by Andrew Gross
“Look. Over there by the stove,” Jens said, peeling himself off the floor. “Is it a mirage or am I dreaming?” To their luck, there was even a bundle of birchwood for a fire.
“You’re not dreaming,” Pedersen exclaimed, extricating himself from his pack, going over and checking for kindling.
The most important thing now, other than getting a fire going and drying out, was to figure out where they were and chart a course to Lake Maure, where they were supposed to meet up with Grouse.
But there was little more they could do once the fire was going than open some food and get ready for sleep. They’d been up for almost twenty-four hours.
“Yank,” Ronneberg said.
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Take the owner’s bed. You’ve earned it tonight.”
“Me?” Gutterson questioned.
“And remember, we only give the owner’s bed to true hill men,” Pedersen explained.
“Aye,” the others chimed in.
“Thank you.” The soldier looked around, unsure but pleased.
“Just don’t get too comfy. You’re up in an hour, lad, and then the bed’s mine,” Ronneberg said. “I’ll take the first watch.” He settled into a chair, holding back his smile.
“Yes, enjoy your beauty sleep, Yank,” Birger Stromsheim chuckled.
They rolled out their sleeping bags and bedded in.
“Feels good to be home, right, boys?” Ronneberg said.
“Aye,” one or two muttered. “It does.”
And then it was quiet.
Outside, the winds grew to a howling high pitch and the snow fell in waves. The shaking wooden walls made it feel like the hut was about to be lifted right off the ground and blown away. In his sleeping bag, closing his eyes for a few hours before it was his turn to watch, Nordstrum prayed that when they awoke this hellish nightmare would have moved on.
26
But the storm didn’t move on.
Instead, it grew even stronger. They woke in early afternoon to winds even more formidable and howling than the night before.
At least three feet of snow had fallen. The drifts against the house piled up closer to five. Every hour, more continued to fall. They had a mission to fulfill and their countrymen to rescue, who were in dire conditions themselves. Ronneberg and Nordstrum tried venturing out to see if continuing was possible, but they could barely get ten feet before the gales pushed them back.
“What do you think, Kurt?” Ronneberg put his face close to Nordstrum’s and shouted above the wind.
Nordstrum replied, “I think this storm will kill us before the Germans ever get off a shot.”
“I’ve never seen one as strong as this,” Ronneberg said, struggling even to stand upright.
There was no choice but to go back inside. Their only prospect was to wait out the storm and hope it would blow itself out.
Wherever they were, the Grouse team was enduring the same conditions.
The first order of business was to determine precisely where they were. They went about examining the hut for any clues. In the back of a drawer Gutterson found a map, and on it, there were a couple of hand-drawn circles and a greased thumbprint, unfortunately not in the area of Bjornesfjord, where they assumed they’d been dropped, but near Skrykken, some thirty kilometers away.
Thirty kilometers back the way they’d come yesterday.
“That would be bad,” Nordstrum said, poring over the map. “You can see there’s no easy route to Lake Maure from Skrykken, if in fact that’s where we are. Or any shelters I know of. And, unless we want to turn two lost days into four, the mountains we’ll have to cross to get there are some of the highest elevations on the vidda. Over a thousand meters. It’ll eat into the rest of our provisions.”
“Then we’d better damn well be certain,” Ronneberg said. “There has to be something here. Turn the place upside down if you have to.”
Pedersen and Storhaug went through the kitchen. Only old cookware and a few tools. Stromsheim and Gutterson searched the living area. The only books were folk tales and hunting catalogs. Nordstrum and Jens went through the owner’s bedroom. They found nothing, not even in the bedside table drawers. Only a Bible and a book on local animals of the wild.
There was always a respect for the owner’s privacy when you used their lodging, especially in a place that had saved their lives, but Jens said, “The hell with it,” and jimmied open the locked closet. Again, they found nothing at first, but in the pocket of one of the owner’s oilskin jackets, he came on something. It was a notebook titled “Fishing Log Book for Skrykkenvann.”
Ronneberg let out a deflated sigh as Nordstrum dropped it on the kitchen table for all to see.
Skrykken, it was.
They realized what a mess that was. Whenever the storm finally broke, not only did they have to retrace the hours they had trekked yesterday, but they had a good thirty kilometers more to get to the hut where they hoped the Grouse team would be waiting for them.
This would have seemed a good time to use the radio equipment their SOE planners had elected not to send along with them—as they thought it was heavy and would slow them down, and they’d be meeting up with Grouse upon arrival anyway. Though in this mess there was no way they would have been able to find a signal.
Outside, it sounded like the roof was being ripped off the hut.
Dejectedly, Ronneberg said, “Tomorrow we’ll try again. Let’s make a fire. This has to blow over.”
But the next day the storm continued with the same fury. And the day after as well. By day four, their food supply was dwindling. They’d only brought enough with them to get to Grouse and complete their mission, which they’d thought would be a matter of days. The rest, for their journey to Sweden, was buried back at the drop site.
