Dark Full of Enemies(70)

Magnus waited for the storm of fire, but he held. The rest of the group did, too. That was the proudest night of his life.

Another minute went by. Two of the three in the path woke and groaned and groggily stirred. The wounded Germans tried to stand but could not, and finally one began to crawl the way he had come. He moaned pitifully, called someone’s name. Magnus watched and waited, peered into the darkness downhill.

Slowly more Germans appeared from the dark and the trees. Magnus counted fifteen, though he could not see well enough to be sure. He did not see any of the machine guns, which worried him—the Germans were husbanding their men. But they had them in the open. Now to wait for Fredrik and his detonator. Its leads connected to ten pounds of TNT planted behind loose rocks facing out from the pass, toward the Germans. When Fredrik blew the TNT, they would open fire.

Four Germans came forward from the rest, slung their rifles and bent to help the wounded. They spoke in encouraging voices. One of them said something and laughed, sharing some old joke with the wounded man, who laughed and moaned. In the silence of that moment, before Fredrik detonated the charge and the hillside flashed and disappeared under dust and snow and shrapnel, before they opened up with their rifles and submachine guns and Amund’s Bren chopped downhill at the German infantry, Magnus could hear, faint and far behind them in the fjord, the Hardr?de’s engine, throttled up. Tonktonktonktonktonk.





McKay rolled Stallings over. Shots from the fleeing Germans had torn two holes in his jacket, one just above the right collarbone and another in the back of the right shoulder. He had no blood on his jacket, but with Stallings coughing up droplets, the shot had at least nicked a lung. McKay remembered Guadalcanal.

“I’m sorry,” Stallings said.

“Shut up, Grove. You didn’t do nothing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Get up,” McKay said. He started to help him up but Stallings cried out as they lifted him and two shots cracked past. The riflemen across the dam had gotten the range.

McKay let Stallings down and he and Graves dragged him to cover. McKay felt hot. He wiped at his face and looked down the staircase in the cliff, to the wharf and the E-boat and to the dark fjord beyond. He could hear, faint and far off, J?rgen coming for them. Like a watch ticking in cotton, he thought, and, Cotton ticking. He felt himself grinning and shook his head. He turned back to Stallings. Graves had unwrapped a bandage and slapped it onto the chest wound.

“What happened, sir?” Graves said. He wrapped gauze around Stallings’s torso and cinched it tight. Stallings grunted.

He had found Petersen dodging between the huts, reloading the Sten. Together they had flushed the handful of Germans away from the barracks toward the dam, toward Graves and Stallings.

“Petersen?”

Petersen looked away. “There were too many.”

Graves swore and checked his work on Stallings. Ollila fired. On the other side of the ridge, something exploded—a small, quick boom. They started and looked up, behind them.

“Frag grenade,” McKay said. “German reinforcements. This is it. Graves?”

“Sir.”

“You seal that door?”

“The fuckers can pound at it all they want. Sir.”

“Outstanding. Time?”

Graves checked his timepiece. “Thirty-nine minutes.”

McKay looked out at the fjord again, at the darkness beyond the dam lights. “J?rgen is coming. We can’t climb back out, so we sit tight and hold them off until he gets here. Then we run like hell for the dock. Grove?”

Stallings looked at him. “Sorry, Joe.”

“You okay to move?”

“Hurts like hell.”

“I know it.”

A second explosion, a big one, shook the fjord and rolled like thunder down the mountain walls. From the ridge came the sounds of rifle fire, a machine gun, and then the answering German weapons. They sat for a moment with the rattle and pop of the weapons reaching them like distant party sounds. Stallings had compared the fire on the beach in Sicily to fireworks. McKay had thought the same thing, several times, on the Canal.

Submachine gun fire woke them. Bullets snapped and sung past and chipped at the concrete building and tore at the snow. They pulled their legs in and McKay climbed over Stallings and Graves to the corner.

“Grenade,” he said to Graves. He leaned out, fired a long burst from the Thompson and saw a pair of men duck to cover behind the concrete parapet of the dam.

“Ready,” Graves said.

“Chuck it.”

McKay fired again and Graves stepped out and lobbed the grenade into the dark. It dropped onto the path, behind the parapet, and they ducked back. McKay heard the Germans curse, the grenade explode, and some survivor cough and feebly swear. Another voice ordered them back, and with one more burst at the stairwell, they fell back. Reloaded, McKay leaned out and sprayed fire across the top of the parapet to encourage them. Rifle fire reached for him from across the dam, and he dropped back to cover.

He reloaded the Thompson and looked up at the cliffs, the hills from whence they had come. Stallings and Graves spoke his thoughts.

“How that lot get so close?”

“Where the hell’d the goddam sniper get to?”





Ollila had worked the E-boat barracks as long as he could without endangering McKay and Petersen. Then the lights had gone out—a bold move by the Captain, but one that put Ollila in danger by robbing him of his best cover, the yellow haze of the lights, against which even his muzzle flashes were hard for the Germans to see. When this darkness descended he had shifted to firing on targets across the dam. Then McKay had found Petersen in the dark and together flushed the remaining German sailors out, drove them toward the dam, and to Graves and Stallings. Ollila could not believe it when he saw it, but was happy to shoot them down as they fled across the long hard arc of the dam. Some of them simply gave up and lay down below the rampart. He remembered, and took an occasional look to see if they had moved. A few did, and he shot them.