Dark Full of Enemies(21)

“I see what you mean.”

Hopper chuckled and shook his head. They stopped and Hopper drew aside a curtain. Behind it stood a table and wooden booth, with little more space than a hole scraped out of the wall of a slit trench.

“The captain’s mess, sir,” Hopper said.

McKay nodded. “It’ll do, thanks. Can you keep a secret, Lieutenant?”

Hopper flushed and shifted his weight. He looked like a schoolboy out of Dickens, called onto the carpet by some shrill headmaster. He might well have been a schoolboy a year ago, McKay thought.

“Sir?”

“I’ll have to brief my team on the assignment ahead of us,” McKay said. “Several times, preferably. Can you keep watch outside this curtain while I do?”

“Watch, sir?”

“I need someone trustworthy to guard our discussions. I’m asking you to do it.”

“Yes, sir,” Hopper said, brightening. “Of course, sir. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

McKay thanked him and turned to walk back to the bunks. Hopper followed. After passing through the control room again, Hopper said, “Don’t mind the skipper, Captain. He’s abrupt, to be certain, but that’s his way.”

McKay smiled. “Don’t bother me in the least.”

“Aye, sir. I think the old man’s a bit impatient with the job, sir. Thinks it’s a bit of a doddle.”

McKay stopped and looked back at Hopper. “A doddle?”

“Ah—a milk run, sir. Something impossible to cock up—if you’ll pardon the—”

“Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“That’s all right.” They had reached the bunks. “Just let me know when we’ve reached open sea and I’ll brief my team.”

Hopper, sweaty now, saluted and hurried forward.

“The hell?” Stallings said.

“Nothing,” McKay said. He knew better than to tell the rank and file that another officer took offense at being used as a taxi service. “Like I said, relax—but be ready. Once we’re underway we need to go over the mission as a team.”

The men looked at each other. Graves grinned, and even Ollila allowed himself a half-smile. Stallings paled and inspected a hangnail.





Hopper came for them two and a half hours later, saying they had just passed out of sight of the Bound Skerry lighthouse and were well into the North Sea. McKay thanked him and roused the team.

They packed into the captain’s booth and Hopper drew the curtain. A single bulb in a wire grille lit the interior. McKay collected his thoughts a moment, then began.

“The objective is a dam, which we’ll disable or destroy by any means necessary.”

He took the pencil and blank white notepad he had brought with him and drew a rough hourglass shape in scraggly lines. Across the neck, with two strong, hard strokes, he described parallel arcs, bowed upward. He tapped the arcs.

“It’s an arch dam, meaning it’s concave, bowed back into the water behind it. Does the same job as an old-fashioned gravity dam, the ones that look like a big concrete bank, but it takes less concrete. That makes it ideal for damming narrow spaces like gorges, which is exactly what we have in this case. Now—” He jotted a negative sign above the crest of the arcs, and positive signs where they joined the uneven lines marking the gorge. “—arch dams are designed to shift the pressure of the water behind them to the outer edges of the dam, where it joins the cliffs or mountains or whatever gap they’re damming. The intake for the hydro plants at an arch dam are usually at one corner or the other. In this case, we think they’re here.” He marked an x on the lefthand side of the dam. “Those intakes, with all that pressure behind them, funnel water through the cliffs on this side of the gorge to a hydro plant about a mile away and several hundred feet lower than the top of the dam. Water pressure and gravity combine to get the turbines going as fast as possible.”

“This sounds kinda familiar,” Stallings said.

McKay nodded. He leaned over the paper again and drew a cross section of the dam, like a steep-sided right triangle. From near the top of the vertical side he drew a wavy line—the lake. He drew a flat-topped superstructure at the peak and curved an arrow through it and down the sloping hypotenuse. He tapped the superstructure.

“At the top are the floodgates. Ever so often they’ll open the gates to release some water. That floods down the backside of the dam. Pretty simple. What we’re interested in, though—” and at regularly spaced intervals down the vertical side, inside the triangle of the dam, he drew small boxes like far-off, empty windows, “—are the galleries.”

“Galleries?” Graves said.

“Passageways. Interior passages in the dam. Arch dams usually have three.” He brought the finely sharpened point of the pencil down on the box nearest the top of the dam, said, “The crest gallery,” the box near the center of the vertical line, “the inspection gallery,” the bottommost, slightly larger than the others, “and the bottom gallery, at the base, near bedrock. They’re used for different things, like repairing gates for the hydro intake. Don’t worry about that. Now, this dam, like some of the ones I’ve worked on, has a hydro station somewhere else instead of directly below it, so we don’t have to worry about slipways or anything inside the dam. Just the galleries. What we’re going to use them for is destroying the dam. Graves?”