Dark Full of Enemies(79)

Some other thing in the night cracked and boomed, and the E-boat exploded amidships. It rocked and its engine idled and died. The Hardr?de’s engine stopped. Dead in the water, McKay thought, and drew his Browning, waiting for the final, tired round, when the boxers paw at each other until collapse. The night cracked again and the E-boat flashed and listed. McKay heard the crew shouting, screaming. When the noise came the third time, he recognized it—a deck gun, British artillery, a three-incher. The Viking had found them in the dark.

He let himself go slack, fell, and lay still in the slurry on the deck, and watched the northern lights.





14





They transferred from the battered fishing boat to the submarine as the E-boat sank. J?rgen again maneuvered the boat up against and onto the sub’s hull, just long enough for Graves and Ollila to leap overboard, and for the Norwegians to pass them the long bundle that had lain quiet in the cabin all through the voyage out. The gear proved easier this time—they returned with much less of it. McKay oversaw the transfer and glanced up once to the conning tower, where Commander Treat waited, arms braced wide against the parapet. The man did not once look at the sinking E-boat.

With the transfer complete, McKay went to the wheelhouse and pulled himself up. He looked in on J?rgen, who stood at the helm amid the ruined timber and metal and glass.

“Thank you,” McKay said.

J?rgen nodded.

“Where will you go?”

“Into Lofoten. We have relations in Leknes, cousins. I’ll repair the ship and go home—when it dies down.”

McKay ran a hand across a splintered beam. “All this?”

“Damaged when set adrift by the dam burst,” J?rgen said, and managed a smile.

“I’m sorry about—Josef.” He had almost called him Petersen.

J?rgen nodded again and thought. “So it was appointed,” he said. He looked at McKay and tried to maintain the smile. “Alt for Norge.”

McKay nodded and dropped to the deck. He hobbled to the gunwales and the waiting submariners helped him across and up onto the sub. The iron deck astonished McKay with its solidity and strength after the hours he had spent aboard the old fishing boat. They helped him into the tower and he looked down to wave to the Norwegians, a final farewell, but J?rgen had edged the boat off and already put the Viking at its stern, its engine pitching weakly up, and bore away from the wreckage and the fighting for the islands to the west.





Hopper explained to him later. The German Navy had gone after a convoy off the North Cape, far up on the bald crown of the earth in the open waters between Norway and Svalbard. The Scharnhorst, repaired and undaunted by the frogman attacks, had steamed out before Christmas and attacked the morning after. It was an unfair fight, the pride of the Nazis’ Norwegian fleet against a convoy and its escorts. The convoy’s cruisers and destroyers sent the Scharnhorst to the bottom.

As the Naval command in Narvik received news from the battle, Hopper said, they had scrambled help to the north from every port on the coast, but too late. The convoy sailed on to the Russians.

“Naturally,” Hopper told him, “the scramble spooked us a bit. Bloody great increase in activity right where we were patrolling.”

“Ain’t that what you’re here for?”

Hopper grinned. “Might tell that to the skipper.”

But Treat had slunk underwater around the islands of Lofoten and into the Vestfjorden, and waited. McKay would not think ill of him again.





The E-boat’s survivors had not cared to wait for help. They swam for the sub, and of fifteen who took to the water ten came aboard. The rest succumbed to the cold in the few hundred yards between. McKay ignored the prisoners.

When he had first climbed slowly down into the control room, Hopper met him and exclaimed “Christ Almighty!” Once he had showered, and shaved, and changed clothes, he understood why. He had arrived aboard Treat’s sparkling ship calicoed in blood, with two days of beard on a visibly thinned face. His dark eyes were hooded above bags of skin almost as dark. And he stank—as did all of them—of blood, sweat, piss, cordite, smoke, and salt water. He cleaned up, saw the boat’s surgeon—who dug into his calf and removed a mangled bullet, probably a ricochet from the cliffs of the fjord—and saw to his men’s billets, and to the storage of their gear in the same forward compartment, and to Stallings’s body, laid carefully in the torpedo room. Then he was finished. The mission was over.

He went with Treat to the signal room and transmitted a message to headquarters: objectives completed loss of one team member kia, followed by his codename. After half a hour, a response came from the Colonel himself. One word, McKay’s own word: outstanding. He stared expressionless at the message for a long while after the wireless operator handed it to him, and finally crumpled it, thanked the operator and Treat, and left.

Still he could not sleep.

Mostly he watched the time pass. Ollila and Graves snored in their racks—both at least twelve hours, Graves fourteen—and McKay stared and rubbed his eyes. He passed a day trying to read his Thucydides, which, though waterlogged and bent and battered, still survived the job. He spent half an hour over the same page, multiple minutes on the same line, and read nothing. He cleaned his weapons again and tried to outline a report. He paced the submarine. Treat tried to put him to work interrogating the prisoners, but McKay did not even respond. He realized just hours before he would have machine gunned the men in the water. He would have to come down from that, and would take some time. He thought of the Australian, coldcocked in the pub, and wondered how long, exactly.