Dark Full of Enemies(74)

Lieutenant Bachhuber, the former garrison commander, had led the reinforcements up from the headquarters camp. Zeichen brought a runner to him a minute later, a private in Bachhuber’s group, as Fass stood watching the tiny flicker of muzzle flashes on the cliffs. The firing reached him as dull pops, divided and diminished by their echoes. Bachhuber’s men had at least given chase to the saboteurs.

The runner was a private, sweaty-faced, panting. He saluted and Fass waved it off.

“What’s the situation?”

“We are still securing the pass, Captain. The Norwegians planted many mines.”

“Norwegians?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“What makes Bachhuber believe they were Norwegian?”

“During the fight we overheard them shouting to each other in Norwegian.”

Fass thought on that. He wondered whether the Norwegians, after what the Gestapo had done to that village, had come back to finish the job. Unlikely—partisans had too little discipline, at least in this part of Europe.

“How many?”

“The Lieutenant is unsure, Captain. Perhaps a squad.”

“Did you capture any? Kill any?”

The private hesitated. Fass had his answer.

“Tell Bachhuber to keep sweeping the heights, and to get his fat ass down here. I want a prisoner or a body and I want to talk to him personally.”

The private ran. Fass and Zeichen walked toward the stairwell.

“We found this by the munitions hut,” Zeichen said. He handed Fass a knife. Fass turned the weapon over in his hands. It had a broad heavy blade, pointed at the end and single-edged, and a stubby leather-wrapped handle. He held the blade up in the light from the dam—stamped into the tang near the crossguard were four letters, u.s.m.c.

“We counted four men escaping by boat, Captain. We have yet to find bodies or any men in hiding here. That is…”

“Four men sneaked into our camp and caused all this,” Fass said. He handed the knife back to Zeichen. “I am an even bigger failure than Bachhuber.”

Zeichen said nothing. They entered the stairwell again and looked down the shaft. Küster was below, on the first landing, the top gallery. The sounds of hammers and grunts and curses echoed up. Fass checked his watch.

“Sergeant, how long since the bandits—the—since the enemy departed?”

“Perhaps twenty minutes, a half-hour, Captain.”

Fass looked down the shaft again, then at Zeichen. The Americans—Norwegians, whomever—had sealed a bomb in the dam. He knew it.

“Tell them to hurry up.”

The men did. With sledgehammers, wedges, chisels, and crowbars they pried a gap between the top gallery’s door and the jamb. Five minutes later they had pulled it down and flooded the passage with armed engineers. They had not discounted wounded and desperate enemies hiding in the galleries, waiting to kill them. Two minutes after that they finished the inspection—nothing.

“It’s in the inspection gallery,” Fass said. “Put everything into opening it. Hurry.”

The door took longer—its seal held tighter, its landing was narrower, its concrete thicker. Fass called up all unnecessary personnel from the shaft and climbed down to oversee the end of the thing himself. Four minutes after the top gallery had been cleared, the men broke through—a crack at the top left corner. Fass dripped sweat. His heart raced. He watched the men pry and loosen, break concrete from the steel frame in chunks and toss them down the shaft. They could clean up later. This was no the time for guardhouse discipline—this was combat, the moment for which he had been preparing them for weeks.

A big man, a Silesian corporal named Maurer, roared and his crowbar scraped against the doorframe and then through. The entire door juddered loose. The men on the platform gasped and cheered. As a team they hauled the door away from the black tunnel mouth and Fass flicked on his torch and called for the dam engineers. They came down the ladder one on top of the other and Fass waved them forward into the gallery with his flashlight, then followed.





McKay knelt beside Stallings on the deck of the Hardr?de and tore open his white jacket and the layers of Army fatigues underneath. Stallings steamed where he lay opened to the cold. At the bottom his field shirt glistened black, like oilcloth. He pulled it open and the undershirt showed dark as well. McKay lifted the undershirt. It smeared aside the blood and the belly showed white in the darkness, a tear the size of a baseball rent ragged above the navel. The belly spasmed and blood pulsed out.

“Does he live?”

McKay looked up. The mechanic, Magnus, stood there, already shivering, already covered in crackling ice.

“Barely.” Stallings was breathing, but his face and skin had become wan and fishlike. “Help me get him in the cabin.”

He stood and bent to lift Stallings, but his knee buckled and he caught himself on the gunwale. He swore.

“You too, Captain?” Graves said.

“Looks that way.” He stood carefully and was about to try lifting Stallings again when he looked at the dam.

It looked small now, about a mile away up the fjord, standing in its glow beneath the clearing starry sky. Then the dam flashed and a black pillar of dust and smoke burst silent from its middle, to the side, and water geysered in a white column from behind its wall. The noise reached them a few seconds later, a thunderclap boom that rocked them on their feet and made the wounded cry out. The boat shook with it. Its echo bellowed in the hollow of the cliffs for what seemed like minutes after. McKay watched, awed. The concrete wall buckled and calved a great piece into the fjord and a dark frothing torrent spilled forth. The last lights on the dam flickered and went out. A moment later, the sound of the waters filled the canyon.