Dark Full of Enemies(17)

If possible, McKay thought. There could be no if. They must reconnoiter the dam.

He wondered about Petersen himself. The dossier the Major had given him was a scrap of what he needed to know about the man. Captured and released by the Germans—McKay had worked with men and women all over Europe who could say that, but for some reason it bode ill when he thought of Petersen. The Nazis had their own counterintelligence operations, capturing, interrogating, and turning enemy agents, just like his own service and the Brits. The resistance got all the attention in the press and the movies, but even more collaborators existed in Fortress Europe. Perhaps—

He dismissed the thought. He had let himself grow anxious because of the limited intelligence, the rushed preparation. He barely knew his team. But he trusted the Colonel, his superiors. If the higher-ups did not know their own people in occupied Europe, he could take care of the problem for them.

Land appeared below, a clutch of huddled rock faces, cliffs, stacks, and great humped bodies of stone edged all around with breakers nearly glowing in the dawn light. Fair Isle, he thought, a speck of land between the Orkneys and Shetland, and the last land they would see if the storm brought them down. He checked the squall line again. It had edged much nearer—he guessed it was less than five miles west, a black wall. He pressed against the window but could not see the top of the clouds. He looked at his watch. From Fair Isle they had less than half an hour of flying ahead.

The storm overtook them ten minutes later.

The windows darkened. The C-47 rattled. Stallings and Graves stopped talking, and Stallings turned white again. Ollila’s eyes opened. The plane flew into the clouds.

McKay had ridden a roller coaster once. The sudden drops, the sensation of floating and falling at the same time—he had howled with nervous laughter the entire time. The first bumps of turbulence now felt like that, but he did not laugh. It would grow worse.

McKay moved up to the cockpit and talked to the pilot. He flew by instruments now and was already descending through the storm. He hoped to come out directly over the airfield and put it down without having to circle back.

When McKay walked back to his place in the cargo bay, he had to brace himself with both hands against the ceiling and duckwalk like a boot sailor. He stumbled three times and had to throw himself onto his bench.

The turbulence worsened. For ten minutes he watched the wings wobble and listened to the plane’s fuselage complain and groan. He sat, closed his eyes, and prayed.

They dropped out of the cloud cover into snow. McKay looked out the window. Dawn had already come and gone, even at these latitudes, but the clouds and snow hung so thick overhead that the land and see beneath them looked like dusk without a sunset. Snow lanced across the wings. Below them lay Sullom Voe, one of the long, thin bays traced across the confusion of land known as Shetland. Someone in the cockpit swore. The crewman leaned into the cargo bay.

“We’re over the water—we’ve got to go around.”

The bay swept by dark and rippling three hundred feet below, then snowy land and a road and the airfield appeared underneath and pitched and yawed and turned beyond the tip of the wing.

McKay felt his stomach lurch and looked at the team again. Graves had his eyes closed, Stallings stared across the hold and out the windows at the whirling ground, a look McKay had seen before on the faces of his Marines, crouched in their holes on Guadalcanal, watching onrushing waves of Japs. Only Ollila seemed calm. He had braced himself against the bench and bulkhead and watched everything as passively as a film. The guy has guts, McKay thought, and absurdly wondered how Ollila would handle climbing the cliffs of Tallulah Gorge.

The plane swung level and banked again. The bay reappeared on the starboard side of the plane, a dark expanse in the windows behind Ollila, Stallings, and Graves, and the plane descended.

Here we go, McKay thought.

He looked out the window—the black water sharpened into waves and breakers and grew blacker and choppier as they dropped through the whirling snow. Up it came. The pilots lowered the flaps and throttled back. In one moment McKay felt the heat drain from his face and he threw his arms against the bulkhead to brace for impact—the plane was going to hit the water. The craft fishtailed, hung a moment, and fell. The hold tricked them, dropped out from under them and came back up a few feet to the left. Land appeared beneath them at the same moment that the wheels shrieked against the tarmac. McKay came down in the middle of his gear and his men slammed against the roof and fell in a heap beside him. The plane groaned a final time and the tail settled toward the earth.

Somewhere in the pile, Stallings’s voice leaked out, “—a bitch.”

McKay lifted himself from the deck, sat, and checked himself for injuries. The others slowly did the same as the plane slowed and taxied through the snow.

“Y’all okay?”

They grunted yeses and began untangling their gear.

The C-47 pressed through the wind-driven snowflakes—a light snow that, McKay thought, looked beautiful now that they were out of danger—and stopped before a hangar. Ground crews in heavy coats and gloves were just finishing the job of tying down a line of RAF fighters. The pilot idled the engines and the crewman moved back through the hold and opened the rear door.

“Sorry about the landing, boys,” he said, and before he could go on, Stallings bolted past him, not even waiting for help, pitched onto the tarmac and vomited. The crewman said, “Well, damn.”