by Andrew Gross
Surely Lund had his.
One of the crew, whose cousin was in jail on a petty vandalism charge, finally admitted under questioning that the NS officer had indeed been on the boat and had drowned on the crossing.
“Drowned?” Lund finally felt he was getting somewhere. “How?”
“They said he had gone in for a swim. But it was clear. They threw him. Over the side.”
“What are you saying?” Lund’s blood snapped to attention. This was murder. A crime against the state. “Who?” he demanded.
“Two of the passengers.” The crewman gave a hapless shrug. “Dressed as workers. But they surely didn’t act the part.”
“Workers…?” There were not many workers with the nerve to do something that brazen and rebellious. “I have some photos I’d like you to take a look at,” Lund said. He opened his desk drawer and took out a file.
The crewman muttered that that was all he could say now and had to go. He got up to leave.
“Of course. I understand your hesitation completely.” Lund nodded, feigning sympathy for the crewman’s position and placing the album of photographs pointlessly on his desk. “Unless, of course, you want your cousin to be taken out and put against a wall and shot, for simply smashing a store window while drunk. That would be a shame. It’s almost out of my hands.”
His color blanching, it was like the strength went out of the crewman’s legs and he sat back down.
“Good.” Lund opened the book of photographs. “Please take your time.”
Ashen, the man leafed slowly through the pages of faces. It was clear he was going against all his inner conviction in betraying a countryman. No matter, he was here. One that he seemed to pause on just a moment too long was a boyish-looking fellow from Vigne, a nearby village, who was known to be among those who had joined the Free Army. Strollman was the rebel’s name. Jens. Lund stopped the crewman, putting a hand on his arm when he saw the man’s hesitation, his eyes beading on him sharply as if to say: Was it him? This one?
The crewman finally lifted his gaze slowly. “That’s one.”
Lund’s blood surged. He had him. “And now the other…?” He put the file back in front of the ferry crewman. The other could be anyone, he knew. Any of a thousand who fought with this man in the resistance. Not even necessarily from around here. But as the man looked on, Lund already had framed an idea.
If one was this Strollman, the other might well have been a friend of his. There was one Lund knew who was known to have been among the fighters. The two had grown up together. Lund went to his drawer and dug through his files. He came back with another photo, an old one. Taken from their school yearbook, the only one he had of the man. He pointed to the face. “Look here,” he said to the seaman. And waited.
Slowly, the crewman let out a breath and shrugged almost imperceptibly. “Yes. Him too.”
“The two of them only?”
Another breath out the crewman’s nostrils. “Yes. Them only.”
“Thank you.” Lund closed the book and smiled. “I think the evidence against your cousin has been misplaced somewhere.”
Kurt Nordstrum.
Lund had known him as well. Lund had been a year older in school, but in the classrooms here, small as they were, one knew everyone. Even those you watched from the back of the room and secretly despised. Nordstrum and his friends were known to have fought with the king’s army, or what was left of it. A ragtag resistance. At first, they had created a lot of mischief for the Germans in the mountains, as far away as Lillehammer and Voss. Lund stared at the ruggedly handsome face. He was always the ringleader, he recalled. The kind that everyone admired. Catching a slippery eel like that could easily mean another bar on his lapel.
In school, Lund had always sat in the back of the class and watched all the girls and the attention go to people like this, people who skied effortlessly and were quick with the answers. To people like Nordstrum, everything seemed to come easily and naturally. Still, they had no understanding of what it was like to have to earn what they had. To have had to hunger for it. That was how it was for Lund, for whom nothing had ever come effortlessly or without careful plotting.
