by Andrew Gross
And Hella was as smart and careful as they came.
A short distance away, he took out his binoculars and scanned the surrounding hills, worried the house might be under watch. He saw no sign of anyone. Still, what he saw on the snow was not a good sign. He increased his pace, finally coming around the lake and in sight of the cabin. A thin trail of smoke came out of the chimney, heartening him. Hopefully she was there and all was fine. The radio was well hidden behind the false wall in the bedroom. He only prayed Hella hadn’t been in the act of transmitting when they showed up. But if anyone could hold herself together through such a visit, it was her.
Even more worrisome, the half-tracks led directly to her door.
Nordstrum skied up quietly and took off his skis. Are they still here? He pulled out his Colt. Before entering, he searched the perimeter of the cabin. No sign of anyone. But what he did see in the snow was the second set of vehicle tracks, the half-track, heading off to the west. And no sign of Hella having left—unless she’d been taken in and was now in custody.
He noticed her skis were stacked outside.
He went up to the door, cocked his Colt close to his chest, and called out, “Hella…?”
There was no reply.
“Hella!” he shouted again. He waited. Nothing.
He pushed open the front door.
She was there, in a chair at the table where she did her transmissions, and he was about to relax and say, “Oh, good, you’re here…” when he noticed her mouth parted slightly and her head crooked on her shoulder and her eyes staring blankly ahead.
Her white sweater was dotted with crimson holes.
“My God, Hella!”
Her gun was on the floor, the gun she boasted she could use so adroitly, which she clearly had gone for in the drawer, now hanging open loosely. The radio was on the floor, hammered into a dozen useless pieces, riddled with bullets. The door to the bedroom was ajar, and the false wall they had built in the closet ripped open.
Nordstrum sank into a chair next to her and shook his head sadly. “Hella, no…”
Sitting there, she looked as beautiful and as defiant as when he had first seen her from across the restaurant. He placed his hand against her cheek. It was cold, cold as a mossy rock in January, but still smooth. Smoother than there was a right to feel in such a war.
He detected a hint of persimmon on her. It made him smile.
He found a blanket folded over a chair and draped it over her. It was better to leave her as she was, he thought, painful as it was. She’d be missed. People in town must know about the farm. Someone would come to look soon enough. Her son would need to be told. She deserved a hero’s burial, not just to lie here, exposed and alone. But that was best.
For a second he considered the possibility that they had been betrayed. Ox? Reinar? He had never spoken of her to anyone. Just as he had never spoken of them to her. No one would connect them. “There are others, I assume…?” she had once asked him, with that smart smile of hers and bright, almond eyes.
Others, yes, but not like you.
No one like you.
Maybe all she’d been was simply unlucky. Maybe the Germans were just patrolling the hills nearby when they caught her signal. Anyone knew, luck trumped all the courage and preparation in the world any day. They would have definitely taken her in, perhaps forced her to give him up—maybe even threatened her son—had she not gone for her gun, and—
A stab of dread knifed through him.
He looked to the open drawer and pawed around inside. It wasn’t there. Then he remembered, she usually kept it with the equipment. In a sweat, he ran into the bedroom closet, got on his knees, and frantically searched in all the corners of the false compartment.
Nothing there either.
His heart began to race. If he didn’t find it, it was more of a loss than the radio. More of a loss than any of their lives. A sweat broke out on his neck. SOE would have to know.
His gaze traveled to the hearth, which was still smoldering, and he saw the shredded embers of the black notepad amid the coals.
The codebook.
He let out a relieved breath.
When they had come, knowing she had no time to hide the radio, that she was likely done, she still had the presence of mind to toss it into the flames before going for her gun. She could have traded it for something, he knew. Her life? Her son’s? But she did what he would have done. He reached in and picked it out of the fire, the crisp, charred pages that were still warm shredding in his hands.
She hadn’t given him up.
“Someone’s got to do something,” she’d once said to him. And she had. She’d done her job.
