Read Chapter 28: The Brother

The labor camp stank of mud, shit, and diesel smoke. Jack lay in the drainage ditch at its eastern edge, chest-deep in cold water, watching the single guard tower through his field glasses. The searchlight swept a lazy arc over the wire, and beyond the wire, rows of men in filthy striped uniforms shuffled between barracks and the quarry pit.

He’d left Henri in that safehouse with a tourniquet and a whispered prayer, and every step away from him had felt like tearing something loose. The Frenchman had been slipping in and out of consciousness when Jack had gone, his face the color of candlewax. *Get to Émile*, Henri had said, gripping Jack’s wrist with a strength that shouldn’t have been there. *The tunnel’s the only way. My brother knows the bridge better than any German engineer.*

Jack wiped mud from his eyes and studied the camp. Two hundred prisoners, maybe more. Somewhere in that human filth was a man who could walk him through the guts of a bridge he’d never seen.

The guard tower’s searchlight swung past, and Jack moved. He was across the open ground in three seconds, flat against the wire, his knife already working at the lower strands. The fence was old, patched in half a dozen places, and his blade found a gap near a corroded post. He squeezed through, snagging his jacket, feeling the barbed wire bite into the meat of his already-broken shoulder. Pain flared white-hot and he bit down on a grunt, pressing his palm over the wound. Henri’s blood was still on his hands. So was his own now.

He dropped into the shadow of a supply shed and took stock. The prisoners were mostly French and Polish, hollow-eyed men who moved like ghosts. Guards patrolled the perimeter in pairs, but their attention was on the quarry, not the fencing. They weren’t expecting a rescue. They were expecting an invasion from the beaches, not one man with a knife.

Jack needed a way to find Émile without screaming his name across the yard. He watched the prisoners move. A bucket of slurry being carried toward the barracks. Two men lifting a timber that was too heavy for them. One of them staggered, and a guard’s rifle butt came down on his back with a sound that carried even through the rain.

Then Jack saw him.

He was standing apart from the others near the mess shed, a tall, narrow-shouldered man with a face that might have been Henri’s if Henri had been starved for three years. Same jaw. Same light brown hair, cropped short and filthy. Émile was staring across the compound at the bridge, visible through a gap in the trees, his expression unreadable.

Jack moved. He looped around the back of the mess shed, keeping low, and came up behind Émile just as a guard turned the corner.

Jack didn’t think. He grabbed Émile’s collar, hauled him into the narrow gap between the shed and the perimeter fence, and put his knife against the man’s throat.

“Don’t make a sound,” he whispered. “Henri sent me.”

Émile went rigid. Then his hand came up, not to fight, but to grip Jack’s arm with a strength that was pure desperation.

“Henri is alive?”

“He got shot. He’s alive, for now. He said you know the bridge.”

Émile’s eyes flicked past Jack’s shoulder. “They’ll see us.”

“Then we move. How many men in your barracks can run?”

Émile’s jaw tightened. His eyes went to the guard tower, the machine gun, the rolls of wire. “Half. The other half can’t make it ten yards.”

“Then we take the half that can.”

The plan formed in Jack’s head as they crossed the yard, Émile walking beside him like a man who had already decided to die. They ducked into the barracks, a low wooden building reeking of sweat and rot. Émile spoke in rapid French to a group of men clustered near the bunks, and Jack saw the fear in their faces. But he also saw the hunger. The need.

“The fence behind the latrine is weak,” Émile said, turning back to Jack. “There’s a dead zone where the searchlight can’t reach for six seconds. If we go at the top of the hour, when they change the guard, we have maybe two minutes before they notice.”

“How many?”

“Eight. You, me, and six others.”

Jack pulled the master key from his pocket. It was useless here, but its weight was a reminder. “When we get out, you’re going to show me the tunnel under the southern pylon.”

Émile’s face changed. Something moved behind his eyes. “The tunnel is flooded. And the maintenance entrance is sealed with a steel grate that hasn’t been moved since they built the bridge.”

“Then we’ll move it.”

“It’s welded shut.”

Jack looked at him. “Then we’ll cut it.”

The top of the hour came fast. Jack’s hands were shaking from a mix of adrenaline and blood loss as he crouched behind the latrine shed with Émile and the other prisoners. Six men, all of them nothing but bone and gristle, but their eyes were sharp.

The searchlight swept past. The guard in the tower turned to light a cigarette, and in that moment, Jack hit the fence with a runner’s tackle, snipping the lower strands with the wire cutters he’d taken from the supply shed. The other prisoners went through the gap like water, low and fast, and then they were in the trees, running for the marsh.

They didn’t stop until they hit a dense thicket of reeds, and Jack fell to his knees, gasping. His shoulder was screaming. His ribs felt cracked.

Émile crouched beside him. “The tunnel entrance is on the other side of the marsh, near the riverbank. They used to keep a pump there, before the war. It’s covered by a metal grate, but…”

“But what?”

Émile’s face darkened. “But I saw them bring new wiring down there two days ago. Not the regular demolition lines. Something separate. A backup.”

Jack’s stomach turned cold. “A fail-safe.”

“Yes. A direct line to the command post. Even if you cut the main detonator, they can still blow the bridge from inside the château.”

Jack stared at him. The master key. The junction box. Henri’s plan. It was all moot if Kessler could just hit a button from a distance.

“Then we find it,” Jack said. “And we cut it first.”

Émile looked at the bridge, just visible through the reeds, hulking and silent in the rain. “We’ll need someone who knows demolitions. All I know is where they put the charges. I don’t know what’s in them or how to stop them once they’re armed.”

Jack wiped mud from his face. “You let me worry about the explosives.”

“You’re not a mine man. I can tell from your hands.”

“No,” Jack said. “But I know a man who is.”

He thought of Weiss, back in the safehouse, unconscious and probably dying. He thought of the marks on the man’s palms, the way he’d handled that timer in the dark like it was a pocket watch.

“We need to move,” he said, getting to his feet. “If Kessler doubles the guard on the bridge, he’ll double it on the tunnel too.”

Émile rose, and for a moment he looked like his brother did when Henri was about to say something hard.

“They’ll kill the other prisoners if they can’t find them,” he said quietly. “The ones we left behind. They’ll hang them from the wire and leave them there.”

Jack looked at the six men behind them, still breathing hard, still alive.

“Then we make sure their deaths count,” he said.

He turned toward the river, and the six prisoners fell in behind him like ghosts in the rain.