Dark Full of Enemies(80)
After twenty-four hours, he approached Treat about burying Stallings.
Treat had balked at bringing the body aboard, but Graves had done the talking for McKay and made it clear the Captain would not accept a no. Still, the Commander insisted that the body could not remain aboard for the entire journey home to Scapa Flow. Graves had insisted as well, and when the haggard leader came aboard and looked at Treat, Treat said nothing.
Now it was time, McKay told him. They had reached or would soon pass south of the Arctic Circle, and McKay wanted his man buried at sea in the light of the sun.
“Impossible,” Treat said, and, when McKay seemed to coil, “Impossible now, that is. It’s not yet 0600. The sun will not rise until even later.”
McKay nodded and returned to lie awake in his rack.
Six more hours, and they did have sunlight, a precious sliver of northern winter sun that scudded low across the horizon. Treat had Hopper assemble an honor guard to bear the body topside, and then Treat followed and McKay and Graves and Ollila climbed the tower too.
The sunlight blinded him. He stood in the freezing air with his eyes shut fast against the light. His head ached with it. He fought his eyes open and managed to watch the service on the submarine’s deck. They draped no flag over the body, and accompanied it with no squad bearing rifles. The sailors had weighted the blanket-shrouded body and lain it on a plank, improvising like good soldiers. Treat presided and read from a book—The Book of Common Prayer, McKay assumed, or else the Bible—but McKay could not hear him above the cut of the bow through the sea, the wash of the turned and piling waves, and the wind. Treat stopped speaking, the sailors upended the plank, and the long swaddled body disappeared into the Viking’s wake.
Hopper and Treat went belowdecks and nodded to McKay as they passed, and then the sailors, who saluted, and finally Ollila and Graves. McKay remained topside a moment, looked north to the horizon, then south to the sun. It stood low, very low for noon, and though he felt for its warmth his face remained cold. If he remained much longer his nose and cheeks would numb, sunshine be damned. He looked once more behind at the wide dark sea.
“Reckon I’ll see you, Grove,” he said, and went below.
He limped through the control room and into the narrow passage to the bunks. He passed Treat and Hopper, and the sailors he met squeezed aside to make way. He reached the bunks, the same they had occupied on the trip north, and climbed up into his rack. Graves was telling Ollila a story, a story featuring both women and South Africa, and McKay felt himself drowse. His muscles relaxed, his face loosened. He looked down at Graves, who lay with his eyes closed, rambling, and then across at Ollila. The Finn smiled as he listened to Graves, but when McKay looked at him, he grew serious. After a moment, he nodded to McKay as if in benediction, closed his eyes, and lay back against his pillow. Graves talked on.
McKay settled into his rack, drifted, and slept.
Author’s Note & Acknowledgements
The events and almost all of the characters in this book are fictional, but the characters know about and allude to many real events from the Nazi occupation of Norway.
Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940, the same day that it invaded and conquered Denmark. Norway’s King Haakon VII refused to capitulate, and the Norwegians and their British, French, and Polish allies held out for two months, putting up an unexpectedly tough fight against the Nazis, who took over 5,000 casualties in the invasion. Narvik, stoutly defended and one of the Allies’ last redoubts in the country, was only abandoned by the British—over Churchill’s objections—beginning June 3. The Nazi conquest of Norway ended a week later with the surrender of the last remaining Norwegian division to the Germans. Haakon escaped to Britain with his government-in-exile, and became a living symbol of resistance to his people.
The Nazis ruled their supposed fellow Aryans in Scandinavia with ruthless brutality. They installed Vidkun Quisling, whose name became a byword for national traitors everywhere, as head of a collaborationist puppet government, but exercised real power through the Reichskommissariat Norwegen, headed by SS Reichskommissar Josef Terboven. Within months they had built concentration camps and begun eliminating the country’s 2,100 Jews.
In part because of its proximity to Britain, just across the North Sea, Churchill’s broad streak of romanticism and firm belief in the efficacy of special operations, and the steadfast example of resistance offered by men like King Haakon, Norway was a hive of clandestine anti-Nazi activity. The most famous—and successful—example is the sabotage of the Nazi nuclear program’s heavy water facility at Norsk Hydro in Rjukan in early 1943.
Resistance activity and commando operations, whether successful or not, provoked savage reprisals. The Gestapo and military counterintelligence units investigated and rooted out resistance using every means necessary, and showed no qualms about using torture to extract intelligence. In April 1942, after two Gestapo officers were killed at Telev?g, a fishing village where two Norwegian commandos were suspected of hiding, the Germans rounded up the locals, razed the village, sunk its fishing boats, shot or deported to concentration camps every adult man, and jailed the women and children for two years. The Germans carried out similar reprisals in other locations, including the Lofoten archipelago, throughout the war, and executed hostages and political prisoners in retaliation as well. Meanwhile, the Allies continued to launch special operations into the country.