The Saboteur by Andrew Gross
PROLOGUE
In the years leading up to 1943, British and American intelligence in WWII focused on the possibility that the Nazis were creating sophisticated and potentially decisive weapons, weapons powerful enough that they could potentially alter the war, including the possibility that the Germans were making progress on what the Allies saw as their own decisive weapon—the atomic bomb. British intelligence networks undertook a vigorous campaign to determine the extent of the Nazis’ progress in this area.
As far back as 1939, it was determined that the Germans were engaged in atomic research, built around the use of deuterium oxide (D2O), or “heavy water,” which acted as a moderator for the crucial step of isotope separation, essential to the creation of an atomic bomb. D2O required enormous amounts of electrical power to produce, power not available in Germany. But D2O was being produced and synthesized in smaller quantities for the end use of ammonia fertilizer at the Norsk Hydro plant at Vemork, Norway. This remote plant was tucked into a narrow gorge under the Hardanger vidda, or plateau, one of the most desolate and inhospitable mountainous regions in Europe.
In October 1941, these worries grew even more dire. British intelligence received a report from the Danish underground detailing a meeting between the Nobel laureate physicist Niels Bohr and Germany’s leading atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Their conversation alarmed Bohr enough to send an immediate warning to London that he was convinced the Nazis were on the verge of obtaining a devastating weapon based on the heavy water experiments in Vemork.
On both sides of the Atlantic, Churchill and Roosevelt gave the matter their highest attention. In England, a secret committee was formed to deal with the issue, part of an organization known as the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, that only a handful of people even knew existed.
What follows is the story of how only a few brave men put an end to that threat.
PART ONE
1
March 1942
The old, creaking ferry steamed across the sun-dappled mountain lake. The Telemark Sun was a serviceable ship, built in 1915, coal-fired, and at around 490 tons, it could still make the thirty-kilometer jaunt across Lake Tinnsjo from Tinnoset to Mael in just under an hour and a half. It held about sixty passengers that day, as well as two empty railway wagons in the bow, heading back to the Norsk Hydro plant at Vemork after loading their cargo onto the train to Oslo at the railway depot across the lake.
Kurt Nordstrum had taken the boat across the lake a hundred times, but not in the two years since the Germans had occupied his country.
He had grown up in this region, known as the Telemark, in southeastern Norway—a place of lush, green valleys in summer and endless expanses of snow and ice in winter—between the town of Rjukan and the tiny hamlet of Vigne at the western edge of Lake Mosvatn. Like most Northmen, Nordstrum had learned to ski these mountains before he even rode a bike. He grew up hunting and fishing, in the way boys in other places kicked footballs around. To this day, the network of huts and cabins that dotted the Hardanger vidda were as familiar to him as were the lines on his own hands. His father still lived in Rjukan, though Nordstrum dared not visit him now. At least, not directly. Nordstrum was known to be one of those who had escaped to the hills and continued the fight against the Nazis. It was common knowledge that the Nasjonal Samling police kept an eye on the family members of known resistance fighters in the hope of tracking them down. The Hirden of the NS party were everywhere, as feared in their tactics as the Gestapo. Followers of the puppet dictator Vidkun Quisling, they had forsaken their country and king to do the Nazis’ bidding. It had been two years since Nordstrum had seen his father, and it was unlikely he would see him on this trip.
On the aft deck, dressed in workman’s clothes and carrying a satchel of carpentry tools, but with a Browning .45 in his belt, Nordstrum sat back as the boat came within sight of the familiar mountains of his youth ringing the Tinnsjo. It felt good to be back in his valley. He let his face soak up the sun. He hadn’t seen much of the sun lately. Since April 1940, when he’d left the university in his second year of engineering school to make his way up to Narvik and join the British trying to blockade the Nazi invaders, the blue skies of Norway had seemed under a perpetual leaden cloud. At first they’d managed to hold them off. The Germans focused their blitzkrieg on the cities. First Trondheim, then Bergen and Oslo fell in a week. Then the king took flight, first to Nybergsund, and then on to Elverum, near the Swedish border, and people knelt in the street and wept. Nordstrum had seen his share of fighting—in Honefoss and Klekko and the Gudbrandsdalen valley. A year ago in Tonneson he hooked up with what was left of a militia unit—a small group of men in tattered uniforms who would not give up. “Here,” they said, and put a Krag in his hand with only thirty rounds of ammunition. “That’s all you get, I’m afraid,” the captain said apologetically. “Better make them count.” Boys, that was all they were, with rifles and Molotov cocktails to make them men, and down to a single cannon taken out of mothballs from the last war. No one knew how to wage a fight. Still, they’d left their mark on the bastards. They blew up bridges, disrupted supply lines and motorcades, ambushed a couple of high-ranking SS officers; they’d put an end to a few Quisling traitors as well. At Haugsbygda, the fighting became close in. Knives and bayonets when the bullets ran out. Until they were no longer going up against soldiers and machine guns, but tanks and artillery and nose-diving fighters unloading bombs. Fifty-millimeter shells rained in from a mile away and blew their trenches into the sky.