“Well done,” Ronneberg called.
Then, supporting his weight on the ice and pressing his back against the frozen wall, with a grunt Gutterson yanked the crate out from where it had lodged. “I think it’s free!”
To do this took a good amount of strength. The Yank leaned his shoulder into the crate and with a grunt began to raise it onto his back, all the while making sure his toe support would hold. Nordstrum shimmied down a few feet and took hold of the parachute straps, which were still attached to the crate. Then he and Ronneberg hoisted it the rest of the way, praying the bindings held, as Gutterson remained directly below it. All they needed was for the damn thing to break free and go tumbling down on him.
As it neared the surface, Ronneberg kneeled and he and Nordstrum rolled the crate back over the edge onto the snow.
“Good work, boys!” Ronneberg extended a hand and helped Nordstrum climb back out.
“How is it down there, Yank?” Nordstrum called to Gutterson. “We can always leave you and come get you after the mission.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll stick with you, if it’s all the same,” he said, then made his way back up with an equal display of agility. Nordstrum pulled him up the last of the way.
They sat there, spent, blowing air out of their cheeks, regaining their breath. “Explosives.” Ronneberg read what was stamped on the crate’s side. “That wouldn’t have worked at all if we left it there.”
“Now, all we have to do is lug it back,” Nordstrum said, getting up and taking hold of one of the straps. Ronneberg grabbed the other. It was a couple of hundred meters, which would have been a whole lot easier with skis on.
“So, they have snow like this back home in Colorado?” Nordstrum said to Gutterson as they hauled the crate over deep drifts. Everything around them was a blanket of white.
“No.” The American picked up one of the lines from the rear. “Deeper.”
“Deeper…?” Nordstrum and Ronneberg looked at each other with a hearty smile and laughed.
Nordstrum looked back at him with a crooked grin. “Just wait.”
25
They broke out their packs and skis and hurried to bury what they didn’t immediately need in the snow, marking the spots with stakes so they could locate them again, in a race against daylight lest German reconnaissance planes flying over spot them.
Then, taking their best guess as to where they were—near the Bjornesfjord, as Nordstrum had said—they decided to head west. Toward Lake Maure, ten kilometers away. Grouse’s last radio transmission had given the lake as the location of their cabin.
The snow was packed and icy and they made excellent time, skiing at five-meter intervals and whooping with excitement to be back on Norwegian snow, not in the Scottish Highlands. Above them, the sun came up in the sky and daylight brought a good sign: The sky was blue.
“So where’s all this dreaded weather of yours I’ve heard so much about?” the Yank called out cockily.
“Just count to ten,” Jens warned. “It’ll change.”
“One, two, three…,” the American said, skiing ahead of them.
“Don’t tempt the gods, Yank,” Storhaug cautioned. “You’ll regret it.”
They skied about two hours, hard work with the seventy-pound packs strapped on their backs. But soon they began to suspect that their bearings had been wrong. They were nowhere near the Bjornesfjord, Nordstrum came to sense. The lake should have been in sight by now. They stood around and chewed a jerky strip and tried to get a fix.
“If we’re not in Bjornesfjord, then where?” Ronneberg asked. “Skrykken?”
“Skrykken? Let’s hope not. That’s almost thirty kilometers off,” Nordstrum said with dejection. “And look…” He pointed east.
The mountains that were in sunlight only a moment ago were suddenly covered in clouds. With the swiftness of a squall at sea rising up out of nowhere, the skies darkened and the winds kicked up.
“Well, seems you’re about to get your wish, Yank,” Ronneberg muttered. “Button up.”
The wind seemed to sweep in the clouds, and in an instant, they could feel the temperature plunge. There was no doubt. A storm was coming in. They were miles from any shelter they knew of. These could last an hour or a couple of days. You never knew how long or how strong it would be.
“Which way?” Ronneberg deferred to Nordstrum. One thing they all knew, they couldn’t stay there. There, they’d be at the mercy of Nature.
He checked the winds. “Your guess is as good as mine. I say continue east.”
“Into the teeth of it?” Pedersen questioned. The winds had now started to howl, even knocking Gutterson’s hood off, and snow was starting to swirl.
“We’ll never outrun it,” Nordstrum said, tightening the toggles on his hood. “Button up, Yank,” he turned to Gutterson, “we’re about to see firsthand if you were born to be a hill man.”
Within minutes, whatever hope they had that this was just a passing squall was dashed. The winds sharpened into icy gales, howling like sirens; frozen snow, hurled around like sand in the desert, bit at their eyes. Large drifts piled up around their skis, making every step a task, the weight of the packs on their backs bringing them to a virtual halt.
Visibility became zero.
“Pull up your mask,” Nordstrum yelled to Gutterson above the howl of the wind. Inside their hoods they had only the narrowest exposed slit for sight, but they could see only an endless sea of white anyway. As the temperature dropped, the wind drove arrows of frozen snow into their eyes, clamping them shut. Virtually blinding them.
The only benefit of such a storm, though a small one, was that the blanket of blown snow would cover their tracks and eliminate any trace of them if the wrong people happened to pick up their presence.
They leaned into it, pushing against the gales, a step at a time.
In minutes, each became covered in white.
An hour of slow going passed. Nothing familiar appeared. Then two hours. They were only able to go about a kilometer. It was becoming nearly impossible to carry on. And Nordstrum knew they were now completely lost. Worse, without shelter, he knew they’d have to dig in somewhere on the side of a slope with Nature’s fury raging all around. This was a bad one, it was becoming clear, and in this kind of storm, even the most experienced of men could only hold out so long. But just finding such a sheltered spot was next to impossible with the snow-swept gales battering them and snow so thick you could barely see your hand in front of your face.
“Come on, all of you, we have to go on.” Ronneberg pushed them on. But his eyes connected with Nordstrum’s and betrayed an expression of concern, which Nordstrum rightly read as, We’re in for a tough fight here.