Dark Full of Enemies

by Jordan M. Poss

  Another minute went by. Two of the three in the path woke and groaned and groggily stirred. The wounded Germans tried to stand but could not, and finally one began to crawl the way he had come. He moaned pitifully, called someone’s name. Magnus watched and waited, peered into the darkness downhill.

  Slowly more Germans appeared from the dark and the trees. Magnus counted fifteen, though he could not see well enough to be sure. He did not see any of the machine guns, which worried him—the Germans were husbanding their men. But they had them in the open. Now to wait for Fredrik and his detonator. Its leads connected to ten pounds of TNT planted behind loose rocks facing out from the pass, toward the Germans. When Fredrik blew the TNT, they would open fire.

  Four Germans came forward from the rest, slung their rifles and bent to help the wounded. They spoke in encouraging voices. One of them said something and laughed, sharing some old joke with the wounded man, who laughed and moaned. In the silence of that moment, before Fredrik detonated the charge and the hillside flashed and disappeared under dust and snow and shrapnel, before they opened up with their rifles and submachine guns and Amund’s Bren chopped downhill at the German infantry, Magnus could hear, faint and far behind them in the fjord, the Hardråde’s engine, throttled up. Tonktonktonktonktonk.

  McKay rolled Stallings over. Shots from the fleeing Germans had torn two holes in his jacket, one just above the right collarbone and another in the back of the right shoulder. He had no blood on his jacket, but with Stallings coughing up droplets, the shot had at least nicked a lung. McKay remembered Guadalcanal.

  “I’m sorry,” Stallings said.

  “Shut up, Grove. You didn’t do nothing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Get up,” McKay said. He started to help him up but Stallings cried out as they lifted him and two shots cracked past. The riflemen across the dam had gotten the range.

  McKay let Stallings down and he and Graves dragged him to cover. McKay felt hot. He wiped at his face and looked down the staircase in the cliff, to the wharf and the E-boat and to the dark fjord beyond. He could hear, faint and far off, Jørgen coming for them. Like a watch ticking in cotton, he thought, and, Cotton ticking. He felt himself grinning and shook his head. He turned back to Stallings. Graves had unwrapped a bandage and slapped it onto the chest wound.

  “What happened, sir?” Graves said. He wrapped gauze around Stallings’s torso and cinched it tight. Stallings grunted.

  He had found Petersen dodging between the huts, reloading the Sten. Together they had flushed the handful of Germans away from the barracks toward the dam, toward Graves and Stallings.

  “Petersen?”

  Petersen looked away. “There were too many.”

  Graves swore and checked his work on Stallings. Ollila fired. On the other side of the ridge, something exploded—a small, quick boom. They started and looked up, behind them.

  “Frag grenade,” McKay said. “German reinforcements. This is it. Graves?”

  “Sir.”

  “You seal that door?”

  “The fuckers can pound at it all they want. Sir.”

  “Outstanding. Time?”

  Graves checked his timepiece. “Thirty-nine minutes.”

  McKay looked out at the fjord again, at the darkness beyond the dam lights. “Jørgen is coming. We can’t climb back out, so we sit tight and hold them off until he gets here. Then we run like hell for the dock. Grove?”

  Stallings looked at him. “Sorry, Joe.”

  “You okay to move?”

  “Hurts like hell.”

  “I know it.”

  A second explosion, a big one, shook the fjord and rolled like thunder down the mountain walls. From the ridge came the sounds of rifle fire, a machine gun, and then the answering German weapons. They sat for a moment with the rattle and pop of the weapons reaching them like distant party sounds. Stallings had compared the fire on the beach in Sicily to fireworks. McKay had thought the same thing, several times, on the Canal.

  Submachine gun fire woke them. Bullets snapped and sung past and chipped at the concrete building and tore at the snow. They pulled their legs in and McKay climbed over Stallings and Graves to the corner.

  “Grenade,” he said to Graves. He leaned out, fired a long burst from the Thompson and saw a pair of men duck to cover behind the concrete parapet of the dam.

  “Ready,” Graves said.

  “Chuck it.”

