Read Chapter 12: The Hunt

The reeds closed over them like a green curtain, thick and suffocating. Water seeped through Jack’s boots within the first minute, cold and brackish, rising to his knees as they pushed deeper into the swamp. Henri moved ahead of him, silent despite the drag of mud, his rifle held high above his head. Behind them, the château’s searchlights swept across the fields in long, angry arcs.

German voices cut through the night, sharp and disciplined. Orders ricocheted between the trees that bordered the marsh’s edge. A dog barked somewhere to the east, then another, and then the sound of boots on hard-packed road.

Jack pressed his back against the trunk of a dead willow and forced his breathing to slow. His rucksack felt heavier than it had any right to be. The explosives were in there, wrapped in oilcloth, but so was a growing certainty that he was carrying the war on his own back.

Henri crouched beside him, watching the far shore. His knuckles were white on the stock of his rifle. “They will bring the dogs soon,” he said, his accent curling around the words. “The swamp will slow them. It will not stop them.”

“We move deeper,” Jack said. “Find a channel, a patch where the scent won’t hold.”

Henri shook his head. “There is no such patch. The mud and the water. It all holds.”

A flare burst overhead, white and blinding, and they both pressed down into the muck. The swamp revealed itself in stark, skeletal detail—drowned trunks, tangled roots, a mire that had swallowed men before the war and would swallow more after. The flare died slowly, fizzling into the black.

Jack wiped mud from his mouth. “How far to the other side?”

“Half a kilometer. Maybe more. But there is nothing there. Just fields and the Germans who are probably looking at them right now.”

Another dog barked, closer. A voice called out in German, rhythmic, a command to search.

Henri’s face was a mask of barely contained fury. “The Baron. They took him in front of everyone. While we ran like rats.”

“We didn’t have a choice.”

“There is always a choice. He is an old man. He gave us the explosives and they dragged him away. And you—you speak of the mission. The mission. Always this.”

Jack turned to face him, or tried to, but the mud shifted under his weight and he had to brace himself against the trunk. “The mission is why we were there. The mission is the only reason any of this means anything.”

“To you,” Henri said. “You came from the sky to blow up a bridge. You did not come to save France. You did not come to save Émile or the Baron or anyone else. You came to kill Germans and go home.”

Jack felt the words land like a blade between the ribs. He had no easy answer. He had dropped into Normandy with a radio and a map and a list of coordinates that mattered to no one but the engineers who would land at dawn on the beaches. The bridge at Mézières was a slab of steel and concrete that Hitler’s generals had drawn a red circle around. It was not a person. It did not have a name.

But Jack had memorized it anyway. He had lain awake in the briefing tent at Broadwell and stared at the aerial photographs until the girders etched themselves into his eyelids. He had told himself it was just a target. A kilometer of deck and truss work that could turn the tide on the American flank.

Now, knee-deep in the swamp with a dead man on his conscience and a Frenchman’s wrath in his ears, he wondered if he had confused the bridge with something more.

The dogs were closer. A light flickered through the reeds, a torch beam swinging low across the water.

“We have to move,” Jack said.

Henri did not argue. He turned and pushed into the reeds, and Jack followed, his boots sinking and sucking with every step. The water around his chest carried the chill of the dead, and his teeth chattered despite the effort of the movement. The rucksack weighed him down, pulling at his shoulders, dragging him sideways into the current.

They came to a fallen tree that stretched across a deeper channel. Henri climbed onto the trunk and lay flat, motioning for Jack to do the same. They lay there, pressed to the bark, as the searchlight swept over them. The beam paused on the reeds twenty meters to their left, then moved on.

Henri’s face was pushed against the trunk, mud and moss smeared across his cheek. He looked older than he had an hour ago—old and tired and gutted by something Jack couldn’t fix with a plan or a target or a well-placed charge.

“Your nephew,” Jack said, keeping his voice low. “What does he look like?”

Henri blinked, as if being pulled from a nightmare. “Émile? He is small. Dark hair. He is fourteen—no, fifteen now. He has his mother’s eyes. My sister. She died when he was six. I have raised him since.”

“He’s smart?”

Henri almost smiled. “Too smart. He once took apart the mayor’s bicycle and could not put it back together. He hid in the barn for two days out of shame.”

Jack nodded. “We’ll get him out.”

Henri’s eyes hardened. “You do not know that.”

