Dark Full of Enemies Read online

  by Jordan M. Poss:

  No Snakes in Iceland

  The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Dark Full of Enemies

  Griswoldville (forthcoming)

  DARK FULL OF ENEMIES

  —

  A Novel of the

  Second World War

  —

  Jordan M. Poss

  NEOCLASSIC BOOKS

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 Jordan M. Poss

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, places, characters, or events are fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Set in Sabon and Monotype Twentieth Century

  Maps and drawings by Jordan Poss

  Author photograph by Scott Poss

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Maps

  Dark Full of Enemies

  Author’s Note & Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  for Sarah

  Maps

  Northern Europe, December 1943

  Vestfjorden, Lofoten, and Narvik area

  Dark Full of Enemies

  The chieftain went on to reward the others:

  each man on the bench who had sailed with Beowulf

  and risked the voyage received a bounty,

  some treasured possession. And compensation,

  a price in gold, was settled for the Geat

  Grendel had killed cruelly earlier—

  as he would have killed more, had not mindful God

  and one man’s daring prevented that doom.

  —Beowulf, 1049-56

  And let us not be weary in well doing.

  —Galatians VI, ix

  1

  The two Americans arrived at the pub just in time to see the fight. They had left the staff car up the street and walked through the cutting winter air to the front of the pub, where the younger of the two wiped at the window with a gloved hand and peered inside. He saw what seemed to him a typical pubgoing crowd—old Brits in tweed and ties, young Brits in khaki, alone, and young Brit women with Americans in their brown class-As fawning over, pawing at them, plying them with ale and spirits. Even through the window he could hear, or at least feel, the rhythm of pub chatter.

  “See him, Sergeant?” the other man asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Dammit. It’s not like McKay to wander off. They said—”

  “Wait.” The Sergeant scrubbed the window again. A lady in a flowered hat, seated on the other side, gave him a crosswise glare. He peered in undeterred. Through the press of brown and khaki and check and herringbone and houndstooth, the earth tones of working people and soldiers, he saw one man in drab green, alone, at the bar, with his back to the window. The Sergeant looked more intently, wiped at the window again, trying to make out his face. A young couple pulled away from the bar and threw on their coats as if it would not long matter how warmly they were dressed and hastened to the door, and the man at the bar turned and picked up his bottle—a Coca-Cola—and took a sip, and turned back. The Sergeant caught a glimpse of an old book open on the bar before him, and grinned.

  “It’s him, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank God—let’s go in.”

  The Sergeant and Lieutenant slipped in past the exiting couple and looked again at the bar, now in the warm haze of tobacco smoke and the press of bodies. Captain Joe McKay sat reading, oblivious. The Lieutenant scoffed and shook his head.

  “Bookworms.”

  “Got to unwind somehow. All right, let’s get him.”

  “Wait, Barnes.” The Lieutenant put a hand on the Sergeant’s arm and nodded. “Watch this.” An Australian corporal, his khaki blouse open at the throat, hair hanging over his ears and stuck to his forehead, reeled to McKay where he sat at the bar and leaned in, close. The Lieutenant shook his head. “My God, this is going to be good.”

  Barnes watched. The Australian said something, and McKay did not react. The Australian glowered, repeated himself, and again, nothing. The Australian lifted himself, looked back across the pub—at a woman, also sheets to the wind, it appeared to Barnes—and turned back to McKay. He grabbed McKay’s shoulder and opened his mouth and took a hard hit, a lightning strike to the side of his head, and dropped.

  The pub fell silent instantly, quickly enough for the woman’s gasp to be heard. For a long moment McKay stood, a lone green-uniformed figure at the center of every stare in the room. He looked down at the Australian, at the floor, at no one in particular as he searched the room. Barnes saw, for a moment, helpless confusion.

  “God, Heyward.”

  “All right,” the Lieutenant said.

  They stepped out of the dark doorway into the room and Heyward raised his hands.

  “Don’t worry folks,” he said, and one or two folks broke their gaze away from McKay and looked at him. “We’ll take this from here. Nothing to worry about.”

  Barnes took the lead and pushed through the room to McKay, who saw him and nodded a hello, but did not speak.

  “Captain,” Barnes said.

  McKay turned and closed his book and tucked it under his arm. He reached into his pocket and dropped a pile of change on the bar without counting it—probably twenty times the cost of his Coca-Cola—and muttered to the barkeep, “Sorry bout the trouble.” Heyward stepped up and knelt and rolled the Australian over. A big bruise already spread from the temple toward his left eye and his nose was a mess—he had landed facefirst on the tile floor. McKay saw and nodded again to Barnes and they made for the door.

  “Bloody yank,” an old voice said from one of the back corners of the pub. Barnes glanced back. An old man, old enough to have fought the Boers, had roused himself and stood braced against his table and the wall. A few people nearby glanced at him, neutrally.

  “Come on, Captain.”

  Barnes retrieved McKay’s overcoat and green officer’s cover from the pegs in the foyer and McKay pulled them on.

  “Bloody yank!” the old man said, more insistently this time, and to encouraging murmurs from the crowd.

