by Bonnie Toews
An imperceptible smile tugged at Quinn’s lips. Not even these prizefighters could stop the surprise in store for the Germans. He had made sure of it.
At Pier Sixteen, the dock was on a man-made canal, which met the junction of rail lines that ended at the town’s bayshore. The long barge was already loaded with the flatcars carrying the sealed drums of heavy water.
Perfect, Quinn noted as he pulled up. Four crewmen from the barge were helping to tie the drums to the tugboat, which would pull them across the sea to Denmark. They were Norwegians. Regret briefly needled Quinn’s conscience. It was unfortunate, he rationalized to himself, but an unavoidable fact of war—Innocent people die.
He produced his shipping orders to the Wehrmacht supply officer stationed at the gangplank. The officer’s eyes bulged.
“Where is this pony?” he demanded crossly.
Quinn pointed to the Westland.
“This is most unexpected. We have no livestock cars for this shipment.”
Quinn’s heart sank. To be defeated by a point of procedure was unthinkable.
“We can easily cordon off an adequate stall with ropes braced to the rail and anchored to the deck. As you can see, the Fuhrer has placed some urgency on this delivery. It would not please him to have his prize gift detained,” he suggested quietly.
A nerve bulged in spasm in the supply officer’s temple as he contemplated Quinn. His lips pursed.
“Naturally. Vossana!” he called to one of the Norwegian crewmen. “Fix up a stall for this pony on the barge.”
The Norwegian looked up in surprise. “A pony?”
He came over to Quinn who showed him the shipping orders.
“The Fuhrer wants a Westland from Norway.” He went over to the pony and patted his neck.
“No problem,” he assured the German officer. “We can make a nice stall for Hitler’s special gift.”
He headed back toward the boat shed and returned with a portable cattle pen.
“You see?” he grinned to Quinn.
While Quinn waited for the Norwegian to install the compound, he whistled off key, a tuneless tew… tew… tew…
Both horses listening to his whistling grew restless. Without warning, each one released his bladder. Their urge was trained to respond to this whistle, and their hard streams splattered on the concrete pier beneath.
The Norwegian crewmen smirked and winked at Quinn.
The Wehrmacht supply officer shrieked in disgust.
“You!” he shouted to a workman. “Get a hose and wash that down.”
The angry tone of the officer made the draught horse nervous. He raised his tail and plopped a neat mound of mushy rank manure on the wharf. The German stood transfixed, staring at the dunghill as though it was a swelling pus boil of bubonic plague. Red rage fired the skin above his collar and shot up from his neck to his ears, to his cheeks, to the translucent skin tightly stretched over the snarled veins threading his temples.
“It’s your pony,” he fumed to Quinn. “I won’t have this mess on my dock. Clean it up,” he hissed between clenched teeth.
Toying with the German’s obsession for spotless order, he asked, “Do you have a shovel?”
“Bring this man a shovel!” bellowed the supply officer to the workman who was hooking up the hose to wash down the yellow rivers of urine already running across the dock.
He looked at Quinn, shrugged, dropped the hose and scuttled back inside the boat shed to find a shovel.
As soon as the stall on the barge was ready, Quinn unhitched the Westland pony and led him over the gangplank and into his makeshift quarters by the port rail.
“Can I help you carry your straw?” one of the Norwegians asked him.
“That won’t be necessary,” Quinn discouraged him.
He went back to the wagon and filled his arms with straw treated with incendiaries. As he passed the flatcars, some of the straw seemed to brush off against their sidings and left a sloppy trail behind him. Returning to the wagon for more straw, he made another trip. The same thing happened.
“What do you think you are doing?” railed the supply officer when he saw the litter Quinn was dropping.
Quinn glanced back at his messy path. “Excuse me. I am so clumsy. I will clean it up.” He walked back to pick up some of the straw.
“Never mind. I want you off my boat.”
“I have to water the Führer’s fine pony.”
