McKay and Ollila went to the cabin below the wheelhouse and shed their coats and the heavy sweaters beneath. McKay’s long underwear and uniform blouse were soaked through. He stank. He had barely slept since leaving the Viking, and had barely slept even during that voyage. He sat at the table to dry out but, despite his exhaustion, could not relax. Ollila sat in a corner with his rifle and closed his eyes. McKay wanted his opinion—other than himself, Ollila had the most experience of any man on the team—but before he could ask, Ollila spoke.
“We will need a lot of help.”
“Yeah.”
“Petersen, he does not want to help, but will. Trust me.”
“What makes you say that?”
Ollila opened his eyes a moment, shrugged, and closed them again. McKay turned from him in his chair and rubbed his temples. After a few minutes, Ollila spoke again.
“I wondered, too, about the man. I even noticed his German pistol like you did. And when you mentioned the cars which came by the house—I wondered, just like you. But there is something he does not tell you.”
“What do you think?”
Ollila thought. “He hates the Nazis, I can tell. But he holds back. I don’t know why.”
McKay thought about Petersen, about the things he had refused to explain. He would not let his men participate in the scouting mission. McKay had not cared—he wanted a speedy group of scouts, not a combat patrol—but there were other things. Petersen’s late arrival off Lofoten, his hesitance about everything, his invitation to the Germans on the E-boat to board, and—
McKay felt the blood drain from his face. The other Americans. Like the other commando teams Treat had bitched about aboard the Viking.
McKay felt ill, and then his face burned, his head hurt. He was tired—when had he last slept? really slept?—and angry. He had to see Petersen, and would find him this time if he had to destroy the boat and strip the tonk-tonk-tonking engine apart and pry him out of a cylinder. He stood, still damp with sweat, and left the cabin. Before the door swung shut behind him, he heard Ollila say, “Good luck.”
The air chilled him but he did not care. He climbed into the wheelhouse and nearly shouted at Jørgen.
“Where’s—”
Petersen stood there, leaned back against the opposite bulkhead, arms folded. He looked at McKay, then resigned himself to a talk and raised himself to his full height.
“Yes?”
McKay stepped inside and pulled the door shut. Jørgen, like a child maintaining neutrality during a fight between his parents, stood statue-still, frozen. McKay imagined him lowering his own body temperature to blend into the ice outside and become invisible. He did not care.
“What did you mean by your comment about ‘other Americans’ the other night? When you picked us up?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Can it. I remember.”
“Yes, yes.” Petersen waved feebly.
“That garrison has been beefed up, ain’t it? Hasn’t it?” Petersen shook his head as McKay spoke. His voice quailed as he held himself back from a yell. “I need you to tell me what’s going on. We have a job to do—”
“Yes—”
“—and I will not be able to complete it without your cooperation. If you don’t wanna help, fine, but give me men who will.” Petersen said nothing for a time. McKay, with a moment to think, realized another possibility. “Or do you not want this job to succeed?”
Petersen looked him in the eye. “No, I do not.”
The big Norwegian crossed his arms again and looked away, sank back against the wall. He slackened like a wind-abandoned sail. McKay waited for more, but none came.
McKay said, “You a Quisling?”
Petersen jerked and spat something in Norwegian, pounded a fist backward into the bulkhead and slackened again. McKay raised a hand.
“Sorry. Had to ask. I feel like I owe it to myself to find out if I’m about to be shot by the Gestapo.”
“Damned rubbish,” Petersen said.
“Why, then?”
Petersen muttered. McKay waited.
“Why? Who were the other Americans?”
Still, Petersen said nothing.
“That dam has been sabotaged before, hasn’t it?”
Petersen nodded.
“When?”
“A month ago.”
“Who were they?” McKay said. “Who were the other Americans?”
“There were six of them. A bigger team than yours.”
McKay imagined Commander Treat’s hospitality toward an even larger group, but did not feel like laughing. “And?”