  “Aw, now, don’t do that to our friend, here,” Heyward called. “He’s not a yank, he’s from the great state of Georgia!”

  Barnes did not stop to see what effect this wisecracking had. He opened the door and hustled McKay outside into the dark.

  McKay’s uniform confused people in Britain. Locals recognized his accent as American—a yank of some variety, a Southerner—but the uniform was unlike any American one they ordinarily saw. He certainly was not Canadian. They wore woolen khaki the same as the most English of Tommies, or even the Australian McKay had put on the floor. This severe looking man with his dark hair and wrathful eyes wore a deep, drab green, and even his badges and buttons were wrong—matte black. Nothing shiny but the silver bars on his shoulders, another tiny clue to his Americanness.

  As soon as they were outside, Barnes said, “Well, you gotta helluva right hook, Captain.”

  “Shut up, Barnes.”

  Barnes nodded. McKay sounded not angry, but defeated. He would probably have been in a foul mood, too, he thought. He offered McKay a cigarette and they lit up, backs against the wind. They puffed a moment and then Barnes gestured the way he and Lieutenant Heyward had come.

  “Car’s up the street a bit.”

  “All right.”

  Barnes and McKay started walking along the dark pavement. Though still late afternoon, blackout conditions and the early sunset of British winter had turned London into a web of dark gullies,
deep-sea trenches swum by slit-eyed trucks and jeeps, giving just enough light to remind one of the day. McKay turned up his collar. Barnes went on.

  “What you reading?”

  “Thucydides.”

  “Say what?”

  “Greek history. The Peloponnesian War.”

  “Hm,” Barnes said. McKay was always reading something. He brought books into briefings and packed them on missions. It was strange to Barnes. He recalled that McKay had been some kind of professor, or been to college, before the war. He told stories—used examples from literature and history in his briefings—to help the planners, presenting them always in his deep, calm but firm Southern accent—not the aristocratic drawl of Gone With the Wind, Barnes, a Hoosier, noticed, but something else, something stronger. And hearing McKay recall Roman mistakes or Greek pitfalls or the lessons of such-and-such a campaign—the variety of examples teeming in McKay’s brain flummoxed Barnes. He glanced again at the book.

  “Good?”

  “A classic.”

  Barnes changed the subject. “I gotta say, we were just in time.”

  “That’s true. Thank y’all.”

  “Still, better get out before some MPs show up. Or some bobbies.”

  “Heyward isn’t taking care of that?”

  “Ah, he’s in there taking care of something. You know him. Don’t worry about it.” They reached the car, and Barnes climbed in behind the wheel. McKay got in the back. Ahead of them the pub door opened and Heyward stepped out, braced himself against the cold, and walked toward them. Barnes looked at McKay in the mirror.

  “What that guy want?”

  “Wanted to know what sort of a uniform this is. Where I come from. If I’m a spy.”

  “Idiot. Spies don’t wear uniforms.”

  “He was in his cups.”

  Barnes regarded McKay a moment more. He sat in the back, staring out the window, gripping his book with both hands. “Edgy, huh?”

  Barnes was serious. McKay looked him in the eye for the first time.

  “A bit.” He looked out the window again. “I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t worry about it,” Barnes said and added, regretfully, “That’ll be useful where you’re going.”

  McKay nodded. Heyward climbed in and shut his door and, as Barnes pressed the starter, turned in his seat.

  “Jesus, Captain—you have to knock him out like that?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You socked him right in the temple.”

  McKay looked out the window as if thinking. At last, he said, “I was aiming for his throat.”

  Heyward laughed, slapped the back of the seat, and turned around.

  “Marines.” Heyward shook his head. “I tell ya—you guys are mean sonsabitches.”

  McKay was not the only Marine in Europe. He knew that, even if the stares at his unusual uniform set him ill at ease. Fleet Marines protected many of the American ships gathering daily in the harbors of the British Isles, and there were other Marines—though he had never met them—in his outfit, the Office of Strategic Services.

  The OSS had its London headquarters on Grosvenor Street, a five minute drive from the pub in good traffic, but Barnes turned the car north and left the city.

  “Not meeting at HQ?” McKay said.

  “Not this time,” Heyward said. “The Colonel’s waiting at the mansion.”

  They drove several minutes into the farmland and forest north of London. Barnes took a side road, shut off his blackout headlights completely and drove a few more minutes by moonlight before turning into a tree-lined lane. Ahead of them in the gloom the gray shape of a stone gate appeared, and Barnes slowed. Two soldiers approached, a sergeant and a corporal with black MP armbands, bundled head to toe in Army winter gear. They raised one hand to stop the car but rested the other, McKay noticed, on the Thompson submachine guns slung across their bodies. Barnes rolled down his window and announced himself to the corporal, an old buddy named Phelps, while the sergeant hung back. McKay recognized the sergeant—he had seen him on guard several times before—but did not know his name. He stood, studiedly casual, at the front left fender with the Thompson slung across his chest, and watched.

  Barnes’s exchange with the corporal ended, and Phelps handed back their identification. The two guards stepped back and, with one hand still on their Thompsons, swung the gates wide and waved the car forward into the sweep. Barnes idled through, flicked the headlights on, and continued. The gates closed behind them.