“Then do it and be gone.”
The officer glowered as Quinn filled the water bucket half full and carried it with one hand, while he picked up the bundled double bales of hay with the other. The German’s eagle gaze pinned Quinn’s progress step-by-step. This time he managed to reach the pony’s pen without dropping anything. The Nazi turned away to supervise the transfer of heavy equipment from the barge to the dock further aft.
In the stall, Quinn knelt down and untied the bundles of hay. Sandwiched between them appeared to be manure. He gingerly laid it in the corner where the Westland had already deposited fresh dung. The piles matched, Quinn saw with satisfaction, and wondered if the Germans even remembered this was the anniversary of their invasion of Norway.
TWENTY-FIVE
Friday, April 9th, 1943
Lee developed a habit of standing by Grace’s station around the time she expected Rolf’s transmissions. Grace teased her. Ignoring her gentle jibes, Lee kept on talking. Her days were filled with thoughts of Rolf, and her nights were spent yearning for his return.
“We shared such joy and contentment,” she confided to Grace.
“Lee, that’s wonderful! You’ve finally fallen in love.”
“He wants to marry me.”
“When?”
“As soon as he completes this mission.”
Grace squealed with delight. Nearby radio operators glanced at her with annoyance.
“Sorry,” she whispered to them and hugged Lee. “I’m so happy for you.”
A sudden thought furrowed her brow. “Did you tell him you love him?”
Lee shook her head. “No. I meant to. We talked about everything imaginable, and then there was no time left. But Rolf promised he would come back to me, Grace. How I want to believe it! I want him to come back to me.”
“Then believe it, and he will.” Grace’s eyes shone.
“Nothing’s ever that simple, Grace. Nothing!”
“You mean because of Quinn Bergin.”
Lee’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I saw the way you were looking at him when Sir Fletcher was briefing us for Operation Firebug.”
“Watch that active imagination of yours. It could get you in trouble.”
“Maybe. But I am right. You do love Quinn too, don’t you?”
Lee stared down at her black oxford shoes as if she were intent on finding one scruffy spot to shine. “Maybe … once.”
“What happened?” Grace prompted.
Lee paused. “I don’t know. We worked so closely together. I did things for him I wouldn’t do for anyone else, but he always made me feel as if I weren’t good enough. He said he had to keep our relationship strictly professional.”
“That could be true.”
“Yes, but something has happened to him since he’s become a commando. He’s colder, more detached. He lets nothing interfere with his objective. Sometimes he’s so unfeeling.”
“Don’t you think that’s what makes him such a good commando?”
“I suppose,” Lee agreed. “We live side by side with death. Living with it the way we do, we come to fear it less, to see it less as an enemy and more as a fact of life, if for no other reason than we can’t deny it to ourselves. It’s always with us. Sometimes it’s even a merciful companion.”
“Is that why you fell in love with Rolf?”
Lee looked startled. “Because you can’t count on your tomorrows?”
She thought for a moment and shrugged.
“I dunno. No. Definitely not. Rolf showed me I’m not o
nly desirable; I’m also loveable. At last I know what it feels like to be loved by a man, unconditionally, and I have a chance to love him in return.”
“Oh, Lee!” Grace hugged her fiercely. “That’s wonderful!”
Rolf Haukelid climbed the steps of the stabbur in the mountains above the Norsk hydro plant. It was an old storehouse in which he had stashed his radio. In days gone by, the upper floor had been used as an extra guest room and was particularly grand as the villagers believed only the best was good enough for their guests. The floating wooden staircase he ascended reached the finely carved balcony of the loft, ideal for a writer’s hideaway.
Some day, he promised himself, he would build something like it for Lee. The robust smells of corn, apples and fermenting beer rising from the stored goods on the ground floor below reminded him his mission was almost finished. Soon he and Lee would be together again.
