Dark Full of Enemies(5)

McKay looked at the third photo. It was soft and grainy—McKay guessed that it had been enlarged from miniature filmstock, the kind used in concealable cameras, and manipulated through multiple prints in the dark room to give an exposure where very little had been captured. The photo showed the dam from the ridgeline above. There were more buildings in this photo than in the previous one. He could not tell for certain, but a pair of long buildings on the far side of the dam looked like barracks. A radio aerial rose above a third building, the largest. Numerous small, dark figures stood about.

“I reckon this is the most recent photo?” McKay said.

The Colonel nodded again.

“That’s the dam at Grettisfjord,” he said. “It’s a hydroelectric complex that powers the Narvik area.”

“Narvik?”

“That’s right.”

Narvik lay 140 miles north of the Arctic Circle, under continuous night for most of the winter. When the Nazis invaded three years before, the British and Norwegians had held out there long after the rest of the country had fallen. Dug into the mountains and fjords, the British, Norwegians, and even some Poles had beaten the Nazis back, but the Nazis had hemmed them in, pounded them. The dueling navies coated the bottom of the fjords with wreckage. In the end, the Nazis forced the Allies to evacuate by sea—not long after Dunkirk, but without the fanfare, and with the fleet harried across the North Sea by the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Narvik had remained a major Nazi naval base ever since. McKay looked at the photos again and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“What can you tell us, judging from these photographs?”

McKay flipped through them again, talking while he did.

“It’s an arch dam. Pretty common design, and not too different from the kind in the States from what I can see. That intake there feeds a pipeline through the mountains, but I don’t see a hydro station in any of these pictures.”

“Major?” the Colonel said.

“It’s on the other side of the northern cliffs,” the Major said. “Not too far from the dam.”

“You work on anything like that before, Captain?”

“Tallulah Dam,” McKay said. “Back home, in Georgia. Arch dam, like this. It’s at the top end of the gorge I mentioned. Intake feeds hydro turbines through more than two miles of underground pipeline. But this dam is big—bigger than Tallulah for sure, probably bigger than any dam I’ve worked on. I reckon a thousand feet wide at the top.”

“That’s about right,” the Major said. “We don’t have exact figures, though.”

McKay held up the most recent photograph and pointed at the new buildings. “Barracks?”

“Probably,” the Colonel said.

“What kind of garrison?”

“Uncertain,” the Major said. “The krauts have all kinds of second-stringers they use for rearguard duty like this, but you never know. Plan like they’re Waffen SS.”

“Yes, sir.” McKay said. “I reckon that’s all we have on the dam?”

The Colonel nodded.

“The most recent photo is from a contact in the area, smuggled out through Shetland. We requested all we could get on the dam from King Haakon’s government-in-exile and those other two were all they could scrounge up. We have a few rough diagrams of the dam and its facilities, and a map of the area, but that’s it. That’s why we needed a man who knows dams.”

McKay, nodded, flipped through the prints once more and looked up. “May I ask what this is about, sir?”

The Colonel folded his hands and took a deep breath, less a sigh than a man about to dive into deep water after something he had lost. He did not begin where McKay expected.

“The invasion of northern Europe is set for late Spring,” the Colonel said. “We’ll probably land in France. When the time comes, we’ll have plenty to do there in the way of sabotage, ambushes, and preparing the way for the conventional forces. In the meantime, and in accordance with our ongoing objectives, we are creating as much trouble as possible on the outer fringes of Hitler’s empire. This dam—this part of Norway—is about a far away as you can get from where the real action is—or, will be. And the more Nazi resources we can tie down in out of the way places, the better our chances for breaching Fortress Europe.”

McKay nodded.

“So it’s a sabotage mission?”

“Blow up the dam.”

McKay said nothing. He always felt two things in the moment that the Colonel stated the objective of a new assignment—excitement and dread. This time he could not be sure which he felt the stronger.

After a moment, the Colonel said, “The Major has your itinerary.”

“Yes, first things first.” The Major opened a folder. “You and your team will fly north to the Shetland Islands, on the line London—Edinburgh—Inverness—the Orkneys—and Shetland. Keeps you over land most of the way, until you really have to cross open water. Don’t want to risk a lost team.”

McKay laughed. “Appreciate it.” He did.

“You’ll be landing at RAF Scatsta, a fighter base up there. There’s an airfield on the nearer end of the island but its runways are half the length we need for your transport. Again, don’t want a lost team, whether in the drink or smeared across a Shetland golf course.”