Mission Telemark

by Amanda Mitchison

  “Och, I suppose there’s no harm you knowing now,” said the Colonel. He spoke in a slightly dreamy voice. “It was a nice wee sabotage project we’d been working on. We were planning to export the rats to France. Get our people to plant ’em down in the boiler rooms of the German munitions factories and transport depots. The idea was that if a boilerman found one of these rats he’d just pick it up with his shovel and fling it in the fire. You know, a fire’s the best place for them. Nobody likes a dead rat in their wastepaper bin…”

  “Or in their bedroom cupboard,” I murmured, but the Colonel’s face didn’t flicker.

  “Sadly, it didn’t work,” he continued. “Somehow German intelligence found out about the idea and factory workers have been warned to look out for stuffed rats. Cat got out of the bag, as it were. So now we’re left with hundreds of stuffed rats. Terrible waste. Don’t know how to shift them.” He gave us one of his wry grins. “A bit disappointing, don’t you think? I’d have hoped for a bigger bang than that.”

  Then he wandered out, saying he needed to look for Mrs Collins. Meanwhile Fred came over to the tea tray, blew the ash off a slice of fruit cake and stuffed it in his mouth.

  Tonight, when I came upstairs and opened my toilet bag, I found my lock pick was still there. But wrapped around it was a small note in the Colonel’s copperplate hand. It said:

  Jakob P. Stromsheim

  6TH DECEMBER 1942, DRUMINCRAIG HOUSE

  I’m afraid I’ve let the log slip. The first day Åse gave it back to me I was too tired to write anything. Then another day went by, and another and another.

  Four days have passed and such a lot has happened that I don’t think I’m quite the same person I was when I first came. I can now assemble and fire a Sten gun in 36 seconds (48 seconds with a blindfold). And I’m becoming pretty fluent at Morse, although I’m not as good as Freddie – I bet he even thinks in dashes and dots.

  Freddie’s eyebrows have started to grow in again. And Lars has settled in as much as he ever will – he’s a loner and never talks when he doesn’t have to.

  He does have one strange quirk, though – a fear of being crammed into small spaces. He has twice refused to go on Sneydy’s potholing expeditions and I was rather surprised when the Colonel let him off.

  The basic training in Monmouthshire got us fit and able to fire rifles and do parachute jumps. But this “fine-tuning” (as the Colonel calls it) has been harder than I could ever have believed. I’ve climbed more cliffs and wobbled along more tightropes than I can count. We memorize routes, we always travel as if in enemy territory, keeping to the trees and away from the skyline. We’re also doing a lot of skiing, but it’s not like skiing in Norway. Here it’s all howling winds and black ice.

  All this, as Colonel Armstrong likes to say, is very “character building”. So too are the classes on how to stand up to enemy interrogation, or jump from a fast-moving train, or kill a mad dog with your bare hands (I’m not going to write about that – it’s too gruesome).

  We’ve also discovered that the Colonel and Sergeant Sneyd have a particular love of blades. They’ve given each of us our own specially weighted, extra-sharp, double-bladed combat knife – a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. The sergeant insists that we each have to be able to wield our knife “as delicately as an artist uses a paintbrush”. And, like artists, we have to act instinctively – the moves must be quick as reflexes. So we practise and we practise and we practise.

  Today we finally found out what our mission is to be (I hope I’ve got Freddie’s explanations correct – I only understand the science very hazily).

  It started with a special meeting that the Colonel called this morning.

  It was about 10.30 a.m. when we were summoned to the library. There we found the Colonel standing in front of the fireplace with his arms behind his back. Something about his manner told me he had something important to say.

  When we’d all sat down the Colonel nodded to Sneydy, who was hovering by the window. Sneydy closed the curtains and, as they’re green, a strange aquarium-like light immediately filled the room. The Colonel looked down at us from over his glasses (why can’t he ever just take them off?) and began his speech.