Inside the charming guest room comfortably furnished with priceless antique furniture, Rolf pulled out a battered suitcase from under the four-poster bed and lifted it onto the side table. He opened the lid and expertly set up the antenna. He had complained of feeling sick to his assistant and left the heavy water plant to make this special transmission to London. At exactly 1500 hours, he tapped out his call signal.
Grace immediately answered. Beside her, Lee’s face flooded with relief. Listening to his dit-dit-da taps, she recognized her name in Morse code.
“What’s he saying?” she asked.
Grace waved her to shush. As she scribbled out the message, she grinned and beckoned to Lee to look down at her code pad:
ESTER GET HOME FIRES BURNING … STOP … JOB DONE… STOP…
More stutterings followed. Grace continued to take down his rendezvous instructions for the sub. An out-of-place signal interrupted his Morse pattern. Grace glanced up at Lee’s face.
The radiant joy registered there one second before dissolved into ashen horror. She had recognized the QUO code: I’m in imminent danger of capture.
“Noooo …” Her protest came out in a squeaky mew. “Not him too!”
She backed away, shaking her head, repeating, “NO… NO…”
Grace desperately signaled back to Rolf, but the airwaves were dead. He had been cut off.
One of the older operators came over to comfort Lee.
“Those signals are always scary, dearie. I had one earlier this week, but my laddie was back on the air yesterday. You mustn’t give up hope. They depend on us for that, y’a know. To be here when they call us. Come. I’ll make y’a a nice cup o’ tea.”
Lee, trembling, darting her eyes over her shoulder to her last tangible contact with Rolf, let herself be led from the radio room.
Her stricken face tore at Grace.
With a heavy heart, she focused on the radio set, every field agent’s umbilical link to home base.
“Call, Hawk,” she pleaded softly, using his code name, which for her was more familiar.
“For Lee’s sake, please. Dear Lord, protect him with your promise of refuge in Psalm 91. Keep him safe and bring him home. Amen.”
In concentrating on his transmission, Rolf missed the warning footfall on the bottom steps. The piercing creak of the balcony floor on the other side of the open door alerted him. Instinctively, his free hand grabbed his semi-automatic pistol, a Colt .45, while he signed off the emergency letter code, QUO.
He rolled to the floor for cover just as a spray of bullets smashed his transmitting set.
“Drop your gun, Hawk,” ordered a cold voice in accented English.
Rolf raised his head. He had been called by his code name. His stomach lurched. Somewhere in the shattered mess on the table lay his cyanide pill. He had just made the fatal flaw of the overconfident agent. Believing he was home free, he had dropped his guard. With resignation, he dropped his Colt .45 on the floor and pulled himself up to his full height, facing his captors.
Two figures in white Arctic coveralls stood astride the doorway with their MP40 sub-machine guns trained on him. The man who issued the command emerged through the doorway. Barely visible under his hood, the SS peaked cap with the silver Totenhof or “Death’s Head” insignia and the twin silver SS bolts, the runic badges on the corners of his black collar, peeked out of his white ski suit. As he holstered his exquisite Polish Radom, a semi-automatic cavalry pistol German officers favored because of the Browning lock action that made it rigorous, his eyes gleamed with self-satisfaction.
“So, Rolf Haukelid, you are the agent Hawk we have been hunting!”
His tight voice revealed a strained balancing act on the edge of sanity.
Rolf knew if he made one wrong move the commander of the SS security force at Norsk could slip out of control.
The Amanita agent refused to give him the satisfaction of an answer and masked the fear seeping through every pore of his skin, greasing his arm pits, back and crotch. Gas blistered in his bowels. How much did the Gestapo know? Where had he slipped up?
Taking in the Nazi’s nostrils flaring with sadistic eagerness, Rolf steeled himself for the worst. There would be no answers from this beast. Only questions.
“This time we got the heavy water out before your Firebugs could destroy it,” the beast bragged.