Years ago, he was convinced the path he had taken was a way to rescue Norway from the trap of liberalism and debt. He knew that he served a puppet government that simply did the bidding of the Nazis. He knew he was despised by most of his fellow countrymen; even those who fed him information were usually paid off or merely collected some favor, as the ferry crewman just had. Trudi, his plump, ambitious wife, had always pushed him in that direction. “You’ll amount to nothing in this war. The Germans will win, you’ll see.” She’d made this case from the start. “They have the will to fight. And they’ll look around for the ones who have similar backbone. Who have helped them, Dieter. And what will you be doing when this all happens?” She cast her eyes on him with a knifing disdain. “Stamping identity papers and processing visas. For once, Dieter, you have to be on the side that triumphs. Do you understand?” Then she would soften her tone and lovingly stroke his scalp, and place his head softly to her breast, and his dick would get hard. “Otherwise, what is the point of all this?” she would say. “All this terrible bloodshed. It will lead to no good end.”
But now, all the lofty ideas that were there at the beginning had long since faded. Instead, he was sucked into a maelstrom of dark deeds: Young men, boys really, taken from their homes in the middle of the night; interrogations in which the normal procedures were not effective; incarcerations that ended up at the concentration camp at Grini, where no one was ever heard from again. Lund couldn’t help but notice the averted eyes and spiteful glances he received when he walked the streets of his hometown. Though in truth, no one had ever even noticed him before, not until he put on his gray Hirden uniform. “Someone must keep the order,” he would say to those who questioned why he served them. “No matter, ultimately, whom it is for.”
But now, two years into the war, things were slipping away. Trudi had been wrong—the Germans were not winning. It seemed they were losing their grip. They were having a hard time holding on to the territory they had seized. Both here and in the east, they heard, where things were going badly. Yet in spite of it all, Rjukan, it turned out, contained a silver lining. “The golden goose,” it was called by his Gestapo overseer, Muggenthaler. “The goose that will win us the war. In spite of how things progress on the ground.” Whatever they were producing at the Norsk Hydro plant up on the mountain, Lund knew it must be defended and protected at all costs. That was the one path still open for him. How he would turn this whole ugly enterprise to his and Trudi’s gain.
And it had fallen right into his lap, in this remote pinprick on a map where he had had to grow up in the shadows. Now he was put in charge. In truth, he had no idea exactly what was going on up there—at the plant. Only that it was whispered to have the highest military value. And he had made his bed in life, and now his career depended on maintaining that magic elixir’s orderly production. Otherwise, he’d be dragged out and shot himself one day—if not by the Germans, surely by his fellow townspeople if the Allies were allowed to win.
The very people this Kurt Nordstrum and Jens Strollman were helping to succeed.
Lund placed the two photos on his desk, side by side. This wasn’t just the murder of a fellow officer. A crime against the state. For Lund, it was a matter of self-preservation. It challenged the most clear and precious commitment he had made with his life.
But what were these two even doing back here? After two years of war.
Perhaps Nordstrum had come to see his father? The old man still lived here, alone, though his men kept a watch on him and it was known he was not in the best of health. The attack on the Hird on the ferry was likely not something they had planned, only a temptation that presented itself, one they could not resist. And that was the weakness in these men. They were reckless. Their actions were not tempered with control. That was what would one day bring them down.
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No, Lund began to feel sure, if they had come back here, to this place with its hidden significance, it was far more likely it had something to do with what was going on up at the plant.
Yesterday a report had crossed his desk of a coastal steamer that had been hijacked on its way to Stavanger and which he heard was now in the open sea. Presumed to be making a beeline for England, it was reported. An act of piracy, Lund first said to himself, but not without some bravery as well, he had to admit. And will. It took a certain type to possess that kind of boldness.
And now he was certain he knew the two behind it.
He would take his findings down the hall to Muggenthaler. Along with the two photographs. The parts all fit. But why…? A coastal steamer. Why the need to take such an audacious risk?
To flee to England. That had to be why.
Maybe Nordstrum was lost to him for now. But he’d be back for sure. A man like that always came back. Not just because there was a fight to wage and he had the will. But because a man like that always believed in his heart in what was right, not simply prudent. And what drove them wasn’t the urge for self-preservation or to get others to notice their actions. Lund chuckled; that was for people like him.
What drove men like them was duty. The sense that they believed in something they imagined to be larger than themselves. The very thing that would also entrap them one day. You could be sure.
