Everything was still and quiet. Maybe too quiet. Kjelstrup bent to the bolt croppers, his shoulders tensing. The powerful teeth closed around the ¾-inch steel of the padlocked chain that secured the Vemork railway gate, as the raiders tensed for the gunshot snap of steel cutting steel.
Ronneberg’s bolt croppers sliced through the chain as if it were a human finger, the innards showing silvery in the moonlight. As the steel thread broke Haukelid caught it, lest the loose metal clank against the gate itself. But still, the noise of the cutting had sounded deafening to the saboteurs.
No sooner was the steel severed than Kjelstrup eased the gate open and the first of the saboteurs crept through, flitting onwards into the darkness. In truth, the throbbing of the Vemork plant was deafening now, and it had doubtless masked the noise of their entry.
They were in.
Haukelid and Poulsson led the party forward to take cover amidst the thickest of the shadows. They came to a halt less than fifty metres short of the SH200 plant. While it had seemed large from a distance, at close range it was truly monolithic. It towered above them, its sheer size and scale emphasizing the dangers of where they were and what they were about to attempt.
Behind them, Ronneberg and his three-man demolitions team cut their way through a second chained gate, opening up an alternative route of escape.
‘I stopped and listened,’ Ronneberg recalled. ‘So far we had not been detected. The hum of the machinery was steady and normal. There was good light from the moon, with no one in sight except our own men.’
Ronneberg signalled for his teams to head for their preassigned positions. Helberg melted into the darkness by the fence, sandwiched between the two gates; he was to guard their escape route. Kjelstrup turned left, towards the mountainside that towered to the rear of the plant. He was to keep his eyes peeled for German sentries patrolling the pipelines who might be drawn to the plant by the coming explosions.
Storhaug—the Chicken—pushed ahead right, to where a track wound downhill, linking the plant to the suspension bridge. It was from that direction that the Germans would send in reinforcements. In a crouched run, Haukelid and Poulsson advanced towards the main threat—the squat black form of the German barracks. They edged their way along the rear of an office block, broke cover and dashed for the wall of the generator hall, then flitted from there to the first of a series of giant storage tanks.
Poulsson gripped his tommy gun, finger tight on the trigger. In his trouser pocket Helberg had one of their chloroform knockout pads at the ready. If they stumbled across any Norwegian workers, he’d use that to disable them. With rubber-soled boots flitting over the gritty yard of the plant, the two men advanced from tank to tank, seeking the best position from which to menace the barracks.
Poulsson gave a signal and they came to a halt. The door to the barracks block was but a few metres away. Should the German guards come piling out of there, he and Haukelid would be nicely placed to put some long bursts of tommy gun fire their way, and at very close range.
‘Good spot,’ Poulsson whispered, eyeing the doorway. ‘Only a few feet away.’
For a moment he glanced at the SH200 plant, which lay just a few dozen metres to their right. From this angle—they were several feet lower than the heavy water works—the blacked-out windows bled slivers of light. Here and there the dark terrain was sliced apart by slits of beamed illumination, as if the earth had grown eyes.
To their left, Ronneberg paused for a second and listened hard. He could barely believe it, but still there wasn’t the slightest indication that their presence had been discovered. His eyes scanned the darkness, lingering on the odd speck of illumination, but still there was no movement to be seen anywhere.
The machinery of the plant drummed out its steady heartbeat. The very earth seemed to vibrate. So far, so good.
As Kayser covered him, Ronneberg stole ahead towards the SH200 plant, the rucksack of explosives heavy on his shoulders. Stromsheim followed, back likewise bowed by the weight of his charges. The two men with the demolitions gear were to be protected at all costs by the others.
They reached the corner of the electrolysis building. Flecks of light escaped from where the blackout paint didn’t quite reach the edge of the window frames. Ronneberg bent to one of those, placing his eye to the glowing chink. Suddenly, he was gazing into a real-life version of what he had practised on so often at Station XVII: a rank of steel vats filled one, massive wall, each stuffed full of the most valuable—and dangerous—liquid in the world.
He snatched his eye away, but not before he’d noted the lone figure keeping watch.
The four men pressed ahead until they reached the solid metal door that gave access to the SH200 plant. With one hand gripping his pistol, Ronneberg reached out and grabbed cold steel. He flicked his wrist to the right, but the handle didn’t budge. The door was barred.
‘Locked,’ he hissed.
He glanced at Stromsheim and Idland, and signalled to the concrete stairwell that ran up to the floor above. ‘Try the door on the ground floor.’
