Dark Full of Enemies(77)
“I understand. But we can fight now if we have to.”
“We will get you to the submarine, Captain,” Petersen said. He stood silent a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Petersen made a helpless gesture toward the boat’s low wake, back, into Grettisfjord and up the narrow waters to the dam.
“We got it done,” McKay said, and felt embarrassed. “I should be thanking you.”
Petersen nodded.
“I am sorry.”
McKay shook his head. They stood for a moment and then parted, Petersen to the wheelhouse with his brother and McKay to the cabin. He reached for the door handle and it opened before him. Graves stood there in the dim light. He looked at McKay.
“Stallings is dead.”
They stripped the body of its remaining gear and the heavy winter coat and pants, down to the Army trousers and stocking feet. They wrapped the body in a blanket and laid the bundle out of the way, against one bulkhead. He had bled too much, yes, Graves said, but it was all too much. The lung wound, the cracked or broken ribs, the shock to the entire abdomen from the final gut shot, a rifle round that struck him above the kidney and jellied his insides as it passed through. Graves had not even expected the man to wake up. McKay took the bloodied uniform and threw it overboard.
They sailed for ten hours without incident and no perceptible change of speed. J?rgen piloted them along the edge of the fjord, sometimes within a stone’s throw of houses and docks and barking dogs, behind the channel islands, slowing almost to a powerless glide when a beam shone elsewhere on the waters. They parted the night slowly, leaving little wake or sound. They could do nothing but wait. McKay thought he would go mad.
He could not sleep. His eyes had stopped burning—now they felt as if the sockets would crumble and the sore globes roll out into his lap, and he looked forward to that. Anything to stop the ache.
He cleared the jam and stripped and cleaned his Thompson, emptied and cleaned the Welrod and put it away. He doubted he could sink an E-boat with the thing. He went to clean his ka-bar but remembered he had left it behind. He wondered when he could get another one, but gave up the thought in despair. He sat in silence and stared. Stallings’s body lay wrapped in the corner, bound like Lazarus but not going to come forth.
The Germans spotted them at 0130.
The voice hailed them on the loudspeaker, the engine of the great swift craft growled nearer, and McKay rose and loaded his Thompson and said to Graves and Ollila, as if resigned, “All right, let’s go.” The Norwegians stood and followed.
They filed onto the deck and the spotlight found them. The boat lay perhaps thirty feet off, still moving, idling past, threatening. Someone aboard the E-boat swore and McKay and the others opened fire.
The spotlight shattered and both boats fell into darkness again. The flak cannon pivoted at the rear of the E-boat as it motored slowly past, and McKay reloaded, aimed for the gunner’s legs, and fired a burst. The gunner fell to the deck and the flak guns swung up to the sky. Another German ran for the mount and McKay cut him down. They lay squirming and McKay reloaded and the others kept firing, at the sailors, at the boat, at nothing but the night.
He turned to Graves and shouted for his thermite grenades, two of them. Graves ducked into the cabin and came back with them. They pulled the pins and hurled them into the boat. The grenades flashed and white hot light poured out of the engine hatch, the little bunker-like bridge, and men poured out into the night on fire. Flame licked at the wooden hull.
They stopped shooting and McKay shouted at the wheelhouse. J?rgen throttled up. The Hardr?de lurched and billowed smoke and the engine found its old tonk-tonk-tonk and surpassed it. They left the E-boat behind, aflame on the waters. McKay thought of the drifting pyres of Hallensnes and started laughing.
They were two miles off when the fire caught the E-boat’s torpedos. The sinking boat exploded. The fire burst from the wrecked and listing shape in the distance and shook the earth, lit up the fjord, the land, the uncalmed waves in the opening sea. McKay and the others staggered and covered their eyes, then stood and watched the pillar of fire in the dark. They had not moved from the deck since they left the boat burning, the sailors leaping into the fjord to escape. The flames rolled up into themselves and rose on the black air until the fireball darkened and disappeared. Behind them lay only a burning ring, nodding on the sea. The Hardr?de strained onward.
“They know where we are, now,” McKay said. “Or at least where we been. Stand ready.”
The Germans came again an hour later, after they had left the land behind and sailed out into the open waters of the Vestfjorden, bearing southwest. The spotlight came on a great way off, swept the waters and found them. The light moved a moment later, and soon the loudhailer repeated the first boat’s message—cut your engine, prepare to be boarded. Ollila shot out the spotlight and the fishing boat pressed on.
The third boat came half an hour after that. This time, J?rgen cut the engine and the boat coasted, all hands on deck and armed, silent on the waves. McKay squatted in the chill and listened. The E-boat’s motor growled deep and purred in the night. It circled them, beginning at their stern and arcing wide to starboard, the engine noise fading only a moment, before looping to port again and crossing their bow. He thought of the lions in Graves’s story, stalking by night, of the young South African waiting by the fire with a rifle. McKay realized he sat grinning in the dark, awaiting the clash. He fought to control himself. The E-boat veered to starboard again, farther ahead now and tacked across their route as if looking for submarines.