Read Chapter 15: The Bridge

The blast wave hit Arthur a full second before the sound did. It slammed into his chest like a farm gate swung open by a gale, knocked the wind out of him, and sent him staggering backward over the rubble-strewn bank. His ears filled with a roar that swallowed every other noise—the crackle of small-arms fire, the scream of a diving Stuka, even his own ragged breath.

He clawed at the air, found a chunk of brickwork, and pulled himself upright. The bridge was gone. Not broken—gone. A gaping mouth of blackened water where the span had been, its iron girders twisted into grotesque sculptures that jutted from the canal like the ribs of a whale. Smoke rolled across the surface in thick, greasy billows, and somewhere beneath it, men were screaming.

“George,” Arthur rasped, though the word was lost in the din.

The private—Fletcher—was at his side, hauling at his sleeve. Arthur had forgotten the boy was even there. Fletcher’s face was pale beneath its coating of dust, his eyes wide and fixed on the burning wreckage where the demolition crew had been standing not thirty seconds before.

“Sir—Mr. Briggs—you can’t—” Fletcher was shouting, but Arthur was already moving, half-running, half-stumbling down the bank toward the water’s edge. He shed his oilskin coat as he went, let it fall into the mud, and waded into the shallows without breaking stride.

The canal was shallow here, barely chest-deep, but the current was vicious and the bottom was slick with mud and worse. Arthur shoved forward, arms outstretched, his boots squelching and sliding, until the water reached his collarbone and the smoke closed around him like a shroud. The heat was immense, pressing against his face, drying the spit in his mouth.

He called his son’s name again. Still nothing. Only the crackle of flames and the groaning of tortured metal.

A shape drifted past him in the water. A body, face-down, uniform bloused with air. Arthur grabbed it, turned it over, and looked into the dead face of a corporal he’d never met. He let the man go and pushed on.

“George!” His voice cracked. He didn’t care. “George, answer me, lad!”

Something moved ahead of him, a shadow in the smoke. Arthur lunged toward it, hands outstretched, and his fingers closed on a sleeve. The man was alive—clinging to a fragment of the bridge’s stone pier, his face battered, his helmet gone. But he wasn’t George. He was a boy of twenty, weeping, with blood running from a gash above his eye.

“Where’s the crew?” Arthur demanded. “The men who lit the fuse—where are they?”

The boy shook his head, mute with shock, and pointed downstream. Arthur followed the gesture but saw only smoke and churning water. The demolition crew had been on the far side of the span when it went. If the blast had thrown them clear, they’d have come down in the canal beyond the wreckage. But the current ran the other way, back toward the city, back toward the beach. George couldn’t swim against that, not if he was hurt. Not if he was unconscious.

Arthur made a decision he would carry with him for the rest of his life. He dragged the weeping soldier to the bank, shoved him into Fletcher’s arms, and plunged back into the canal.

He swam, or tried to, striking out against the current with long, desperate strokes. The smoke thinned as he moved downstream, and ahead of him he saw a tangle of broken girders jutting from the water like a dam. Debris had piled against it—crates, packs, a bicycle, the bloated carcass of a mule—and caught in the mess, half-submerged, was a shape that made Arthur’s heart seize.

It was a man in the dark blue of a signalman. The uniform was the same as the one George had worn when he’d left Ramsgate, the same Arthur had seen in his mind’s eye a hundred times since.

“George!”

He didn’t remember closing the distance. One moment the shape was twenty yards away; the next he was grabbing at the man’s collar, hauling him up out of the water, turning him over. The face was bloodless, slack, the eyes closed. A gash across the scalp had stained the blond hair—George’s blond hair—a vivid crimson. But the chest still moved. Faintly. Raggedly. A whisper of breath against Arthur’s hand.

“Oh, thank God. Oh, thank God.”

Arthur hooked an arm under George’s shoulders and struck out for the bank. He was not a young man, and the current fought him with every stroke, and the weight of his son dragged at him like an anchor. But Arthur had hauled crab pots and storm-damaged nets and, once, a drowning sailor twice his size out of the North Sea in a winter gale. He knew how to curse and how to strain and how to not let go.

The mud of the canal bank came up under his boots. He climbed, gasping, dragging George’s limp body onto solid ground, and collapsed beside him with his head bowed and his hands shaking.

Fletcher appeared moments later, the weeping soldier forgotten, and dropped to his knees beside them. “Is he—is he alive?”

“Barely,” Arthur got out. “Barely.”

He pressed two fingers to George’s throat. The pulse was there, thready but present. He tore a strip from his own shirt, wadded it against the gash on George’s head, and bound it with shaking fingers. George’s face was pale beneath the grime, his lips tinged with blue. He needed a medic. He needed warmth and dry clothes and rest. He needed to be carried to the beach and put on a boat, and every minute spent here was a minute the Navy might not give him.

Arthur looked up through the smoke. The firing had slackened on this stretch of the line, but the crackle of small arms still echoed from the flanks. The bridge was down, the canal was impassable, and the rearguard that had held this position was dead or scattered or slipping back toward the beach in small, desperate groups. The evacuation was supposed to end at dawn. Arthur had no idea how long it had been since the naval officer had shouted that warning. Minutes? Hours?

He reached into his oilskin, still wet and heavy against his hip, and touched the two packages he carried. Thornbury’s message. The sergeant’s sealed order. He had risked both to come here. He had gambled everything on a bridge and found his son, half-dead, in the wreckage of it.

“Mr. Briggs.” Fletcher’s voice was urgent. “There’s a truck. On the road behind us. Looks abandoned.”

Arthur turned. A Bedford lorry was nosed into a ditch fifty yards off, its canvas torn, its windscreen shattered. He couldn’t see if it was drivable, but he couldn’t see what else to do. George needed transport. George needed to get to the coast.

He hauled his son into his arms—the boy was too light, too limp, far too light—and staggered toward the truck. Fletcher ran ahead, climbed into the cab, and began sorting through the ignition wires.

“Can you start it?” Arthur called.

Fletcher’s head appeared, streaked with soot. “British Army issue, isn’t it? You can start these with a bent nail and a prayer.”

The engine coughed, turned over, and roared.

Arthur slid George into the back of the lorry, onto a pile of abandoned greatcoats, and climbed in beside him. The sealed order pressed against his ribs with every jolt of the truck as Fletcher bounced them out of the ditch and turned east, toward the road that led to the sea.

George’s hand moved. Just a twitch, just a finger curling against Arthur’s palm. Arthur looked down and saw that his son’s eyes were open, unfocused, drifting.

“Dad?” The word was barely a breath.

“I’m here, lad.” Arthur’s voice broke. “I’ve got you. We’re going home.”

George’s lips moved again, but no sound came out. His eyes rolled back, and his hand went limp in Arthur’s grip.

Arthur held his son’s hand and watched his face for any sign of breath, and all the while the sealed order from Sergeant Cole burned against his ribs, demanding to be delivered, demanding to be remembered, demanding to be weighed against the life of his only child. He had risked it all to save his son. He had not yet considered what it would cost to keep him.