They hurried up the steps but returned just as quickly. Idland shook his head; that door too was locked.
What options remained, Ronneberg wondered. They had grenades to blast open the steel doors, or to blow in one of the windows—but that was bound to alert the German guards. And the longer they stayed here, right at the entryway to the SH200 works, the more chance they would be discovered. As yet, they hadn’t been spotted. But their luck couldn’t last for ever.
The answer had to lie in the cable duct, if only they could locate it. Ronneberg ordered the parties to split up, to see if they could find that tiny entry point. He and Fredrik Kayser headed right around the plant, Stromsheim and Idland going in the opposite direction. The plant was so massive, it felt as if they were searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
A snowplough had been at work recently, clearing paths around the building. The snow was pushed into high banks. If one of those had inadvertently covered the cable duct entry hatch, they were in serious trouble.
Near the far corner of the building, Ronneberg spotted a steel ladder several feet deep in a drift. He glanced upwards. The topmost rungs terminated at a small, dark, empty square. Cut into the side of the massive stone wall, it looked like the entrance to a troll’s cave.
He gestured excitedly. ‘There it is!’
He raced across to the ladder, kicked the snow aside and began to climb. The beanpole figure of Kayser followed. Ronneberg reached the top and knocked away the snow that blocked the entrance. There was no time to risk a call to the others. Stromsheim and Idland would have to find their own way.
Ronneberg leant forward, threaded his head and shoulders into the darkness and began to wriggle his way further inside. It was darker than hell and there was a fetid, dank airlessness to the narrow space. Beneath his knees whatever ran along the floor of the duct dug in uncomfortably. There was no way he could risk proceeding without a light.
He pulled out a torch and flicked it on, using one hand to shield the beam. The duct stretched ahead of him: too narrow to turn around; too long to countenance backing out again; too constraining to linger indecisively. Heaven forbid if either he or Kayser discovered they were prone to claustrophobia halfway.
This had to be the route that Jomar Brun had alerted them to, back in Britain, but it was several months since he had ventured this way, and who knew what might have changed in the interim as a result of von Falkenhorst’s security upgrades.
Above the maze of pipes and tubes there was just enough space to crawl ahead. Ronneberg set off. Behind he could hear Kayser panting as he tried to catch his breath and keep up. Ronneberg tried to focus his mind. He scanned the route ahead with his torch beam, identifying any cables, piping or loose debris that could be shoved out of the way. It gave him something to focus on.
At the back of Ronneberg’s mind was the nagging worry that even now he and Kayser were crawling across the ceiling of their target, with no direct route of entry unless the duct actually led somewhere—to a point where they could exit. Surely it had to, for that was what Brun had told them. But maybe all that had changed in the interim.
If they were heard or otherwise detected while trapped in this narrow tunnel, Ronneberg didn’t want to think about the consequences. One burst from a Schmeisser sub-machine gun from the far end of the duct, and he and Kayser would be in trouble. And there was zero chance of reaching for their suicide pills, constrained as they were.
He blanked all such thoughts from his mind and crawled onwards. Halfway down he came to some water pipes. They passed through the duct, draining into the room below. Presumably they carried a lesser concentration of SH200 from the floor above to the final stage—the high-concentration cells. As Ronneberg went to crawl over the obstruction, he froze. The pipes didn’t make a tight seal with the roof, and through the gap he could see directly into the SH200 plant; right below him, and seated at a desk making some notes, was the lone guard.
Barely daring to breathe, Ronneberg inched his way across. Having made it, he paused to regain his equilibrium. Behind him, Kayser moved to cross the pipes, but when he was halfway he must have leaned too far over. His heavy Colt slipped out of its shoulder holster and clattered onto the water pipes, the noise of steel striking steel ringing out like a clanging alarm bell.
Both men froze, terrified that they might be discovered this close to the target. To be thwarted at this point—it was too bitter to contemplate.
Finally Ronneberg risked a peep through to the floor below. He was just in time to see the guard turn back to his paperwork. He must have concluded that this was just another of those odd noises that the massive plant tended to make. He gestured to Kayser to fasten the pistol properly, so it couldn’t fall out again.
Ronneberg turned and pressed onwards, his mouth dry, his heartbeat firing like a machine gun. He squeezed past several thick webs of cabling, before finally he reached an open hole in the floor. Just as Brun had described, the cable duct ended in a hatch, which was kept unbolted and opened into the high-concentration floor of the plant. Below Ronneberg was a ten-foot drop—an easy leap for someone recently out of training at Crispie.
