“What do you think, Kurt?” Jens asked, shouting above the gales.
Nordstrum shielded his face from the wind and checked the compass reading. “They have to be here.”
They searched all around. But after three grueling hours, they had no choice but to give up. The marking stakes they’d left were completely buried. They dug futilely, but never found a thing. They had no other option but to turn back for the hut. Back into the teeth of the very storm they had just braved, with nothing to show for it.
Empty-handed and exhausted, the two made it back to the Skrykken cabin after dark.
The thought occurred to all: What if Grouse, knowing Gunnerside had landed, had sent out a search party to find them? In this weather, they would surely be dead by now. Or what if they had lost hope and managed to get word back to SOE that they, Gunnerside, had likely perished? There was no choice but to wait it out, the mission still in the balance. Not to mention their friends’ lives. It seemed to them all that Nature herself had taken sides in the conflict.
By the fourth day, their own provisions had now grown perilously thin. The kind of trekking they had to do required nourishment. And they were at least a full day’s journey from where they had to be. Pedersen and Gutterson had come down with colds and swollen glands. Somewhere nearby, the members of the Grouse party were starving with no news of them.
“What are you thinking now, Yank?” Storhaug chided Gutterson, who stared out the window, which was now half covered by mounting drifts.
“I’m thinking, you win,” the Yank said. It was the only laugh they had the whole day.
The fate of the war was being decided by a ferocious storm that seemed like it would never end.
27
In the tiny cabin at Lake Maure, the situation for the Grouse party was growing just as dire.
They’d had word from England that Gunnerside had landed successfully and were likely on their way to them. But they were both riding out the same storm. Poulsson and his men feared there was no way, unless the Gunnerside crew were lucky enough to have somehow located a hut, they could survive in such hostile conditions.
More than likely, they were dead.
Poulsson and his men had been holed up on the vidda for four months now. Their food stocks were long gone. They were living on whatever they were lucky enough to catch, as well as using survival tricks Poulsson taught them, like sucking out moss from rocks, a high form of protein and nutrition, which he said the reindeer nourished themselves on when there was nothing else to eat, and which they heated into a repugnant-tasting paste. Each had lost a good 15 percent of their body weight. Their hair had grown straggly, their beards long and tangled. In this storm there was no way anything could be hunted, nor could they get a visit from Einar Skinnarland, who occasionally skied up from Vigne with food. Worse, they were running perilously low on firewood.
When it came to Gunnerside, the four were not of one mind about what to do. Claus Helberg wanted to send out an expedition to Bjornesfjord and look for them. Poulsson said no; it was far too dangerous. And anyway, if the bomber pilot had been unable to find the drop zone, which was well lit with their Eureka beacon signaling, they could be anywhere, miles and miles away, in the worst storm many of them had ever lived through.
They started to think that their friends, not to mention the mission, had met with a tragic end.
Still, Poulsson argued, if anyone could survive such an unsurvivable ordeal, if there was one man, two, maybe, who could withstand whatever Nature threw at them and steer their team through, it was Kurt Nordstrum and Joachim Ronneberg.
Anyone else, and the Nazi heavy water production would have claimed seven more lives.
28
On the fifth morning, the men of Gunnerside awoke to a long-awaited sign.
The winds that had battered them for four days had calmed. Sunlight angled into the cabin, where in the teeth of the storm the steady blanketing of snow only made it appear to be night.
Nordstrum got up before the others and crawled out of his sleeping bag to the window. It was covered nearly to half its height with drifts of wind-blown snow.
Birger Stromsheim, who had taken the last watch during the night, was looking out. “It’s finally over,” he said.
The sky was a brilliant blue.
One by one everyone rose, buoyed by the change in fortune. They dressed, made some food, packed up what was left of their provisions. The first order of business was to retrace their steps back to the drop site, where they had buried the balance of their supplies. Ronneberg ordered their packs reduced to fifty-five pounds and Storhaug and Pedersen fashioned whatever wood they could find into a makeshift toboggan to cart the balance. With relief, they finally bid good-bye to the Skrykken cabin. It had held together in the worst storm any had remembered having to endure. The little hut had surely saved their lives.
Outside, where slopes of rock and even valleys and lakes could be seen five days before, now there was only an endless vastness of white. Climbing proved to be tougher; they were weighed down by even the reduced packs on their backs and lugging the heavy sled. Even gliding, where on the downslopes they could normally catch their breath and rest their muscles for a bit, was a taxing effort in all the snow. Still, it was exhilarating to see their short herringbone patterns in the snow as they climbed the ridges, and they whooped like boys on a day’s outing, hopeful now that they were only hours from finally meeting up with their stranded countrymen.
It was an exhausting, four-hour effort to even get back to the ridge they had parachuted onto five days before. But when they did, or at least the compass readings assured them it was so, everything had changed. They were no longer in a valley on a rocky face, but in a large basin covered by a blanket of white. Famished and exhausted, the seven searched around for any sign of their stakes they had planted as markers, which were now completely buried in snow.
Nordstrum finally came upon the handle of one protruding though the snowdrifts. “Over here!” He got on his knees and pawed at the thick, wet snow until he finally unearthed the buried container four feet below.
They all began digging in the same area, until, one by one, an hour later, all twelve supply crates were recovered. They brushed them off, reloaded their packs with needed food, then sat around chewing biscuits and cured venison until they regained the strength to continue.
It was still a thirty-kilometer trek to Lake Maure, a trip even most trained mountain men would find unmanageable.
“Kurt, you know the way?” Ronneberg asked when everyone was ready.
“I do now.” He nodded. He started out, east, pushing off and climbing the first ridge.