“That makes two of us!” Olf Pedersen cackled.
“Well, that makes you the winner then, Kurt,” Ronneberg said. “Here.” He tossed Nordstrum his sack. “You get to carry the equipment.”
*
After a short rest, it was essential they move on. Their destination was the Langsja hut, ten kilometers away, where Knut Haugland was waiting to radio back the news.
Once there, they would split up into groups. Ronneberg and the rest of Gunnerside, Nordstrum included, were to head across the vidda to Sweden. Two hundred and fifty kilometers away. Poulsson and the Grouse team were to head to Oslo. Everyone had the clothes, identity papers, and the mannerisms of an everyday civilian.
Even up here, the Germans could easily be on top of them. Once they realized where they’d gone, they would surely throw everything they had at tracking them down. But for now they had to face another adversary, one they knew well—the weather. The wind was already howling. The sun had risen over the mountains, a gorgeous molten orange band, as if Nature herself was congratulating them, saying, Job well done! But behind it, they could see the clouds.
As soon as they started to walk again, a storm flared up, biting winds blistering in their faces, frozen ice balls splintering their eyes. It took six long hours traveling into the teeth of it to make their way back to the cabin. The only good news, of course, was that even if the Germans came up here, now they had no way to follow their tracks.
On the edge of exhaustion and collapse, they finally made it to the cabin. Knut Haugland was waiting for them with bated breath. Ecstatic to see his friends return, even more eager to hear how it had gone. He gaped and hugged each one in joy and disbelief when, to a man, all ten staggered in.
“Tell me,” he said to anyone with the strength to talk to him.
Ronneberg groaned in exhaustion and collapsed on the floor, panting, his body on the edge of giving out. “The job’s done,” was all he said, in between breaths of agony.
“You got them? All the compressors? The heavy water too?”
“All.” The leader nodded. “You can tell them all.”
“All?” he said again, repeating the word in amazement.
“All.”
It had been thirty-six hours since any of them had caught a wink of sleep. Fighting to stay awake and not submit to his body shutting down, Ronneberg went through the events, Haugland jotting them down as feverishly as a reporter taking down a story for the afternoon edition. Not a shot had been fired.
Then the ten of them simply shut their eyes. Their goal was to continue on to Skrykken, deeper into the vidda, but outside, the winds raged and the snow fell and the storm socked them in.
But they knew they were safe, as the Germans would be at the storm’s mercy too, and would not venture up after them until it had cleared.
In a few minutes all of them gave themselves over to a well-earned rest. Amid the snores, Haugland settled down to his keys, and toward morning, when the storm broke for a short while, long enough to allow him to transmit, he tapped out a few words.
46
Back at STS 61, Jack Wilson burst into Tronstad’s quarters with a cable, catching him in his shorts, trimming his mustache. “Read this!”
Both had been up all night.
Putting down the scissors, and scanning the text, Tronstad slowly allowed himself a grin, a subtle one at first, more of a warming swell of pride and amazement, until the two espionage officers looked at each other and could no longer hold themselves back from hugging each other in triumph and joy.
Shortly after, the news reached Winston Churchill, at 10 Downing. He read the cable not once but twice, and then sat back and closed his eyes. Maybe for the first time he could see a path to victory in this long, bloody ordeal. Then the old artillery officer pounded his fist against his night table with such force the report he’d been reading before bed flew onto the floor. When an aide ran in and asked if everything was all right, the prime minister answered, “Quite all right. Thomas, do we have a sherry at hand?”
“Sherry? Of course, sir. But it’s six A.M.”
“You’re right, damn it. In that case make it a cognac. And something of quality, Thomas. One that we might toast Monty or FDR, if he was here.”
Four thousand miles away, at the White House in Washington, D.C., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, still at work long into the night, received the cable, leaned his head back, and whispered to whatever Providence had guided these men. “Thank God.” Maybe He had taken sides.
The cable they all read said simply:
Operation carried out with 100 percent success. High-concentration plant completely destroyed. Shots not exchanged since the Germans did not realize anything. The Germans do not appear to know whence they came or whither the party disappeared.
47
After the storm began to wane the next day, the eleven quickly split up the supplies and prepared to go their separate ways.
The plan was for Nordstrum to head with Ronneberg, Storhaug, Stromsheim, Pedersen, Jens, and Gutterson across the vidda to Sweden—two hundred and fifty kilometers away, which, with luck, they could make in ten days—while Grouse was to head to Oslo to be reassigned.
They knew the Germans would be throwing everything they had at them to stop them.
The storm that reared up had served them well, for it had covered their tracks up the Ryes Road, and as it continued into the second day, would conceal their escape routes as well. The group going to Sweden remained in their British uniforms, counting on the idea that if they were somehow caught, it would lessen the reprisals against the local population. The rest of their party buried theirs deep in the snow.
The mood in the group was soaring. To a man, there was the feeling they had done something few others could have even contemplated, much less dared. But now they had to get out. The winds were starting to die, the snow weakening, and the hut they had slept in, while safe, was still only ten kilometers from the factory. Once the storm stopped, the Germans would be on their tails.
The two groups prepared to bid farewell.
Jens caught sight of Nordstrum changing out of his uniform and into civilian clothes as well. He looked at him, perplexed. “Kurt, what’s going on?”
“I won’t be going with you,” Nordstrum said to his friend.
Their leader, Ronneberg, was also taken by surprise. “What are you saying, Kurt?”
“I’m staying behind. Tronstad and Wilson asked me before we left. There’s some work to be done here. I agreed.”
“What work?” Jens asked.
“The recruitment of agents and radio operators. They need to build a network here.”
“You realize by midday the place will be swarming with Germans.” Jens looked at him, dismayed. “Where will you go? Every Heine who can limp will be on the hunt for us.”