Lire le chapitre 27: The Trap

The barn smelled of dry hay and rat piss. Jack lay flat against the splintered planks of the loft, his M1 carbine pressed to his shoulder, watching the gap where the door hung crooked on one hinge. Henri crouched by the window slit, Beretta in hand, his breathing low and forced.

Outside, the Germans were not being careful. They crashed through the undergrowth like hogs, shouting coordinates to one another, their flashlights raking the tree line. Jack counted at least a dozen voices. Maybe more. The radio theft — Claire’s walk into the bunker — had triggered something close to panic in the German command.

“They’re encircling,” Henri whispered. “We cannot stay.”

“Shit.” Jack wiped sweat from his eyes. His fever had spiked again. The marsh run had soaked him to the bone, and his shoulder wound was seeping through the bandage. He could not feel his fingers properly. It did not matter. Nothing mattered but the bridge. “How’d they close so fast?”

Henri shook his head, dark eyes fixed on the window. “She told them where we ran. She knows this land. She knows every place I would take you.”

A window crashed in the farmhouse next door. The Germans were clearing buildings one by one. The barn would be next.

“The château key,” Jack said. “Still on you?”

Henri patted the canvas sack slung across his chest. The master fuse key sat inside along with his remaining ammunition. The plan had been so clean. Cut the power. Drop into the dark. Strip the charges by hand. The whole weight of the invasion riding on their fingers and their nerve. Now the plan was garbage, the team was dead or gone, and Claire was in the bunker laughing as she sold them down the river.

“You should go alone,” Henri said, reading his mind, or maybe the fever had made Jack’s face an open book. “I can hold them here.”

“No.”

“Calloway, you are a reasonable man until you are not. And right now —”

A grenade clattered through the door. Jack grabbed Henri by the collar and yanked him flat behind the old stone feeding trough just as the blast ripped through the planks, filling the air with nails and splinters and the deafening crunch of bursting timber. The trough shuddered but held. Hay caught fire above their heads.

Henri rolled left, came up on his knees, and fired three rounds through the gap where the door had been. A scream. Jack drove his shoulder against the trough and pushed himself up, gun tracking. Floodlights — no. Flashlight beams. Five, six shapes in the night, fanning toward the barn.

“They wanted us to shoot,” Jack said. “Now they know where we are.”

A machine gun opened up from the tree line. The coaxed rounds chewed through the barn wall at chest height, and any thought of a clean standoff dissolved.

“North wall,” Henri shouted over the din. “There’s a shuttered doorway. If we break through the back —”

“Then they loop around and catch us in the field.”

“You have a better offer?”

Jack didn’t. The bullets kept coming, six tracer rounds stitching the beams above them, dropping burning straw onto their shoulders. Jack killed the fire in his pack with a wet palm. He measured the distance to the sealed north door. Ten yards of open floor. It might as well have been ten miles.

“You go first,” Jack said. “They’ll expect movement from the front. I’ll give them something to look at.”

Henri frowned. “Jack —”

“My fever’s cooked half my brain, Henri. We go together, they get us both. You go, you live, you get to the safehouse. I’ll be right behind.”

The Frenchman took one hard breath, and Jack saw in his face the comprehension that this was not negotiation. Henri nodded, turned, and raced low across the floor to the north door. He hit the shutter with his shoulder. Rusted wood groaned; the bolt snapped. Pale moon flooded through a gap of black night.

Jack turned back to the fire-eaten front wall, lifted his carbine through a gap in the planks, and fired. He did not aim. He just gave them volume, sending round after round toward the flashlight beams, tracing silhouettes that flickered between trees. Somewhere in the dark, a man cursed and went down.

The shutters burst open. Henri’s boots thumped on packed earth.

Then the Germans did exactly what Jack had not wanted them to do. A flare gun cracked from the tree line. White fire bloomed overhead, turning the farmyard to bone. Every shadow, every lean-to, every blade of dead grass exposed. Henri sprinted across the open ground, twenty yards and closing on the tree line. A sniper round sang from the far side of the yard.

Henri’s leg folded. He pitched forward, rolled twice, and came to rest in the mud, face down, motionless.