  McKay fired again and Graves stepped out and lobbed the grenade into the dark. It dropped onto the path, behind the parapet, and they ducked back. McKay heard the Germans curse, the grenade explode, and some survivor cough and feebly swear. Another voice ordered them back, and with one more burst at the stairwell, they fell back. Reloaded, McKay leaned out and sprayed fire across the top of the parapet to encourage them. Rifle fire reached for him from across the dam, and he dropped back to cover.

  He reloaded the Thompson and looked up at the cliffs, the hills from whence they had come. Stallings and Graves spoke his thoughts.

  “How that lot get so close?”

  “Where the hell’d the goddam sniper get to?”

  Ollila had worked the E-boat barracks as long as he could without endangering McKay and Petersen. Then the lights had gone out—a bold move by the Captain, but one that put Ollila in danger by robbing him of his best cover, the yellow haze of the lights, against which even his muzzle flashes were hard for the Germans to see. When this darkness descended he had shifted to firing on targets across the dam. Then McKay had found Petersen in the dark and together flushed the remaining German sailors out, drove them toward the dam, and to Graves and Stallings. Ollila could not believe it when he saw it, but was happy to shoot them down as they fled across the long hard arc of the dam. Some of them simply gave up and lay down below the rampart. He remembered, and took an occasional look to see if they had moved. A few did, and he shot them.

  A pair of officers had spent the time since the shooting began dashing back and forth, organizing for a counterattack. He had watched a squad form up in the open, then fired on and brought down three of them, two fatally wounded. The rest ran for cover. The wounded he let crawl away.

  The officers put picked riflemen at high points in the camp—above the command post, on the roof of a barracks, on the far side so they had cover. A few dared stand in the open to take occasional potshots. Ollila harried them and shot two, drove the others to cover too often to be useful.

  Then he saw a squad run from the cover of the barracks to the far dam entrance, a concrete building like the one on this side. They filed in. After several minutes, they came back out, and Ollila shot two who had grown careless.

  Meanwhile the reinforcements had come up, and the Norwegians nearby had fired on them. They had only two automatic weapons between them but they held the Germans off and—judging by the cries he heard—inflicted more damage than he had expected. The fire slackened, and the fight died down with the hollow booms of two German grenades. He looked up from his scope and listened. The Germans were retreating. The Norwegians had beaten them back.

  Then he heard the whistle. A pea whistle, high and shrill above every other noise in the daytime night. He turned from the dam and climbed up to the edge of the ridge. He glassed the dark below and saw bodies, some wounded crawling or squirming in their throes. He looked farther, at the headquarters camp. More men had fallen in—fifty, sixty, he could not tell—and then they shut their lights off. He heard the whistle again. The Germans had called up the rest of the garrison.

  He looked back at the dam in time to see a few soldiers climb down the far bank and disappear behind the dam. He swore, out loud, the most terrible oath he knew.

  He jumped up and ran across the face of the hill. The shreds of his suit flapped around him. He climbed over the ridgeline and ran farther, then crossed back over to a shelf where he could take up a new position. He threw himself down, spread out, steadied his breathing and put his eye to the sight and the sight to the
dam. Just then, the cloudcover passed and faraway pinpoint stars came out. The darkness thinned, and Ollila saw.

  Behind the dam walking flat-footed on the frozen lake, a German lieutenant led twenty men in white and camouflage. The Panzergrenadiers, the crack new men of the garrison. They moved at a shambling jog, widely dispersed. They had already made it halfway.

  He heard submachine gun fire at the dam as he reloaded his rifle. He wanted to start with a full magazine and make all five rounds count. He clapped the bolt shut and found the German lieutenant and fired. His jacket puffed and he staggered against the dam. Ollila raised the rifle a hair—the Germans stood lined up before him, ready for his plunging fire—breathed, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught the fourth man in line in the neck. His next shot crumpled a man’s skull. The next struck a man flat in the chest. Ollila saw the breath thumped from his body in a cloud, and the man sat gaping and clutching at himself as Ollila sighted and killed a sergeant.