With no other choice, they decided that a party had to go back to replenish their supplies. Nordstrum and Jens volunteered to make the trek. For Nordstrum, sitting around and doing nothing was making him stir crazy anyway. They set out at 9 A.M. The snow was coming down so heavy it was barely possible to even see your hand in front of your face. By 1 P.M., exhausted and famished, they finally made it back to where they thought they’d landed. At least that’s what their compasses read. But four feet of snow had made everything appear different.
“What do you think, Kurt?” Jens asked, shouting above the gales.
Nordstrum shielded his face from the wind and checked the compass reading. “They have to be here.”
They searched all around. But after three grueling hours, they had no choice but to give up. The marking stakes they’d left were completely buried. They dug futilely, but never found a thing. They had no other option but to turn back for the hut. Back into the teeth of the very storm they had just braved, with nothing to show for it.
Empty-handed and exhausted, the two made it back to the Skrykken cabin after dark.
The thought occurred to all: What if Grouse, knowing Gunnerside had landed, had sent out a search party to find them? In this weather, they would surely be dead by now. Or what if they had lost hope and managed to get word back to SOE that they, Gunnerside, had likely perished? There was no choice but to wait it out, the mission still in the balance. Not to mention their friends’ lives. It seemed to them all that Nature herself had taken sides in the conflict.
By the fourth day, their own provisions had now grown perilously thin. The kind of trekking they had to do required nourishment. And they were at least a full day’s journey from where they had to be. Pedersen and Gutterson had come down with colds and swollen glands. Somewhere nearby, the members of the Grouse party were starving with no news of them.
“What are you thinking now, Yank?” Storhaug chided Gutterson, who stared out the window, which was now half covered by mounting drifts.
“I’m thinking, you win,” the Yank said. It was the only laugh they had the whole day.
The fate of the war was being decided by a ferocious storm that seemed like it would never
end.
27
In the tiny cabin at Lake Maure, the situation for the Grouse party was growing just as dire.
They’d had word from England that Gunnerside had landed successfully and were likely on their way to them. But they were both riding out the same storm. Poulsson and his men feared there was no way, unless the Gunnerside crew were lucky enough to have somehow located a hut, they could survive in such hostile conditions.
More than likely, they were dead.
Poulsson and his men had been holed up on the vidda for four months now. Their food stocks were long gone. They were living on whatever they were lucky enough to catch, as well as using survival tricks Poulsson taught them, like sucking out moss from rocks, a high form of protein and nutrition, which he said the reindeer nourished themselves on when there was nothing else to eat, and which they heated into a repugnant-tasting paste. Each had lost a good 15 percent of their body weight. Their hair had grown straggly, their beards long and tangled. In this storm there was no way anything could be hunted, nor could they get a visit from Einar Skinnarland, who occasionally skied up from Vigne with food. Worse, they were running perilously low on firewood.
When it came to Gunnerside, the four were not of one mind about what to do. Claus Helberg wanted to send out an expedition to Bjornesfjord and look for them. Poulsson said no; it was far too dangerous. And anyway, if the bomber pilot had been unable to find the drop zone, which was well lit with their Eureka beacon signaling, they could be anywhere, miles and miles away, in the worst storm many of them had ever lived through.
They started to think that their friends, not to mention the mission, had met with a tragic end.
Still, Poulsson argued, if anyone could survive such an unsurvivable ordeal, if there was one man, two, maybe, who could withstand whatever Nature threw at them and steer their team through, it was Kurt Nordstrum and Joachim Ronneberg.
Anyone else, and the Nazi heavy water production would have claimed seven more lives.
28
On the fifth morning, the men of Gunnerside awoke to a long-awaited sign.
The winds that had battered them for four days had calmed. Sunlight angled into the cabin, where in the teeth of the storm the steady blanketing of snow only made it appear to be night.
Nordstrum got up before the others and crawled out of his sleeping bag to the window. It was covered nearly to half its height with drifts of wind-blown snow.
Birger Stromsheim, who had taken the last watch during the night, was looking out. “It’s finally over,” he said.
The sky was a brilliant blue.
One by one everyone rose, buoyed by the change in fortune. They dressed, made some food, packed up what was left of their provisions. The first order of business was to retrace their steps back to the drop site, where they had buried the balance of their supplies. Ronneberg ordered their packs reduced to fifty-five pounds and Storhaug and Pedersen fashioned whatever wood they could find into a makeshift toboggan to cart the balance. With relief, they finally bid good-bye to the Skrykken cabin. It had held together in the worst storm any had remembered having to endure. The little hut had surely saved their lives.
Outside, where slopes of rock and even valleys and lakes could be seen five days before, now there was only an endless vastness of white. Climbing proved to be tougher; they were weighed down by even the reduced packs on their backs and lugging the heavy sled. Even gliding, where on the downslopes they could normally catch their breath and rest their muscles for a bit, was a taxing effort in all the snow. Still, it was exhilarating to see their short herringbone patterns in the snow as they climbed the ridges, and they whooped like boys on a day’s outing, hopeful now that they were only hours from finally meeting up with their stranded countrymen.
It was an exhausting, four-hour effort to even get back to the ridge they had parachuted onto five days before. But when they did, or at least the compass readings assured them it was so, everything had changed. They were no longer in a valley on a rocky face, but in a large basin covered by a blanket of white. Famished and exhausted, the seven searched around for any sign of their stakes they had planted as markers, which were now completely buried in snow.
