“In addition, there will be a state of emergency imposed in Rjukan, effective today. There will be a nightly curfew of six o’clock. Anyone on the streets after that will be deemed up to no good and shot. And there will be house-to-house searches in town. Anyone in possession of explosives or even a fuse will be immediately imprisoned. Captain Lund, I imagine you are capable of overseeing such measures. Does any of this present a problem in any way?”
“No problem at all, Herr General.” Lund clicked his heels and stood facing straight ahead, his chest expansive. In fact, one such farmer came to mind immediately. One he would love to toss into his cell. And for a farmer, dynamite and fuses would be a common possession, to blow up rocks and clear the land. Lund would only be upholding the law.
“Colonel Rausch, I am not sure why you are still standing here.” The Gestapo chief turned to face him. “By day’s end, I want five hundred men up in the mountains on the trail of these criminals. They cannot have gotten too far away. Surely German mountain divisions are every bit the equal of a few Brits and local mischief makers?”
“Indeed they are, sir.” The colonel snapped his heels. “But, I’m told, we are hampered by severe storms up there today. Nothing will be visible until they clear. Besides, in this weather, any tracks they left will be swept away.”
“Then I would dress warmly, Colonel. Indeed.” The Gestapo general went up to him, his face only inches away. “Am I clear? And turn over every hut and cabin in the region so you do not need tracks. Burn each unoccupied one to the ground; that way anyone cannot double back. Captain Lund, I am certain you have men who know their way up there as well as any, do you not?”
“Yes, there are some.” Lund nodded.
“Fit these men out and have them get after these intruders. And if I find out the people responsible for this are, in fact, Norwegian, and not British after all,” his stare landed on Larsen and Director Nilsson, “there will be hell to pay in town. Do you understand? And I might be starting with you two as the first examples. Just so we fully understand each other.”
With blanched faces, Larsen and Nilsson both looked back at the Gestapo man.
“So get on with it. I want those processors repaired, as quickly as possible, Herr Chief Engineer. That is your work now. I am certain there is an assistant chief engineer who would be happy to comply if his boss were to be lined up against a wall.” He nodded and dismissed everyone with a formal Heil Hitler. “That’s all.”
The group made for the exits. Rediess took out a notebook from his jacket and jotted something in it. Everyone hurried to get out of his sight.
“Oh, and Night Watchman Fredrickson…” the general muttered, still buried in his notebook.
Gustav stopped, a hand on the door. “Sir?”
“It was on your watch that this sabotage took place, was it not?” The Gestapo chief finally looked up. “You didn’t honestly think that I had forgotten about you, did you now…?” he said with a blank smile.
49
For the next two weeks, Nordstrum traveled from hut to hut, staying ahead of the German pursuit, which came onto the vidda in a presence larger than anyone had ever seen before.
The first few days, the storms in the mountains continued to rage; despite his blistered cheeks and ice-stung eyes, Nordstrum knew it only aided his advantage. His tracks would be concealed. The reconnaissance planes couldn’t fly. After a week, he’d eaten the last of the food he’d brought with him, and from then on it was whatever he was able to find or catch in the wild. On the Songvaln he shot a deer, which lasted him for days. He hoped to get back to Rjukan to see about his father, but right now it was far too dangerous there. More German soldiers were flooding into the Telemark every day, and there was always the risk that someone in town might recognize him.
After a month, when he felt safe enough to show his face again, he got on with the work he was sent to do.
His assignment from Wilson and Tronstad was to recruit three agents who would be set up as radio transmitters. Things had become a little too heated for Einar, who had a family, an important job and, as such, couldn’t easily disappear for days at a time. Not to mention Einar’s brother Torstein had been picked up by the NS for questioning, which cast the glare of suspicion on the family. And as SOE intended to drop in more agents and plan further operations, it required a broader network on the ground.
The first recruit he found was a friend of his cousin, named George Hansen. He was a bull of a man, with a thick red beard and a gap in his teeth, a farmer whose house had been burned to the ground by the Nazis and whose wife had been shot. He was now skinning hides in a slaughterhouse in Uvdal, the same town Kristiansen, the ill-fated hunter they’d had to shoot, had come from. He had a daughter somewhere.
The butcher wasn’t hard to convince. Haugland’s radio and codebook had been hidden before they left and Nordstrum knew enough about how to operate it. George was willing, though a little slow on the coding and decoding. “I’d much rather shoot the fuckers,” he simply said. “Given a choice.”
“You’ll get your chance. I promise,” Nordstrum assured him. “In the meantime you have to be careful.” A working radio was a valuable commodity in occupied Norway. George still had his old stone barn and a cabin deep in the wilderness, which he could use as a transmitting site.
“You have to move from place to place,” Nordstrum instructed him as they set up the transmitter in the remote cabin. “No two transmissions in a row from the same location. I’ll meet you every other Tuesday. There’ll be a stone in your mailbox if I have something for you. And you leave one on the post if you’ve something for me. We’ll meet the next afternoon at the barn.”
“Okay,” George agreed, scratching his beard.
“You’ll need a code name.”
“How’s Okse? That’s what they called me back in school.”
“Ox. That works. Welcome to the Free Norwegian Army, Ox.” Nordstrum put out his hand.
The big man grinned and took it, almost burying Nordstrum’s grip in his. “I’m happy to finally be doing something in this war.”
The second possibility happened serendipitously, in the town of Rauland. From a ridge on the vidda, near where he was hiding out, Nordstrum had spotted German patrols, and thought, at some risk, that there would be better cover for him in the town, since no one knew him there. From the word he’d received, the Germans were not only looking for Brits, but for some locals as well, who might have assisted them. He skied in and found a hotel and presented the forged identity papers to the proprietor behind the desk. He said he was a hunter from up north, on his way to Oslo for a family funeral.
“Watch out, they’re rounding people up left and right here,” the manager warned. “Some big sabotage raid down in Rjukan a few weeks ago. Everyone’s gone crazy over it. If I were you I wouldn’t go out after dark.”