  “We’ve come to the time when you children need to be told what’s in store for you. As you know, we have chosen you to go on an important mission. It won’t be easy and it won’t be safe. Indeed, I cannot even assure you that you’ll survive. But you’ll be risking your necks for a cause more important than anything you can possibly imagine. This mission may decide the course of the war. And if it doesn’t go ahead the whole of London – eight million people – could be destroyed in a flash.”

  The Colonel paused for a moment to let this awful idea sink in, then he went on. “First of all I need to give you a wee demonstration.”

  He took a glass of water from the coffee table and held it up in the air.

  “You see this water? Anything unusual about it?”

  I stared blankly at the glass. It seemed perfectly ordinary. I looked over at Freddie and he shrugged – he clearly didn’t think there was anything unusual either.

  The Colonel unscrewed the lid of an ice box and, with a pair of tongs, he picked out two ice cubes and plopped them into the glass of water.

  He held up the glass again.

  “Anything unusual now?”

  There was something strange about it, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Nothing unusual?” the Colonel asked me again. He was getting a little impatient. “Have a closer look. Take a sip if you want.”

  The Colonel passed the glass to me and I took a sip. It was perfectly ordinary water. But there was something not quite right. What was it? Then, at last, I twigged.

  “The ice! Ice is meant to float. This ice has sunk!”

  The Colonel rolled his eyes. “Well, that took you a while! Does anyone know what this is? Miss Jeffries? Petersen? Haukerd?”

  “It’s not ordinary ice,” said Freddie, twiddling with a bit of fluff on his jumper and staring up at a little brownish watercolour on the wall. He continued, “It must be heavy water – deuterium oxide, or 2H20. It’s similar to water – H20 – but the hydrogen atom is made of the heavy isotope deuterium. There’s a proton and a neutron in the nucleus of each atom, instead of just one proton on its own as you get in an ordinary hydrogen atom.” And he did a little diagram for us.

  “This kind of ice takes longer to melt – its melting point is 3.8 degrees Celsius. Heavy water is a very stable medium for chemical reactions. There are some really interesting things that you can do with it. Am I boring you all to death?”

  “Go on,” said the Colonel.

  “Heavy water is used as a moderator – it can help slow down and control chemical reactions. A few years ago there was a lot of work done with splitting the atom. It’s a new field called nuclear science. Take uranium, for example. It’s the heaviest element and it’s fissile – in other words it has a big atom that can be broken apart. If you bombard uranium with neutrons and split it, an enormous quantity of heat is produced. But what’s even more important is this: when a uranium atom splits you also get other neutrons coming away at the side of the atom. It’s a bit like when you chop a loaf of bread and crumbs fall down. Well, these neutrons – the atomic crumbs, if you like – then collide with other atoms, leading to more atoms splitting. You get a chain reaction that increases exponentially. One atom splits, then two atoms, then four atoms, then eight atoms, then sixteen and so on. You can generate enormous amounts of heat and that means you can cause huge explosions – far greater than anything we’ve seen before.”

  “How d’you know all this?” asked the Colonel. For once he looked a bit discombobulated.

  “It’s amazing what you can order through Barnet public library,” replied Freddie, fingers still twiddling on that bit of fluff. Then he added, “Well, you used to be able to do that. There’s been nothing published recently. Must be to do with the war—”

/>   Freddie stopped. He blinked slowly. “Excuse me, sir. But if scientists can control chain reactions, they could make huge, super-powerful bombs. Is this what you meant when you were talking earlier about London being destroyed?”

  The Colonel smiled. “Haukerd, you may have two left feet and be the worst shot this side of the Great Glen, but you’ve got a good brain in there. And you’ve hit the nail on the head. We know that German physicists are working on making a bomb – a bomb which will harness the energy from splitting the uranium atom. This bomb will be a hundred times more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen. And if Adolf Hitler gets his hands on such a bomb, he’ll be able to obliterate London, Washington, New York. You name it. There’s just one thing he lacks…” Here the Colonel raised the glass of water, and jiggled the ice cubes.

  “Heavy water,” said Freddie tonelessly.

