Dark Full of Enemies(65)
He liked McKay—a hard name, very unFinnish, so he preferred to address him as “Captain” if at all. The man had gone through difficult fights, like himself, and Ollila had begun to find he could not respect anyone who had not. He wondered how the Japanese compared to the Russians in brutality, then stopped. He could not let his mind wander.
But McKay and the others had done well. So far they had killed four guards and the sailor, reacting instantly to every surprise. Ollila had seen men freeze the moment something with the plan went wrong. It got people killed. That was why the Colonel had chosen him, at the British officer’s insistence, to come along. If Petersen had turned, had gone to work for the Nazis, if it was Petersen who had handed the first team of saboteurs over to destruction, and McKay could not take care of it, they knew that Ollila could. He was glad he had not had to—yet.
This could succeed, he thought. He had not held out such a hope before.
McKay moved. Ollila laid the sight on him. He had risen from his squat, half-kneeling now, legs coiled to spring. Ollila looked at the dam—two guards in the middle talking, lighting cigarettes, the one nearest them had just turned to walk away. He swung back to McKay and saw him running for the entrance.
12
McKay reached the door and dropped to one knee and looked around—at the barracks, the latrine, down the stairs marked zum Dammfu?. No one in sight. Graves and Stallings came to a stop beside him, pressed close in the narrow lee of the concrete building. He looked back to the barracks, at the shadowed corner where he had left Petersen. He raised fingers to his eyes and pointed them in a wide arc across the barracks grounds. He turned to the door.
He had left Petersen behind to cover their rear. Any trouble and Petersen would be in a position to cover them—the silenced Sten would help. Stallings he would leave inside the entrance building, once they got in.
He tested the doorknob and found it open. He turned slowly, awaited and felt the bolt come free of the doorpost, then shifted out of the door’s way and slowly pulled. Its hinges squeaked once, and he stopped. He waited and listened. Stallings fidgeted, Graves placed a hand near his Thompson’s bolt. After a moment, McKay, satisfied, pulled further. The door opened without another sound and the team slipped in.
The inside of the building gave them six feet of width and twelve of depth to work in. Beyond the small foyer or landing stood a railing, and then a concrete aperture leading down, down, with a block and tackle suspended over the pit. McKay leaned over. A row of yellow lights merged with the rungs of the ladder hundreds of feet below. He checked the block and tackle. He turned and nodded and they all dropped their packs.
He leaned close to Stallings. “We’re going down, Grove. I’ll whistle once when we’re ready and then you lower Graves’s gear down. Got it?”
“No problem.”
McKay slung his Thompson across his back, watched Graves grip the rungs and climb, and followed.
He did not like the well, not at all. The air felt colder and wetter even than outside, the cold and wet of rock in permanent shadow. He had found places like that in the mountains, rocky spots that never saw the sun and smelt of granite, earth, and moss. Worse was the sound—a dull hum, too low and slow and evenly pitched to hint at rhythm or tune. It did not sound like machinery. It sounded like the concrete itself intoning its massiveness, like the long weary outbreath of a mountain god long since unworshiped.
McKay tried for a moment to remember which god caused disasters with his breath and pushed it from his mind.
The rungs were bent iron rods, rusted and—McKay stopped and looked closer—frosted. He looked below to Graves. His breath clouded thick. He whispered Graves’s name. Graves looked up.
“Careful—ice.”
“Right, sir.”
They kept down. After a while, Graves whispered up. “We’re here.”
They had reached the inspection gallery. McKay guessed they had climbed one hundred and fifty feet down. They stood on a narrow landing with a steel door set in the concrete, hoarfrost like marbling paper across its entire surface. McKay tried the handle. The door opened.
“Colder down here than up top,” Graves said.
McKay held up a hand and entered the gallery. It was totally dark, another patch of underworld blackness hiding in the northern winter. McKay lit his flashlight and played it across the walls. He found a switch in a box behind the door, turned it, and the passage echoed as the lights in the ceiling cracked on. The dim lights hung in mesh cages, all stemming from a steel pipe that ran along the gallery ceiling. They flickered in a row that curved into the distance and out of sight. McKay looked at Graves and nodded.
Graves leaned out and whistled softly up the shaft and McKay heard faint movement at the top. He checked the Welrod and tapped Graves on the shoulder, pointed at himself and the tunnel, and moved forward.
He walked the gallery from end to end. The passage was small—McKay’s toboggan almost brushed the lights, and Graves would almost have to squat—and narrow. McKay had six inches of space at either shoulder. Some of the lights had burned out near the center. He guessed the crew had been cutting corners. At the opposite end he found another steel door. He opened it, slowly, leaned out and looked up at a well identical to the one they had come down. He closed the door and returned, first at a walk, then a jog—he did not like the sound of the dam.