“No,” Jack said. “But I know we can’t do it alone. We need help.”

Henri turned his head, studying Jack with suspicion. “Help? You have spent two days telling me how you do not need help. How your mission is your own.”

“I was wrong.” Jack swallowed, the admission tasting like swamp water. “The Baron’s arrest changes things. The Germans know someone is out here. They’re going to crawl over every farmhouse, every barn, every hole in Normandy looking for us. We can’t hit that bridge without support—someone to watch our back, to know the terrain, to keep us alive.”

He thought of Claire, alone at the farmhouse with the stranger who had brought the warning. He thought of the radio he’d lost on the drop, the batteries drowned somewhere in the Irret or crushed in the fields. He thought of the invasion fleet sliding toward the beaches, every minute counted, every man and gun aboard driven to move or die.

“The Resistance,” Jack said. “The men the Baron mentioned. The ones who went quiet. We find them.”

Henri was silent for a long moment, the dogs barking in the middle distance now, the searchlights still sweeping. Then he said, “There is a man. A priest in a village north of here—Saint-Jean-des-Marais. He helps the Resistance. He hides fugitives in his rectory.”

“Can you get us there?”

“If we survive the night.” Henri gestured toward the eastern shore, a dim line of reeds that barely showed against the darkness. “Beyond that, there is an old drainage ditch that runs to the village. It will be cold, and it will be wet, and it will be almost impossible to follow in the dark. But I have walked it with Émile when the Germans were hunting downed pilots.”

Jack pushed himself up off the trunk. The mud slurped at his thighs as he descended into the channel. The water rose to his chest, to his chin, and then he was swimming, one hand holding the rucksack, the other silent to keep his rifle from trailing and catching on the reeds.

Henri swam beside him, stroke for stroke, and for a while they moved in silence. Long minutes passed. The sounds of the search party faded behind them, replaced by the low drone of insects and the occasional cry of a night bird.

Jack’s arms ached. The cold had settled into his bones. He had been in water this cold before—off the coast of Sicily, floating in a life raft with a shrapnel wound in his thigh—but this was different. This was pursuit. This was flight. This was running out of time.

They reached the bank and hauled themselves out onto a narrow strip of mud. Henri led the way up a shallow embankment and into a thicket of brambles, where they collapsed side by side, breathing hard.

Jack checked the rucksack. The oilcloth was intact. The explosives would stay dry. He looked inside again, carefully, touching each package. Shaped charges—yes. Det cord—yes. But the detonators were thin copper tubes at the bottom, tucked between folded maps and a wire cutter. He counted them, then closed the bag.

Henri appeared at his elbow. “What is wrong?”

“We’re short,” Jack said. “Three detonators. Four initiators. We’re missing two of what we need to make all of the charges go at once.”

Henri stared at the gap in Jack’s hands. “Then we find more.”

“From where? We just burned the only source we had.”

Henri’s jaw tightened. “There are other sources. The Resistance had arms caches. The priest—he will know. If anyone can find us what you need, it is him.”

Jack double-knotted the straps of the rucksack and stood. He could feel the weight of the night in his shoulders, the hunger in his belly, the exhaustion scraping at the edges of his vision.

“We move,” he said. “Before dawn if we can. This ground is too open in daylight.”

Henri gathered himself and pointed west. “The village is that way. We follow the ditch until we hit the old road, then we find cover in the hedgerows.”

Jack started moving, his boots squelching, the water draining out of his socks with every step. The stars above were dim, half covered by drifting cloud. He thought of the boats out in the Channel, sleek and full and waiting for the signal. He thought of the soldiers he had trained with, the ones who would hit the beaches in a few hours and not know that a burned-out scout was dragging explosives through a swamp to blow up a bridge they had never seen.

He thought of Émile’s face, which he had never seen, and the Baron’s, which he would not forget—the old man’s eyes steady as the Germans pulled him away, the certainty in his voice when he told them the code to the cellar.

Jack stopped. Henri kept walking, then paused, turning to look back.

“What is it?”

Jack looked across the marsh, toward the glow of the château’s lights, still visible above the trees. “The bridge,” he said. “What are the odds it’s destroyed before we get there?”

Henri thought for a moment. “They have the charges wired. They have engineers. They have the order. It could go at any moment.”

Jack said nothing. He turned and followed Henri into the dark, the swamp behind them like a wound that had started to close—but not yet. Not yet.