Chapter 27Vermok, February 27, 1943
Track Four
Knut Haukelid could feel the repetitive thud of the turbine as a dull throb in his breastbone. At first it had been hard to pick out the sound over the swirl of the wind and the roar of the waterfall, but now it filled the air, overwhelming, inescapable, signaling the journey’s end. Vermok lay before him, shining in the moonlight, on the other side of a gorge said by everyone except Claus Helberg to be steep to climb.
Tonight, he and his companions would attempt to climb it.
They had decided, the matter put by Rønneberg to the others in a democratic vote, to disobey London’s order. They would avoid the suspension bridge and climb the gorge. Helberg had done all he could to supplement their knowledge of the Nazi defenses, but the intelligen
