Read Chapter 4: Roadblock

The cabin door opened onto a wall of green that smelled of wet earth and sap. Jack stepped out first, rifle low across his chest, scanning the tree line while Henri secured the latch behind them. Dusk had bled the color out of the sky, leaving only a bruised purple wound above the canopy.

They moved in silence for the better part of an hour. Henri set a pace that bordered on reckless, threading through thickets and skirting clearings with an economy of motion that told Jack this man had been doing this long before the war came to his doorstep. Jack followed, boots squelching in the soft ground, fighting the urge to ask questions every time Henri paused to listen.

A game trail opened ahead, and Henri dropped to a crouch. Jack did the same, breathing shallow through his nose.

"Road," Henri whispered, pointing through a break in the undergrowth.

Jack inched forward on his elbows until he had a sight line. A narrow ribbon of packed dirt wound between hedgerows, no more than a cart track really. But at a bend fifty meters east, a truck sat angled across the road. Sandbags ringed its wheels. A machine gun on a tripod faced west, toward them, manned by a soldier whose helmet glinted dully in the dying light.

Checkpoint. German.

Jack counted four men visible. Another two by the truck cab, one with a cigarette cupped in his palm. A seventh stood off to the side, talking into a field telephone wired to a pole.

"Fresh," Jack breathed. "They're reinforcing it. More men coming."

Henri spat on the ground. "We go around. Through the marsh."

"How far?"

"Two kilometers. Maybe three. Soft ground."

Jack shook his head. "We don't have three hours to wade through swamp. I need that bridge before first light. That's—"

"You need to be alive to reach any bridge." Henri's voice was flat, final.

The machine gunner shifted, adjusted his position, and Jack caught the glint of field glasses around his neck. They were searching. Pushing out.

"Listen to me," Jack said, keeping his voice low and hard. "I've seen these checkpoints before. They get bigger every hour. Every hour we wait, that crossing gets harder. If we hit them now, fast, before their relief arrives—"

"You want to attack an armed position with two rifles and a knife?"

"Surprise is worth more than numbers."

Henri's jaw tightened. For a moment Jack thought the Frenchman might actually agree. Then Henri shook his head, slow and deliberate, like a man explaining something to a child.

"You do not understand how this works, American. You fire one shot here, the garrison in Sainte-Mère gets a call. They send a patrol. Then another. The roads close. The bridges get watched. Everything you need to do becomes impossible, and my countrymen pay for your bullets with their lives." He pointed east, where the road curved out of sight. "The marsh is cold and wet, but it is empty. Germans do not put men where they cannot drive their trucks. We go around, and we live."

Jack's knuckles went white on his rifle. Every instinct screamed at him to move, to push through, to do what he'd been trained to do. The clock was running. Somewhere out there, in the dark beyond this road, his unit was scattered and his mission was bleeding away minute by minute.

"Your way costs three hours," he said.

"My way costs nothing else."

A dog barked somewhere to their left. Close. Too close.

Both men went still.

The bark came again, followed by a man's shout in German, sharp and commanding. Through the undergrowth, Jack saw shapes moving along a treeline about a hundred meters off—three, four, five soldiers spread wide, one with a leashed German shepherd straining at the collar.

"They're sweeping," Jack said.

Henri's face had gone pale beneath his tan. "This way. Now."

They crawled backward off the game trail, bellies flat against the loam, moving toward a dense stand of brambles where the hedge met an old stone wall. The dog barked again, and this time it was closer, its energy jagged and hungry.

Jack's heart hammered. The water in the marsh had washed away a lot of his scent, but sweat was pouring off him now, and the wind was blowing from the east, straight from the soldiers to them.

They reached the brambles and pressed themselves into the shadow of the wall. Henri pulled a fold of canvas over both of them—a hunting blind, camouflaged with leaves and mud—and they lay underneath it, staring through tiny gaps in the weave.

Boots crunched on the road. A voice called out, closer now. The dog whined, and Jack heard the jingle of its chain.

He could feel his own pulse in his throat. Beside him, Henri had gone utterly still, barely breathing. The canvas smelled of dried blood and moss.

Through the gap, Jack watched a pair of gray-green legs stop no more than five meters from their position. The soldier turned in a slow circle, hand on his holster. The dog—a big shepherd, ears pricked—sniffed the air, then dropped its head toward the ground.

Jack's hand tightened on his rifle. One shot. Maybe two. Then the whole sector would light up.

The dog took a step toward them.

A whistle blew from the road. A voice barked a command. The soldier muttered something, yanked the dog's chain, and turned away.

Jack didn't exhale. Not yet. He counted thirty seconds. Then sixty. The footsteps faded. The dog's whine receded into the distance.

Henri waited another full minute before lifting the canvas a crack.

"They are moving south," he whispered. "Toward the farm road."

Jack let out the breath he'd been holding. His shirt was soaked, and not just from the marsh.

"That patrol was looking for us," he said. "Specifically."

Henri's eyes were dark. "The patrol you evaded at dawn. They must have found your chute. They know someone is out here."

Jack stared at the road. The checkpoint had grown again—he counted three more men now, unloading wooden crates from the truck. Within the hour that road would be a proper strongpoint. And the dog team was ranging south, cutting off one direction of escape.

"Your marsh," Jack said, the words tasting bitter. "How long, really?"

Henri's mouth quirked, not quite a smile. "Two hours. If we do not drown."

Jack's jaw worked. He looked at his wristwatch—a cheap one, not his father's. The luminous hands showed a quarter past nine.

"It gets us around that checkpoint," he said. "Then what? We're already off schedule."

"There is a farmhouse. East of the marsh, past the main road. The farmer is a friend. He will know where your paratroopers landed."

"The one you mentioned before."

"Yes."

Jack closed his eyes. He could still see the bridge in his mind—the maps, the aerial photographs, the engineer's briefing chalked on the blackboard back in England. A stone arch over a river gorge. A single demolition point wired with enough explosives to drop a thousand tons of rock onto the valley floor.

He didn't know if his unit had been reassigned. He didn't know if the bridge was even still standing. All he had was a mission and a dead radio.

"Two hours," he said. "Then we move fast on the other side."

Henri nodded once. "Agreed."

They rose into a crouch, and Henri led them back into the trees, angling south toward the marsh. Behind them, the dog barked once more, farther away now, but still hunting.

Jack didn't look back. But he counted the sound, and he remembered the direction the patrol had gone.

If they were still sweeping when he came back through, he'd have to deal with them first.