Dark Full of Enemies(72)
The Germans shouted and the grenade exploded. He did not wait—he leaned out again and dropped to his belly, his eye already at the Thompson’s sights. He fired up and down the line of floodgates, chipping concrete and ice and puffing loose snow in little clouds. The Thompson jammed again. He swore and rolled back for his second grenade. He heard shouts as he pulled the pin, which caught halfway through the spoon. He jerked it loose, gripped and threw without looking, and ran for the staircase. He reached the top and faced the cliffs. He shouted, “Ollila! Ollila!” and took the stairs two at a time.
One of the dying Germans there reached feebly for him as he bounded past. He caught up to Stallings, Graves, and Petersen halfway down. The Hardr?de was perhaps four hundred yards from the wharf and closing. The engine had slowed as it approached. McKay fell in behind the group and went backwards down the stairs and watched the top, working to clear the jam in his Thompson.
They were a hundred feet from the dock when the Germans opened fire.
The first shots smashed into the cliff behind and below them. McKay looked at the far side of the fjord. The riflemen had broken from cover and taken up positions on the top of the dam, beside the entrance, and on the switchbacks of a path to the foot of the dam. Six or seven of them fired continuously. McKay realized that, with their white camouflage snowsuits against the cliffs, his team made brilliant shooting gallery targets.
“Keep moving—go.”
A rifleshot pinged off the handrail. Another snapped past McKay’s ear and splinters of stone pattered against his back. Another.
“Shit!”
Graves.
“You hit?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.”
The Germans from the lake ice reached the top of the stairs and opened fire. Bullets zipped and snapped from two directions, all descending upon them like hail. They reached the dock and ran across it in a storm of splintering wood and chipped rock. The boat neared, engine reversed as it glided in, just out of reach. Petersen grunted and swore in Norwegian. Graves pointed at the docked E-boat, shouted, “Sir?”
“Leave it. Let’s get out of here.”
“Aye, sir—”
A bullet smacked into flesh and Stallings spasmed and fell behind Petersen.
“Grove?”
McKay slowed his stride and went to kneel beside him and something struck his leg. After hours, days in the cold, he noticed the white heat of the bullet first. It fascinated him. He pondered it with detachment, even as the stroke unstrung his leg like a hammerblow and dropped him to the planks.
He righted himself and looked at Stallings. “Grove?”
Stallings did not move.
McKay pushed himself to one knee and hobbled forward. Graves took him by one arm. Petersen lifted Stallings. The boat swung broadside into the dock, rocking them, and crunched into the bow of the E-boat. The E-boat’s hull splintered and its fore moorings snapped. The boat began an angular drift, tethered only at the stern.
They swung over the wooden gunwales as the fire rapped at them and blew chips from the painted boards and sprayed them with fountains of the fjord’s waters. And then smoke billowed and the Hardr?de’s engine snarled and rattled and they slid backwards from the dock, McKay and the team in the lee of the gunwales watching the dam’s remaining lights dim with distance. The gunfire stopped.
McKay did not move from cover until the latticed rail bridge spanned the sky in the darkness. Until then, all he heard was the boat’s engine, the rattle of gunfire and grenades across the ridge, and, in a bass murmur audible from the wheelhouse, J?rgen praying at the helm.
Magnus saw the second wave of Germans coming, spread through the dark rustling pines in battle formation, just as the Finn, the sniper, slid downhill into the pass, came up running, and dashed past shouting, “To the boat! Run!”
Magnus ran. He took up his rifle and followed the sniper. The Germans fired. He heard bullets—felt them, horribly—all around him in the dark. He thought of the legends his grandmother had told him, the old stories, and imagined himself pawed by trolls in the night. His whole body went cold despite the sweat and the heat and the dash across the crags. He ran harder.
Behind him, Fredrik detonated the last of the manned explosives. The shock threw him and the Finn to the ground. He rose and helped the Finn up. He staggered, tore off the strange cape of rags and scraps, the goggles on his head, broke into a lope, and worked himself up to a run. More bullets, fading shouts, and they ran alone through the winter dark.
On the way they had discussed an escape route, a narrow path better suited to mountain goats than men, but a place where they could drop quickly to the fjord and the boat if they needed to. Magnus, who had lived on the fjord since boyhood, knew it. He took the lead.
They reached the place some minutes later, a spot well beyond the rail bridge he and H?kon had mined, with the dam and the headquarters camp far away.
Magnus pointed at the trail, a broken line in the cliffs following some old seam in the rock, turned up and sharded eons before. He dropped to it, the Finn followed, and they worked their way down.
They had made it halfway down when they heard others overhead. Magnus looked up, thought he saw movement in the darkness, but looked to his footing and kept climbing. Below him, the boat sidled toward the cliff. Men on deck looked up at him. He found himself about to wave, grew angry at himself, and continued downward.