Helberg grasped the stunted, springy fir tree and used it as an anchor from which to carefully lower himself downslope. Little moonlight filtered through the dense vegetation and it was as dark as the grave here. He was leading, and so far all was well. The round-the-houses approach route that he’d mapped out the previous evening seemed to be working just as he’d intended.
There had been only the one major scare. As they’d descended from the hut, a pair of buses packed with night-shift workers had loomed out of the darkness, taking the road from Rjukan to the bridge leading into Vemork. The saboteurs had narrowly escaped plunging onto the roofs of the vehicles, only saving themselves by grasping onto the trees.
But now would come the real test: the drop into the gorge—something that Ronneberg described as being ‘like a gigantic trap’.
A few dozen metres higher up the slope, Helberg and the rest of the assault party had slipped out of their skis and dumped all extraneous gear in a cache. Each man was stripped down to the bare minimum now: his main weapon, pistol, grenades, explosives, plus their chloroform knock-out pads (for subduing any Norwegian guards), and a little water and food.
As his boots bit into the snow, Helberg felt the breeze cutting through the woodland. Ever since that morning when he had cleaned his weapons, it had been stiffening. He figured it had strengthened a good dozen knots or more. The snow felt damp and claggy underfoot, the air unseasonably muggy. It made for hard going.
Helberg could feel the sweat trickling down his back and soaking into his thick woollen British Army fatigues. It wasn’t just the physical exertion that was causing him to perspire: the wind carried with it a real sense of heat. It picked snow off the ground where he’d disturbed it, and whisked it away, greedily. Above him, it dislodged heavier clumps, which fell with a hollow, ghostly whoomp.
The lower he descended, the stronger the wind gusted: hotly, moodily, unpredictably. There was no denying it: it had all the characteristics of a foehn. If it blew hard enough and hot enough, snowmelt from above would surge into the gorge, first inundating and then breaking apart the river ice, with catastrophic consequences.
But they were committed now. No turning back. Votes had been taken. It was this way, or no way.
A fresh gust pummelled into Helberg with the power to blast him off his feet. It carried with it something else: something eerie yet strangely intoxicating, all at the same time. Helberg detected a deep, hollow throbbing. It seemed to reverberate through the dark air all around him and the cold rock at his feet, as if coming from all directions.
He knew instinctively what it was. He recognized it from his childhood. It was the heartbeat of the hydroelectric plant; the pulse beat of the turbines. Unmistakably Vemork.
Then, as clouds blew clear of the moon, far below them their target suddenly appeared, lying on the far side of the chasm and bathed in a silvery, gunmetal-blue light.
‘There it was, less than 1,000 yards away,’ Ronneberg recalled, ‘this great concrete factory, looking like a fortress …’
As if by an unspoken command, all came to a halt. The nine saboteurs stared, transfixed.
Seven storeys high and constructed of 800 tonnes of steel and 17,000 barrels of cement, the electrolysis building was built from massive blocks of rock hewn out of the mountainside. Above rose the pipelines, each five and half feet across, and together channelling 1,750 cubic feet of water per second to the plant below. The friction of the water’s passage was so great it heated up the steel pipes, melting the snow to either side; their bare forms glistened in the moonlight, like giant serpents.
It was the rushing of the water, and the resulting churning of the plant’s machinery, that they could hear. To the local boys, who had watched in childish wonderment as the plant had risen from the mountainside, block by block, it seemed almost unreal that they were back, and this time intent on wreaking havoc in the bowels of that massive structure. To the outsiders, it just seemed impossible that they were so close, and poised to strike such a blow in freedom’s name.
It was Ronneberg who brought the men’s minds back to the moment at hand. ‘Birger, you have your set of charges?’ he whispered.
Stromsheim—thirty-one years old, the grandfather of the group—nodded. He and Ronneberg were each carrying a full set of Nobel 808 explosives, put together by the SOE’s demolitions experts back in Britain, and shaped to fit the giant electrolysis cells. If one of them was killed going in, the other would still be able to plant his charges and destroy the target.
Ronneberg turned to Helberg, his eyes glinting with excitement. ‘All right, let’s go. Lead the way.’
Helberg turned to the narrow groove in the rock-face—the one by which he had descended not so many hours before—and dropped out of view. One by one the others plunged after. The darkness swallowed them, the raiders vanishing into the abyss.