“Their leader,” Petersen said, “His name was Keener.”
9
Captain Fass had expected the indiscipline, but not the lack of morale. He should, he now thought, have expected both. Pessimism was the best preparation for a soldier.
He sat restless in his office. He had last toured the dam only two hours ago, but he could not sleep and another minute in his office would drive him mad. He raised himself, tested the soundness of his leg, and stepped outside. The nice thing about this billet, he thought, was that one never had to take the trouble to put on a coat—one always had it on.
The guard by the headquarters door was one of his—Pfaff—and snapped to attention. Fass acknowledged and asked after Lieutenant Koch, Sergeant Bäuml.
“Both in their quarters, Herr Captain,” Pfaff said.
Fass considered sending Pfaff after them but decided against it. He would inspect the dam alone, to clear his head.
He started for the dam and looked, slyly, ahead of him. Awareness of his coming passed in a visible ripple across the men standing in the yellow lampglow at the top of the dam. Backs straightened, boots stepped more sharply, at least one cigarette dropped over the edge and into the darkness below. His few weeks here had shaped the old men up nicely. He was still working on the morale.
The indiscipline he had anticipated, yes. He had also expected the troops he found when given command of the Grettisfjord Dam garrison to be second-rate, older men, asthmatics, flat-footed rearguard types. Here his pessimism had given him its greatest gift—a pleasant surprise. The detachment at the dam consisted largely of older men, to be sure, but men relatively fit despite their inactivity. Their minds wandered on guard duty. He found the men staring at nothing or pacing well outside their ambits. No wonder the American gangsters had almost succeeded in their sabotage.
Gangster—it was not Fass’s word. He might have heard it on the radio. Reportedly it was one of the Führer’s favorite epithets for the Americans. No, Fass’s word for saboteurs and cutthroats was bandit. They had applied the term universally—to partisans, saboteurs, assassins, armed civilians—to anyone they had to shoot in Russia.
The first man on the dam came to attention, one of the reservists, Luckner, a bicycle repairman from—somewhere. Saxony, perhaps. Fass could barely understand the man.
Fass snuck a look up the length of the dam again. The pacing continued, but the guards were watching him. He acknowledged Luckner but kept walking. The posture of the entire dam seemed to relax. He smiled to himself. These men, the old and the new, belonged to him now. He had done one of the things the Army did best, and take disparate, broken parts and forge them into a new and stronger whole. Was not the whole reason he was here—one of them, that is—that his unit had ceased to exist? Its remains folded into another to form a new one? He thought of Siegfried and his sword, broken and reforged. He smiled again. He had once despised opera but had come to find comfort in it. He learned Wagner from a private in his company in Russia, Hansi, who would whistle entire acts of the Ring while they marched or rode to the front.
Russia had required discipline even beyond that he had grown into as a Panzergrenadier. It took discipline to stand in the face of the Ivans’ assaults, discipline to keep from cracking under Red artillery bombardment, discipline to raze villages and hunt down and destroy the bandits, village by village, and show th
em that their resistance was not only pointless, but wasteful.
Waste. A year and a half in and out of the front had sharpened his pessimism well before the arrival of summer and the offensive into the salient. Then he had learned that his own army could waste just as much as the bandits.
They had moved into the line a week ahead of the attack, in support of a column of Panzers and self-propelled guns. He had felt disappointment—he liked the really heavy stuff, the Panthers and Tigers and tank hunters, and had hoped to join them in the main thrust northward against the Ivans. But he had orders to stand by, to wait for the enemy to collapse. Then would begin the race—into the collapsing pocket, a race to cut off and destroy the hundreds of thousands of Bolsheviks inside. Then, he had been made to understand, with the enemy weakened, reeling from his losses, they could turn eastward again, deliver the blow that would finally bring the rotten but stubborn house down.
So he had been told.
He passed the guards along the top of the dam one by one but did not stop and inspect any of them. His appearance had done the trick.
