Read Chapter 34: The Crossing

Dawn bled over the ridge like a wound opening. Dust and cordite still hung in the air, thick enough to taste, and Jack stood at the bridge railing with his hands flat against the cold stone, watching the first shapes come out of the gray light.

Tanks. Shermans, low and heavy, their treads chewing the road. The lead one flew a white star on its flank, and behind it more steel, a column stretching back into the smoke of the German positions that were still burning. The roadblock was gone, shoved aside by the first hull, and the sound of engines rolled across the water like thunder closing in.

Jack pushed off the railing. His legs nearly buckled. A stripe of blood, Émile’s blood, was dried brown along his forearm, and his own dirt-caked hands trembled from the adrenaline still burning out of his system. He didn't feel the pain in his ribs. Not yet. That would come later.

A tank commander stood in the turret of the lead Sherman, goggles pushed up on his helmet, face gray with dust. He caught sight of Jack and raised a hand in a lazy wave, as if crossing a bridge at dawn behind enemy lines was an everyday occurrence.

Jack lifted his hand. Saluted. Proper, sharp, aching. The commander nodded once, and then the tank was past him, and the second was already coming, engine whine filling the gap.

They came across one after another, an endless river of steel and canvas and mud-caked infantry riding on the hulls. The bridge groaned under their weight, hairline cracks in the southern pylon invisible to the men who cheered as they crossed. Jack leaned his weight against the railing and watched them go, his chest hollow and full at the same time.

“That’s a sight.”

The voice was ragged, thick with pain. Jack turned. Émile stood a few paces behind him, holding his side where the shrapnel had torn through, his shirt black with dried blood. Henri was beside him, his arm in a makeshift sling, the other hand resting on Émile’s shoulder like he was afraid to let go.

“You should be lying down,” Jack said.

“I have been lying down,” Émile said. “It is boring.” He looked past Jack, at the column grinding across the bridge. The dawn light caught his face, and for a moment, he looked young. Younger than the war had made him. “We did it.”

Henri squeezed his shoulder. “You did it. Both of you. I was rotting in a cellar.”

Jack shook his head. “We all did it. Kessler’s dead. The charges are cut. This bridge—” He stopped, because the words caught in his throat.

The third Sherman rumbled past, its commander a silhouette against the burning sky, and the sound of infantry boots on the deck was a steady drumbeat now. The road behind the bridge was clogged with men and vehicles, the whole mass of the invasion pouring through the gap they had opened.

“What happens now?” Émile asked.

“Now we hold it,” Jack said. “Until the engineers come up and confirm it’s stable. Then I find my unit.”

Henri’s mouth tightened. “Your unit was on the drop. There was a lot of confusion. We heard reports of heavy fighting inland.”

Jack already knew. He’d felt it the moment they’d stepped off the plane—the wind, the flak, the chaos of the drop zone. His unit was scattered across a dozen fields, maybe more, and the odds that he’d find all of them standing were not good. He didn’t say that out loud.

“Find them after the bridge is secure,” he said.

A Jeep roared past, a colonel in the passenger seat shouting into a radio. A medic had stopped near Henri, crouching to look at the wound on his arm, but Henri waved him off and pointed at Émile, who had gone gray again. The medic nodded and started toward him.

“I saved that brute,” Henri said, nodding at Émile, “from dying in a tunnel. I did not intend for him to die on a bridge.”

“I’m not dying,” Émile said. “I’m waiting for breakfast.”

Jack laughed. It came out rough, almost a sob. He hadn’t expected to laugh today. Maybe that was what the end of a thing felt like: not a grand closing, but a small, stupid joke that could mean you were still alive.

The last of the infantry pushed past, and then came the rear guard, trucks and half-tracks and more tanks, a seemingly unstoppable tide that would roll south and east and keep rolling until someone stopped it. The engineers were already starting to arrive, dismounting from a deuce-and-a-half with rolls of cable and levels and clipboards. One of them, a young lieutenant with a face like a schoolboy, walked up to Jack and saluted.

“Sergeant, we’re here to assess the bridge.”

Jack nodded and pointed at the southern pylon. “Main charge was severed there. The fail-safe went off on the east support. Hairline cracks in the pylon—check those first.”

The lieutenant’s eyes widened. “You’re the one who —?”

“Check the pylon,” Jack said.

The lieutenant saluted again and hurried off with his team, and Jack turned away from the railing, back toward the river. The water moved slow beneath the bridge, gray-green with the dawn, indifferent to the steel and blood that had changed the world above it.

Henri came to stand beside him. They watched the column in silence for a long moment.

“Your key is still in your pocket,” Jack said.

Henri touched his jacket, felt the shape of the château key. “So it is.”

“Might want to give it to the colonel.”

“Or keep it as a souvenir.”

Jack almost smiled. “Souvenir’s good.”

He leaned on the railing and let his head drop forward, exhaustion pressing down on him like a physical weight. The column was still moving, a river of men and machines that didn’t pause to ask if the bridge would hold, because the bridge was holding. It was holding because he had held it.

Émile limped up on Henri’s arm, and the three of them stood together at the railing, watching the war move past them, waiting to see what came next.