Dark Full of Enemies(12)
“A dam?”
“In Norway,” McKay said, and then, after a moment to consider how much to say, “We’re going to blow it up.”
Stallings whistled and handed back the photo. McKay could not see him, but he could imagine Stallings’s grin.
“Sounds like a helluva party.”
McKay left Stallings to his cigarette—and idle chatter with Heyward—and pored over the file again. He had less than four hours now to absorb all he could. He would have no other intelligence until he met his contact in Norway.
Petersen’s dossier barely filled a half-page, double-spaced. The file described him as a fisherman, but he had also been a sub-lieutenant in the Norwegian Navy before the war. Upon invasion the Germans had captured him but released him almost immediately on condition that he return to civilian life. McKay wondered if there had been other conditions. He knew that the British had double-agents scattered all over Europe, feeding the Germans falsehood and aiding the underground. He looked at the photograph clipped to the sheet. The grainy picture, enlarged from some old group portrait snapped in hard, midday sunlight, told McKay little about the man’s appearance—strong jaw, bull-neck, raffish grin. He hoped the man was a brawler.
Petersen, piloting his fishing boat, would pick the team up from the submarine well off the coast. That, so far, was McKay’s biggest worry. He had no fear of tight spaces but hated the ocean—he pondered, again, his decision to join a branch dedicated to amphibious war, and laughed—and the move from the sub to the fishing boat with all their gear. He shook his head. He would work on that later. But the gear he would inspect before takeoff—thoroughly.
He had chosen the small arms himself. Each man would take a Thompson submachine gun, the newest model, lighter and less complicated, easier to maintain, than the beast he had carried on Tulagi and Guadalcanal. The newer model did not accept the fifty-round drum that the old one did, but McKay did not care. The drum was heavy and hard to load and, in McKay’s experience, the only people who wanted it were boys who had seen too many gangster movies. He had seen that tough guy, gangster romanticism wear off, drip off with sweat and pour out through profanity as once-eager gyrenes lugged the thing through the jungle. Thirty-round stick magazines were enough. They had been enough on the ridge on Guadalcanal, when no one had time to reload the drums.
His sidearm he already had with him, strapped to his hip on a webbed belt. Stallings would be the only man on the team with a Colt. He probably should have insisted Stallings leave it, but he had assumed the pistol was a gift or something he had bought with his pay for extra security. He should have known.
McKay preferred the Browning Hi-Power. It fired the smaller 9-millimeter slug instead of the Colt’s .45, but it left the barrel a hundred meters per second faster. Resistance fighters and other special operations units liked it, so ammunition on his previous assignments had proven plentiful. He had even, once or twice, looted dead Germans of their ammo. The Browning’s magazine also held thirteen rounds, almost twice as many as the Colt. McKay was comfortable trading off the older, heavier, more complicated Thompson and its fifty-round drum but if a fight ever came down to pistols, he wanted a bigger magazine.
His last weapon, one of his specialized tools, lay safely in a black Bakelite box among the rest of his gear.
So much for armament. In addition to the Thompsons and Brownings, not only Graves, the engineer, but every member of his team would carry explosives. Graves had selected a doughy plastic explosive that smelled like almonds and could only be ignited with a detonator. He had seen it dropped, stepped on, run over, and even dropped into a fire once, but without a blasting cap and a little electrical current, the stuff lay inert. Its explosive property did not in itself concern McKay, but the forty pounds of it allotted for each man did. This gave McKay pause when thinking of the transfer from sub to fishing boat. He thought of the long climb down the cargo net toward a roiling sea and a tiny gray craft full of Marines, and of the eighty pounds on his back and the ninety or hundred pounds on others’. Maybe it was the seasickness or the nervousness of going to battle for the first time, but McKay could swear the gear pulled at them as they climbed lower. It had pulled at least one man down. He fell between the pitching boat and the ship, cried out once, and sank.
McKay shuddered and blinked.
He had been staring at the same sheet in the file for a long time. He looked up and rubbed his eyes. The jeep hummed along the dark road and rocked in cross-currents of wind. Stallings and Heyward swapped bawdy stories. Both had strong opinions about the quality of women in England. McKay smiled and put thoughts of landing craft out of his mind. He took up his flashlight, pointed it at the file again, and read.
The gear awaited them in a closed and blacked-out hangar at an airfield north of London. The Major was there with Barnes, a sergeant and a corporal that McKay recognized from the quartermaster and supply section, and the other two members of the team. The Major met McKay, Stallings, and Heyward at the door and introduced them.
McKay was not a short man, but Graves hulked over him. He stood six and a half feet tall and had broad shoulders. He wore British Army khaki battle dress and had a confusion of patches on his sleeves—in addition to the chevrons and crown of his colour sergeant’s stripes, he had the Royal Marines flash and the tommy gun and anchor patch of a true British Commando. He wore the green commando beret and had pinned to it the Long Range Desert Group badge, a brass scorpion. McKay wondered how a Royal Marine had ended up driving machine gun trucks in the Sahara. It must be some story, he thought.