His mother cried out, “Jan!”
“He’s all right, madame.” The German major bent down and helped the boy back up. “Just a little bump on his backside.”
“I may have caused it, I fear,” Nordstrum said. He helped the lad up and back in line. “Sorry, young man.”
“I’m all right,” said the boy, slightly embarrassed. “I just tripped.”
One of the crewmen threw the gangplank to the dock and people began to move toward it.
“Say danke,” the boy’s mother prodded her son, and the boy meekly complied. “Danke, sir.”
“You are welcome.”
One of the major’s fellow officers signaled to a fellow soldier on the dock. “We are disembarking, Major. Our driver is waiting.”
“Ja, ja.” The major took one more glance at Nordstrum’s violin case and smiled. “Enjoy your play,” he said with a nod.
“Danke,” Nordstrum replied, his heart settling back into his chest. “I will.”
They moved ahead and Nordstrum hung back in the line, putting as much distance as he could between them.
On the wharf, he immediately headed the other direction, merging in with the crowd. Only then did he allow himself to blow out his cheeks in relief. There had been four of them. Even if he had been able to surprise them, he would have been hunted down in the town. He would likely be dead. There would have been reprisals. The heavy water shipment would likely have gone as scheduled. All for a fucking glance at a violin, he thought.
The ride back was uneventful.
66
Ox had a friend in Rjukan, John Diseth, a retired Norsk Hydro inspector, whose hobby now was repairing old clocks and watches. He kept a shop on the outskirts of town. Over a beer he said he would do what he could to help. By Wednesday, Ox had convinced him to supply the second alarm clock and to handle the complicated wiring.
Using Diseth’s workshop, late the next night Nordstrum and Ox prepared the plastic explosives while the sixty-year-old repairman configured the two alarm clocks. They calculated just how large the hole should be in the ferry’s exterior. Not so large that the ship would immediately sink and cause more people to die. But not so small, either, that the rail cars carrying the deuterium oxide wouldn’t slide into the lake until after help arrived. Einar, the engineer, used the Hydro’s tonnage and estimated its displacement of water, and arrived at the figure of five feet across. Working together, Nordstrum and Ox kneaded the nineteen pounds of plastic explosives into a sausage some nine feet long and wrapped it in burlap for easier handling. The fuses would be inserted on the ship at the last minute, once the alarm clock and detonators were set and wired.
Meanwhile, Diseth removed the bell, but not the bell hammer, from each clock. Determining the exact contact point of each hammer’s swing, he attached an electric insulator from an old telephone receiver, a tiny strip of Bakelite, and ran a wire into it. When it all was correctly wired and the clocks set, the bell hammer, at the moment the “alarm” rang, would strike the metal contact, complete the electric circuit, and activate the percussion caps in the detonators, which would set off the bomb. The repairman used four flashlight batteries to power the entire mechanism, soldering the terminals so that the wires would not come loose. The only worry was that the distance between the hammer and the contact point was so razor thin—merely a third of an inch—that an unsteady hand, or even a wayward movement of the ship, could set it off prematurely.
“Be very careful when you connect it to the plastic,” Diseth instructed Nordstrum. “If your hands are unsteady and the contact points touch, then, boom!” He snapped his fingers. “You won’t have to worry about if it works or not. You may want to take a gulp of whisky before you go.”
“Not to worry,” Nordstrum replied, extending his hands. “Why would anyone be nervous setting nineteen pounds of explosives with a hundred Germans close by outside? Still, good advice,” he said with a smile. “We may want that drink anyway.”
*
Nordstrum and Ox packed the equipment and, in the dead of night, climbed back up to the hut they’d been staying in atop the mountains. It was a three-hour trek in the dark, up a winding, icy path, and they arrived exhausted. To be absolutely sure that the clocks would work as planned, they set them for 10 A.M., later that morning. Then they went to sleep.
Six hours later two sharp cracks made them jump out of bed. Ox took his rifle and went to the window; Nordstrum grabbed his Sten and held it against the door, sure that the Germans had found their hiding spot.
There found no one there.
Suddenly the two men looked at themselves in embarrassment and began to laugh. It was the detonators—going off on schedule, the percussion caps sounding exactly like rifle shots.
Diseth had done his job well.
67
The next day they came back into town to go over a few more details and convey that the clocks had worked to perfection—almost too perfectly.
Larsen was at work at the factory. Einar took the afternoon off from his job at the dam. They met at Diseth’s place. As Einar came through the door, he had someone with him. The person SOE had sent in to join the team.
“I believe you two already know each other,” Einar said to Nordstrum.
As Nordstrum looked through the stubbly beard and the no-longer callow eyes, he lit up with surprise. It was the last person in the world he expected to see. In fact, he thought that person was dead.
“Yank!” His face split into a wide grin.
It was Eric Gutterson.
“I was told you didn’t make it.” Nordstrum went up and threw his arms around him.
“I almost didn’t,” the Yank admitted. “I got separated from the team. It’s quite a tale.”
“Well, let’s hear it,” Nordstrum said. “Here’s a beer. There’s no time like now.”
*
“Two days after we left you on the vidda on our way to Sweden,” Gutterson started in, “we stopped near the Skrykken hut where we had all taken refuge from the terrible blizzard we encountered after we parachuted into Norway.
“Ronneberg pushed us to move farther east. The Germans were known to be in pursuit. He wanted to put as much distance as he could between them and the Telemark region. But you remember we had buried that cache of arms, as well as sleeping bags and tents back at the cabin. Olf Pedersen and I volunteered to ski down and dig them up. The others continued on a few miles east to set up camp. It was far too risky to sleep in the huts at night.
“Upon digging up the equipment and getting ready to rejoin the boys, I spotted four skiers in white suits coming down the slope toward us,” Gutterson said.
“‘What do you think, Olf?’ I asked. I admit I was pretty concerned.