Dark Full of Enemies(45)
McKay smiled.
They moved on. Soon they came to the rail tunnel. Here the pines ended at the embankment thrown up to raise the tracks to the level of the tunnel and bridge across the fjord. They climbed the crook where the earthen trestle joined the ridge and sprinted across the opening of the tunnel. They reentered the brush and kept climbing.
McKay had warmed to the hike. He had not quite begun to sweat, but his armpits, chest, and groin were hot and growing hotter and the constant movement generated damp in the thick folds of clothing. The heat had climbed his neck and his face and nose were no longer numb. He breathed deep of the cold air. He found himself grinning, and tried to forget Ollila’s joke. He had made a reputation for himself for laughing in the thick of things, but that had been in the chaos of the Canal. This demanded stealth, which increased his excitement the more.
They crested the ridge and McKay shielded his eyes. The dam lay beneath them, lighted bright as day.
McKay knelt in the snow. Directly below them the railway bridge, a steel bridge wider even than the dam, spanned the fjord. It was 250 feet tall, at least, and stood on one spindly steel piling thrust down into the black depths of the fjord. McKay thought idly of a sleeping flamingo, and wondered how much damage the bridge could take from the dam’s destruction.
He looked up the fjord at his real target. There it stood, bigger in life than the figures, estimates, and photos had suggested. His guesses about its dimensions had been correct—he saw that immediately—but to see it himself… He suppressed an oath, and then a grin. He rose and gestured to Petersen. Closer.
Petersen looked at him for a moment, showing nothing, then rose and led them on.
They dropped behind the ridge again, moving in the dark, and soon dipped into a saddle. Here there was a footpath with tracks in it. McKay stopped to look. No one had used the path in some time. Wind and further snowfall had spoiled the prints, but there were a lot of them. McKay looked downhill where the camp glowed beyond the scree and scrub pines, and then at Petersen. Petersen nodded. German troops rotating between the dam and the camp followed this path. McKay nodded and Petersen led them on.
They climbed again and reached a point almost above the dam before they crossed the ridgeline again. The ridge here was cragged and sharp enough for them to grab onto like the top rail of a fence and haul themselves over. They came down on their bellies and crawled to the edge of a flat space below the ridge. The view was perfect. McKay raised his binoculars again.
The dam was much thinner than he had thought. He had compared it repeatedly to the Tallulah Dam, a dam he had worked on and knew well. This dam, though twice as high and wide, was no thicker than the smaller one back home.
He allowed himself one sound: “Hm.”
He glassed the dam complex. Flat spaces had been hacked and blasted from the rock on each end of the dam, and barbed wired fenced the buildings there. The old buildings on the far side still stood there—barracks, a building with a small aerial, small outbuildings, one of which looked like a latrine. Miserable, he thought. At least in the Solomons it had not been freezing when it came time to take a crap. He watched the buildings. Smoke drifted from chimneys, lit from underneath by the dam lights. He lowered the glasses. The place looked like a ghost in a fever dream.
He relaxed his grip on his Thompson and opened a hand toward Ollila. Ollila understood. He removed the lens covers from the Mauser’s sight and handed the rifle to him. Petersen, he saw from the corner of his eye, shifted in the snow and looked from him to the dam and back.
McKay ignored him and settled into position. He braced the rifle butt against his shoulder and put his eye to the scope. The crosshairs swam into view and he settled his cheek against the stock.
He swept the opposite side of the dam again, the barracks, outbuildings, and headquarters. He saw one guard tower and could just make out a dark figure standing in it. As with the camp, there was no searchlight. Another guard stood outside the command post. A Volkswagen Kübelwagen, roof up and sagging under the snow, sat beside the building. McKay wondered who had gotten the vehicle up there and whether they had gotten a medal for it. Then he wondered whether the path between the dam and camp were passable for vehicles, and stopped grinning. They would have to mine the path—just in case.
The command post was the oldest permanent building there—he remembered it from the photos the Colonel had shown him—and looked like it was made of concrete. A bunker. The barracks were of the same clapboard and timber as those downhill at the camp. A few of the outbuildings looked like stone or brick. The latrine was plywood. He commiserated again with any man using it.
He breathed steadily, just like on the ranges, and passed the gunsight down from the opposite side onto the dam itself. At the end of the dam stood a small concrete building the size of an outhouse. He caught a guard in the crosshairs and followed him. The lights like drooping sun-forgotten flowers bowed their yellow bulbs to the concrete pathway. The lake behind the dam, McKay noticed, seemed to be frozen for a hundred yards beyond its wall. He passed from guard to guard at their posts on the dam, counted four of them, and came to rest on the buildings below them, the newest of the lot.
This side of the dam had another small concrete building—a stairwell to the guts of the dam, McKay thought—and four wooden buildings, long and narrow like barracks. McKay did not like that. The building nearest the dam had electrical lines running from its rear to a pole near the water. Smoke rose from the stovepipes of three of the buildings. Two guards patrolled the perimeter, alone but with overlapping paths, and a single guard tower stood beside the lake behind the dam. There, on the water, was another wharf and another small boat. McKay guessed that the terrain forced the Germans to move about by water as much as possible.