Bonzo Haukelid and Jens Poulsson eyed the barracks block warily. What the Grouse leader wouldn’t give now for a long pull on his pipe. Haukelid tapped his watch: twenty minutes in, and still no sign of the sabotage party.
‘What can be keeping them?’ Poulsson hissed.
Haukelid shrugged. ‘I wish I knew.’
It had taken seven minutes to plant the charges when they’d rehearsed this back in England. Ronneberg and his men must have hit trouble getting access to the plant.
Poulsson had his tommy gun levelled at the barracks doorway. If there was any sign of movement he would start ‘pumping lead into the hut’. Haukelid had half a dozen hand grenades within easy reach; if the Germans raised a hue and cry, he would dash forward and hurl them through door and windows. But he would have to be careful: the wooden walls of the barracks would offer precious little protection from the blast.
‘Remember to shout Heil Hitler when you throw your grenades,’ Poulsson muttered, his eyes not leaving the doorway.
The suggestion was only half in jest. That cry of allegiance to the Führer might buy them a few extra seconds in which to wreak their carnage.
For an instant Haukelid’s mind flipped back to an incident etched deep in his memory. At one stage during the fighting against the German invaders Haukelid and party had surrounded a section of enemy troops. The Germans had taken cover in a wooden house, not realizing what little shelter it offered. By the time Haukelid and his fellows had ceased fire, there were dead Germans hanging out of the windows. This wooden barracks blocks would give equally limited protection.
The steady throbbing from the generator hall seemed to taunt Haukelid. What was keeping the sabotage party? It felt as if he and Poulsson had been waiting here for ever. It had to be worse for the others. Helberg, Kjelstrup and Storhaug were utterly isolated at their solitary posts. As the minutes ticked by they each must be thinking: had Ronneberg and his party got trapped inside the plant?
A short distance downhill Storhaug stared with unblinking eyes at the two sentries on the bridge. He was so close that he could hear their night-time chatter. They clearly had no idea that a force of ‘British’ soldiers had infiltrated the SH200 plant. The trouble was, Storhaug had no idea where the sabotage party had got to, or even if they were still at liberty.
It was all just so nerve-racking.
Inside the high-concentration room, Ronneberg and Kayser eased off the pressure on their triggers. One of their number—Stromsheim; the grandfather of the group—had thrust his head through the freshly broken windowpane, and he’d almost got it blown right off. They’d only just recognized him in time.
Stromsheim, who was carrying the second set of demolition charges, had despaired of finding the cable duct entryway. Instead, he’d decided to smash his way in: the noise of the breaking glass, plus the shaft of light that would have suddenly pierced the darkness, lent Ronneberg’s task an even greater sense of urgency now.
With his rubber gloves to protect him, Ronneberg removed the remains of the shattered window pane, to help Stromsheim in. He ordered the man’s companion, Idland, to head around to the main steel door and take up a position there, to guard their exit. But as he pulled a final fragment of glass free and went to guide Stromsheim through, Ronneberg felt a sharp stab of pain in his hand.
He glanced down to see a spurt of oozing red. A shard of glass had pierced the rubber glove, and it looked as if he’d cut himself badly. For the briefest of instants his mind flashed to the gorge, and the sheer climb he would have to execute to get out of here. Now he would have to attempt it with an injured and bloodied hand.
He forced such thoughts from his mind. Enough time had been lost already. Ordering Stromsheim to help, Ronneberg turned back to his task. Two sets of hands should make light work, and with luck they’d have the final explosives set within the next couple of minutes. Feverishly Ronneberg and Stromsheim worked away, moulding their Nobel 808 charges to the remaining SH200 chambers.
As he worked, Ronneberg’s mind was racing: each package of Nobel 808 came equipped with a 120-second fuse, but he didn’t want to risk such a lengthy delay. If they fled the room leaving two-minute delays, it was just possible that a guard might make it in here and disable the fuses. He decided to cut the time short—very short. They’d use thirty-second fuses instead.
That would leave them only half a minute to get the hell out of the room. They’d also be left with zero chance of making it out of the Vemork grounds before the explosions ripped the SH200 plant asunder. But Ronneberg figured that was a risk worth taking to ensure the sabotage was successful.
Fuses and charges set, Ronneberg and Stromsheim ran through one last set of checks, ensuring that all was as it should be. Then Ronneberg turned to Kayser.
‘Right, let’s get the door onto the yard unlocked.’
At gunpoint, Kayser ushered the night watchman towards the exit. The heavy steel door was encased in thick reinforced concrete. He got it unfastened, then swung it open a fraction, just to ensure there was nothing that would obstruct their escape. Thirty seconds didn’t leave a lot of time for something to go wrong.