At times Helberg sank up to his waist in a deep drift, where snow had piled thick on a perilous ledge, and he had to fight his way out again. Moments later he found himself struggling to remain upright, where the precipitous rock had been transformed into a sheet of treacherous ice. He was forced to make a wild grab at the juniper bushes, or the low-lying branches of spruce and birch, to save himself from a fatal plunge.
Without the tree cover, this descent would be impossible.
Finally, his boots touched solid, level ground. Or rather, sticky, squelchy ground. He was down in the bowels of the gorge; above him the starred heavens consisted of a narrow slash of sky squeezed between sheer walls. Here, where the hot breath of the foehn was at its fiercest, the effects of the thaw were far more noticeable.
Water trickled down the rock face in runnels. The air was full of the sound of the thaw and of dripping. The few remaining patches of snow were sodden and spongy underfoot. The melt-water drained into the river, turning its partially frozen surface into a wet and treacherous ice rink. As Helberg turned towards it, searching for the solid ice bridge he’d discovered earlier, he knew how nightmarish this crossing could prove.
Signalling the others to follow—but to move one by one, to limit their weight on the ice—Helberg stepped out onto the frozen surface. Strangely, he almost relished the risk. As he placed one foot in front of the other, feeling for the strongest, thickest ice, it felt like a game of Russian roulette. One false move and he would he sucked into the freezing water below.
At the river’s edge the ice had been sculpted into bizarre forms—ripples frozen in time. The clear, translucent ice had entrapped vegetation—grasses, ferns—freezing them fresh in its glassy embrace. Further out the ice turned a greyish-blue as it thickened and toughened, but here and there cracks were visible.
The question was, which force of nature, the freeze or the thaw, would triumph?
The ice bridge creaked and pinged, voicing its discontent at Helberg’s crossing. But finally he was over. As those behind began their odd, fearful dance across the river’s frozen surface, Helberg surveyed the way ahead. This side of the chasm was far steeper. The slope they had descended was only vertical in places. Between were rock shelves, and steep slopes garlanded with trees.
Here, it was all sheer. As others joined him to stare in awe at the rock face, Helberg noted whichever dark fissures and chiselled corners might offer a little purchase. Here and there an odd spruce or pine grew, stubborn as the rock to which it clung. They would have to feel for and test every hand-and foothold, each a step into the unknown.
Helberg glanced at the riverbank. It was littered with sharp boulders, caused by the repeated freezing and thawing of the cliffs above. If a man lost his footing and fell, he would come to grief in one of two ways: either he would smash into the river ice, or impale himself on one of those knife-cut rocks.
To left and right shadowy figures reached up and tested handholds. The saboteurs placed their feet into grooves in the sheer rock, rehearsing the first moves they would make. In a strange way, making the descent in darkness had served to sharpen their sense of feel and touch, plus it had yielded an instinctive sense of what rock might give good purchase, and what vegetation might hold fast under a man’s weight.
When all nine were gathered, Ronneberg gave the order to move. As one, the figures began the climb towards the railway tracks 200 metres above them. There was no following the leader now. While Helberg had rehearsed the descent, he hadn’t tested the climb. It was every man for himself.
Throwing his tommy gun onto his back on its sling, Helberg reached up and grasped the slippery rock face. The foehn sang a siren song as it whipped along the slab-sided gorge, its warmth turning icicles into mini waterfalls. To all sides Helberg could hear water spurting and cascading downwards. Damn this foehn. But there was nothing they could do about it now.
Helberg found a couple of toeholds and thrust himself upwards, his hands grasping for the next outcrop of rock or stubborn vegetation that might conceivably hold his weight. One thing their mountain warfare instructors had stressed when training in the Cairngorms: never look down. Every man amongst them repeated that mantra as they grabbed sharp edges of rock, slid boots into cracks running with meltwater, and levered bodies and heavy packs upwards.
Of course, in Britain they’d trained on routes that had been scaled countless times before. Every hand and foothold had been tested ad infinitum by the previous trainees. This was virgin territory.
They’d been taught to ensure they had four good holds on the rock, before relaxing one and reaching higher. There was no doing that now. Instead, desperate lunges towards a promising clump of roots or a lip of rock were the order of the day. One precious handhold was swapped left to right, freeing the other hand finger by finger so it could grope higher in the search for grip. At times a foot was swung free, only to toe its way across the rock face in a desperate effort to make contact with something—anything—that might offer firm support.
