Dark Full of Enemies(38)
Just then the church bells of Grettisstad pealed out of the darkness and silence. McKay started at the noise and looked uphill. Across the snowy knoll the bright church spire stood, still and steady in the streetlight glow above the roofs of the village. The bells rang loud, uncannily loud after the long silences of the trip in from the submarine.
McKay risked a whisper to Petersen. “What is that?”
Petersen said nothing, but led them down the stairs behind the firewood. McKay, with another glance at the church spire, followed.
At the bottom of the stairs, Petersen let them through a heavy door into a dark room. full of cold, damp air. McKay sensed stone walls even before Petersen turned on the lights.
“Cozy,” Stallings said as he filed in.
McKay did not like it. They stood in a rock-walled cellar perhaps twelve feet by fifteen feet wide. The effective space was even smaller—empty wineracks lined the room. A card table with folding legs leaned in one corner. There were no chairs or beds, but McKay did see rolled straw pallets on the racks in another corner. And he was unconcerned with comfort, anyway. What bothered him were the lack of windows and the single exit, a door at the foot of a stairwell, a door narrow enough for one man to block, especially a man as large as Petersen, who stooped in the doorframe now, already drawing the door shut behind him.
McKay grabbed the door. “We need to talk.”
“Later,” Petersen said. He tested the door, gave it a little pull. McKay did not let go.
“We need to talk. I have to see the dam at least once, for planning.”
“I say again, impossible.”
McKay said nothing. He held firmly to the door.
Petersen said, “I have to report to Narvik, if you recall.”
“Now?”
“They know the speed of our boats. They reported our time and position. If I am late, they will guess I detoured and want to know why.”
“All right. When you get back, then.”
Petersen, still gripping the door, looked at him for the first time since landing. He said, “Yes.” McKay let go of the door and Petersen pulled it almost shut, then stopped and leaned back into the room. He jerked his head back, toward the church, where the bells still rang. “Happy Christmas,” he said, and shut the door.
They stood still and silent for a moment, none of them looking at each other.
“Well, the hell with this,” Stallings said.
Alone now, they checked their gear. McKay checked his own before doublechecking his men’s, starting with weapons and going through everything. He wanted to make sure nothing had been lost, broken, or destroyed in the transfers along the way. They spent time inspecting the radio and its individual parts. If they could not destroy the dam, McKay wanted at least to deliver a serviceable radio to the Norwegians. When they had finished, they checked everything again, and then McKay set them into the long haul of loading magazines.
Ollila—with his bolt-action Mauser—excepted, each of them carried ten magazines for their submachine guns—300 rounds per man, every one loaded by hand. McKay had not had them load the magazines before departing, a precautionary measure. The larger a magazine, the more tension the spring sustained when fully loaded, and the more likely to break and jam the weapon. The submachine gun the Germans carried had a 32-round magazine but they seldom loaded it to capacity precisely to prevent jams. And the likelihood of a jam increased the longer the full magazines sat unused, the springs bracing uselessly against the stack of bullets above them. McKay had seen weapons jam in combat and, with the odds already so heavily against them as a four-man team in enemy territory, he would not have malfunction against them, too.
Now, though, he felt they had reason to load. He did not want to be caught here of all places. He tried not to think of the effect of three submachine guns in such a tiny place, or of how they might escape if they managed to shoot their way out and up the stairs—the firewood could provide good cover, but a single man on the stoop above could kill every one of them with plunging fire. He focused on the task as a step toward assaulting the dam.
They pulled out the card table and set it up. Without chairs the table proved nearly useless, so McKay had them fold the legs back up and they rested the table on their packs. They sat Indian style on the floor, one of their ammo crates open in the middle of them like a platter at Sunday dinner. Or Christmas dinner.
The holiday had snuck up on McKay. He had thought of it a few times since returning to England, and he had even heard—without noticing—the Coventry Carol on the wireless in the pub the night he decked the Aussie, but since then he had been… distracted. He owed his family a card and a letter. Perhaps even Sally. He felt an old longing reawaken in him like new pain in an old wound and scoffed and shook his head. He would take care of it when they returned.
He watched the team for a moment. Every filled magazine went into a stack beside the crate on the table, where they each dipped in a hand as needed and brought out smaller cardboard boxes marked pistol ball caliber .45. Ollila had pitched in and sat thumbing the squabby rounds along with them. Graves worked quickly, nattering to himself from time to time. Stallings worked slowest, almost absentmindedly. He seemed to have trouble seating the rounds in the slot at the top of the magazine, and even tried to put a few rounds in backwards before stopping himself and turning the bullet over, laboriously, with fingers from both hands, and snapping into place with the others.