“Ja,” he said, quickly detecting the slight widening of Rolf’s eyes. “We know all about your Firebug operation, your plan to plant explosives inside Norsk to blow up our heavy water supply.
“Isn’t that a shame?” he sneered. “So much effort… wasted!”
There was a scurry of jackboots and jabbering of muffled voices on the ground floor.
“What is it?” the Nazi barked down to the men below.
A few seconds later, an SS captain in white coveralls charged up the stairs and entered the room.
“We’ve just received word from the ferry base, Colonel Ketmann. The heavy water cargo exploded at sea. None of it was salvaged.”
Rolf delighted at the shock on Ketmann’s face and laughed triumphantly. “Tsk … tsk … Berlin won’t be happy,” he taunted.
Seething with hatred, Ketmann turned on Rolf.
“Don’t bask in your victory too long, Haukelid,” he spat viciously. “We’ve both been betrayed … and by someone on your own team.”
Disbelief flooded Rolf. Someone on his own team!
“Hang him!” Ketmann snarled at the SS captain and stomped out the door and down the storehouse steps.
The brutal order scarcely appeased Colonel Ludwig Ketmann’s lust for revenge. Driven by his own demons, he snapped on his skis left standing in the drifts against the stabbur and pulled his black wool balaclava over his head. His eyes peering through the slits burned. He adjusted a pair of goggles snugly to his face, tightened the fur-lined hood around his head, dug his poles in, and jumped off, swooshing down the sheerest trail he could pick to the Norsk hydro station at the valley’s bottom.
Matching his skill against the treacherous terrain restored his self-esteem and determination to crush the faceless traitor who had humiliated him. Hanging Haukelid instead of interrogating him was Ketmann’s personal message to the traitor. He would not be thwarted again.
The SS ski squad dragged Haukelid outside and hauled him up to a barren tree at the side of the stabbur. About seven feet off the ground, the horny stub of a severed branch jutted out from its main trunk. The SS soldiers looped a noose of piano wire around Rolf’s neck and hoisted him up until the cord caught on the makeshift tree hook, and then let him go.
His body floundered in the open air. He bucked and kicked, resisting the noose cutting and choking his throat. The frigid cold frosted his last gasps of breath in ribbons of cloud that twined his head like a crown of thorns.
As he continued to writhe, the cord gradually grew tighter and tighter until slowly, ever so slowly, in excruciating pain, Rolf Haukelid strangled to death. His last coherent thoughts were of Lee. He had promised her he would return.
PART FOUR
“Greater love hath no man th
an this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
JOHN 15:13
TWENTY-SIX
Friday, September 24th, 1944
Prime Minister Winston Churchill had requested an urgent meeting with Project Amanita’s director, Sir Fletcher McAlister, and the chief coordinator of Roosevelt’s new spy organization in London, Morgan Saunders of the OSS, at his personal chamber in the ‘Hole in the Ground’ as he called it, a labyrinth of tunnels converted into emergency war headquarters under Whitehall. He greeted them in bed.
Sir Fletcher immediately noted Saunders’ crafty move. He slipped into the bedside chair leaving Sir Fletcher to face Churchill from the other seat at the foot of his bed. The former naval person was in a thundering mood.
“Am I given to understand that Dr. Nielsen finally consented to smuggle out his journal to us and it’s been lost at sea?”
“That’s correct, Mr. Prime Minister.”
Sir Fletcher braced himself for the brunt of Churchill’s wrath.
“How much more insufferable stupidity must we endure?”
“It’s a regrettable accident,” Sir Fletcher acknowledged.
Churchill glowered. “Nielsen detailed all his results in nuclear fission. If his journal washes up on shore and is handed over to German authorities, can they grasp the significance of what he’s talking about?”
Sir Fletcher cleared his throat. He felt the rim of his droopy mustache folding over his upper lip, and his mouth receded into a thin, grim line. “That’s difficult to determine, sir. We can’t project the condition of the recovered journal or the inclination of the person or persons who may discover it.”