Ronneberg put the final touches to his handiwork. He pulled out a handful of British parachute wing badges and scattered them over the floor—the commandos’ calling card. That done, and with blood oozing from his cut hand, he grabbed a box of matches.
The first flared, and still there wasn’t the slightest sign of alarm from anywhere around the plant. But as Ronneberg bent to the fuse, the night watchman cried out in alarm.
‘One moment! My glasses. I left them on the desk. I must have my glasses.’
Ronneberg froze. From Jomar Brun’s intelligence reports he knew there were German guards stationed within this building. At any moment one might arrive, on patrol. Every second was precious. But he also knew that the Germans had seized all of Norway’s optical manufacturing facilities, so there was no way this man would get replacement glasses any time soon.
He killed the match, hurried to the desk and grabbed the man’s spectacles case. ‘Here.’
‘Tusan takk’—a thousand thanks—the watchman replied.
Ronneberg turned back to the charges and struck a second match. The voice rang out again.
‘Wait! I beg you! My glasses! They’re not in the case!’
Silently, Ronneberg cursed. Was he really to endanger their mission for a pair of eyeglasses? Roosevelt, Churchill, the Norwegian king and so many others in high office were waiting on his actions. If they failed now—if a German guard intervened and raised the alarm—there surely would be no second chance. Not for them, nor for any other raiding force, and possibly not for the free world.
He blew out the second match. ‘So, where are you damn glasses?’ he hissed.
He rushed to where the man indicated, and found them jammed between the leaves of a logbook. He thrust them at the watchman. ‘Take them!’
The man repeated his thanks.
Ronneberg struck a third match. Third time lucky. But as he crouched to light the fuse he heard the noise that he had most dreaded: heavy footsteps thundered down the iron stairway from the floor above. He felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. A German soldier was coming. Should he throw caution to the wind and light the fuse? Or wait and disable the guard?
For a moment the flame hovered indecisively, before Ronneberg snuffed it out. He turned to Kayser and Stromsheim; all had their weapons ready. The three men tensed for battle. A figure strode through the doorway. The three raiders breathed a collective sigh of relief. It wasn’t a German in uniform. It was a Norwegian—the plant foreman doing his rounds.
The foreman stared at the scene before him in utter disbelief. His eyes took in the watchman, Johansen, with his hands above his head; three rough-looking soldiers in what appeared to be British uniform, guns levelled; and the Nobel 808 charges, threaded around the eighteen SH200 cylinders like a long string of sausages.
It was impossible. The plant was ringed with barbed wire, electrified wire, minefields, alarms, searchlights, machine-gun posts and German guards. So how could all this be happening here, at the heart of this facility that was of utmost importance to the Reich?
There was no time to ponder this. Instead, the foreman was forced to put his hands up, under the menace of three gaping muzzles.
‘Get the both of them over to the stairs,’ Ronneberg ordered. ‘After I light the fuse tell them to run. They should reach the second floor before the charges blow, so they should be safe enough … Tell them to lie down and keep their mouths open, or they’ll lose their ear drums.’
Almost as an afterthought Ronneberg scattered about some of the tools that he’d been using, each of which had ‘Made in Britain’ stamped into its metal parts—yet more evidence of who exactly had wreaked the carnage here.
That done, Ronneberg set his match to the fuse and yelled: ‘Go!’
At the stairway, Kayser delayed for a few seconds, just to ensure his two captives couldn’t do anything to interfere with their handiwork. Then he shoved them up the steps, his words chasing after their heels. ‘Run! Run! As fast as you can!’
With that he, Ronneberg and Stromsheim yanked open the steel door, darted out of the plant, slamming it shut and locking it after them. They turned and ran, legs pumping and pulses racing, heading east into the beckoning darkness. They’d made no more than twenty metres when there was the flash of an explosion. The noise of the blast was muffled by the massive walls of the building and the thick steel door, yet inside the SH200 room was all a mass of flame.
The force of the explosion burned hot upon their backs as they sprinted for safety. The shortened fuses had made sure that no desperate or misguided German’ had had a chance to spoil their work. But having struck at the heart of the Nazi’s greatest—and darkest—of secrets, now they had to make their getaway.
To Poulsson and Haukelid, standing guard over the barracks block, the explosions had sounded somewhat subdued. The noise was ‘like two or three cars crashing in Piccadilly Circus’, noted Poulsson. Yet the white-orange flash of the blast had cut through the darkness like lightning, and they had to presume that the sabotage team had done their work.
