Read Chapter 32: The Last Sentry

The flare gun’s kick bruised Jack’s palm, and the red star clawed up into the grey dawn sky. He didn’t wait to watch it bloom. He was already moving, boots slipping on the wet marsh grass, the sound of his own breath loud in his ears.

“Émile, stay with me,” he hissed, hauling the Frenchman up from where he’d slumped against the tunnel’s mossy mouth. Émile’s arm was slick with blood, his face the colour of old bone, but he gritted his teeth and nodded.

“They will come now. Fast.”

Jack didn’t answer. The roadblock was two hundred yards ahead, a squat concrete bunker and a crib of steel teeth straddling the narrow bridge approach. Two sentries, no—three. One was already shouting, pointing at the flare bleeding its light into the sky. Jack swore.

No time for silence.

He brought the rifle up and fired. The first sentry folded. The other two dropped behind the concrete, and a moment later, the air cracked with return fire. Bullets whined off the road’s edge, chewing up grass and dirt at their feet. Jack shoved Émile behind a low stone wall and dropped next to him.

“You have a plan, or are we just having a party?” Émile rasped, clutching his side.

“Run and shoot,” Jack said, levering a fresh magazine in. “It’s all I’ve got left.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. He rolled over the wall and came up firing, three round bursts, forcing the sentries’ heads down. The bridge was right there. He could see the gap where the roadblock left a narrow lane against the guardrail—just enough for a jeep, maybe enough for a man.

Maybe.

Then the mg42 opened up from the bunker’s slit, and Jack knew it was over. The heavy rounds chewed the wall apart, flaking granite shards into his face. He flattened himself against the earth, the ground shaking under the stream of fire, and thought of Henri. Of the safehouse. Of the old man’s stubborn face as he’d pushed Jack out the door.

Then the mg42 stopped.

Not because it had run dry—Jack knew the sound. A German gunner didn’t stop short. Unless he was hit.

Jack risked a look. The gunner had crumpled backward out of the slit. And beyond him, down the road from the village, a line of shadows moved fast, low, rifles up. At their head, a shape Jack knew better than his own reflection.

Henri.

The old hunter moved like a ghost, limping hard but moving, a rifle at his shoulder, firing with methodical calm. Behind him, a dozen men and women fanned out, rough clothes, grease-stained hands, but their weapons were clean and their eyes harder.

“Fight,” Henri’s voice carried over the crack and roar. “Fight now, damn you!”

The remaining sentries turned, and it was their mistake. Jack popped up from behind the ruined wall and put two rounds into the closest man. Émile, one-handed, found a pistol on a dead gunner and fired across the top of the wall, covering the rush.

The firefight lasted seconds. One German tried to run, and a sharp-eyed woman in a farm smock dropped him with a single shot. The third threw his hands up.

Jack didn’t waste time on him. He was already running for the roadblock, reaching the steel teeth, and there it was—the keyhole. The narrow lane. He shoved his shoulder against the heavy gate and it didn’t move.

“Crank,” Henri said, arriving at his side, breathing hard, one hand pressed to his own ribcage where the bandage was already soaked. “Behind the bunker. It’s still there.”

Jack found it, a rusted hand-crank bolted to the concrete. He threw his weight into it, and the roadblock’s teeth began to slide apart, grating against stone. Somewhere behind him, Émile was shouting something, and then Henri shouted back, and then the roar was not shouting but engines—far off, but coming closer.

The lane opened. A cold wind blew up off the estuary, cutting through Jack’s soaked jacket.

He stepped through the gap and stood on the bridge itself. Under his boots, old stone. Beneath that, water. And beneath that, the steel and wire he had cut with his own hands and the dying breath of a man he’d never met.

Henri came up beside him, silent, and handed Jack a cigarette. Jack took it, though he didn’t light it. He just held it, smelling tobacco and cordite and diesel smoke from the approaching dawn.

“He’s alive,” Jack said, not looking at him. “Your brother. He’s hurt, but he’s alive.”

Henri’s hand found Jack’s shoulder and squeezed, once, with a strength that said everything.

The first Allied jeep crested the far rise, canvas rippling, a young lieutenant standing in it, waving. Behind it, more shapes, dust rising, armour growling.

Jack turned his back on the road. The bridge at dawn. He had done what he came to do.

But far away, at the château on the ridge, a window caught the first light.

And a hand was already reaching for the detonator.