Dark Full of Enemies(46)
He brought the sight back to the new buildings and looked for signs or placards. He saw nothing, just one posted beside a handrail near the dam—zum Dammfu?, to the base of the dam, marking a staircase. That helped him not at all.
McKay lowered the rifle, and Petersen seemed to go slack. McKay looked at him for a moment, then tapped a finger on the upright safety at the back of the rifle’s bolt. Petersen glowered and looked away.
He handed the rifle back to Ollila and looked at him. Ollila, though McKay could not have detected a specific movement, seemed to shrug. McKay thought a moment and looked again at Petersen. Petersen seemed to mull something. He bit his lip and stared into the light of the dam. Finally, he rose to hands and knees and jerked his head toward the ridge. McKay and Ollila followed.
They crossed into the shadows of the mountains again and moved back the way they had come. McKay watched Petersen carefully. As they walked, he felt for the bolt of his Thompson in the darkness and, slowly, eased it back with the heel of his hand, just to be sure it had not frozen shut. Behind him, he heard a soft click. Ollila had seen, and had unsafed the Mauser.
Petersen led them back to the footpath in the saddle. They turned onto the path, crossed the ridge, and left the path again, climbing.
Finally, they stopped. They had reached a flat knob in the rock faces, a bluff jut of rock above the quiet waters of the fjord. They crawled again into the light of the dam, eased themselves on thighs and elbows into position. They stopped, and McKay knew. Petersen did not even have to point. McKay did not allow himself his next words—he had no control over them.
He whispered, “Son of a bitch.”
Below the dam, at the foot of the staircase cut into the rocky bank, a third wharf reached along the cliffs and extended an arm into the black water. There lay moored and under the watch of three guards a German E-boat.
They watched the dam for three hours, long enough for McKay to discern some of the rhythms of its routine. The perimeter guards on his side of the fjord, at the new barracks, moved in overlapping rounds. They passed each other every few minutes. If they had to kill one of them in order to infiltrate, McKay saw, they would have to kill both.
He watched the guards in their patrols long enough to gather something of their personalities. At least two were visibly overweight, even beneath their winter coats. Several smoked continuously. McKay noted this indiscipline, and noted again when an officer—a lieutenant, he thought—chewed a pair of guards out for smoking on duty. They waited until he had returned to the command post and lit new smokes for each other.
He watched long enough to see the guard change. He could tell the hour approached for some time—an hour after McKay had started watching them, the guards began checking their watches and did so more frequently—he could have charted it like shortening radio waves—until the moment they were relieved. The new guards filed out of a single barracks on the far side of the dam, near the command post. They took up their positions in a military manner, the outbound watchmen waiting for their replacements, though visibly impatient. The General Orders sprang to McKay’s mind as he watched. There was discipline here, he decided, but not much. Whether the guards were learning it or losing he could not tell.
The new batch took over the posts and made an impressive show. Even from a distance they appeared younger, trimmer, wore more sharply maintained uniforms, and carried themselves more like soldiers. McKay did not like that. He wondered whether there were two groups of guards mixed in the garrison, and wished he had noted how the guards had responded to their relief—familiarly, like old buddies, or otherwise.
Something was up.
And there were the lights. It had not surprised McKay, after he had seen Narvik and Grettisstad lit up in the arctic night, that the Germans did not maintain blackout here, well out of range of Allied bombing. But to have every light on—all the lamps along the top of the dam, lights in every window of every building, and lamps over the doors of every barracks building—it was strange. Like so much else, he did not like it.
They lingered long enough to watch an officer make the rounds. The first officer, so concerned with smoking on duty, trailed this one, a superior. McKay made out silver epaulets, possibly a gold pip—he could not be sure. The man was anything from a first lieutenant to a colonel.
By the time he decided to end the reconnaissance and make for the Hardr?de, McKay’s excitement had gone. He had felt exhilarated, after the long journey and the hours in Petersen’s basement, to move into the field, weapon in hand. At least, he would remedy the skimpy intelligence, see the dam for himself, and begin to lay plans. But remedying the intelligence had only worsened his problems by making them clearer. On one side of the dam there were barracks for at least forty men, multiple perimeter patrols, guards pacing 250-foot segments of the dam itself, and the E-boat.
The E-boat, the greatest blow. The new buildings were barracks, all right—for the boat’s crew, and the seemingly uninhabited building probably held mechanical supplies and a stock of ammunition for its weaponry. Like the boat that had tried to search them in the Vestfjorden, the E-boat at the dam had an anti-aircraft machine cannon in its stern. Were McKay to plan his attack, execute it, and be caught in the act, the Germans could pour rifle fire on them from one end of the dam while the E-boat machine gunned them with 20-millimeter shells. McKay had seen what happened when a slug that size hit a man. And worse—he imagined the E-boat catching the Hardr?de.