Nordstrum stoked the flame, throwing on another log, tossed the charred codebook back on the fire, and waited until it broke up into ashes. Then he went back and draped the blanket over her face. “You can rejoin your Anders now,” he said, recalling the officer he had once seen in the Gudbrandsdalen. It was as good as any blessing he knew.
Then he went back outside and put on his skis. He left, heading east. Toward Rauland. The thought went through him that he had been foolish to allow any attachments in this war. Attachments could only cause regret and death and there was already enough of both without adding to the flame.
A day later, that feeling would grow far, far stronger.
57
Dieter Lund was at his desk in Rjukan when he heard the first rumbles.
It was just after noon. He was contemplating heading home and taking his lunch with Trudi when the building, then the entire valley, began to shake. At first it sounded like thunder in the far-off sky. Then all of a sudden the ground began to tremble. He ran to the window. The sky was perfectly blue. It wasn’t thunder. Certainly not an earthquake. Maybe a landslide somewhere, above the gorge. Such a thing had happened years before. But then Lund realized it was only November and there was not nearly enough snow for such a thing to—
Then he heard the first deafening blasts and the sirens start to sound. He felt the ground shake beneath him and he knew precisely what was taking place.
They were bombs.
The Allies were bombing Norsk Hydro.
In a flash the sky became dark with a sea of planes. Dozens. Hundreds, maybe. American planes. Through the mist and smoke, the Stars and Stripes could be plainly seen on their fuselages. Suddenly the ground exploded all around. He should hit the floor, he knew, or take cover under his desk; it was a heavy one and would keep him safe if the building came down around him. But Lund remained at the window, staring. Incredulous. The streets of Rjukan lit up with fire. People on the street were screaming, running for cover, their hands over their heads.
They were bombing the fucking factory, the fools, and wayward bombs were landing here.
The concussion from distant explosions shook the town. Every once in a while, a bomb exploded closer to home. One street away, a building collapsed in a ball of flame, debris hurtling into the street. Wood flying, roofs crumbling. Fires springing up all around.
Were they mad? No air force on earth could be so precise, or bombs so powerful, as to bring down the Norsk Hydro factory. It was simply protected too well by the narrow gorge in which it stood. Lund knew what they were after. The compressors, in the basement. Underneath a building of solid concrete, sturdier than any other structure in Rjukan. In all of Norway, perhaps.
The valley shook as wave after wave of planes came in. The skies were opaque with an umbrella of gray dust.
Corporal Holquvist ran into his office. “Captain, please, you must get down! You can’t stay there!”
Lund ignored him. He remained, eyes fixed on the rain of bombs leveling the town, wooden structures bursting into flame, concrete buildings crumbling. People screaming and running for cover in the streets.
“Damn you!” he screamed at the sky.
Not from any sympathy for what he saw. Or about the destruction to his own town. Still, it was almost as if his own heart was being torn apart. His
future. What was in the basement of that plant was as important to him as it was to any physicist or party leader in Berlin.
“Corporal, get my car.”
“Your car…?” Dust came down from the roof from a close hit. The corporal looked at Lund as if he were mad. “Captain, I’m sorry, but we have to wait this out. No one can possibly drive in this.”
“Order my car!” Lund turned and said. “Or so help me, Corporal, I’ll strap you to that plant myself and find someone who will.”
58
Nordstrum heard of the raid while in Rauland with Reinar, and rushed back to witness the bombing runs on the second and third days, a feeling of both hope and sadness in his heart.
Hope—quickly dashed—that the raid would prove successful, as each new bomber dropped its payload against the seemingly impregnable factory. Nordstrum was one of very few who knew the true reason for the attack.
And sadness, as he watched his own town come under attack. The cratered buildings, the fires all around, the horror of innocent townspeople who had no idea why they were being attacked. Streets reduced to rubble. If the Allies claimed they knew how to conduct a raid of such precise bombing, what Nordstrum witnessed in anger showed they had a long way to go.