  The Colonel looked at the glass in his hand. “It doesn’t seem like much, but this stuff is pricey. It’s difficult and time-consuming to produce – there is a complex extraction process. And at present the only place in the world that makes significant quantities of heavy water is a hydro-electric plant in Vemork, up in the mountains of Norway.”

  The Colonel gave us one of his grim smiles. “And that’s where you lot come in. Your mission is to go into occupied Norway. We will parachute you into the mountains of the Hardanger Plateau, west of Oslo. From there you will make your way to the Norsk Hydro power station at Vemork. The Norsk Hydro is perched on the edge of a cliff, hence all the climbing practice you’ve been doing. You’ll enter the basement of the building, lay charges and then escape. So how does that sound?”

  I just sat there numbly in my chair. Nobody said anything. I remembered that in one of the Colonel’s letters at the beginning of the log he suggested we might “come to grief” on the trip, so I simply didn’t know what to think.

  I looked at Åse, who was looking at me with an expression that was part smile and part grimace.

  “Does anyone feel they don’t want to go ahead with this?” the Colonel continued. “Does anyone want to leave the room? There’s no obligation to take part, though you know what your king and your country expect of you.”

  “How do we get away afterwards?” asked Åse.

  “You’ll make your way to Sweden, which is about 400 kilometres away. You’ll have skis, of course, and some of it’s a nice downhill run. When you get to Sweden, one of our operatives will take care of you.”

  The Colonel looked at each of us – first Lars, then Åse, then Freddie. They all nodded.

  Lastly the Colonel turned to me.

  His words were still ringing in my ears. Could I, Jakob Stromsheim, really alter the course of the war? Maybe I’d die. Maybe my whole life had been building up to this moment. Was this what I was destined to do? And what about Mother? What would she think? That was what clinched it for me – thinking what Mother would want me to do.

  So, fool that I am, I nodded too.

  The Colonel gave a quick smile and said to Sergeant Sneyd, “I thought we’d picked the right chaps for the job.”

  “I’m not a chap,” hissed Åse.

  The Colonel raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Chaps and chappess,” he corrected himself. “There are two things I want you to realize. First, you’ve all been picked for different reasons; each of you has a specific purpose in this mission. Haukerd, you are in charge of communications. Miss Jeffries, your prime duty is explosives, but we are also relying on your size to enable you to squeeze into tiny spaces. Petersen, you are the outdoor survival expert. And Stromsheim, you must lead the mission. Each of you has to do your particular bit and more. Each of you is responsible. There’s no room for passengers.

  “My second point is this. Stromsheim has the temperament and the judgement and the steadiness of character that are perhaps the most important of human qualities, and his job is to hold the party together. As for the rest of you, what Stromsheim says goes. He is the leader. He decides. You do what he says, even if you don’t agree with him.”

  “But sir,” I said, blushing slightly. “Why don’t you just bomb the hydro plant from the sky? Surely that would be easier?”

  “You’re quite right – that would be far simpler,” replied the Colonel. “But it’s risky. As Petersen knows, there are people living in that valley – at least 2,000 in the village of Rjukan. If we accidentally hit the Mosvatn dam, billions of litres of water would sweep down the valley, obliterating everyone and everything for miles around. There are also some liquid ammonia storage tanks at the bottom of the valley. If you’ve ever seen an ammonia explosion you wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy. So I’m afraid sabotage is the only answer.”

  “How long do we have to prepare for this?” I asked.

  “You leave on the next full moon. That’s two days from now,” said the Colonel.

  “But, sir, it’s December!” I blurted out. “We’re landing on the Hardanger Plateau. It’ll be snow-bound. And what about the blizzards? You can die in minutes up there.”

  “The temperature goes down to minus thirty degrees Celsius,” added Freddie.

  The Colonel, who was reaching into his pocket for a scrap of paper as we spoke, nodded. “You’re quite right, lad. And the wind-chill factor can make it twice as cold.”

  “Isn’t this madness?” I asked. “Even wild animals starve to death up there. Nobody goes up on the Hardanger in winter.”

