Dark Full of Enemies(8)
“Unavailable.”
McKay, the Colonel, and the Major looked at the Commander again.
“Unavailable?”
The Commander cleared his throat. “Major Keener is unavailable—on a previous assignment. I’m afraid you must pick another.”
McKay looked at the Colonel and the Major, both of whom looked at objects on the desk. The colonel touched his hated glasses distractedly. McKay waited. They said nothing. Both had evaded his question about the radio, and now this.
“I’m sorry, sir,” McKay said. “Anyone y’all would recommend?”
“We’re spread pretty thin,” the Major said. “We have no one else. The main objective of the assignment is the destruction of Grettisfjord dam—I have a file for you to read here, by the way—and since this aspect of the assignment isn’t much more than delivering a package, you can always choose to take that on yourself. There will be manuals and diagrams for the radios—having a radio expert along is a redundant measure. Just to make sure. If you don’t want to take that on, you’ll have to find someone else. You have contacts in other special operations groups. I’m sure you can think of someone.”
McKay knew just enough about electrical engineering not to trust himself with signals equipment. But someone else? He had only ever worked with Keener on technological problems. Keener had been an expert with radio equipment of all kinds, the wires and dials and vacuum tubes that flummoxed McKay, had been since their days in the engineering courses at Clemson—
McKay thought of someone.
“And if this person doesn’t belong to any special operations unit?”
The Colonel shrugged. “I’ll take care of whatever paperwork you incur.”
“He’s a corporal in the Sixteenth Infantry Regiment,” McKay said. The Major made a note. “Big Red One. I’ll take a jeep from the motor pool and find him.”
“Take a driver,” the Major said, and held up the file on the assignment. “You have a lot of reading to do.”
“I’ll take Lieutenant Heyward with me,” McKay said.
“Heyward?” the Commander said. “That impertinent subaltern we sent to collect the Captain three hours ago?”
Everyone ignored him.
McKay made an effort not to look at the Commander and said, “Heyward has a skill I need—smooth-talking people.”
The Colonel grinned. “Fine.”
The Major, still jotting notes, said, “Check our list of what we’ve already got for you and get any additional requisitions in before you leave here. Better hurry, though.”
“Sir?”
“I’m sorry for the late notice, Captain,” the Colonel said. He did look genuinely sorry, and McKay felt dread overcome his excitement. “You fly north tomorrow.”
2
McKay had ten hours. His flight left at 0600.
He finished his briefing with the Colonel, the Major, and Commander Bagwell, put in his requisitions, changed out of his greens and into utilities, and rode into the darkness and wind-driven sleet with Heyward at the wheel. The 16th Infantry’s camp lay almost three hours away, not far from the southern coast of England, where, come spring, the regiment would board landing craft and repeatedly assault beach and dune and hill until they were ready to do it while Germans bombarded them. McKay shuddered. He had fought through two landings in the Pacific, on palm beaches with hills and forests full of Japanese inland from the strand, and those two were enough for any lifetime.
He used his time and an angle-head flashlight to go through the file the Major had given him. The file was fifty pages thick with information on the dam, the surrounding area, Narvik, its outlying villages, and any intelligence that might prove relevant to the mission, but included little useful detail about the dam—specifications. McKay had to settle for guesses about its size based on the photos he received and his own experience.
Grettisfjord Dam looked much like Tallulah Dam, the one with which McKay was most familiar, an arch dam with floodgates and a concrete deck wide enough for cars. But the Norwegian dam had a more pronounced arch and the water intake for the hydroelectric station appeared to be below the surface of the lake. The intake must be on the same side of the fjord as the hydroelectric plant, the northern side, but McKay had only the rough map of the dam’s environs to go by, no other photographs, and could only guess about the plant. And there was the dam’s size. Tallulah Dam stood 120 feet tall and was a little over four-hundred feet wide at the top. Having taken time to look closely at the human figures dotting the handful of photographs in the file, McKay felt even more confident in his initial guess—this dam was at least nine-hundred feet wide, possibly closer to a thousand, and over twice the height of Tallulah Dam. It was a monster.
“It’s a hell of a thing, ain’t it, Captain?”
McKay looked up from the stack of papers in his lap. He clicked off the flashlight. His eyes could use a rest.
“What’s that?”
Heyward gestured through the windshield into the snow. MPs in scarves and heavy brown coats waved and cursed their jeep through a snarl of US Army trucks. Cities of tents, snow gathering half-melted on the roofs, stood on both sides of the road.
“All this,” Heyward said. “I bet Hitler’s sorry he picked a fight with us. Sorry as hell.”