Dark Full of Enemies(76)

Stallings choked. McKay realized that he was laughing.

“Hell of a note,” Stallings said.

“We did it,” McKay said. They had succeeded, they had achieved their objective. He shook his head and said it again to convince himself. “We blew it up.”

“Hell of a note,” Stallings said.

“You did good.”

Stallings tried to nod. “I froze.”

McKay had hoped he would not remember. “Don’t matter. You did what we needed you to.”

“I got myself killed, didn’t I?”

“Shut up, Grove. This wasn’t your fault.”

“No—I picked this. You told me—you told me what to expect, and I picked it.”

McKay said nothing.

Stallings squeezed his eyelids shut and grimaced. “God, the tanks.”

“This ain’t Sicily, Grove. That’s over.”

“Uh huh.”

The door opened and Petersen entered. He had left them earlier as they sailed past Grettisstad. His face had become inscrutable again, what McKay now recognized as his look of pain.

“You must see this,” Petersen said.

McKay pushed himself up and Stallings lurched from his pallet on the floor. He grasped McKay by the knees and sobbed.

“Don’t let em bury me in the dark,” he said.

McKay felt sick. He moved Stallings’s hands and shrank away, edged toward the door. “I’ll be back, Grove. Hang on.”

Graves helped ease Stallings to the floor and McKay stepped out onto the deck with Petersen. He shut the door and said, “What is it?”

Petersen pointed forward into the darkness, across the still troubled waters of the bay. A bright point, a moving beam of light, blinding even from a mile away, played across the waters and trembled in reflection up to their prow. McKay squinted, found his binoculars and looked. Far off in the light he saw the shape of a Norwegian fishing boat, one of the Hardr?de’s thousands of kin. Tiny men moved on deck, picked out by the light. He saw then why the light was moving, rotating around the boat—the spotlight shone from the deck of an E-boat.

“How many are there in Narvik fjord?”

“I do not know,” Petersen said. “But they will all be looking for us.”

McKay noticed then that the boat’s engine had dropped to a low gear, quieter and much slower, and that they sailed hard by the fjord’s southern edge, avoiding the open channels in the center. He wondered how long they could hide like that.

Petersen spotted something and pointed. McKay looked. Farther away, on the rim of visibility and deeper in the bay, another spotlight had come on and another fishing boat, blinded, coasted in the beam.

“There is more,” Petersen said. “We came—we did what we did, because you had no time, you see. The Germans are sailing for somewhere. Your submarine will depart without you. Well, look toward Narvik if you can.”

McKay glassed the distant twinkling port and watched. He saw nothing unexpected at first, just the lights of the town, heaped up above the dark waters of Ofotfjord. Then he caught it, some darkness crossing the others, moving over the lights spread across the water, the still lights on the hills. He watched, and finally recognized the shadow on the bay—the silhouette of a battle cruiser.

McKay swore.

“The patrol boats are all out looking for us, and we must also avoid the cruisers. My guess is that they weighed anchor an hour ago, ready to sail north. Excellent timing.”

McKay looked at Petersen, and the hard, bearded face broke into a smile. Wry humor—black humor. Petersen continued to surprise him. McKay nodded.

“Do what you have to.” He checked his timepiece. 1525—they had fourteen hours to reach the Viking in the Vestfjorden, and it had taken how long going the opposite way? Thirteen, fourteen hours? Their new rendezvous point lay nearer by several hours, but… McKay looked back at the bay. “What do you want us to do if boarded?”

Petersen grinned again. “Follow me.”

McKay did and walked favoring his leg, which burned and throbbed beneath the bandage. Petersen led him behind the cabin and wheelhouse to the pair of oildrums he had seen them loading into the boat before they left for the dam. They stood at the stern, one lashed to the gunwales at each corner of the deck. Petersen laid a hand on one.

“Our friends in Shetland built these for us. I have yet to use them—I have kept them in the shed with our nets. Look.”

His gently outspread hand clutched at the corner of the drum’s lid, found a space McKay had not seen, and yanked up. The lid came off in his hand and he whisked it aside like a magician, and from the barrel sprang a mounted pair of machine guns. They jolted up into view and shuddered, awaiting magazines and gunners.

McKay raised his eyebrows. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Lewis guns,” Petersen said. “We have the magazines hidden aboard. We will load them and put them back, just in case.”

“Outstanding.”

Petersen took him to the ammunition cache. They had several hundred rounds in the filmcan magazines of the Lewis guns, and they loaded all four, compressed the springloaded mounts back into the oil drums, and made the lids fast. When they had finished, McKay nodded to the engine hatch.

“We need to make way as quickly as we can.”

“I will speak to J?rgen. We are trying to hide.”