Storhaug even closed his eyes and caught a nap.
Nordstrum’s thoughts drifted to his father. As a boy, after his mother’s death, he’d had to bring him home from the pub many times when the old man had had too much to drink, driving at fifteen—everyone knew and looked the other way—dragging him up the stairs against his stubborn grunts and groans, and tucking him in bed. He’d been forced to be a man before he could shave.
He’d been so close his last visit, his father in the window, knowing Nordstrum was there, waving him on. He might never see him again. He thought of him coughing and hacking in a frigid basement jail.
And then his thoughts turned to how they had to succeed, no matter how long the odds. They had to. Not just because everyone was counting on them in England. Or because of the stakes. It’s important to the world.
But because something had to matter in this war. Something had to make his choice mean something.
His choice not to come back for her.
Because he’d kept on fighting, as she had always said he would. He’d never taken her to Sweden. And she had stayed and died, carrying his child.
And because knowing that now, it was too late to undo it and bring it all back. He reached in his pocket and took out the baptism cross she had given him on the train. He pressed it to his heart. That’s why they had to succeed tonight. Some good had to come of it all. His choice to stay and fight.
Because in the tremors of his heart, as he waited for the call to go, nothing else did matter.
35
At 8 P.M., skis on, packs strapped to their backs, weapons over their shoulders, Ronneberg looked at the nine men who had taken the fate of the Allied war machine onto their backs. “All right, boys, let’s go.”
They took off down the mountain, single file, no celebratory yelps this time. In silence. Claus Helberg led the way, having made the trip down just that morning. The rest followed in his tracks.
At first the slope was steep and straight, and they maintained a steady pace. An icy wind had kicked up, and the moon was bright; too bright for Nordstrum. As they made it down the mountain and approached Vemork, the hum of the factory’s giant turbines could be heard in the distance, a steady, deep, bellowing whoosh. On the valley floor, a thousand feet below, the lights of Rjukan came into view.
They swept down over the edge of the vidda on the western side of the gorge. The woods grew so dense that they had to remove their skis. The snow was alternately deep and soft, then hard and icy, depending on its exposure to the sun. At one point, they sank in all the way up to their waists and were barely able to take a step at a time, struggling with their packs. Other times, they slid on their backs on the hardpack, grabbing for shrubs and tree limbs to stop their descent. Using the telephone poles that ran from the valley to the top of the mountain as a guide, they slid from pole to pole, latching onto whatever they could, the wires above them sagging from the weight of the snow. It wasn’t cold. In fact, the wind down here was warm, and silently Nordstrum feared a foehn, which could melt the ice on the river and make their escape back up the side of the mountain even slower and more treacherous.
Finally they came out at the upper end of the main road, which Helberg had traveled earlier that afternoon, and slipped their skis back on.
They continued along the edge of the darkened road. The ice made it as hard and slippery as a skating rink, their skis clattering. Maybe the blowing snow and difficult conditions were, in the end, a good thing, Nordstrum thought to himself, for there was no sign of anyone out and around. It would be easy to spot a vehicle coming in either direction. The headlights, plus noise from its engines, would easily give them time to prepare.
Then all at once, as they came around a bend, each of them stopped.
Across the gorge, lit up by the moon, they saw their target for the first time. It was perched on its seemingly impregnable shelf of rock. The mammoth seven-story hydroelectric building towered over the valley and the Mann River that cut through it far below. Above the plant, huge conduits with diameters five and a half feet wide funneled endless supplies of water from above, some 1,750 cubic feet per second, powering its massive turbines. Only the narrow-track railway that led from its back gate down the gorge, and the slender suspension bridge that crossed the valley, connected it to the world below.
Though they knew every inch of it and had seen the photos a hundred times, each man felt his heart stop for a second, staring at it, consumed with the sheer impossibility of what they were here to do.
They arrived at the large U-bend in the road near the tiny hamlet of Vaer, where Tronstad had initially thought it most practical to ford the river. No one was around. From here, they would continue down the slope to the dirt power line road on the bend below, to circumvent the small town. The slope was sheer though filled with scrub, dead trees, and bushes to latch onto. The main road wound back from a wide U-curve directly below them.
At a rock, Helberg stopped, seeming to recognize a clearing. “This is where we head down.”
They removed their skis and, because of the steepness of the grade, let gravity take them, clutching onto brush and tree limbs with one hand, their skis with the other, the moon peeking through clouds and trees. It took fifteen minutes to get most of the way down, digging their heels into the snow to keep from sliding out of control. As they got close to the main road again, on a bend, Nordstrum, who was near the lead, suddenly became aware of a rumble ahead of them, which grew increasingly louder. Then ahead of them lights flashed, moving toward them at a fast pace.
Headlights.
“Hold up!” he yelled, latching onto a shrub to bring himself to a stop. He put up his hand to make sure the rest understood.
They were all still covered by the brush, but the slope they clung to was steep enough that any of them could have slipped and fallen out into the road and into plain sight at any time.
The rumble grew louder. Then headlights came around the bend.
A bus.
Not one bus, two.
Heading up from Rjukan, and likely carrying the night shift up to the plant. All of them remained perfectly still, holding their breath as the two vehicles rumbled past them, praying their camouflage ski suits would blend into the snow and that the headlights that had just cast their light over them hadn’t exposed their presence.
But the buses moved by, Helberg and Ronneberg hanging on to a tree limb so that they literally would not fall on their roofs as they passed by underneath them. Then it grew quiet again. The vehicles made their way around the wide U-bend and headed farther up the mountain.