At the other end of the dam, he walked into the snow and to the little concrete outbuilding that led into the dam’s interior. He opened the door and peered inside. Beyond a small landing and below a block and tackle for lowering tools to the galleries, a well with a metal-runged ladder extended downward. From below came the deep thrum of the dam, the sound of its size. Concrete and water, tons of each, that seemed—somehow—alive. He dismissed the thought. Perhaps the opera had made him sentimental. He closed the door.
The cold made the blood beneath his skin prickle, fight for warmth. He breathed deeply. He had just been thinking about Russia—the steppe in July. They had all moved into the line with their shirtsleeves rolled and their helmets hooked to their belts, clattering against their canteens and gas masks. The men joked—before they no longer felt like it—about drowning in sweat. No such worries here, he thought, and turned to walk back across the dam.
He had still had Sergeant Bäuml with him, thank God. The man kept the company in line. They had packed their Panzergrenadiers, many fresh from home, still wide-eyed at the endless golden plain, aboard their trucks and rolled to their places, and waited.
Their part in the race never came. They faced the inside of the pocket, fought off anemic probes, and waited. They heard the great tank battle clearly though it took place fifty miles away, a constant rumble dappled with cracks and bangs. And they saw the offensive stall, the armored columns feeding into the salient slow, halt, and begin to pull back. The Russians came down upon them a few days later.
They had held—thanks to training, firepower, and discipline—for three days under attack. Bäuml fell in the first assault, shot twice but alive. Two privates had to drag him to the rear and out of the fight. Only one returned. The other, the survivor said, had been annihilated by Russian mortar fire. When the next assault came in the pitch dark that night, the survivor died, too. The next day the morning concert, the dawn bombardment, killed Hansi, the whistler of Wagner.
The attacks worsened. Fass lost men and his company weakened, and the Ivans drove more and more out of their way and brought more strength to bear on them. Fass, even without the fearsome company sergeant, held on. He did not expect relief. He knew better. He held until a wave of six T-34/85s crossed the horizon, pivoted on their earth-tearing treads, unburdened themselves of their brown and khaki soldiers, and jerked into gear toward them. Until the last moments before the shooting started, he could see only the blocky turrets above the blackened and bullet-scythed patches of summer wheat. Then the Russian infantry opened fire.
A submachine gun round found him as he raised a hand to his mouth to shout to his men. The bullet crossed his back shoulderblade to shoulderblade, and before he fell a salvo of tank fire blew shrapnel into his legs and side.
Five months, and his body still had not unstiffened. He gauged his leg’s strength as he walked across the dam, back past the guards, and felt for weakness, pain, soreness, stiffness. Almost none at all, now. After release from hospital, without even taking leave, he had tried to bluff his way back to his unit. Impossible, they said. He did not yet have full motion in his arms and back, and it was obvious. And despite his best efforts—a true thespian, they had said, and he could not tell if it was sarcasm or good-natured commiseration—he could not fully hide his limp. Light duty.
He should have expected as much. He had honed his pessimism to something almost like cynicism. He was an experienced officer and an army that was pouring tanks and men into the Bolshevik maw needed experienced officers—probably needed them most at the top. And so he resigned himself to indefinite months in the rear, a Panzergrenadier guarding railcars or road junctions.
His only encouragements were Bäuml and Wagner. The first chance he got, he ordered a complete set of Wagner’s operas and played them during all his waking hours in hospital. And after a few months, he had run into the sergeant while exercising his wounded legs in the hospital yard. They both recovered more slowly than they liked. When Fass got his orders for Norway—a dam that needed guarding most urgently, else it might desert, he told Bäuml—he brought the sergeant along, as well as a dozen other Panzergrenadiers he talked into joining them. Bäuml, cunning man, handled the bureaucrats.
They traveled the length of Norway by train and when they arrived at the dam’s little station, squatting in the snow and arctic dark, two men in civilian clothes awaited him.