  “Precisely,” said the Colonel. “Nobody goes there. So nobody will see you. You couldn’t have a better hiding place.”

  “Hold it, everyone!” Åse was on her feet. “Why are we going? Colonel, why do you want kids for this mission? Why aren’t you using trained paratroopers? They’re bigger. They’re stronger. Why us?”

  “As you know, we’ve already lost a whole team of special agents, so we’re trying a different approach. Now have a look at this,” the Colonel continued nonchalantly, “and this concerns you in particular, Miss Jeffries.” The Colonel’s piece of paper was now flat on the coffee table. It showed a diagram of the side elevation of a complex, six-storey building.

  “This is the Vemork power plant. And here next to the door—” the Colonel’s finger rested on the side of the tower where the steps ran down into the basement of the plant “—is an electrical cable duct about thirty centimetres square. It’s the one unguarded way down to the heavy water stores. No adult could fit through this passageway. But you, Miss Jeffries, could scuttle down it fast as a ferret. Though you’d better not eat too many of Mrs Collins’ puddings or you might just get stuck.” He saw the expression on Åse’s face and added quickly, “I’m joking, of course.

  “And there’s another reason for sending you to Norway. There is the element of surprise. Nobody suspects children. Nobody thinks a bunch of kids could bomb a power station. They think children wouldn’t have the strength or stamina. They’re right to an extent. The most important thing will be to eat enough to maintain your strength.

  “And of course, if anything goes wrong and you are picked up, you must stay silent. Don’t try to be clever under interrogation. Don’t try and explain. Say nothing. The Germans aren’t very kind to saboteurs. And they know what we’re after.”

  Jakob P. Stromsheim

  6TH DECEMBER 1942, DRUMINCRAIG HOUSE

  I’m writing this in bed.

  For lunch Mrs Collins surpassed herself: there was fillet steak with mountains of chips, followed by caramel apple turnovers. Yet the meal was a sombre affair. We just sat there, lost in thought. No one spoke and no one had much appetite. Even Freddie didn’t finish what was on his plate.

  All through the meal something was nagging at the back of my brain. Immediately after lunch, I went up the winding stairs to the Colonel’s study and knocked on the door.

  “Enter,” he growled.

  The Colonel was sitting back with his feet on his desk and his pipe in his mouth. The air was thick with smoke and the Colonel cut it with a curved dagger that he flicked from
hand to hand – swish, swish, swish. Every now and then he spun the knife in a high arc through the air and caught it by the hilt.

  I must have been gawping stupidly at him, for suddenly the Colonel spoke quite sharply.

  “Well, what is it, boy?” Swish, swish, swish, went the dagger.

  “Well, sir…” I began, trying not to look at the knife.

  “Spit it out!”

  Swish, swish, swish.

  I didn’t know how to start the conversation, so I began with a question.

  “Sir,” I stumbled, “what are the chances that any of us will return from this mission?”

  He considered this for a moment and then said, “You’re children and you’re facing impossible odds. The chances were never going to be good.”

  “You say ‘impossible odds’. Do you really think our chances are that bad?”

  “Och, technically speaking, you’re bound to get killed,” said the Colonel amiably. He chewed on his pipe for a minute and then added, “As I said, you’re children. Nobody in their right mind sends children on such a mission. But personally I see things differently. I think people always underestimate kids. I know what you can do. The assault courses you and the others have been on at Drumincraig are no different from those tackled by our adult trainees. Maybe a few more hand-holds on the climbs, but that’s the only real difference.”

  Listening to the Colonel talk about the prospect of being “technically” dead seemed to focus my mind. I had to tell him what had been worrying me.

  “Sir, I do have one real concern about this mission. It’s my mother. Ever since my father went missing things have been a bit difficult for her. I know that you want me to go, and I know that she would want me to go. I would be letting both of you down if I didn’t. But I don’t think I can leave her. She needs me at home.”

  The Colonel put his knife down. “Jakob, don’t worry,” he said quietly. “We sent one of our men to visit your mother on Tuesday – we needed parental permission before we asked any of you to do this.”