In training, they’d been told repeatedly that use of knees and elbows was a strict no-no. It might help in the short term, but it would manoeuvre the body into a contorted position from which it was difficult to move on. How did you get off your knees, when suspended two hundred feet up a sheer cliff? All such lessons went out of the window here in the grip of the shadowed valley. Elbows, knees, even faces sometimes—all were scraped across dirty rock slick with moisture, in the search for a handhold or a scrap of vegetation to latch on to.
Figures seemed to freeze in mid move. Cramp seized muscles unused to such constant and punishing exertion. Faces gazed up into the moonlight, searchingly, only to receive a shower of rock and detritus dislodged by the man above. Climbers fought their way upwards through cascading water as thick as any waterfall.
Several minutes into the impossible ascent, Kasper Idland froze. He’d reached a point where his feet suddenly went out from under him. He was reduced to hanging on to the cliff by one precarious handhold. Idland—the gentle giant—was immensely strong. But not even he could hold out one-handed for ever.
With his free hand he felt along the contours of the slab, fingers spidering for the slightest crack or outcrop. Nothing to the left: only a shallow fissure packed full of flaky rock, repeatedly shattered by the freeze, and now rendered into a slippery sludge by the thaw. He swapped hands, inching the fingers of his left to replace the hold of his right, while trying to brace with his feet against the smooth, sheer surface.
To the furthest reach of his right, his fingertips felt the tantalizing promise of vegetation: tree roots, burrowed deep into a fissure in the rock. It was just too far to grasp, but the longer he hesitated the more the strength in the fingers of his left hand seemed to drain away. Jolts of pain shot through his shoulder as he began to do the only thing possible—to swing by his one arm in an arc across the cliff.
He made a final swing and forced himself to let go with his left hand. For an instant his body arced through the air, unsupported in any way. Then the fingers of his right hand made contact with the base of that small tree, and, fighting through the mulch of rotten pine needles and dirt, he held fast with all he was worth. Both hands gripped the precious hold, as a sudden blast of warm wind howled down the gorge, tearing at him, moodily. If he hadn’t made the jump he’d have been caught one-handed by that gust, and it would very likely have thrown him into the abyss.
The desperate move had taken precious seconds, and Idland was falling behind the others. He shook the sweat from his eyes and moistened cracked lips. The fear of the fall drove each man onwards, propelling him upwards at a precipitous rate. Dread drove them on. Idland moved, chasing the underside of the boots clambering higher above him.
Relentless, driven, feverish; nine men swarmed ever higher. Three hundred feet; four hundred; the impossible end point drew ever closer. But even as it did, fatigue began to drag at their resolve. Never look down. Don’t look down. Do not ever look down. The mantra played through their minds, even as pain-racked limbs cried out for a brief rest on a narrow ledge, and a squint at what lay below. After all, a glance downwards would show how far each man had come and how little there was to go.
Three did look down. Ashen-faced, their features smeared with muck and flecked with bloody scratches, they took a glimpse into the shadowed abyss. The Måna River was a twisted sliver of silver far below, the dizzying drop to either side framing it in empty, beckoning darkness. Intoxicating, irresistible; how much easier it would be to jump, rather than force the body to go on.
Never look down. To left and right their brother saboteurs hissed the climber’s prayer; the mountaineer’s mantra. Never look down. It served to break the spell. The very sight and sound of their fellow warriors struggling ever higher drove the down-lookers back into action, and back to the climb.
Five hundred feet. Five hundred and fifty. With bruised hands and knees the leading ascenders hauled themselves over the lip of the railroad cutting, driving those below to ever greater efforts. Amongst the first, Helberg and Ronneberg sank to their knees on the level, hard surface. Even though they had made it, the reality of their achievement—proving the impossible possible—seemed difficult to grasp.
Here and there a figure reached out to touch the cold, hard steel of the tracks—proof that they were indeed at the shelf of rock on which the railway ran all the way to the gates of the Vemork plant. So far at least, they seemed to have made it here undetected. Apart from the wind and the growl of the plant, all was night-dark silence and stillness.
