At All Costs Read Free Page A

was always hungry to learn. Grace Line was pleased when he passed the exam easily and it was able to make him an officer.
    In early 1941, Larsen sailed as cargo mate on the freighter SS
Nightingale,
which was chartered by Grace Line. It was a busy job with heavy responsibility, including some functions of the chief mate, supervising the loading and off-loading of cargo. The
Nightingale
sailed to Valparaíso, Chile, stopping at every little port on the way back to load strategic metals from South American mines, coffee from Colombian plantations, and fruit, which was good moneymaking cargo, carried home in the
Nightingale
’s refrigerated holds in the ’tween decks.
    After three months on that run, he got sweet duty as junior third mate on a spring cruise to the Caribbean with the SS
Santa Rosa,
a 225-passenger ocean liner advertised as being “sexier than Rita Hayworth.” He served two more months as junior third mate on the SS
Siletz,
another chartered cargo ship sailing out of New York.
    He was making nearly $100 per week, and saving it all because he had no living expenses; and unlike other sailors, he didn’t go out to bars when his ship was in port. He knew he would need cash to get Minda and Jan to the United States, although he still didn’t know how he could. He wasn’t counting on the State Department.
    In Norway, German officers had taken over the Heskestad farmhouse, located six miles from Farsund. Minda’s aged father and mother were moved into an upstairs bedroom, while Nazis ate the harvest from Heskestad farm. Minda and Jan, who was about eighteen months old at this time, lived in a small apartment in town.
    Their bedroom window was against the sidewalk, which was traveled by goose-stepping soldiers whose barracks were just down the street in a school building. The daytime marching was intimidating, but the nights were downright scary, as the soldiers often staggered home loud and drunk. Minda said it was like having Nazis in her bedroom. She held her son, stroked his cornsilk curls, and told him his father would protect him.
    She supported herself by cutting hair in the front room of their apartment. “One time a Nazi officer came right in and took off his cap and his gun belt, and told me to give him a haircut,” she said. “I got so angry. I said, ‘I don’t do men’s hair.’ He insisted, but I refused, and I held the door open for him. He took his cap and his gun and left.”
    The other girls there were terrified, but Minda was too firm to be afraid. She was more worried that the Nazis would find the radio her brother kept in the barn, where he listened to the BBC. The penalty for having a radio was death.
    Fred wrote dozens of letters to Minda during this time, but she received few of them. The mail to Norway was opened by the Gestapo and read by “little quislings,” said Minda. She clung to her favorite funny memory of their courtship, the time Fred had ridden his bicycle a hundred miles from his aunt’s house along the coast to visit Minda in Farsund one weekend, sleeping overnight in the woods. When he got there, she was out on a ship with her sister until Monday, so he had turned around and ridden back.
    But she did get one package from her husband. “There were some clothes for Jan and a pink satin robe for me,” she said. “It was beautiful, and I treasured it for a long, long, long time. It was quilted, and it fit me perfectly. Oh, I was happy. I thought I was a queen.”
    Larsen had heard that the Norwegian Resistance was recruiting, and he wanted to join. Other Norwegian mariners had told him about the Lingekompani, a group of commandos led by Kaptein Martin Linge, called “ice cold” and “heroic” by his men. Since his scheme to take a fishing boat from Liverpool to the western coast of Norway wasn’t possible, he now wanted to go to Farsund on a commando mission, and rescue Jan and Minda by sneaking them through the forest across the border to Sweden. The
Siletz
sailed