The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [123]
The two pilots trudged on, hour after hour, wandering ever further away from Denmark. Their fitness and determination were sorely tested against the biting cold. Then an awful groaning beneath their feet alerted them to fresh danger. They had stepped onto unstable ice. A sharper, splitting sound warned that their weight might take them down at any moment. Using their poles, they launched themselves towards what they hoped would be a more secure surface. The fear that they might land in freezing water instead lasted for as long as they were in the air, seconds seeming like an eternity. Instead their momentum took them onto what felt like firm ice. Scarcely daring to trust their feet, they scurried away before the fresh sheet could also betray them.
Tommy believed they must now be near the middle of the Oeresund, close to the daytime shipping lanes. He thought he could just make out the little island of Hven to their left, though he knew it could well be a trick of the eye. So, ignoring the possible mirage, they straightened their course and pressed on for the preferable target of Landskrona. Later Tommy reflected: ‘We didn’t have any trouble until we were south-east of Hven. But in the morning, just before dawn, we could feel that the ice was starting to move under us, and it cracked sometimes.’
As the first weak colours of dawn streaked the horizon, there was an almighty roar, as if the gods of winter and spring had begun to do battle. Sneum admitted:
It was like rolling thunder and then we got scared, because two massive slabs of ice, the size of football pitches, just broke apart. If the fragmentation continued we knew the ice wouldn’t be able to carry us. If the ice keeps breaking, finally you find yourself on such a small flake that you just go down with it, because it can’t carry your weight. I knew how dangerous these conditions were from my childhood, walking on ice around Fanoe. When I had fallen in as a boy I had been lucky to survive.
If that happened so far out in the Oeresund, they faced the same fate as Thorbjoern. From the southern end of the channel, where the younger Christophersen brother had died, a storm was now blowing with terrible ferocity. A swirling wind whipped up the cold air and flurries of sleet and snow flew in all directions. ‘We didn’t realize that such a heavy storm was moving north so quickly,’ Tommy explained. ‘We didn’t have a weather forecast.’
But the natural forces unleashed above the ice were nothing compared to the dangers lurking below. The stretch of sea shaken by the storm had begun to exert untold pressure on the thick slabs of ice above it. The original, thunderous sound heard by the men was a fracture that threatened to open all the way down the Oeresund’s main shipping lane. Vast areas, carved up by icebreakers the previous morning, had healed overnight in a brittle callus. Now the storm had sliced open the old wound, leaving Tommy and Arne perilously close to a channel of water filled with freezing debris.
In the distance, beyond the widening gap in the ice, Sneum could see dark figures, like matchstick men, near the Swedish shoreline. The thin light had brought out the morning fishermen near Landskrona; and now the distant crowd seemed to be warning away the two intruders. Frantic shouts carried kilometers across the ice floes which were steadily breaking into pieces.
‘Oh God, Sneum, look.’ Helvard pointed south and Sneum followed his gaze to the source of his concern.
The latest fracture line was heading straight for them. The previous morning’s ice-breaker had clearly chopped its way along this line, riding up on the slabs with its rounded bow and crushing them as it sank back into the water. Now the underwater