Every second was precious now. Discovery was surely only a matter of time—if not for them, then for the cover party. With no sign of Stromsheim and Idland—the others tasked with the demolitions—Ronneberg decided to press on and attempt the job with just himself and Kayser.
With hands placed to either side of the manhole-like gap, Ronneberg lowered first his legs and then his torso through the floor, and dropped. He landed like a coiled snake, his gun out of its holster almost before he’d come to rest. He swept the room to either side. It was deserted. They’d reached a side chamber to the main high-concentration plant, which now was but a bare few steps away.
‘NO ADMITTANCE’ read the sign on the doorway.
Kayser having vaulted down beside him, Ronneberg reached for the handle. As Kayser covered him, Ronneberg pulled the door open wide and the hallowed confines of the SH200 high-concentration room swung into view. It felt strangely familiar and alien peering into that room; the rehearsals at Station XVII had prepared them for this moment, but not for the sense of penetrating the heart of the Nazi nuclear dream.
‘There were the cells,’ Ronneberg remarked of the moment, ‘looking just like the models we had attacked during our training, but they were the real thing at last.’
The night watchman, an overweight, grey-haired Norwegian, was sitting with his back to them, and still he hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong. All around them the plant hummed and purred reassuringly. Kayser strode forward, his gun at the ready.
‘On your feet,’ he barked in Norwegian. ‘And hands up.’
The guard turned, abruptly. His consternation was accentuated by his need to remove his glasses. He was obviously long-sighted and couldn’t make out who his unexpected visitors were. He fumbled, removed his specs, then stared, open-mouthed.
‘On your feet,’ Kayser repeated. ‘Keep your hands above your head. And where’s the key to the door leading to the yard?’
He meant the steel door via which Ronneberg and party had tried to gain entry. They would need to exit through it after they had triggered the charges. They certainly wouldn’t be able to crawl back out through the cable duct, not with the explosives detonating right beneath them.
‘The key!’ he repeated. ‘Nothing will happen to you if you do as you’re told.’ He tapped the British insignia on his shoulder flashes. ‘See. We’re British soldiers.’
‘Keep talking to him about Britain,’ Ronneberg barked at Kayser, deliberately speaking English.
The more they could impress upon this man that they were British, the less the likelihood of any reprisals—or so the two hoped. As Kayser dealt with the guard, Ronneberg bolted the door they’d just come through, pulled the desk over, opened his rucksack and laid out his twenty charges of Nobel 808—one for each electrolysis cell, and two spare.
His hands worked feverishly, but with a practised authority: he was only doing now what he had rehearsed so many times before at Station XVII. Each charge was sausage-shaped, about twelve inches long, with a fuse and detonator inserted into it. Pulling on some rubber gloves, to protect against electric shocks from the SH200 cells, he turned to the first and got to work.
It towered above him, a mass of pipes, tubes, seals, rubber connectors, anodes, cathodes, water jackets and flanges, all wrapped around a large metal cylinder—the stainless steel SH200 container. He reached up and moulded the first charge around the base of the container, where it stuck fast like sticky plasticine.
When it detonated, it would rip the guts out of the equipment and send the precious SH200 gushing down the drain. The explosives seemed to be made to measure and fitted like a glove’, Ronneberg remarked. He turned for another set of Nobel 808 charges, moving onto the second steel cylinder.
‘What’s your name?’ Kayser asked the night guard. Anything, to keep the man calm.
‘Gustav Johansen,’ he replied, but his eyes were glued to Ronneberg, a mixture of fear and shock writ large upon his features.
Kayser kept chatting to the night watchman, regaling him with stories from England. They’d had reports that Johansen was a good, loyal Norwegian, and they wanted to give him as many reasons as possible to believe that the raiding party was British.
‘Have a good look,’ Kayser told him, fingering the sergeant’s stripes on his shoulders. ‘Notice those marks? Now you can tell the Germans what an English uniform looks like. I don’t suppose there are so many of the Übermensch who’ve had the chance of getting close to an Allied soldier!’
Ronneberg had reached the ninth cell in line, halfway through his task, when a sudden crash of breaking glass cut through the steady hum of the SH200 plant. A boot had crashed through one of the windows to the rear of the room. Kayser whirled away from the night watchman, his weapon at the ready, finger bone-white on the trigger.
In a flash Ronneberg drew his pistol, as he too prepared for battle.