Dark Full of Enemies(37)



The fjord had narrowed. Dark mountains rose to starboard and port as they sailed through a neck in the Ofotfjord, visible only thanks to the faint glow of the descending sickle-moon and their heavy capes of snow.

He stood on deck until he could barely feel his nose, and then climbed into the wheelhouse. J?rgen was there but Petersen himself was not. McKay sat and read and waited, and thought.

His short sleep had been good, but something had kept him awake a long time before drifting off. How’d they know we were here? Stallings had asked him, and Care to come aboard? Petersen had asked of the German. He had been sure it was a bluff—J?rgen had worked the entire time to keep the E-boat from dropping its boarding party into their laps—and yet… He wondered how often the Germans patrolled the Vestfjorden, how often they stopped and searched fishermen, especially this far north, where Howarth’s Shetland operation rarely reached. And what about the odds of the E-boat happening upon them in the dark? The Germans were paranoid—he had heard what they did to partisans behind the lines in Russia—but how paranoid must they be in Norway?

He did not read for long. Petersen may have kept silent, but his brother had decided it was time to talk. He had traveled to America, New York, where he had attended seminary. That explained the exhortation to prayer, McKay thought, and the facility with American idiom. He tried to imagine the helmsman as a preacher or priest. But not for long.

“I got the boot,” J?rgen said. He shrugged. “Women. And the booze.”

“I think I got a friend you’ll get along with.”

“But I was excellent at my studies. I could have been the hell of a great theologian.”

McKay did not know what to say.

“There,” J?rgen said. “Narvik.”

McKay stood and peered through the wheelhouse window. Ahead in the darkness, about four miles away off the starboard bow, he could make out the low shape of a seaside town on a hill. There were some lights, none individually distinguishable, but enough to make out the shape of the city in the surrounding gloom. As he looked, J?rgen throttled the boat back to its old, slow speed.

“We do not want to look like we’re in a hurry,” J?rgen said.

McKay saw other boats in the distance, but could not tell how many, how far off, and how large. He thought of German battleships, destroyers, cruisers—even the lone E-boat was more than a match for them.

“German?”

“Some of them, and some not. But some fisherman work for the Germans, you know. Not many, but enough to worry about. We do not want to hurry.”

With that, he wheeled to starboard and Narvik drifted across their bow and out of the window frame. Ahead lay more darkness, more dimly felt mountains with a channel between. And, near the mouth of the fjord, a town. This one had taken little or no blackout precautions at all, and the close-set huddle of homes, with a single church spire, lay mottled by the house lights of the locals.

“Grettisstad?” McKay said.

“Home,” J?rgen said.





The Petersen house stood on the water at the near end of the town, a sturdy two-story building like a chalet or cabin, but of more comfortable proportions. Two or three outbuildings stood in the snowy yard, and a wharf big enough for the sixty-footer reached out to them across the water. No other boats nodded at the dock—it was their own. The Petersens, McKay decided, were well-off.

He also noticed, a minute or so before they docked, that no lights burned. The house stood dark on the shore.

They had almost reached the dock when one man appeared on it. Petersen came on deck for the first time in hours and waved to him. They said nothing as the boat slowed and sidled toward the dock. Petersen threw the man a line and J?rgen brought the Hardr?de to a perfect stop beside the pier, not even bumping the dock until their own wake pushed them softly against it.

McKay waited in the door of the cabin. Someone doused the cabin light and he and the team stood ready, all gear strapped on and ready for hauling. He watched Petersen.

The man on the dock did not tie them off but belayed the rope around the top of a piling and leaned back on the line. He looked around once and jerked his head at Petersen. Petersen stepped up onto the dock and waved McKay forward.

McKay swung through the cabin door at a trot, skip-stepped to the top of the gunwale and in another bound leapt onto the wharf. Petersen had already stridden off toward the dark house. McKay gave his men a hand up onto the pier and then a shove after Petersen. As soon as Ollila, the last in line, left the boat and trotted for the house, McKay dashed ahead of the team to catch up with Petersen. He looked around, listened. They moved quietly despite their eighty or more pounds of equipment, crates, and cans. They had packed carefully.

He caught up with Petersen as the Norwegian rounded the house. He fell in beside him but said nothing. Talk could wait.

The house, McKay could now see, was set back into the swell of a hill. The rest of Grettisstad stood above them, two hundred or more yards off and partly hidden by another fold of the earth. He looked for other houses along the waterfront and saw a few dark shapes on the water farther up the fjord and, like the town, partly hidden by the terrain and a few small trees. The Petersens had privacy.

The hill behind the house came up almost to the second story, where there was a door and a small wooden stoop. Beside the stoop, a long stack of firewood, leaning against a chest-high fence set a few feet from the house, stretched the whole length of the back wall. In the gap between the house and the fence—a railing, McKay realized—a staircase led down into the earth.

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