Dark Full of Enemies(62)
He knelt and leaned low and to the right, around the cliff, and glimpsed the E-boat barracks, the tower, the wharf and johnboat, the wire. He checked his timepiece. 1140. It surprised him again, but he savored the oddness of it—this kind of darkness, and almost noon—and then felt exhaustion well up in him again. He looked back at the dam, the barracks. A single sentry had appeared, walking a slow pace along the inside of the barbed wire. McKay extended an arm to the men behind him and gestured down—Take ten, boys. He lowered himself to the ground and crawled forward, where he could peer at the enemy while prone in the snow. Now to wait for the guard to change. He prayed they would change at noon.
H?kon and Magnus had no difficulty with the bridge. Magnus, who had never admitted it, but feared the dark, and H?kon had jogged through the black tunnel and onto the bridge. Magnus had felt exposed there, standing just the pair of them on that strip of ground stretched across the air—and with the Germans how near? Near enough for him to hear their music, hanging on the air like a ghost. He wondered if the light carried far enough for the Germans to discern shapes on the bridge. He hoped not. But they would climb down the far side of the bridge support just to be sure.
H?kon went down first, and Magnus followed. The girders made a steel lattice, perfect for climbing. The bridge rose high above the fjord, probably higher than the dam, but both men had worked hard for years and the effort was nothing to them at first. Only Magnus’s hands ached from the constant gripping. What concerned him was the ice rimed upon the steel. He made certain to have a solid hold on the metal before trusting his grip. He did not want to end his days sinking into the black depths of the fjord because of a single slick handhold.
They neared the bottom of the column and stopped. H?kon unslung the bundle from his chest and they divided the contents. H?kon took the explosives, thirty-five pounds of hoarded gelignite, Nobel, and TNT, and set about fastening them to the bones of the bridge’s support.
Magnus took the pressure plate, climbed further down, almost to the waterline, and set to work. For his job he would have to leave the safety of the darkness. He took a breath and crept slowly around to the damward side of the bridge. He clung there in the dim light and listened to the Nazis’ music as he worked.
The Englishman had explained to him, carefully, how to set the device. A pair of planks, one wider than the other, with metal strips underneath, wire, and a battery cannibalized from the torch he kept in the Hardr?de’s engine compartment. When the dam exploded—the Englishman had seemed sure they would succeed—the water flooding into the fjord would climb the bridge’s pier to the planks and press one—the larger of the two—against the other. The metal strips, one electrified by the battery, would touch, completing a circuit to the detonator in the explosives above. Magnus imagined the result. He hoped it would work.
The planks and wiring set, he climbed up to H?kon. Cord, rope, and H?kon’s own belt strapped the bundle tight to the steel. He looked at the belt, at H?kon.
H?kon whispered: “I wanted to make sure.”
Magnus nodded and drew the blasting cap from his pocket, a silver cigarette wrapped in wax paper. He let the paper drift into the dark and connected the wire from below and, with H?kon pointing him to a bare spot in their handful of plastic explosive, pressed the silver tip deep into the doughy compound.
He heard shouting from the dam and nearly fell. H?kon scrambled back into the shadow, but Magnus froze, one arm stretched high above his head where he had caught himself. He listened. Someone at the top of the dam was shouting—in German. He knew for a terrible moment that the Germans had spotted him, and waited. The riflemen would get him.
A long time passed. When Magnus began to notice his hands aching in their grips upon the steel, aching like the bones would crack, he looked back. Half a mile away, the dam stood still and peaceful in its own light. He could barely make out the movement of guards at the top, but at that distance he might have been seeing things. In the darkness, the eyes want movement so much that they will see things. The shouting had stopped.
He flexed his fingers, swung back into the shadow, and climbed—aching hands and frost be damned—back to the top of the bridge.
They went through the tunnel and found their friends in place near the footpath through the gap. Fredrik had picked a place for him to wait, a well-shielded spot behind some snowy rocks. He pointed the way saying “Careful of the path—mines” and Magnus took his place. He sat and breathed and watched the distant German camp.
McKay had never heard a sergeant chew out a private in German, but despite the language it differed little from what he knew. The guard had changed at noon, as he hoped, overseen by a sergeant. McKay had heard the man coming from all the way across the dam. He had left the command post shouting, rousted the new detail from the barracks shouting, and run them from post to post shouting even louder.
“The hell’s going on?” Stallings had whispered.
McKay pointed back at him without looking—Shut up, Grove.
Then the sergeant had appeared. A short man—McKay had smiled at first, remembered a war novel in which the narrator wondered why so many noncoms were angry little men—with a fine grey mustache and perfectly maintained uniform. He even came armed, wearing his helmet and bracing a slung submachine gun against his side. And the man looked tough—instead of the overcoat and scarves the new guards wore, he wore a Panzergrenadier’s dappled camouflage smock.