Over those three days, three hundred U.S. Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses and Liberator bombers pounded the Norsk Hydro facility with over seven hundred five-hundred-pound bombs. They also targeted the Saaheim plant in Rjukan, where it was thought some of the finished heavy water stock was being stored. According to the Rjukan Daily Times, which continued publishing, even the very next day, twenty-one civilians were killed in town and in the houses that ringed the plant, and sixteen in a bomb shelter, where women and children had gathered, and which took a direct hit.
When at last the smoke subsided, the Norsk Hydro factory still stood unscathed with barely a mark.
Over the next week, England radioed Nordstrum over and over:
“Please send earliest possible information on success of American air attack.”
“Urgent. Need information on current IMI status.” IMI was the code name SOE used for heavy water.
Gradually, information leaked from the plant. One of Einar’s sources secretly met with him at the market in Vigne. He told him the stocks of heavy water in the high-concentration room had suffered no damage at all. The processors and the canisters of finished inventory were untouched. However, he told him, the hydroelectric power station had been struck, incapacitating the massive turbines that produced the power for the D2O electrolysis process to take place. Given the vast amount of power needed to run the processors and the Allies’ ongoing effort to destroy them, the engineers ultimately decided that further repairs and construction to continue the operations would be pointless.
“By all accounts, heavy water production put on hold,” Nordstrum radioed back to England. Further distillation was now stopped. Still, there was adequate finished inventory already stored there that continued to pose a real problem. And by draining the cells, Einar’s source told him, the Germans were able to almost double the amount of “juice” in their possession, even though not all of it was fully concentrated, giving them close to eleven thousand pounds.
* * *
Nordstrum traveled to the town of Porgrum at the end of January and met with a representative from Milorg, the Norwegian underground, which his own small network of agents was now a part of.
“It’s possible they will try to move what they have,” he told the Milorg man, whose name was Rolf and who was from Oslo. “Once it leaves the area, it will have to be put on trains and ships. Perhaps you have contacts on the docks?”
“Contacts, yes, but trained agents…? That’s a whole other thing. Plus, the docks and train station are closely watched by the Germans. How large a shipment are we talking?”
“Twenty to thirty drums. Maybe more. Several truckloads. They’ll have everyone they have protecting it. And they won’t exactly be telegraphing the time and place when they move it. Or how.”
“Maybe the Brits can bomb it from the air?” Rolf suggested. “Or attack the ship.”
“We’ve already seen the wisdom of that. We can likely let you know when it’s on the move.” Nordstrum got up. “The rest…?” He shrugged, helpless. “It would be wise to get your men on the docks alerted.”
“So what the hell is this stuff anyway?” Rolf asked as he put out his cigarette. “Heavy water?”
“All I know is, we lost thirty-six lives trying to eliminate it. Ask London if you want to know, but they won’t tell you any more.”
59
On his way back to Rjukan, Nordstrum took the ferry up the Heddasvat to Nottogen. He was dressed in a calfskin jacket and thick wool sweater. His hair had grown out a bit and these days he sported a light beard and fake wire-rim glasses.
The day was clear and the trip calm, the mountains reflecting off the water’s ice-blue surface. Nordstrum leaned on the railing in the stern deck with a smoke. He had seen a few Hirden on board, but it was worth the risk, he decided, for a few moments simply to enjoy the view. It had been a year since the Norsk Hydro sabotage, and his face was no longer on most people’s minds.
A woman came out to stand near him to take in the view from the deck. She was pretty, in her early twenties, he thought, in a stylish purple wool shawl. A woman of some means, he assumed, and taste. Her brown hair was blown by the breeze, and she grabbed at her brimmed hat to keep it from being swept into the lake. Taste perhaps, but not wisdom, he chuckled to himself. A Norwegian woman would have known better.
She let out a cry as without warning her hat fell out of her grasp and blew toward the railing. Nordstrum took a quick step to his left and blocked it with his foot at the railing.