The men sent Bäuml and the others to the barracks and stepped into the headquarters with Fass. They did not introduce themselves, but Fass did not need his pessimism to guess that they were Gestapo. They had the look.
“Do you know why you’re here?” one of the men said. Fass was no aristocrat, but a country upbringing and love of army protocol led him to expect some kind of preamble. He disliked them instantly.
“Light duty,” Fass said, “until I and these men recuperate.”
“Yes,” the other man said, “a Panzergrenadier captain, here. Of the Großdeutschland, no less. That strikes you as odd, no?”
“An officer does what he is told,” Fass said. Discipline.
The men lit cigarettes and did not offer one to Fass. The second man spoke again. He told Fass about the American bandits—gangsters—and their attack a week before. He told him about the lax security at the dam and hinted at the fate of the previous garrison commander. He made the fates of the gangsters and their nearby allies explicit. Fass stiffened. It had never occurred to him to squelch banditry the same way in the west as they had in the east, with its mix of Asiatic barbarity and Jewish Bolshevism. But the men left him to the task at hand, and sent fifteen more frontline veterans a week later.
Fass and Bäuml whipped the indiscipline out of the garrison immediately. No more staring out across the frozen lake, no more wandering from one’s post. He made surprise inspections, mixed his veterans with the reservists, and held all of them to a high standard. He did not believe they would attack the dam again—the Americans may be gangsters, or so the Führer said, but gangsters are not fools—but he would leave the garrison better than he had found it. And he would make that his own discipline.
It was then that he noticed the morale problem. Discipline tightened, and the garrison’s already low morale plummeted. Even his veterans began to sag in their uniforms. The men completed their duties, then lay catatonic in their bunks. They had not even the energy to read, write letters, or sneak a filthy magazine into the latrine. He had read in a novel, long since banned as subversive, about prisoners of war too demoralized even to masturbate, and had not believed it. Now he saw.
He had taken three immediate actions. He exercised them. He had them carry all their supplies overland from the railhead or up from the dock. He had them work on the new E-boat crew barracks in shifts continuously until it was finished. He sent squads to the headquarters by the railhead for even the slightest needs. It was time-consuming and tedious. It gave them something to d
o instead of mope, and it kept them fit. He also increased the frequency of their trips into Narvik. Garrison duty was shit, every soldier knew it, and the cheap nude cartoons of Der Stürmer pinned to barrackroom walls could only do so much for a man. There were plenty of real women in the cities—the sturdy blondes of Norway, no less.
He had finished his inspection, and realized that he had spent most of it—both trips across the dam and the brief look into the ladder well—daydreaming. He worried that his own discipline had slipped, was slipping, and after so much work on his men in such a bleak place that would be a shame. He reordered his thoughts as he came to his command post.
Pfaff came to attention again, and this time Fass returned a proper salute before entering the building.
He looked at his desk but did not sit down. He stood a moment, unsure of what to do. He had inspected the dam twice in close succession. He had not slept in some time. He did not want to read.
He opened the door at the back of his office and entered his quarters, a small, narrow room with a single bed. He found himself standing motionless again. He opened the lid of his phonograph, selected the first platter of Das Rheingold, and set the needle. He walked back into his office, switched on the outdoor loudspeakers, and returned to his room. The music filled the room and, outside, he could hear the prelude ring tinny and distant off the dam, the ice, the lake, the mountainsides. He lowered himself fully clothed to his bed and stared at the bulb in the ceiling.
That had been his final order in his effort to bring the garrison’s morale to the level of its discipline—he ordered that all the lights on the dam burn, constantly. Months of dwindling daylight and finally weeks of total black had to have a terrible effect on a man who was already alone in a cold and strange land. And so he ordered the dam lights on as well as the few perimeter lights, and then the lights on the barracks—some of them brand new—and finally, though he did not order this for the enlisted men, he began leaving his own office and bedroom lights on.
Dark Full of Enemies Page 15