  McKay felt suddenly tired—before the briefing had even started. Tired but restless, keyed up. He found himself checking the guards for weakness and inattention—the guards on his own side. And he had assaulted that drunken Aussie in the pub… He saw the crumpled body, a cord of blood that found a track in the tile and followed it, probing outward, and a vein that pulsed in the back of the man’s neck. Alive. He had felt a second of relief at that, and then panic again. Thank God for Heyward and Barnes. He shook his head, closed his eyes, took a deep, quiet breath, and held it until the car stopped.

  The mansion, as Heyward and most of the other lower echelon staff called it, was a small, run-down manor house—the kind of country estate that McKay imagined common to the middling gentry of Jane Austen—with a carriage house and a few outbuildings sagging in the frost. The house had stood unlived in since before the First World War, and its owners, having long ago moved into the city for business, found the ancestral home a burden they were willing to rent to the Yanks for undisclosed purposes.

  Three jeeps and a staff car already stood in the sweep when Barnes stopped at the carriage house and the three of them got out. Barnes stepped into the carriage house, where enlisted staff reported, and McKay followed Heyward to the front door of the main house. Two British sergeants stood smoking beyond the door with another American MP, and McKay noted the markings on the staff car—British. He wondered who the guest lecturer might be. Heyward opened the door for him and they stepped inside.

  The Major stood in the foyer, conferring with the corporal at the desk by the door. He looked up when they entered. He was tallish, dark-haired, middle aged, and fatherly, with a faint Arkansas accent, and always led McKay into his briefings.

  “Ah, Captain McKay,” the Major said. “That was quick, Lieutenant.”

  “Yessir,” Heyward said. “Had to smooth things over with a sorry Australian tommy at a pub, but we got the Captain here as fast as we could.”

  The Major raised an eyebrow. Heyward grinned.

  “Saw the whole thing, sir,” Heyward said. “Cold-cocked him, right in the head. Knocked his lights out for a couple minutes.”

  The Major looked at McKay but said only, “That’ll be all, Lieutenant.”

  Heyward blushed, still grinning, said “Yessir,” and was gone.

  “This way, Captain.”

  They walked up the staircase on faded scarlet carpet, worn through at the edges of the steps and in blackened spots where discarded cigarettes and cigars had landed. They turned at the top and approached a set of paneled doors.

  “Anything I’m going to have to paper over with the Colonel, McKay?”

  McKay felt ill again. “I hope not, sir.”

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  “Yes, sir. I punched a tommy, sir. At the pub.” The Major stopped at the doors and looked hard at McKay. His eyes moved back and forth across McKay’s face, assessing. “To be honest, Major, I don’t know what happened. He was drunk, I think. I couldn’t sleep, so I went down there to do some reading. He grabbed me by the shoulder and before I knew what I’d done I’d laid him out.”

  The Major looked at McKay a moment more, thought about it, and nodded. “I’m sure Heyward took care of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s go.”

  He opened the door.

  McKay had never been sure what purpose the briefing room had once served the mansion’s owners, those middling gentry. The panel
ed walls reached twelve feet to a ceiling with dusty and soot-tarnished gilt moulding. A fireplace, much too large, kept the room much too hot. Ceiling-height windows faced outward, toward the drive and the woods, but these now stood taped and hung with velvet blackout curtains.

  The room was dark. The only light came from the fire in the grate and the hooded lamps on the Colonel’s long desk. The desk stood off-center in the room, near the curtained windows—the Colonel didn’t like the fire roaring at his back all day. The desk looked to McKay like the bar at some grim tribunal—long enough for two men to sit behind, with a third at the far corner, tall enough for men to look more than a little like judges behind it.

  The Colonel sat at the middle of the desk, head down, writing. To his right, nearest the black drapery on the windows, stood the Major’s chair. Most of the folders, envelopes, and papers, as well as the only telephone in the upper floor of the house, stood on the desk before the Major’s seat. To the Colonel’s left, with one dark blue pant leg visible around the end of the desk, sat a British officer, a Royal Navy Commander.

  The Colonel looked up and McKay came to attention and saluted.

  “Come in, Captain,” the Colonel said. “Have a seat.”

  McKay sat in the old yellow chair before the desk. The Major shut the doors behind them and came around the desk, sat, and busied himself with folders.

  “Just a moment, Captain,” the Colonel said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Colonel returned to his memo. For a minute the room stood silent. Only the logs settling in the fire and the dull scratch of the Colonel’s pencil made any sound. The Colonel wrote with furrowed brow and a fast, heavy hand. He bore down heavily while he wrote—McKay had seen him tear word-shaped holes through the paper when agitated. The Colonel was a career Army officer, bald, gruff, with hooded eyes and a gravelly voice. He wore glasses but did not like to be seen in them—they lay before him near the edge of the desk—and so hunched and squinted over his work. He was thorough and fastidious, a stickler for detail and protocol, and like most career sticklers, irritable, impatient with incompetence or failure. McKay was flattered to know that this man liked and trusted him.