The Odin Mission

Chapter 14

Sergeant Tanner had to remind himself that it didn't pay to allow over-confidence to creep into one's thinking, but nonetheless he couldn't help feeling that things were looking up. Shooting down the Junkers had probably meant their whereabouts would remain secret for a while longer, but had also boosted everyone's spirits. And then they had safely reached Uksum Farm, where Merit Sulheim was considerably more helpful than the nervous farmer they had encountered above Alstad earlier that Thursday morning.

With the men left to keep a close watch from the large barn outside, Fanner, Sandvold, Anna and the officers were ushered into the house. A spry, heavily built man in his thirties, Sulheim had a young family, ran a successful logging business, and also kept cattle, goats, sheep and even pigs, all housed in a number of rambling barns on the farm during winter and on pastures that ran along either side of the J0ra river in summer. Evidently a man of enterprise and zeal, he had, unlike most other farmers of the Gudbrandsdal valley, invested in the latest machinery, including an American Fordson tractor and a large Morris-Commercial truck. Neither was the farmhouse as primitive as some of the others Tanner had seen: rather, it was equipped with electricity, running water, had a modern range in the kitchen and even a radio, on which Sulheim had been carefully following the progress of the war.