A romantic. A fool.
Lund put the photos into a file and stamped it OFFICIAL. NS SECURITY MATTERS ONLY, and put in on the side of his desk.
Nordstrum, he was always the fucking ringleader. Just like back then.
Next time Lund would be on them, like a bee to honey.
Next time, you could count on it—he’d be the one throwing them over the rail.
8
Two days later, Nordstrum, Einar, and Jens and their mates stepped onto the dock in Scotland, as the Galtesund, in the company of a British destroyer and a fleet of curious fishing boats and near its last shovelful of coal, put ashore in Aberdeen Harbor. The passengers lined the decks in nervous anticipation, not sure what to expect. They’d intended to land on the Norwegian coast, not the coast of Britain.
Leif Tronstad, in military khakis and a red beret, with three stars on his lapels, went onto the dock to greet them. He was accompanied by a civilian in a dark overcoat and black bowler and a ruddy-faced British officer in full dress uniform. Nordstrum and Einar bid the captain farewell.
Tronstad was a highly respected figure back in Norway, a renowned scientific mind who studied in Berlin with Bothe and Strassmann at the forefront of the uranverein research, then went on to become a lecturer in inorganic chemistry at the university in Trondheim, only to have to flee the Germans after passing along secrets on their V-3 weaponry and make his way through Sweden to London. Now he had the rank of major in the Free Norwegian Army. He had wiry, light hair, sharp blue eyes, and a ready smile, which seemed particularly wide today. And a pipe that he carried with him always.
“Thanks for the escort,” Einar said, embracing him warmly as he stepped onto the dock. “And you have no idea how timely it was. Without it, we’d be at the bottom of the sea.” He introduced the other members of the team. Nordstrum felt honored to meet such an esteemed national hero. They all shook hands.
“I’m only sorry it took so long,” the scientist turned intelligence agent replied in English. “And with such need for the dramatic. But scrambling a squadron of Spitfires for a Norwegian coastal steamer was no easy feat.”
“Better late than not at all, as we say,” said the Brit in the overcoat, whose name was Gubbins, and who was introduced as part of some outfit named SOE. “In any event, we’re glad you all made it here successfully. Very clever feat.”
“Which I hope to God was worth it,” Einar replied, digging into his pants pocket. He came out with the rolled-up tube of toothpaste, the purpose of this whole affair. “Here. It almost ended up on the ocean floor.”
Tronstad grinned. “You went to all this trouble on a matter of personal hygiene. Kind of you, my friend, but sad to say, they have ample toothpaste here in Scotland. Even in the war.”
“It’s from Jomar Brun. Of the Norsk Hydro plant in Vemork. You know him, I think.”
“As I should.” The scientist pulled on his pipe. “I hired him.”
“Well, I think you’ll find something quite valuable inside it. He said it was vital to get it into the right hands.”
“Well, you’ve done that, boys.” Tronstad nodded at the five grimy men who stood before him in workmen’s clothes. “And I know if it was Brun that pushed you to do this, I have no doubt that what you have here was worth what it took.”
“What’s going on up there in Vemork, if you don’t mind?” Nordstrum asked. “It seems there are more Germans around Rjukan these days than in Berlin.”
“Business. Very nasty business,” was all the scientist said. “But well worth the effort it took to bring this here.” He put the toothpaste tube in his jacket pocket. “For now, I’m sure you’d all like to get cleaned up and maybe into some new clothes. Say, military issue, if you’d be up for it?”
For two years they’d been fighting in tattered sweaters and skins, whatever kept them warm and dry. The thought of real uniforms sent a glow through each of them. “Yes, we would.” They nodded heartily.
“So who was it who engineered this little escapade of yours, if I may ask?” the British officer, a colonel by the name of Wilson, inquired. He was introduced as being in charge of the Special Operations Unit of the Free Norwegian Army.
“I guess that would be me, sir.” Nordstrum shrugged, not sure whether he was about to be commended or upbraided for putting so many of their countrymen at risk. “Kurt Nordstrum.” He wasn’t sure whether to salute or shake hands.