  He reloaded. He kept firing. The Germans had stalled and looked for cover behind the pillars of the floodgates. They began moving ahead one pillar at a time. A few fired wildly upward at him as their comrades worked their way forward. Ollila fired and reloaded, and again. He heard the Hardråde coming, and reloaded.

  McKay heard Ollila firing again and looked up at the cliffs where they stood against the clearing sky. Ollila had shifted to the right. He understood immediately.

  “They’re flanking us,” he said. He ran low across the path, past the bodies at the edge of the dam walkway and knelt by the parapet. A few rifle shots hummed well behind him. He checked the Thompson and leaned out. The Germans on the lake had taken cover but were moving steadily forward, leapfrogging from cover to cover. A few took potshots at Ollila but McKay knew the Finn would not be intimidated. He pulled out his binoculars and glassed the Germans on the lake, the command post, just in time to see another squad scramble down the snowy far embankment.

  He dashed back to cover, squatted, and glassed the fjord. Out in the black he saw the Hardråde coming, turning a white wake behind it. He heard the engine banging away at twice its usual tempo.

  “Jørgen’s coming,” McKay said. “Grove, you okay to move?”

  “Yes, goddammit.”

  “All right. Petersen.” Petersen, facing the dam, submachine gun ready, turned his head and looked at him. “Get Stallings down the stairs. Graves and I will cover.”

  Petersen nodded.

  “All right, go. I’ll follow.”

  Stallings looked at him. “What—”

  “Go!”

  Petersen grabbed Stallings and heaved him to his feet. Stallings swore. McKay turned from them, looked up at the cliffs, at the dam, and ran again to the parapet.

  There were more rifle shots, now, and more accurate—the bullets snapped and zinged. He crouched at the edge of the dam and looked around the corner again at the Germans. The point man stood not a hundred feet from him. As McKay looked, the man glanced up—a babyfaced private who squinted ahead into the dim light and then gaped in surprise at seeing the enemy. McKay leaned back and pulled two grenades from the pouch on his belt.

  He gripped the first grenade in his entire fist, the spoon in his palm, and pulled the pin. He took a breath, then stood and stepped fully into view of the men on the lake. The young private looked up at him again. The whites of his eyes stood out in the dark like the fishing boat’s wake. McKay put the whole strength of his arm into a baseball throw and ducked back.

  The Germans shouted and the grenade exploded. He did not wait—he leaned out again and dropped to his belly, his eye already at the Thompson’s sights. He fired up and down the line of floodgates, chipping concrete and ice and puffing loose snow in little clouds. The Thompson jammed again. He swore and rolled back for his second grenade. He heard shouts as he pulled the pin, which caught halfway through the spoon. He jerked it loose, gripped and threw without looking, and ran for the staircase. He reached the top and faced the cliffs. He shouted, “Ollila! Ollila!” and took the stairs two at a time.

  One of the dying Germans there reached feebly for him as he bounded past. He caught up to Stallings, Graves, and Petersen halfway down. The Hardråde was perhaps four hundred yards from the wharf and closing. The engine had slowed as it approached. McKay fell in behind the group and went backwards down the stairs and watched the top, working to clear the jam in his Thompson.

  They were a hundred feet from the dock when the Germans opened fire.

  The first shots smashed into the cliff behind and below them. McKay looked at the far side of the fjord. The riflemen had broken from cover and taken up positions on the top of the dam, beside the entrance, and on the switchbacks of a path to the foot of the dam. Six or seven of them fired continuously. McKay realized that, with their white camouflage snowsuits against the cliffs, his team made brilliant shooting gallery targets.

  “Keep moving—go.”

  A rifleshot pinged off the handrail. Another snapped past McKay’s ear and splinters of stone pattered against his back. Another.

  “Shit!”

  Graves.

  “You hit?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  The Germans from the lake ice reached the top of the stairs and opened fire. Bullets zipped and snapped from two directions, all descending upon them like hail. They reached the dock and ran across it in a storm of splintering wood and chipped rock. The boat neared, engine reversed as it glided in, just out of reach. Petersen grunted and swore in Norwegian. Graves pointed at the docked E-boat, shouted, “Sir?”

