Dark Full of Enemies(23)

The Welrod was the ugliest weapon he had ever seen. It looked like a footlong piece of parkerized pipe with a grip and trigger unbeautifully welded to the bottom. The ejection port on top looked like it had been hacked out slantwise with a hatchet. Another oddity—it was a bolt-action pistol. The back end of the pipe was a knurl-edged knob that, with a twist, a pull, a push forward, and another twist, brought a round up from the grip and chambered it. It had iron sights tipped in fluorescent paint—the Welrod’s designers knew how often their customers moved in darkness. The pistol was not completely silent—no “silenced” pistol really was—but between the long suppressor and the small, slow .32 caliber pistol rounds it fired, it did the job, and quietly. When loaded and sighted McKay could drop a man with little more noise than a sharp cough. McKay had not strangled anyone since.

He cleaned the Welrod carefully and repacked it, then returned to the bunkroom.

He had a narrow rack with a bulkhead at one arm and a drop to the iron deck at the other. When he lay down and took out his copy of Thucydides, he noticed the movement of the sub—really noticed it—for the first time. Already they were in the open ocean. The sub cruised on the surface to make better speed and chopped up and down in the troughs.

He read. He imagined the Greeks in the book’s pages rolling across warmer seas, but sailing from battle to battle just the same. He had been reading ten minutes when the boat rocked him to sleep.

He awoke to Stallings and Graves talking. He had rolled onto his side, and the first thing he saw was a doodle of Chad, the British Kilroy. Chad peeked at him from the bulkhead and asked Wot, no birds? Underneath, another artist had added an anatomical graffito that would not have passed muster among cave painters.

McKay rolled over. Graves lay in his rack, near the deck, and Stalling sat on the edge of his own above Graves and across from McKay. Graves was talking about lion hunting again.

“Nah, you use an elephant gun for, well, elephants,” Graves said. “We had one of those, an old Mauser, belonged to my granddad. Held two rounds—.577 Nitro Express. Bullets the size of your tadger.”

“Must’ve been a cannon,” Stallings said.

“Pfft. You hang on to this story, you can use that on the ladies when we get home. No, for the lions, I used our other Mauser. Another one belonged to granddad—got it offa this Boer basher fifty years ago.”

McKay sat up and lowered himself to the deck. Graves looked up, said, “Evening, Captain,” and continued.

McKay stretched and checked his timepiece. Midnight approached. They had been underway for nearly twenty hours, enough time to put them two hundred nautical miles north of Shetland—a third of the way. They would be sailing parallel to the Norwegian coast by now.

He did not feel like reading and knew that he would sleep no more tonight, so McKay excused himself from Graves’s excursus and moved forward. The worst thing about commando operations, the thing he had never seen depicted in the movies, was the boredom. That was also, he thought, the worst thing about war.

One of the boat’s cooks offered him an apple—a luxury. McKay took it and thanked him. He passed through the control room. Commander Treat gave the apple a disapproving look but said nothing and McKay nodded to him and Hopper. Treat, like most of the old sailors McKay had known, never seemed to sleep. McKay admired that.

He entered the storage area. Ollila sat on the floor in front of the stack of bags and boxes with his rifle across his lap and looked up as McKay entered.

“Sir.”

“Sergeant.”

McKay shut the door and Ollila went back to work on his rifle. McKay took up his Thompson and sat, idly checking its action, the polish of its parts. After a while, Ollila spoke without looking up.

“Just cleaning the rifle, sir.”

“Good man,” McKay said.

“No more sleep, sir?”

McKay shook his head. “I guess not.”

“I thought that maybe Graves, he would wake you. He woke me.”

McKay laughed. “Telling his stories.”

“They are good stories, but a man must sleep.”

“I’m going to have to remember that.”

Ollila chuckled as if to himself and looked up from his rifle. “You do not tell stories, Captain?”

“What do you mean?”

Ollila went back to his rifle. With a fine brush he went over all the surfaces of the bolt with short, sharp strokes, like a painter.

“Graves tells his stories, lots of them. Stallings—Stallings? He tells a story or two, none like Graves though. Graves talks about shooting, about lions and Germans in the desert. Stallings tells about women.” McKay laughed. Stallings had been right about one thing—don’t nobody change. “You tell none at all.”

“I still don’t—”

Ollila shook his head. “I understand this. I understand. We have both killed terrible enemies, and terribly. I think Stallings has too.”

McKay thought again of Sicily, of the long ride shoreward in the darkness. He thought of Italians with machine guns and cannon at the shore and legions of German tanks inland. He looked at Ollila, who held the rifle up at arm’s length, bolt open, and squinted into its action.

“And you?”

“Me?”

“I haven’t heard you tell any stories either.”