The two men tensed, waiting for the reaction from the German guards. A few moments passed before the door was flung open. A single figure stood there, silhouetted in the light. Bareheaded and without a visible weapon, he glanced at the balconies running around the SH200 plant—those that housed the hydrogen burners, the ‘cannons’, which were well known for issuing their sporadic explosions.
The guard shook his head, as if the burners’ erratic behaviour must account for the noise that he had heard. With shoulders hunched against the chill he wandered over to the SH200 plant’s steel door. He tried it, found it locked as usual, and returned to the warmth of the barracks. Haukelid and Poulsson relaxed their grip on their weapons and readied themselves to take flight.
But then the barracks door was thrown open for a second time. The same figure stepped out, only now he looked decidedly more businesslike. He was armed with a rifle and had a torch gripped in one hand.
‘The bastard’s back,’ Poulsson hissed. ‘He must smell trouble.’
‘Could prove fatal,’ Haukelid growled.
With the torch held before him, the German began to play the beam back and forth across the ground. Steadily he approached where Poulsson and Haukelid lay prone, weapons at the ready. Poulsson thought of his parents and his brother and sisters in nearby Rjukan. If he blasted this fellow with his tommy gun, others would follow, and there would be a bloodbath. The reprisals would be correspondingly brutal.
‘Shall I fire?’ he whispered, as he stared down the barrel of his tommy gun.
Haukelid, gripping his grenades, shook his head. ‘Not yet. He might not see us. Leave it for as long as possible.’
For an instant the guard flashed the light up towards the balconies that housed the cannons, before bringing it down again to quarter the ground to the rear of Poulsson and Haukelid. All he needed to do now was sweep the beam forward onto the prone figures, and he was a dead man. The German hesitated, as if trying to puzzle something out, glanced at the balcony again, then turned and stomped back into the barracks.
The moment the door closed, two silent figures rose from the ground and melted into the darkness. Haukelid and Poulsson raced for the railway gate, feet flashing across the ground. They were met there by Helberg and Kjelstrup, who confirmed that they were the last; everyone else was ahead of them and making their way down the railway tracks.
Haukelid swung the gate shut and wrapped the severed chain around it several times, so at a casual inspection it might appear to be intact. For an instant Haukelid and Helberg paused. Had they really left enough evidence that this was a British sabotage operation? Surely a little something scattered along the escape route wouldn’t hurt?
Haukelid decided to dump his chloroform pads and tube. But before doing so, he gave the equipment a wipe over with a handkerchief. No sense in leaving any finger prints for the Gestapo. They’d taken Haukelid’s prints when he was arrested in 1941, and he didn’t want to risk any reprisals against his family.
Helberg, meanwhile, laid his beloved tommy gun gently in the snow beside the tracks. He’d nursed that weapon through three terrible months on the Vidda, but now was the time for their parting. There was nothing more symbolic of the commandos than a tommy gun, hence his leaving it behind.
‘All right, let’s go!’
The last two saboteurs took to their heels, heading east along the glistening line of the tracks.
Up ahead Ronneberg waited, making certain that everyone had made it out of the plant. ‘For a moment I looked back down the line and listened,’ he remarked. ‘Except for the hum of machinery that we had heard when we arrived, everything in the factory was quiet.’
It was hard to believe, but they appeared to have got in and out and to have blown the SH200 plant to pieces without the defenders even realizing it. Even now, the impossible promise of escape beckoned. But in the euphoria of the moment, the nine saboteurs had overlooked one thing. There was a sense of real heat to the air; a fetid hotness to the wind.
The foehn—the snow-eater—was hungry and intent on feeding.
‘Helberg—lead the way,’ Ronneberg ordered, as they turned towards the chasm.
Helberg found a place where the cliff looked noticeably less treacherous, compared to the place where they had climbed. He led the nine over the edge, scrambling from one snowdrift to another, and leaping from ledge to ledge in a semi-controlled scramble towards the floor of the gorge. Above and behind him figures stumbled after, in a helter-skelter dash for the low ground.
Helberg reached the banks of the Måna first. His gaze was drawn to the groaning river. It looked as if an earthquake had torn apart the ice. Slabs had been thrown free and piled against each other, as the sheer volume of water released by the snow-eater threatened to carry it all away. The noise was deafening: fresh meltwater rushing over slabs of ice that were tearing themselves apart under the strain.
Helberg searched for a point where they could chance a crossing. At all junctures angry waters eddied and swirled. Wave crests foamed white in the moonlight. The river roared and the ice wailed. And then, over it all rang out an even louder screaming.
Rhythmic, piercing, unearthly—the new sound echoed deafeningly down the length of the gorge. The German guard force had sounded the siren, raising the alarm.
The hunt was on.