“Madame,” he said in Norwegian, as he picked it up, brushed it off, and presented it back to her.
“Tussen tak,” the woman said with an appreciative smile, in what Nordstrum perceived as a Germanic accent. She went to pin it back on and Nordstrum gave her a slight shake of his head, to suggest, given the breezy conditions, perhaps it wasn’t the smartest idea. “Bist du Deutscher?” he inquired.
“Nein. Oustereichsch,” she replied. Austrian. “Sprechen sie Deutsch?”
“Nein, I’m afraid.” Nordstrum shook his head again.
“Français?”
“Juste un peu.” He shook his head again. “English, perhaps?”
“Yes, English, a little,” she said, nodding. “I guess it was clear I am not Norwegian,” she admitted, a glimmer of embarrassment in her pretty brown eyes.
“Well, yes, a Norwegian woman would never step out on deck without a firm grasp on her hat, that’s true. A clear giveaway,” Nordstrum said.
“Ah…” She smiled. “Next time I shall be in the know.”
“And if you are trying to appear Norwegian,” Nordstrum looked down, “I’m sorry, but such shoes, though stylish, will not do you much good in the snow, which can come up at the snap of your fingers,” he said with a smile of his own.
“Yes.” She looked down too. Her short black leather boots might be comfortable for a long journey, but … “Even in Austria, you are right on that. But I took a chance on the day.”
“You are a long way from home,” Nordstrum shrugged, “so it’s forgivable. Where are you heading?”
“Nottogen,” she said, pronouncing it with a hard g, in the German manner.
“Nottogen,” he corrected her gently.
“Nottogen…” she said again.
“Spoken like a true Norwegian. And what’s in Nottogen, if I may ask? There’s not much there but a whaling museum and lots and lots of lutefisk.”
“I am accompanying my grandfather, who’s inside. He’s a cellist. His name is August Ritter. Perhaps you know of him? We’re here for a series of concerts in Norway. Do you know music?”
“I played the clarinet as a boy. Terribly, I should say. Finally they simply barred me from continuing.”
“You clearly moved
on to football goalie then, I see. You showed great skill in saving my poor hat.”
“I merely put out my foot and it stuck.” Nordstrum shrugged modestly. “A lucky grab.”
“Well, it impressed me. Actually my grandfather is quite well known. He’s played with the Vienna Philharmonic. Nottogen,” she pronounced it correctly now, “is our third stop of the tour. We’ve already been to Oslo and Sognefjord.”
“And how long will you be in Nottogen?” Nordstrum asked. “I don’t think of it as a center of music in Norway.”
“Actually, the German Army sponsors his tour. We’ll be there three days only. And from there we go on to Rjukan.”
“Rjukan…” Nordstrum replied with curiosity.
“Do you know it? I hear it is very chilly there.”
“It’s chilly everywhere in Norway. But Rjukan has a climate of its own, you’re right. I’m afraid you’ll have to retire those pretty shoes for good, if you’ll be there for any time.”
“I have boots with me as well. And we’ll stay a week. He performs two concerts there. One for the army. The other for the townspeople. He insisted on that.”
“At the King Edvard Hall?”
“So you know the place?” She looked at him with curiosity.
“Yes. A bit.” I’m heading there myself, he was about to divulge, then thought better of it. He took out a cigarette. “Do you smoke?”
“Thank you, no. My grandfather says it makes the cello out of tune.” She turned and rested her arms on the railing and looked out. Nordstrum found he could not take his eyes away from her. “It’s so very beautiful here.”
“When the storms come, it’s quite another thing. And they come frequently.”
“Well today we seem to be in luck. In fact, so far we have only been blessed with sunny days in Norway.”
“Then you must stay for a bit longer. You’ll see. So look, do you see that mountain? All the way out there…” Nordstrum pointed across the lake to the highest snowcapped peak. “That’s called the Odinskjegg. Legend has it Odin himself would go there to trim his beard, as he could see himself in the lake.”