Nothing there either.
His heart began to race. If he didn’t find it, it was more of a loss than the radio. More of a loss than any of their lives. A sweat broke out on his neck. SOE would have to know.
His gaze traveled to the hearth, which was still smoldering, and he saw the shredded embers of the black notepad amid the coals.
The codebook.
He let out a relieved breath.
When they had come, knowing she had no time to hide the radio, that she was likely done, she still had the presence of mind to toss it into the flames before going for her gun. She could have traded it for something, he knew. Her life? Her son’s? But she did what he would have done. He reached in and picked it out of the fire, the crisp, charred pages that were still warm shredding in his hands.
She hadn’t given him up.
“Someone’s got to do something,” she’d once said to him. And she had. She’d done her job.
Nordstrum stoked the flame, throwing on another log, tossed the charred codebook back on the fire, and waited until it broke up into ashes. Then he went back and draped the blanket over her face. “You can rejoin your Anders now,” he said, recalling the officer he had once seen in the Gudbrandsdalen. It was as good as any blessing he knew.
Then he went back outside and put on his skis. He left, heading east. Toward Rauland. The thought went through him that he had been foolish to allow any attachments in this war. Attachments could only cause regret and death and there was already enough of both without adding to the flame.
A day later, that feeling would grow far, far stronger.
57
Dieter Lund was at his desk in Rjukan when he heard the first rumbles.
It was just after noon. He was contemplating heading home and taking his lunch with Trudi when the building, then the entire valley, began to shake. At first it sounded like thunder in the far-off sky. Then all of a sudden the ground began to tremble. He ran to the window. The sky was perfectly blue. It wasn’t thunder. Certainly not an earthquake. Maybe a landslide somewhere, above the gorge. Such a thing had happened years before. But then Lund realized it was only November and there was not nearly enough snow for such a thing to—
Then he heard the first deafening blasts and the sirens start to sound. He felt the ground shake beneath him and he knew precisely what was taking place.
They were bombs.
The Allies were bombing Norsk Hydro.
In a flash the sky became dark with a sea of planes. Dozens. Hundreds, maybe. American planes. Through the mist and smoke, the Stars and Stripes could be plainly seen on their fuselages. Suddenly the ground exploded all around. He should hit the floor, he knew, or take cover under his desk; it was a heavy one and would keep him safe if the building came down around him. But Lund remained at the window, staring. Incredulous. The streets of Rjukan lit up with fire. People on the street were screaming, running for cover, their hands over their heads.
They were bombing the fucking factory, the fools, and wayward bombs were landing here.
The concussion from distant explosions shook the town. Every once in a while, a bomb exploded closer to home. One street away, a building collapsed in a ball of flame, debris hurtling into the street. Wood flying, roofs crumbling. Fires springing up all around.
Were they mad? No air force on earth could be so precise, or bombs so powerful, as to bring down the Norsk Hydro factory. It was simply protected too well by the narrow gorge in which it stood. Lund knew what they were after. The compressors, in the basement. Underneath a building of solid concrete, sturdier than any other structure in Rjukan. In all of Norway, perhaps.
The valley shook as wave after wave of planes came in. The skies were opaque with an umbrella of gray dust.
Corporal Holquvist ran into his office. “Captain, please, you must get down! You can’t stay there!”
Lund ignored him. He remained, eyes fixed on the rain of bombs leveling the town, wooden structures bursting into flame, concrete buildings crumbling. People screaming and running for cover in the streets.
“Damn you!” he screamed at the sky.
Not from any sympathy for what he saw. Or about the destruction to his own town. Still, it was almost as if his own heart was being torn apart. His future. What was in the basement of that plant was as important to him as it was to any physicist or party leader in Berlin.
“Corporal, get my car.”
“Your car…?” Dust came down from the roof from a close hit. The corporal looked at Lund as if he were mad. “Captain, I’m sorry, but we have to wait this out. No one can possibly drive in this.”
“Order my car!” Lund turned and said. “Or so help me, Corporal, I’ll strap you to that plant myself and find someone who will.”
58
Nordstrum heard of the raid while in Rauland with Reinar, and rushed back to witness the bombing runs on the second and third days, a feeling of both hope and sadness in his heart.
Hope—quickly dashed—that the raid would prove successful, as each new bomber dropped its payload against the seemingly impregnable factory. Nordstrum was one of very few who knew the true reason for the attack.
And sadness, as he watched his own town come under attack. The cratered buildings, the fires all around, the horror of innocent townspeople who had no idea why they were being attacked. Streets reduced to rubble. If the Allies claimed they knew how to conduct a raid of such precise bombing, what Nordstrum witnessed in anger showed they had a long way to go.
Over those three days, three hundred U.S. Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses and Liberator bombers pounded the Norsk Hydro facility with over seven hundred five-hundred-pound bombs. They also targeted the Saaheim plant in Rjukan, where it was thought some of the finished heavy water stock was being stored. According to the Rjukan Daily Times, which continued publishing, even the very next day, twenty-one civilians were killed in town and in the houses that ringed the plant, and sixteen in a bomb shelter, where women and children had gathered, and which took a direct hit.
When at last the smoke subsided, the Norsk Hydro factory still stood unscathed with barely a mark.
Over the next week, England radioed Nordstrum over and over:
“Please send earliest possible information on success of American air attack.”