Dark Full of Enemies(73)

A rifle cracked above them and a shot burst at the boat’s waterline. The men on deck ducked and scattered. More shots, closer. A pair burst against the rock nearby. The Germans had seen him. Magnus jumped.

He had dived into the fjord in winter before, but the cold was a feeling that he could not fully remember—it was too strong. He crashed through the black water and instantly stroked outward, stopped the plunge, pulled himself to the surface and gasped. He made for the boat, his clothes already a leaden shroud on his limbs and his fingers and face numb.

Someone else hit the water behind him, and two more. Gunshots echoed, bounced and caromed between the cliffs. The water burst in geysers around them. He looked up at the boat, hands reached for him, and he flopped aboard. Then the Finn, gasping, and two more—H?kon, yes, and Amund, somehow clutching the big machine gun. H?kon screamed—Magnus could not understand him, his mind had been shocked out of him, but then it came to him, “Go on! Go on! Go on! We’re it! We’re it!” They lay in a line like four sopping air-stunned fish, while the American saboteurs fired at the Germans on the cliffs and J?rgen gunned the engine.





13





Captain Fass called his men off as soon as the boat had reached speed and wheeled about for the escape. He had radioed the Navy in Narvik—let them handle it.

He entered the dam stairwell, the one the bandits, the gangsters, had used. He had detailed some of the squads crossing the lake to enter the dam immediately, not bothering with the escaping saboteurs, and start inspecting the dam. He had sent them below early in the confusion to cross the dam belowground, through the galleries, and to surprise the enemy from the dam itself. They had found the doors to all three galleries welded shut.

He assigned three men with sledgehammers to work on the uppermost gallery’s door and tried to think of something else. The dam complex had descended into chaos. The Naval contingent, the Schnellboot’s crew and officers and support personnel, had panicked and scattered, chasing one—no, two—no, a dozen—armed men around their barracks, losing men constantly. Then the lights had gone out—one of his men reported seeing a man hacking at the power cables—and the lot of them had made for the dam and the safety of the garrison. Now he stepped over them everywhere he turned. Undisciplined sailors.

He leaned over the well and looked down. Men stood crammed together on every landing, all the way down. Their voices echoed up in a babble. He shouted down to the dam’s chief engineer, a fat reservist named Küster. The man climbed up and stood panting before him.

“All welded, Captain, just like the others. Well, the lowest gallery is still open. The door has been jammed—well, since I got here.”

“Then concentrate on the middle and upper galleries. Get in those doors—God knows how much time we have.”

“Time, Captain?”

“The Americans did not come here to weld our doors shut, Küster.”

“Yes, Captain. There is little we can do without blowtorches, special tools—”

“Do you have blowtorches?”

“No, Captain.”

Fass looked at him and left the entrance.

Lieutenant Pfaff had been killed, and at least twenty others. Twice that many carried wounds of varying severity. The camp surgeon and a pair of volunteers with a little medical experience—a veterinarian, a college dropout—moved among the bodies to look for more wounded and perform triage. Fass had pulled his infantry back from the stairs and had them search the Schnellboot barracks for traps, mines, enemy bodies. The reports were all confused, as always in the instants after battle. Some of his men reported saboteurs in white winter gear like the Russians of the winter before, ghosts in the snow. A few reported men disguised in Navy uniforms, peacoats and officer’s caps. Those men who had not been killed or wounded fleeing the Navy camp had cowered indoors and waited for the fire to stop. He discounted anything they said. He had gotten a different estimation of strength from every man he spoke with and did not care to formulate an estimate of his own until later. Perhaps days later.

He walked toward the barracks and Sergeant Zeichen, one of the surviving squad leaders, met him. Zeichen saluted and fidgeted. Fass waited. It was unlike Zeichen to show nerves.

“Herr Captain,” Zeichen said, and began crying. Fass knew—this was not nerves. “Captain, we have found Sergeant B?uml.”

The blood left Fass’s face. His stomach knotted. “Dead?”

“Yes.”

He followed Zeichen to the rear of the naval huts and there lay B?uml in a line with a few others—the boy Private Frühauf, Lance Corporal Wissen, a couple of sailors in long underwear and overcoats. Killed going to the latrine. Fass handed Zeichen his torch and knelt by B?uml. The sergeant had a neat dark hole in one side of his neck and a tattered hollow in the other. Frozen blood crusted his neck, face, and the entire left side of his chest. After Russia, the partisans and bandits, after Kursk, he had bled to death in the snow.

“Damned shit,” he shouted. He wrung his cap and hurled it into the darkness. He stood and walked back among the barracks. “Zeichen, this makes you my second in command at the dam. Understood?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Where the devil is Bachhuber?”

“I’ll find out, Captain.”

“Get me that Bavarian pig immediately.”