“No.” Jack left the barn in a low sprint, carbine fitted hard into his shoulder, firing from the hip as he crossed the same open ground, not bothering to dodge, because there was no dodging with the flare spilling magnesium light over the yard. Some part of him expected the bullet. It never came. He reached Henri, dropped to his knees, and dragged him by the jacket collar toward the tree line. Another round snapped past Jack’s ear. Then the flare sputtered dead.

Darkness. Relative. The Germans fired blind vectors into the trees. Jack hauled Henri deeper into the dark, moving in a crouch, lungs aflame, the world tilting around him. He didn’t look back. He did not need to. The bridge could wait. The bridge had waited a thousand years. Jack would not let it wait one moment more than necessary.

---

The safehouse was a collapsed stone mill a mile beyond the marsh. It had a roof over one corner, and that was enough. Jack laid Henri on a pile of rotted flour sacks, peeled back the torn trouser leg, and found the wound. A rifle round through the meat of the thigh. No bone broken — he checked by feel, running fingers along the femur where blood ran thick and black — but it would bleed, and it would fester, and Henri would not be walking on it for a week.

“You’re getting tired of sewing me up,” Henri said through clenched teeth. His face was gray, filmed with sweat.

“Shut up.” Jack packed the wound with clean cloth from his med kit, pressed hard until the bleeding slowed, then wrapped the leg tight with a strip of silk torn from his own shirt. He had seen worse. He had done worse with less. “The bullet’s out. You’ll live. But you won’t be going anywhere tonight.”

Henri’s head fell back against the flour sacks. His eyes were glassy, half-lost already. “The key is in the sack. You know the route to the bridge.”

“I know the route.”

“You cannot cut the power without the key. And you cannot remove the charges without the power cut.”

Jack checked Henri’s pulse. Fast, but steady. The man was bleeding more than Jack wanted to admit. If he left now and came back to a body, there would be nothing he could have done anyway.

“Reiner knows every inch of your plan,” Henri whispered. “Lay the boat. Go quiet. The caissons — under the bridge, on the pylons, you will find them. You can do this alone. You were always alone, Jack.”

“So was you.”

The ghost of a smile crossed Henri’s lips. “I had Émile. And the baron. And —” He stopped, the smile fading. He did not mention Claire’s name. He did not need to. The silence said everything.

Jack stood. He checked his weapon, his remaining ammunition, the pair of detonator shears in his belt. The canvas sack with the master key he slung over his chest. He looked at Henri lying in the dark, already slipping into fever-sleep, and for a moment — just a moment — the weight of everything settled onto him. The mission. The dead. The river of blood made of men who thought they could walk on it.

But there was only one way through this war: forward.

“If I’m not back by dawn,” Jack said, though Henri could barely hear him, “you tell the Allies the bridge is still standing and the Germans still own it. That’s all that matters.”

He pressed two extra grenades into Henri’s pockets, half for protection, half because he suspected he would still die before the Frenchman would. Then Jack pulled the broken door aside and stepped out into the night.

The moon was low and the ground was soft. He circled the marsh from the east, using the reed bed’s shadow for cover, moving in the ground-eating lope that had carried him through Anzio and Sicily and every other hell the army had thrown at him. He checked his compass by the faint blue light of the stars and set his course for the bridge.

It rose against the horizon like a skeleton. Taller than he remembered. Greener fires burned along its span now — spotlights on both ends, sets of double guards moving on the road above, vehicles idling with engines running. The Germans were not waiting for him. They were waiting for the signal to blow. And they would not notice one man on the water.

Jack crossed a fence wire, walked down to the river’s edge, and stood a moment where the current kissed the bank. He pulled out the folded map. The caissons hung beneath the structure, each filled with enough amatol to turn the bridge to toothpicks. The charges were wired to the detonator in the tunnel. The tunnel was where the labor camp fed its workers.

He considered that. And he made his choice.

He shoved the map back into his pocket, turned, and walked into the reeds, heading not toward the water but toward the low sprawl of barracks he had glimpsed from the hilltop. A single line of barbed wire traced the perimeter, and beyond it, men in gray prisoner rags moved with the slow death-march of the labor crews.

Henri had said there was one other person who knew the bridge better than he did. Jack had never believed in luck. But he had learned to believe in Émile.

The fever burned behind his eyes. He pushed it down. He had a man to find.