Dark Full of Enemies(16)

“And y’all fought Rommel?” Stallings said.

“Bloody right—in jeeps and lorries, with seldom anything greater than a Lewis gun.”

“How’d you wind up in this line of work?”

Graves pointed at the Commando patch on his sleeve.

“I’m a Royal Marine, mate. I went from there to the desert ‘cause of this Rhodesian joker I knew from home. Popped up from nowhere one day, told me about this lot in the desert. On a plane to Cairo in an hour. Served with them ‘til six months ago but decided to join this lot when Jerry scarpered back to Italy. I had some mates from the SAS who we’d shown round the back edges of the Sahara once or twice.”

“Tough getting used to the cold?”

“You know, one reason I left South Africa was to get somewhere a bit cooler. Only reason I found myself in the Sahara was for the bally fun of it. Me? I don’t miss the heat.”

“It’s hot in North Carolina. Hot in Sicily, too.”

McKay checked his timepiece again.

The plane continued northeast for another half hour before banking inland. McKay looked out the window and caught a glimpse, he thought, of Aberdeen below, on the coast. It lay in darkness below brightening banks of cloud. He looked up into the Scottish highlands and saw nothing through the grey and white piles of cloud. The pilots would have to fly by instruments the rest of the way.

He settled back into his seat, snapped the compass closed, and was surprised to wake up again twenty minutes later.





The plane lurched and McKay seized the compass as it slipped from his hand. He lay back stiff against the bulkhead and tried, in the moment of shock after waking, to get his bearings.

It seemed he was the only one startled by the sudden drop and arrest of the plane. There were no panicked voices in the cockpit, as he had heard on troubled flights before. Stallings and Graves still sat chatting—“Lion hunting is actually very sporting,” Graves said—with Ollila politely, intently, silently listening. But then Ollila, his face still turned toward Graves and Stallings, looked at McKay and held his gaze. The plane dropped, floated them all a half inch and dropped them onto the benches as the wings bit back into the air.

“Shit fire,” Stallings said.

Ollila, still watching McKay, shook his head.

McKay stood and walked—climbed—to the cockpit, stuffing compass and map into his coat as he went. The plane shimmied to the left and dropped and rose again. Graves and Stallings laughed. He moved forward, gripped the cockpit doorway with both hands and pulled his upper body in.

“What’s going on?”

The pilot glanced up and then back at the controls.

“Turbulence, Captain.”

McKay ignored that.

“That storm over the highlands?”

“Yeah.”

“We can’t make it around it?”

“Just been on the horn to Inverness. This front picked up speed and just shifted east in the last hour.”

“You can’t go over it?”

The pilot laughed. “You know how tall a thunderhead is?”

McKay did, but he thought ahead to something else.

“This stuff covering the Orkneys?”

“Fraid so.”

“What else is between us and the destination?”

“Nothing, or so we thought. Could be more of this.”

They could descend through the storm and wait it out at Inverness. McKay felt the plane lurch and yaw and decided against that. The Major did not want to lose a team in the ocean. McKay was fine with that, but they had a job to do and no time to wait out storms with the Scottish Home Guard. He checked his watch. North Sea be damned.

“Change course. Make directly for Shetland.”

“Yes, sir.”

By the time McKay had reached his seat again the team sat gripping their bench in silence. He sat and pulled his gear nearer.

McKay was used to turbulence. The rest of his team were not. He doubted Stallings had ever seen the inside of a plane before—his face had drained of all color now, wet and doughy like a corpse in the tropics. Stallings saw him watching, swallowed, and spoke:

“The hell with the light—I need a cigarette.”

McKay laughed.

The pilots banked, turned north over the sea, and gunned the engines. Within fifteen minutes the turbulence had settled and the plane sailed smooth over the gloaming. McKay reassured himself that the mission was more important, and looked out the porthole behind him at the ocean and the clouds. The storm they left behind connected with a long front. A wall of cloud stood arrayed to their west as far as he could see, both behind and ahead. And he knew from the pilot that it was advancing toward them.

Graves coaxed Stallings back into conversation, and they resumed their stories. Ollila listened a few minutes before stretching out and falling immediately to sleep.

McKay could not go back to sleep. He watched the storm front through the window, the sea below, and made two or three efforts to read from Thucydides. All failed. Mostly, he mulled over the mission.

He did not like the task ahead. He did not like proceeding with limited intelligence, no plan, and no ability to rehearse the attack. No mission he had ever undertaken had succeeded without those things. So far they were depending entirely on guts and the expertise of the team—two things in which he did have confidence—but no amount of sheer guts could save them if the mission went awry without intel and plans. He thought of his Norwegian contact, Petersen. He would press him for further intelligence. He would have to. They would make a reconnaissance of the dam, if possible, before they could begin to plan an attack in earnest.