Dark Full of Enemies(18)

McKay pulled on his gear and stood. The crewman helped him down and he stood over Stallings. Snow skittered across his back like cotton lint.

“You all right, Grove?”

Stallings nodded. “Peachy,” he said, and retched again.

“You sure?”

“Yes, dammit. Just glad I didn’t—didn’t shit myself.”

McKay grinned and shook his head and bent to help him up.

Graves and Ollila handed Stallings’s equipment down and began to unload themselves. The crewman stood in the door, offering jokes.

“You guys know that was a great landing, huh? You know what the difference is between a good landing and a great landing?”

Everyone but Ollila ignored him.

“What is the difference?” said Ollila.

“After a great landing you can use the plane again.”

Ollila stared at him, lit a cigarette, and looked at him again. The crewman shivered and blanched, and McKay realized the man had been just as terrified as Stallings. The pilot, disembarking with them and a little pale himself now, said, “Shut up, Wentworth.”

Stallings hefted his gear and the four of them walked through the wind and snow toward the hangar. Three jeeps and their drivers waited, and from them a thin man in a Royal Navy uniform strode forward to meet McKay.





His name was Lieutenant Howarth, the second in command of the operation in Shetland. He had dark hair, the light frame of a runner, and seemed to be McKay’s age, perhaps a little older. He grinned and shook McKay’s hand, worried it like a terrier, and set about loading the team and its gear into the jeeps. Graves, Stallings, and Ollila piled into the second jeep, their gear filled the third. Howarth shooed his driver to the last jeep and insisted on driving McKay himself. They were bundled in and on their way in minutes.

“Jolly glad to see you, Captain,” Howarth said as they turned onto the coastal road. “Imagine my anxiety as that storm blew in.”

“Thanks for waiting on us,” McKay said, and Howarth laughed.

“Not at all, not at all. Always glad to have guests in Shetland.”

They drove north on a small road that followed the coast, then turned into a saddle in the low, treeless hills of Shetland’s interior. A few minutes later, the sea reappeared and they drove south. The land lay dark green and empty under a grey sky, and the snow seemed to settle nowhere. It reminded McKay of Iceland, where he had spent a few hours once waiting on a plane. Like Iceland and the Orkneys, and even England itself, Shetland had once played host to invaders, crossing the cold sea from Norway to kill and destroy. McKay felt himself smiling. They were going to return the favor.

“Dales Voe,” Howarth said, and gestured at the water. “Have you ever seen a fjord, Captain?”

“In books.”

“These are nothing compared to those across the way, of course, but there’s nothing quite like a fjord, eh?”

“It’s beautiful,” McKay said, and thought of home.

“I understand you were picked on the basis of your studies?”

McKay laughed.

“Medieval history. I reckon I’m the only man in our outfit to have read the sagas. Don’t know whether it was that or the engineering. I sure wasn’t good at the engineering.”

Howarth laughed again, said “Jolly good,” and changed gears.

They left the sea behind—though not for long—and drove past low hills and scattered houses. McKay saw only one small village. The island lay dark and quiet. The sea reappeared ahead of them, and they turned left, putting the sea on their right as they drove onto another splayed arm of the island.

“You can’t get away from the water for long here, can you?” McKay said.

Howarth laughed.

“Quite right! A hundred islands, dozens of bays, sixteen-hundred miles of coastline—lovely desolation. But hardly the place for a hydrophobe.”

At last, they came around a gentle bend in the road, a rocky shoulder of hill moved aside, and their destination lay in sight.

The island narrowed suddenly to an isthmus barely two hundred yards wide, a neck crisscrossed by stone walls and dotted with stone buildings—the shell of a long-derelict house, a pier, a church and its acre of gravestones—and across the neck, on a boulder-strewn swell of land rising above the sea on either side, a grey house. They dipped across the isthmus and approached it from beneath like supplicants, its crow-stepped gables and chimney pots reared against the dark sky.

“Welcome to Lunna House, Captain.”

The road bore left past the house, then brought them uphill and behind it to a large outbuilding and a stone wall with an open gate. They turned through the gate and stopped in the drive behind the house. A pair of guards sheltering from the wind behind the outbuilding approached.

“I brought a few lads along to help out,” Howarth said. “You needn’t worry—they’re cleared for Most Secret work. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all—thanks.”

They unloaded the jeeps and brought the gear inside. Howarth led them through the dark house to the main hall. The house echoed with its size and emptiness. Wind-driven snow pecked the windowpanes. A third guard had, with bits of kindling and shreds of newspaper, coaxed a guttering fire to life on the hall’s hearth, but the house stood otherwise sepulchral cold and full of grey winter light. McKay looked at the walls and ceilings. Everything needed repair. Howarth noticed him looking around.