Dark Full of Enemies(4)

While the Colonel finished jotting the memo, McKay glanced at the Royal Navy officer. The man sat stiff, with a heavy face too young for jowls but beginning to suggest them. This man was the guest lecturer, as McKay thought of it.

Three officers oversaw every briefing—the Colonel, McKay’s superior; the Major, head of operations for the Colonel; and a third officer, always different, always a representative of some other group within the OSS or another special operations unit entirely. There were scads of them, across dozens of separate special operations executives and intelligence groups working for every Allied country. These were the guest lecturers. McKay knew they were relevant to the mission briefings—probably intelligence or liaison officers of some kind—but they never spoke or otherwise contributed, just haunted the briefing as if ready to correct the other men or divine weakness in McKay himself. McKay usually forgot they were there by the middle of the briefing, and never saw them a second time. He would forget the Commander like all the others.

The Colonel sat up, took a last look at his memo, and flicked it to the Major. He looked at McKay.

“Now, Captain. What do you know about Norway?”

The Colonel’s questions had nonplussed McKay at first. He had grown used to them, but never had the Colonel asked about a specific place before—that always came later.

“Pretty good bit, sir, but I’m not sure how much of it’s relevant.”

“How so?”

“Most of what I know about Norway is historical,” McKay said. “The sagas. Vikings.”

“Ah.”

McKay grinned. “Afraid I can’t help you much past the twelfth century.”

The Colonel nodded. “And mountain climbing?”

The Colonel did love his sudden changes in direction.

“I’ve done a little of it, just around mountains back home.”

“What kind of climbing?”

“Scaling rock faces mostly,” McKay said. “There’s a couple of pretty rocky mountains in my county. They make for good climbing. Good views up there. One of them’s the second tallest mountain in Georgia.”

“Cliffs all the way up?”

“No, sir, just off the back side of it. Just enough to fiddle around on with some rope and hiking boots. I’ve also done some abseiling in Tallulah Gorge. Deepest canyon east of the Mississippi—lot of big cliffs there. That’s probably the most serious climbing I’ve done.”

“That’s fine. Now, how’s your German?”

“Fine, sir.”

The Major leaned forward and looked down the length of the desk at the Commander. “Captain McKay just got back from Germany.”

The British officer raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“Do you speak any Norwegian?” the Colonel said.

“No, sir, not at all, but I reckon I can pick up a little. It is Germanic, after all. I’ve picked up enough Danish to get by before. Depends on how long I’m there.”

The Colonel nodded and furrowed his brow. He neared the point McKay always anticipated, tried to ready himself for—the bald statement of his next assignment. McKay waited. The Colonel sat back in his chair and said, “McKay, what do you know about dams?”





McKay came from Rabun County, Georgia, the northeastern corner of the state, a redoubt of the Appalachians curtained from the rest of the South by forest, river, and hill country. His home country had lots of nicknames—the backwoods, the sticks, cow country, the middle of nowhere. His people had even more—hicks, rubes, hayseeds, bumpkins, crackers, local yokels, hillbillies. In a country whose educated elite sneered at what they thought a backward and uncivilized South, Southerners sneered at the backward and uncivilized hillbillies. But they needed electricity, and the mountains—which Low Country Southerners regarded, between trips to view the scenery, as the enemies of civilization and literacy—could provide it. The mountains streamed with rivers, which cut gorges and falls and choke points through the rock, perfect for hydroelectric dams. His home county alone had four, and McKay, during his college days, had visited and worked at every one.

He took his time with the three large photos the Major had handed him. All showed the same dam, one at a point late in its construction, the dam a hive of effort. Laborers worked in gangs hauling dirt, pouring concrete, and hauling machinery by mule team and main strength. The dam, not yet bracing a lake, looked like a wall between two rocky cliffs. Two level areas crowded with wooden buildings lay at each end of the dam—housing for dam personnel, toolsheds, offices, probably latrines. On the far side of the gorge workers were filling, by muscle and machine, a deep gash in the ground behind the dam.

McKay tapped the photo there. “Intake for the hydro turbines?”

The Colonel nodded.

McKay slipped the print behind the others. The second was an aerial photo. The dam stood complete, a deep lake swollen behind its wall. Dark water covered the gash for the pipeline intake. The concrete had darkened enough to suggest to McKay that this photograph had been taken at least a decade after construction. In place of the wooden cabins and shacks, permanent buildings of stone or brick stood in neat clusters at both ends of the dam. The aerial angle afforded a better view of the surroundings—sheer cliffs, mountains, scrubby vegetation, and not another building in sight. More interesting, a bridge spanned the gorge below the dam. At each end, rail track bored through the cliff walls of the gorge.