked awake again, and the team looked at him. He blinked and squeezed the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes.
“How long that time?”
“It’s been some time now, sir.”
“One and one half hours,” Ollila said, and covered his watch with his sleeve.
McKay raised his eyebrows. “That’s better,” he said, and dropped off again. The team laughed.
Half an hour later, the crewman shook him awake.
“Captain—excuse me, sir,” the man said. “Lieutenant Woodruff—the pilot, sir—he needs you.”
McKay nodded, stood, and stretched as he walked up the cargo bay to the cockpit door. He leaned in and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. The pilot looked over his shoulder and remo
ved his headset.
“Bad weather north of Edinburgh,” he said.
“How bad?”
“Reports from the ground say it looks like a blizzard to them. It’s parked on top of the mountains between there and Inverness.”
“Can you get around it?”
“Sure, but it’ll add a hundred miles or more to the flight. I can set down—”
“Do it—fly around.” McKay checked his timepiece. “You understand.”
The pilot nodded and turned back to the stick.
McKay walked back to his place in the hold. The plane rocked once and he braced himself against the fuselage. The first of many, if we aren’t lucky, he thought.
They passed over Edinburgh, banked, and bore northeast, following the coast toward Aberdeen. Night still lay over the land, but the tops of the thunderheads to the west were touched with sunlight. McKay watched them from his window, and saw three flickers in the dark bank. Lightning in winter. On any other occasion, he would have marveled.
Nothing could make him sleep now. McKay kept an eye on the weather, his watch, and his compass. They were due in Shetland no later than 1030.
Stallings, Graves, and—to a lesser extent—Ollila talked. Stallings retold a number of moonshining stories. McKay had heard all of them more than once. The stories from his time at Clemson, McKay noted, lacked key details—the narratives were streamlined, their ultimate result omitted entirely. He wondered how accurately he retold other stories.
Graves matched Stallings story for story. Unlike Stallings who—McKay noted—shared no stories from Sicily, Graves told almost nothing but war stories. After comparing the relative vulgarity and toughness of drill instructors in the British and American Marines, Graves talked about the Long Range Desert Group, the LRDG.
“That lot was mostly Aussies, Aussies and New Zealand lads,” he said. McKay noted that he seemed to have picked up most of his buddies’ slang. His accent was not purely South African—though he did, like the other South Africans McKay had met, call the continent Effrica. McKay wondered idly if he spoke Afrikaans.
“And y’all fought Rommel?” Stallings said.
“Bloody right—in jeeps and lorries, with seldom anything greater than a Lewis gun.”
“How’d you wind up in this line of work?”
Graves pointed at the Commando patch on his sleeve.
“I’m a Royal Marine, mate. I went from there to the desert ‘cause of this Rhodesian joker I knew from home. Popped up from nowhere one day, told me about this lot in the desert. On a plane to Cairo in an hour. Served with them ‘til six months ago but decided to join this lot when Jerry scarpered back to Italy. I had some mates from the SAS who we’d shown round the back edges of the Sahara once or twice.”
“Tough getting used to the cold?”
“You know, one reason I left South Africa was to get somewhere a bit cooler. Only reason I found myself in the Sahara was for the bally fun of it. Me? I don’t miss the heat.”
“It’s hot in North Carolina. Hot in Sicily, too.”
McKay checked his timepiece again.
The plane continued northeast for another half hour before banking inland. McKay looked out the window and caught a glimpse, he thought, of Aberdeen below, on the coast. It lay in darkness below brightening banks of cloud. He looked up into the Scottish highlands and saw nothing through the grey and white piles of cloud. The pilots would have to fly by instruments the rest of the way.
He settled back into his seat, snapped the compass closed, and was surprised to wake up again twenty minutes later.
The plane lurched and McKay seized the compass as it slipped from his hand. He lay back stiff against the bulkhead and tried, in the moment of shock after waking, to get his bearings.
It seemed he was the only one startled by the sudden drop and arrest of the plane. There were no panicked voices in the cockpit, as he had heard on troubled flights before. Stallings and Graves still sat chatting—“Lion hunting is actually very sporting,” Graves said—with Ollila politely, intently, silently listening. But then Ollila, his face still turned toward Graves and Stallings, looked at McKay and held his gaze. The plane dropped, floated them all a half inch and dropped them onto the benches as the wings bit back into the air.
“Shit fire,” Stallings said.
Ollila, still watching McKay, shook his head.
McKay stood and walked—climbed—to the cockpit, stuffing compass and map into his coat as he went. The plane shimmied to the left and dropped and rose again. Graves and Stallings laughed. He moved forward, gripped the cockpit doorway with both hands and pulled his upper body in.
