Dark Full of Enemies(28)
He left his gear for last and helped Stallings up the ladder first. They lifted the gear, bags, and equipment up like a bucket brigade, with McKay on the ladder, heaving Stallings’s gear overhead to Graves, who lifted it up to be received by the watchmen. When it had been collected at the top, McKay climbed up, Stallings followed, and they looked at the Hardr?de.
The boat lay broadside, barely ten yards off, and closing. The pilot—Petersen himself, McKay assumed—had skill. He could hear the boat’s engine now, barely, a low slow drumming under the wind. He saw men on deck. They shouted to McKay and the men in the tower but whatever they said was taken by the storm.
McKay waved and shouted and lifted two of Stallings’s ammo cans. One of the fishermen, a big, bearded man in a peacoat and knit cap, who stood on deck with perfect indifference to the wind and cold and wet, waved back. He bent for a moment, then stood and held up a coil of rope. McKay shouted “Okay!” Treat had called three more sailors up to assist the team in transferring their equipment from his boat. These men stood on the sub’s deck, and when the Norwegian lifted the rope, they called for it. Three great swings of the Norwegian’s arm, and the coil lofted into the wind, caught and slowed, described slow circles, sloughing off lengths of itself in the air, and dropped into the arms of one of the sailors. McKay cheered and climbed down to the deck.
They looped the rope through a rung of the tower’s ladder and threw the coil back to the Norwegians. McKay asked Stallings for his pack—not the radio—and Stallings handed it down to him. McKay hooked two of his karabiners to the rope first and then the straps of Stallings’s pack. He took two lengths of cord he had cut for the occasion and linked the karabiners with both, leaving the cord on the Hardr?de ’s side coiled and tied. He waved to the Norwegians, the bearded one waved back, and McKay shoved the pack across the gap and the slopping waves to the boat.
The Norwegians understood. They brought in and freed Stallings’s pack and the bearded man waved. McKay pulled the karabiners back across.
“Good thinking,” Stallings said.
“The radio now,” McKay said.
The radio was mummified, wrapped in a waterproof tarp inside a pack inside another tarp and bound with nylon parachute cord. McKay checked its wrappings and the ropes around it. He imagined, for a moment, the ropes untangling themselves from the burden, the tarps unwinding around the radio until it plunged unshrouded into the sea. He shook his head and ignored the idea. They sent the radio across, and McKay felt relieved. If these were the Norwegians for whom the radio was intended, they had just completed one objective.
They sent the rest of Stallings’s equipment across and McKay called for Graves. First the radio, then the explosives. He wanted to get the important gear into the fishing boat before they tired and numbed and started making mistakes. The men would go last.
They sent Graves’s explosives—also wrapped in tarps and rubberized blankets—across without incident, and followed with Ollila’s simple pack and weapons. Finally came McKay’s own gear.
“All right,” McKay said. He called up to Stallings and Graves on the conning tower: “Ammo boxes!”
The boxes came up one at a time, and McKay added two karabiners to the rope pulley. He clipped three boxes on at a time, by their carrying handles, and sent them across.
He almost lost the rope on the first run. His hands, even through two pairs of gloves, had gone almost numb, and the weight of three ammo boxes rushed the rope through his hands and toward the sea. He gripped hard and stopped the boxes a few feet above the waves.
McKay found himself lying on the deck. He had not even noticed himself falling with the rope. He looked up to the conning tower.
“Grove, get down here!”
He sat halfway up and braced his feet wide apart and wound the rope around his arms until Stallings and a few nearby sailors had climbed down and taken hold behind him. They took hold of the rope above and below McKay’s hands and hauled up to keep the ammo from the deep. McKay looked up at the fishing boat. The bearded Norwegian stood at the gunwales shouting, calling more hands to the rope on his end. McKay could see the man more clearly now, hearty and grey bearded. He found himself thinking of Poseidon and shook himself. He had to focus.
When both sides looked ready, McKay raised his voice above the wind, shouted “All right,” and the ammo cans swung their way across and out of danger.
“Dammit,” Stallings said. He looked at the last two cans. “Maybe make that one can at a time.”
“If we do it like this we’ll get it in fewer trips.”
“If we lose half the ammo we’ll get it in fewer trips.”
McKay was too tired to laugh. “That’s enough.” The Norwegians waved and they drew the rope back. “We’ve just got two left, anyway.”
All of them ready now, they sent the last two boxes across. McKay felt relieved again. All gear, ammunition, and explosives. McKay removed the cord and karabiners, and the sailors unlooped the rope from the tower ladder. McKay spooled and tied the cord and looked at the gap between the boats. Now all that remained were bodies, the men themselves.
“What now?” Stallings said.
McKay waved to the Norwegians, both arms overhead like the deck crew on an aircraft carrier. He caught the grey-bearded man’s attention and kept waving as if lifting the Hardr?de whole from the sea and tossing it over his head. McKay stopped to gesture at Stallings, at Graves and Ollila, and shouted, “Closer!”