Nordstrum finally came upon the handle of one protruding though the snowdrifts. “Over here!” He got on his knees and pawed at the thick, wet snow until he finally unearthed the buried container four feet below.
They all began digging in the same area, until, one by one, an hour later, all twelve supply crates were recovered. They brushed them off, reloaded their packs with needed food, then sat around chewing biscuits and cured venison until they regained the strength to continue.
It was still a thirty-kilometer trek to Lake Maure, a trip even most trained mountain men would find unmanageable.
“Kurt, you know the way?” Ronneberg asked when everyone was ready.
“I do now.” He nodded. He started out, east, pushing off and climbing the first ridge.
Reenergized, they all followed in line with yelps of excitement, Pedersen and Gutterson dragging the sled behind, the herringbone pattern of their skis up the first climb a beautiful mosaic in the sunlit snow.
But it was exhausting work. Each ridge left them gasping for air, their thighs burning from exertion. In normal snow, a trek like this would take a good half day, but now they were loaded down with packs and with more snow to push through than any of them had ever seen. They kept their eyes peeled for strangers along the route—but for the first few hours they didn’t even see a deer or fox, much less a human. And their gazes were trained toward the sky as well, for German planes—though in their camouflage suits, their packs and weapons painted white as well, they would be difficult to make out from up there.
“So, tell us, what’s it like back in Colorado?” Pedersen asked Gutterson, as he skied up from behind.
“The mountains are rockier and taller,” said the Yank, “and the valleys wide. But it’s all green in the summer. Greener than anything you’ve ever seen.”
“I didn’t ask for a postcard,” the Norwegian said. “How are the girls? Are they pretty?”
“They are,” the American said.
“As pretty as here?”
“So far the only Norwegians I’ve seen here are all of you. So yes, far prettier, in my view. But when I do see a girl or two I’ll let you know.”
“Not to worry,” Nordstrum said from behind him, “if you meet one they won’t understand you anyway, with that accent.” He skied on ahead.
About two hours in, Jens, who had taken the lead at that stage, stopped suddenly and pointed ahead. “Hold up! Look!”
In the distance, something was moving through the sea of white. A black speck, below them in the valley. Not yet in binocular range. Whoever it was was heading directly toward them. In their white suits, there was no way he could have noticed them yet, so far away.
They decided to take cover on the slope, hoping the traveler would veer off and avoid them, but he didn’t change his route. Nordstrum skied down a bit closer and focused his binoculars. “It’s one man. Heading directly toward us, I’m afraid.”
They stopped on the slope of a hill nestled between two peaks. There were large ice boulders, but truly nowhere to completely hide. Anyway, when the man got to them he would surely come upon their tracks. He appeared to be dragging a sled behind him.
Ronneberg took the glasses. “You think he’s from Grouse?”
Nordstrum shrugged. “A hunter, more likely. We’re still too far away. And he’s alone.”
They watched him come closer and closer, headed straight for them, until it became clear there was no avoiding the man.
“All right, Jens, Olf, go down and bring him here,” Ronneberg finally decided.
Colonel Wilson and Tronstad had been clear: They were under the strictest orders to liquidate anyone they might run into, friend or foe. The stakes were simply too high. In England, each swore to a man that he was capable of carrying it out. But as the tr
aveler came into view, in a deerskin coat, climbing at a good pace, a rifle slung over his shoulder—clearly a man used to the mountains, like themselves—they had to ask themselves again if they could.
Lugging a toboggan, the man stopped in his tracks when Olf and Jens skied down into his path, their weapons drawn.
“I’ve got a little money in my jacket,” the man said. He put up his hands. “You’re welcome to it. As you can see, I’ve caught no prey.” He pointed toward his sled.
“What’s your name?” Ronneberg said, coming down from his cover. “And what are you doing up here?”
“My name’s Kristian Kristiansen.” The man removed his hat. “And I do a little hunting.” He was large, balding, and broad shouldered with a thick reddish beard, and his eyes went curiously but methodically from man to man, trying to figure out just who he had stumbled upon in the wild, watchfully taking note of their drawn machine guns.
“Anyway I’ve just set out. From Uvdal. It’s a town on the edge of the vidda. About thirty kilometers from here. I spent the night in my brother-in-law’s cabin a few kilometers down—”
“We know where Uvdal is,” Nordstrum said.
“You do? Then you also know food there is pretty slim these days. Which should answer the question of why I’m out here.”
“Weapons are strictly forbidden by the German authorities, are they not?” Ronneberg went up and indicated for him to remove his rifle. Like radios, being caught with them was punishable by death.
“They are.” The hunter nodded, still unsure whether he was talking to friend or foe. He likely assumed only Germans or Quislings could possibly be up here with weapons of their own. “I beg you, it’s only for shooting deer. I have no politics.”
“Black market?” Nordstrum questioned. The trade for deer meat above what their ration cards allowed would make such a trip with two or three trophies worthwhile.
“War or no war, people still have to eat,” the hunter said. “So who are all of you?” He looked around warily.