“What’s going on?”
The pilot glanced up and then back at the controls.
“Turbulence, Captain.”
McKay ignored that.
“That storm over the highlands?”
“Yeah.”
“We can’t make it around it?”
“Just been on the horn to Inverness. This front picked up speed and just shifted east in the last hour.”
“You can’t go over it?”
The pilot laughed. “You know how tall a thunderhead is?”
McKay did, but he thought ahead to something else.
“This stuff covering the Orkneys?”
“Fraid so.”
“What else is between us and the destination?”
“Nothing, or so we thought. Could be more of this.”
They could descend through the storm and wait it out at Inverness. McKay felt the plane lurch and yaw and decided against that. The Major did not want to lose a team in the ocean. McKay was fine with that, but they had a job to do and no time to wait out storms with the Scottish Home Guard. He checked his watch. North Sea be damned.
“Change course. Make directly for Shetland.”
“Yes, sir.”
By the time McKay had reached his seat again the team sat gripping their bench in silence. He sat and pulled his gear nearer.
McKay was used to turbulence. The rest of his team were not. He doubted Stallings had ever seen the inside of a plane before—his face had drained of all color now, wet and doughy like a corpse in the tropics. Stallings saw him watching, swallowed, and spoke:
“The hell with the light—I need a cigarette.”
McKay laughed.
The pilots banked, turned north over the sea, and gunned the engines. Within fifteen minutes the turbulence had settled and the plane sailed smooth over the gloaming. McKay reassured himself that the mission was more important, and looked out the porthole behind him at the ocean and the clouds. The storm they left behind connected with a long front. A wall of cloud stood arrayed to their west as far as he could see, both behind and ahead. And he knew from the pilot that it was advancing toward them.
Graves coaxed Stallings back into conversation, and they resumed their stories. Ollila listened a few minutes before stretching out and falling immediately to sleep.
McKay could not go back to sleep. He watched the storm front through the window, the sea below, and made two or three efforts to read from Thucydides. All failed. Mostly, he mulled over the mission.
He did not like the task ahead. He did not like proceeding with limited intelligence, no plan, and no ability to rehearse the attack. No mission he had ever undertaken had succeeded without those things. So far they were depending entirely on guts and the expertise of the team—two things in which he did have confidence—but no amount of sheer guts could save them if the mission went awry without intel and plans. He thought of his Norwegian contact, Petersen. He would press him for further intelligence. He would have to. They would make a reconnaissance of the dam, if possible, before they could begin to plan an attack in earnest.
If possible, McKay thought. There could be no if. They must reconnoiter the dam.
He wondered about Petersen himself. The dossier the Major had given him was a scrap of what he needed to know about the man. Captured and released by the Germans—McKay had worked with
men and women all over Europe who could say that, but for some reason it bode ill when he thought of Petersen. The Nazis had their own counterintelligence operations, capturing, interrogating, and turning enemy agents, just like his own service and the Brits. The resistance got all the attention in the press and the movies, but even more collaborators existed in Fortress Europe. Perhaps—
He dismissed the thought. He had let himself grow anxious because of the limited intelligence, the rushed preparation. He barely knew his team. But he trusted the Colonel, his superiors. If the higher-ups did not know their own people in occupied Europe, he could take care of the problem for them.
Land appeared below, a clutch of huddled rock faces, cliffs, stacks, and great humped bodies of stone edged all around with breakers nearly glowing in the dawn light. Fair Isle, he thought, a speck of land between the Orkneys and Shetland, and the last land they would see if the storm brought them down. He checked the squall line again. It had edged much nearer—he guessed it was less than five miles west, a black wall. He pressed against the window but could not see the top of the clouds. He looked at his watch. From Fair Isle they had less than half an hour of flying ahead.
The storm overtook them ten minutes later.
The windows darkened. The C-47 rattled. Stallings and Graves stopped talking, and Stallings turned white again. Ollila’s eyes opened. The plane flew into the clouds.
McKay had ridden a roller coaster once. The sudden drops, the sensation of floating and falling at the same time—he had howled with nervous laughter the entire time. The first bumps of turbulence now felt like that, but he did not laugh. It would grow worse.
McKay moved up to the cockpit and talked to the pilot. He flew by instruments now and was already descending through the storm. He hoped to come out directly over the airfield and put it down without having to circle back.
When McKay walked back to his place in the cargo bay, he had to brace himself with both hands against the ceiling and duckwalk like a boot sailor. He stumbled three times and had to throw himself onto his bench.
Dark Full of Enemies Page 5