To the west stretched the tracks, straight and level some 900 metres to their target. The building rose stark, angular and greyish white in the moonlight. It was utterly alien in these wild and rugged surroundings. As the nine caught their breath and fought to bring the feverish pounding of their hearts under control, so the roar of the Vemork plant seemed to grow in intensity.
Carried on the foehn wind, the sound served to focus minds. The night shift would be at work now, each at their stations within the plant, and at their guard posts would be the German soldiers. All were blissfully unaware that a force of nine saboteurs had infiltrated their defences.
‘All right, let’s get closer,’ Ronneberg announced, once the nine were gathered on the rock shelf. ‘The cover party will lead the way.’
Haukelid and Helberg shouldered their packs. Together they set out, heading west into the teeth of the gathering wind. In doing so they were consciously taking their lives in their hands: if the railway was laced with landmines, they would be the first to know.
Haukelid discovered some footprints in the snow: someone had walked this way recently. He placed his feet in the prints of those who had passed before, for surely they must know where any minefields might lie. Behind him, Poulsson did the same, and so they advanced in single file, aping each other’s movements. Ronneberg waited until they were a good fifty metres ahead before signalling the demolitions team to follow.
In that manner they came to a small iron shed, housing some kind of electrical installation. Here the heartbeat of the Vemork plant was that much louder. To those who had spent so long in the wilds of the Vidda, the churning of so much giant machinery sounded unnatural and foreboding. It served to further focus minds on what was coming.
Ronneberg ordered a halt in the cover of the shed. ‘We’ve got a good view from here. We’ll wait until the guards on the bridge are relieved. That will be at midnight, so thirty minutes from now.’
The entire Vemork complex was laid out before them. Directly across the valley the light of a vehicle snaked along the Rjukan—Vemork road. Below and to their right, the suspension bridge threw a narrow thread across the gorge. At one end, they could just make out the distinctive silhouette of two German guards. Directly ahead lay the railway gate and beyond that the two massive buildings: to the rear, the generator hall; in front, the SH200 plant. And, sandwiched between them, the squat black form of the guard barracks.
‘The wind carried the deep humming of machinery to us,’ Ronneberg remarked of the moment. ‘Now and then we could hear a door being opened or shut.’
The seconds ticked by. Some munched on chocolate to replace energy lost in the gorge. Others eyed the zigzag course of the Ryes Road as it climbed the valley in a series of convoluted hairpins. Helberg sought to calm their worries about that untested escape march by regaling all with the story of the ant-encrusted syrup tin. Ronneberg gazed at his men, amazed and not a little humbled by how calm they appeared to be; how primed and ready.
He felt so close to them, yet somehow also a man set slightly apart. One half of his mind was in London, where he knew that the highest in the land were longing for tonight’s mission to succeed, where before had come only failure. The raiders were so close now. So much hinged upon this moment. And here Ronneberg’s men were, listening to a tale about an ant-infested syrup tin, as if they had not a care in the world.
He felt a massive surge of confidence. If anyone could do this, surely they could. Having scaled the gorge with such calm determination, what were his men not capable of?
At 11.57 the door to the barracks swung open, bleeding light into the darkness. Two figures, their helmets and their weapons utterly distinctive, moved across to the bridge. Nine sets of eyes tracked their movements. They reached the bridge, exchanged greetings with the sentries, who then moved back towards the barracks. One was taller than the other, and talkative. As they walked, he thrust out his chest to emphasize a point he was making.
There was something thrilling about spying on their heedlessness to danger. None had an inkling of what was coming. Ronneberg ordered a few more minutes’ wait, just to let the new guards settle into the routine and the boredom of their shift. Then, the nine would make their move.
The Gunnerside leader was a man who thrived on the tension of coming action. He became calmer as the moment of danger drew closer. He walked from man to man, softly reminding them of their role in the coming attack, and the key points to remember. With each he reiterated the need to try to minimize German casualties, in the interests of their fellow Norwegians.
At 12.30 Ronneberg gave the word: the cover party was to advance up the track and cut their way through the gate. ‘Once the gate is open, signal. We’ll stand by to follow up immediately.’
Five figures turned and headed into the windswept darkness, Helberg, Haukelid and Poulsson leading. One gripped a pair of powerful bolt croppers that their leader, Joachim Ronneberg, had discovered in a British ironmonger’s store.
Soon now.