Dark Full of Enemies(69)
He had a third detonation device, a pair of them—tin boxes with wire drawstrings. He set them in place and took four climbing pitons and a hammer from his coat. Six feet from the charge, he knelt and drove a piton into the wall at shin height. Frozen blood crackled in the wrinkles of his palms as he worked. He drove its mate into the opposite wall. He hooked his great callused finger into the loop of one device and pulled its drawstring out, clicking, to the first piton. He hooked the line underneath and drew it across to the second piton, where the hooked the drawstring’s loop and left it. He did the same with the second device. With the tripwires in place, he flicked switches on both boxes and, minding the wire, left the gallery.
When he reached the door he could hear the shooting, what sounded like a grenade.
“Shit.”
He looked back and confirmed that he had placed the tripwires out of sight in the curve of the dam. He took out his knife and reached above him to the pipe that guarded the electrical wires, pried it free of the ceiling, exposed the wire, and cut it. The gallery went dark.
He shut the door applied the last of his thermite to the lock, hinges, and jamb, and mounted the ladder before the stuff had stopped sputtering its glowing drops of steel.
He reached the top and found darkness there as well—all the lights in the barracks had been doused, and from there the shapes of men in coats streamed toward him, toward the dam, in the darkness.
Behind him, Stallings shouted, “Graves—down! Fire!”
He threw himself to the ground before the concrete building and they fired without aiming into the crowd. The group—five, six, seven of them—reacted at the once, some buckling and falling, some raising weapons toward nothing, or scattering, breaking into a faster run, but all reacted. He thought of a herd of antelope moving in close order to avoid lionesses in the grass. He grinned and rolled onto his side to reload, opened fire before he had even returned to prone.
The last of the group ducked into the pathway at the top of the dam and were gone. For a moment there was silence, and then Graves heard a single rifle shot, high on the air.
He rose and looked back at the dam. The lights still burned there. He could see the humped backs of the men scrambling low across the dam toward their comrades. He looked farther, at the far camp, and saw Germans watching him. He grinned again, and fire flickered like sparks from two, three of them. Pop pop, pop.
The shots zipped overhead, not near enough to scare him, but Graves still ducked into the cover offered by the stairwell and looked at Stallings.
“Cover, Stallings, cover.”
Stallings did not move. He turned his head, looked at Graves, and mumbled something.
“Bloody shit, it’s happened.” The concussion had finally gotten to Stallings. He even seemed to be drooling. Graves reached for him and shook his shoulder. Stallings coughed blood.
Graves pulled his hand away, started to speak, and McKay arrived with Petersen.
As soon as they had heard shooting, Magnus and the others delved deeper into the snow, burrowed farther behind their rocks, readied to ambush the reinforcements sure to come from the headquarters camp. Magnus waited and counted. The Germans responded in two minutes.
In the lights of the camp he saw a figure run from the headquarters beside the railhead to a barracks and, within thirty seconds of that, the soldiers poured out into the open ground and formed up. Another thirty seconds, and they were moving. Magnus could not be sure at such a distance, but there were probably a platoon—thirty men. Behind them in the camp, more fell in and began to hoist on coats and gear.
Along the face of the ridge, spread across the saddle on both sides of the path, safety catches clicked off, bolts slid home.
The Germans left the light of the camp quickly and in good order. For a few minutes someone in the van of the column shone a torch on the path, but doused it as they reached the uphill slope. They suspect, Magnus thought. They remember. The Germans would come on in combat formation, spread out, ready for the ambush. Suddenly his body cooled and he felt the sweat standing out on his face, greasing the palms of his aching hands. He tried to breathe steadily.
Long minutes passed. The firing at the dam increased, and he thought he heard grenades exploding. Above it all, from somewhere farther along the ridge, came the steady crack of the Finn sharpshooter’s rifle.
Suddenly, the shooting ebbed. Magnus wanted to raise his head, turn, and look, but he could have seen nothing, and the Germans were out there. The night lay silent for a moment. Then he saw them coming.
The Germans had sent forward half a squad, five men, to bait the ambushers. Petersen had trained them well, taught them to look for this. They held their fire. The Germans moved up the path slowly. They wore heavy grey overcoats and white winter smocks, though one had forgotten or did not have time to reverse his and it still showed green and brown camouflage. In the darkness it hardly mattered. All but their leader carried Mausers. The Germans had held back the cream of the squad, the machine gun and its support. They neared the pass, and Magnus’s body tensed. His muscles bunched against themselves and he tried to shrink into the earth without moving. He closed his eyes as the leader hit the first booby trap.
It was an American fragmentation grenade that they had rigged to a tripwire. Magnus heard the metal handle spring away, and one of the Germans spoke. The grenade exploded and one man screamed. Magnus looked. Three bodies lay scattered in the path. Two more had fallen and rolled downhill. They tried to stand and winced and cried with the pain.