“You’ve seen action, soldier?” the colonel asked.
“We have.” Nordstrum nodded, pleased to be addressed as such after so many months now without a clear chain of command. “At Narvik and Tonneson and the Gudbrandsdalen valley. And more.”
“Tonneson?” Tronstad said with a grim nod. “Tonneson was rough, I heard.”
“It was,” Nordstrum said. “But we held for as long as we were able.”
“And you want to continue the fight, do you not?”
“Continue? Until the Germans are out of Norway, and not a day less. I think we all feel that way, sir, if I can speak for the men. That’s why we’re here.”
“Good. And so what rank were you, son,” the British colonel asked, “in your regiment back at home?”
“Rank?” Nordstrum shrugged. “We had no ranks at the end. We only served the king.”
“He was a sergeant,” Jens spoke up. “And the best we had.”
“A sergeant, you say?” The colonel stood in front of him.
“Only because I could shoot straight, sir,” Nordstrum said, glancing at Jens in a rebuking way.
“Well, you’ll serve the king as a lieutenant now, if that’s all right with you. Welcome to the Linge Company, officer. And congratulations!”
“Lieutenant!” Einar’s eyes went wide. He rubbed his knuckles against his chest as if he were shining a medal, and went to salute.
“Don’t bother, soldier. You’re now one as well.”
“Two lieutenants!” Jens exclaimed. “The army must clearly be short of officers here. If you’re giving away bars, you know, I was part of it too.”
“Well, we’ll have to leave something to work up to for the rest of you,” the colonel said. “But there could be stripes in your future.”
“Stripes will do just fine, sir.” Jens grinned widely.
“So what exactly is the Linge Company, sir?” Nordstrum asked the colonel. “If I might ask?”
“Oh, we do this and that.” He smiled evasively. “You’ll find out soon enough. Judging from what I’ve seen already, I believe you’ll be a good fit.”
“The three of you will indeed be a good fit!” Tronstad
chimed in approvingly. “But now I think we should let these men set foot on the British Isles,” he said to the man with the bowler. He clutched the toothpaste tube. “And we’ll get on to taking a look at just what you’ve brought us.”
9
July 12, 1942, four months after the Galtesund docked at Aberdeen
Colonel Jack Wilson went down a narrow alley at 82 Baker Street in London, just a few miles from Whitehall itself, one of six men who arrived, one by one, wearing dark business suits and carrying briefcases, and entered the drab brownstone building once owned by the retailer Marks & Spencer. He gave a series of three rings, then two, unlocking the iron-grated side door that only opened for the correct series of rings and led to the home of British intelligence’s most secretive wartime unit, named SOE.
The Special Operations Executive was a little-known and highly independent organization directed by the Ministry of Economic Warfare of the High Command. Its stated purpose was to promote “disaffection and, if possible, revolt in all enemy and occupied territories; to hamper the enemy’s war effort by means of sabotage and partisan warfare.” Their mission was to field and train agents to create as much havoc as possible in their home territories and, ultimately, disrupt the enemy in as many ways as possible.
They were so effective at their craft the Germans even came up with a term for them: “the international school of gangsters.”
Of the five other men who went upstairs and took seats around the third-floor conference table once used for making purchasing decisions on men’s suits and ties, two represented Whitehall: Lord Arthur Brooks, of Combined Operations, and Dr. Brant Kelch, a professor of applied sciences at Cambridge and an adviser to Churchill himself on scientific matters. The rest were military, though not in uniform that day: Major General Colin Gubbins, the ranking officer in SOE; Leif Tronstad, the onetime scientist and now a major in the Free Norwegian Army; and Lieutenant Commander Henneker, an ex–Royal Highlander and an operations planner in SOE. Wilson was in the company of the highly placed men from Whitehall for the first time. Two years ago, when Wilson had put in for this type of work, Gubbins, who he knew from university days, told him, “I think there’s a place for you, Jack. Head of the Norwegian section.”