  “Leave it. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Aye, sir—”

  A bullet smacked into flesh and Stallings spasmed and fell behind Petersen.

  “Grove?”

  McKay slowed his stride and went to kneel beside him and something struck his leg. After hours, days in the cold, he noticed the white heat of the bullet first. It fascinated him. He pondered it with detachment, even as the stroke unstrung his leg like a hammerblow and dropped him to the planks.

  He righted himself and looked at Stallings. “Grove?”

  Stallings did not move.

  McKay pushed himself to one knee and hobbled forward. Graves took him by one arm. Petersen lifted Stallings. The boat swung broadside into the dock, rocking them, and crunched into the bow of the E-boat. The E-boat’s hull splintered and its fore moorings snapped. The boat began an angular drift, tethered only at the stern.

  They swung over the wooden gunwales as the fire rapped at them and blew chips from the painted boards and sprayed them with fountains of the fjord’s waters. And then smoke billowed and the Hardråde’s engine snarled and rattled and they slid backwards from the dock, McKay and the team in the lee of the gunwales watching the dam’s remaining lights dim with distance. The gunfire stopped.

  McKay did not move from cover until the latticed rail bridge spanned the sky in the darkness. Until then, all he heard was the boat’s engine, the rattle of gunfire and grenades across the ridge, and, in a bass murmur audible from the wheelhouse, Jørgen praying at the helm.

  Magnus saw the second wave of Germans coming, spread through the dark rustling pines in battle formation, just as the Finn, the sniper, slid downhill into the pass, came up running, and dashed past shouting, “To the boat! Run!”

  Magnus ran. He took up his rifle and followed the sniper. The Germans fired. He heard bullets—felt them, horribly—all around him in the dark. He thought of the legends his grandmother had told him, the old stories, and imagined himself pawed by trolls in the night. His whole body went cold despite the sweat and the heat and the dash across the crags. He ran harder.

  Behind him, Fredrik detonated the last of the manned explosives. The shock threw him and the Finn to the ground. He rose and helped the Finn up. He staggered, tore off the strange cape of rags and scraps, the goggles on his head, broke into a lope, and worked himself up to a run. More bullets, fading shouts, and they ran alone through the winter dark.


  On the way they had discussed an escape route, a narrow path better suited to mountain goats than men, but a place where they could drop quickly to the fjord and the boat if they needed to. Magnus, who had lived on the fjord since boyhood, knew it. He took the lead.

  They reached the place some minutes later, a spot well beyond the rail bridge he and Håkon had mined, with the dam and the headquarters camp far away.

  Magnus pointed at the trail, a broken line in the cliffs following some old seam in the rock, turned up and sharded eons before. He dropped to it, the Finn followed, and they worked their way down.

  They had made it halfway down when they heard others overhead. Magnus looked up, thought he saw movement in the darkness, but looked to his footing and kept climbing. Below him, the boat sidled toward the cliff. Men on deck looked up at him. He found himself about to wave, grew angry at himself, and continued downward.

  A rifle cracked above them and a shot burst at the boat’s waterline. The men on deck ducked and scattered. More shots, closer. A pair burst against the rock nearby. The Germans had seen him. Magnus jumped.

  He had dived into the fjord in winter before, but the cold was a feeling that he could not fully remember—it was too strong. He crashed through the black water and instantly stroked outward, stopped the plunge, pulled himself to the surface and gasped. He made for the boat, his clothes already a leaden shroud on his limbs and his fingers and face numb.

  Someone else hit the water behind him, and two more. Gunshots echoed, bounced and caromed between the cliffs. The water burst in geysers around them. He looked up at the boat, hands reached for him, and he flopped aboard. Then the Finn, gasping, and two more—Håkon, yes, and Amund, somehow clutching the big machine gun. Håkon screamed—Magnus could not understand him, his mind had been shocked out of him, but then it came to him, “Go on! Go on! Go on! We’re it! We’re it!” They lay in a line like four sopping air-stunned fish, while the American saboteurs fired at the Germans on the cliffs and Jørgen gunned the engine.