Read Chapter 20: The Work Detail

The German uniform itched. Jack ignored it, the way he ignored the throb in his shoulder, the way he ignored the cold sweat tracking down his spine beneath the field-grey wool. He ran his tongue over his teeth—tasted dirt and cordite and the faint, metallic ghost of fear.

Weiss walked ahead of them, a thin, pale man whose steps had the mechanical precision of a man walking to his own execution. Henri flanked him on the left, Claire on the right, both in uniforms stripped from the dead guards at the truck ambush. The uniforms had been too big on Claire, but she’d cinched the belt tight and tucked her hair under the field cap until she passed for a slender young soldier at a glance—which was all they could hope for in the grey dawn.

The bridge loomed ahead through the mist, a dark iron skeleton against the pale sky. Beyond it, Jack could just make out the reinforced concrete of the far bunker, squat and ugly as a toad. His chest tightened. Émile was in there somewhere. Or wasn’t. The radio had been silent on that point.

“You’re limping,” Weiss said, without turning around.

Jack said nothing.

“The shoulder, too,” Weiss continued. “You favor it. If we are stopped, you will be noticed. A wounded man is a question. Questions are answered with bullets.”

“I’ll manage,” Jack said.

Weiss stopped walking. Henri’s hand went to the pistol at his belt, but Weiss only turned, his face grey and earnest beneath the field cap. He spoke to Jack in low, careful English.

“There is a checkpoint at the bridge’s south approach. Two men. They know the work rotation. They will ask me for papers. I will show them, and I will tell them you are replacement labor from the signals unit, reassigned after the bombing at Carentan. But you—you must not look like a man who has just crawled out of a gorge. You must look like a man who is tired of war, not afraid of it. Can you do that?”

Jack forced his shoulders to relax. Fire lanced through his right arm and he bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. He held Weiss’s gaze.

“I can do that.”

Weiss studied him a moment longer, then nodded once and continued walking.

Claire fell into step beside Jack. “He’s nervous,” she murmured, barely moving her lips. “More than before. That’s good or bad.”

“Which one are you betting on?”

She didn’t answer.

---

The checkpoint materialized out of the mist like a bad dream. A sandbagged position beside the road, a heavy machine gun angled across the approach, and two soldiers in grey greatcoats huddled around a small fire in a rusted oil drum. One of them straightened as they approached, rifle cradled loose in his arms. The other stayed by the fire, watching with dull, incurious eyes.

Jack’s heart hammered. He forced himself to breathe slow and even. Beside him, Henri had let his posture collapse into something almost lazy, a soldier’s boredom worn like a coat.

“Papers,” the first sentry said, in German.

Weiss stepped forward, producing a folded document from his tunic. The sentry took it, glanced at it, then looked past Weiss at the three of them standing in the road.

“Replacement labor,” Weiss said. “Signals unit. The bombing at Carentan scattered half the battalion. I was told to collect what I could.”

The sentry’s eyes moved over Henri—steady, unremarkable—then to Claire. His gaze paused. Jack felt his blood run cold.

“Young,” the sentry said.

Weiss laughed, a dry, brittle sound. “Volunteer. Eager to see the bridge before it becomes a crater. You know how the new ones are—full of ideas about glory.”

The sentry’s lips quirked, almost a smile. He handed the papers back.

“You’re late. The Obersturmbannführer doesn’t like late.”

“The bombing,” Weiss said, spreading his hands. “What can I do?”

The sentry grunted and waved them through with the back of his hand. The one by the fire never looked up.

They walked past the checkpoint, past the sandbags and the machine gun, and onto the bridge itself. The dawn light was beginning to bleed through the clouds now, painting the river below in shades of copper and grey. Jack kept his eyes forward, but his peripheral vision took in everything—the crates stacked near the far abutment, the coils of wire snaking along the bridge’s iron girders, the two sentries patrolling the midpoint with rifles slung across their backs.

And there, at the far end, the bunker. Low-slung, concrete, with a steel door that stood ajar. Men moved in and out of it, carrying boxes. Workers, from the look of them—French civilians in ragged coats, guarded by a single soldier with a submachine gun slung across his chest.

Jack scanned their faces as they drew closer. He didn’t see Émile.

“Don’t stare,” Henri muttered, his voice barely audible.

Jack forced his gaze away. Focused on the ground ahead, on the wet planks of the bridge deck, on the steady rhythm of their boots.

Weiss led them past the bunker, to a small cluster of wooden sheds set back from the riverbank. Tools hung on the walls—shovels, picks, coils of rope. A workbench littered with oil-stained rags and spare parts. It smelled of grease and damp concrete and stale cigarette smoke.

Weiss stopped in front of the largest shed and turned to face them. His face was tight, his eyes darting to the bunker and back.

“The primary wiring runs underground from the bunker to the detonation points on the bridge’s load-bearing members. There are three junction boxes. Two are in plain sight, which is what the Allied intelligence will see. The third is routed through a maintenance access beneath the deck, about twenty meters from the far abutment. It’s hidden. Even the bridge engineers don’t know about it. It’s wired directly to the main charge—bypasses the bunker entirely.”

“That’s the one,” Jack said.

Weiss nodded. “The access hatch is beneath the bridge deck. There is a recessed ladder. But there is a sentry posted at the ladder’s top, on the deck above. He is there to prevent sabotage—not from you, but from the French workers. He will be watching the bunker, not the river.”

“What about the secondary charge?” Jack asked. “The SS special team’s work.”

Weiss’s face went even paler. “I told you. I don’t know where it is. It was installed after my last full inspection. Kessler brought his own men in—I wasn’t permitted near the site.”

“But you’re the engineer. You’d have a sense of it.”

Weiss shook his head. “I studied the bridge’s original drawings. There are voids in the abutments—spaces designed for drainage, never used. If I were Kessler, if I wanted to charge a bridge to destroy it when the enemy was crossing—not before—I would place it in the voids, wired to a trigger that could be set off remotely or by a pressure plate. But I don’t know. I don’t know if they used a timer, or a radio, or a simple command wire.

Jack stared at him. The wind off the river was cold, cutting through the stolen greatcoat, through the bandage on his shoulder.

“What about the prisoners?” he said. “The men taken from the village. One of them—an older man, a hunter. Henri’s father.”

Weiss hesitated. It was a small thing—a flicker of the eyes, a fractional tightening of the jaw—but Jack saw it.

“They are held in the bunker’s lower level,” Weiss said slowly. “Used for the heavy work. I don’t know individuals. I haven’t been in the lower level since the prisoners arrived.”

“But you’ve heard things. Rumors. Talk.”

Weiss’s gaze flicked to Henri, then away. “There was talk,” he said, “of a prisoner who tried to escape. An older man. He was caught before he reached the river.”

Jack felt Henri go still beside him. Dangerously still.

“What happened to him?” Henri asked.

Weiss’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked at the ground, at his boots, at the river. Anywhere but at Henri.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”