Chapter 24 In The Crosshairs #2
The word came out harsher than I intended. She flinched, hurt flashing across her face, but she went. I heard her voice in the corridor, gathering stragglers, herding people toward the exits with the efficiency of someone who'd practiced this drill a hundred times.
Ruth's face appeared in my peripheral vision. “Two minutes. Then I'm carrying you out myself.”
“Understood.”
She disappeared. The hut emptied around me, desks abandoned, chairs overturned, silence falling except for the endless wail of sirens and the scratch of my pencil on paper.
Distant boom. Explosion somewhere beyond the estate. Testing range, maybe. Or the first bombs falling on outlying targets.
Pencil moving faster. Translating. Cross-referencing. Feeling the pattern lock into place with the particular satisfaction that always accompanied a successful decode.
Horchlager Süd. Koordinaten best?tigt. Prim?rziel.
Listening Post South. Coordinates confirmed. Primary target.
There it was. Confirmation. The estate's codename embedded in targeting coordinates that matched our exact location. We were the target. Had always been the target. Peter's betrayal leading enemy aircraft straight to the heart of Allied intelligence operations.
But also timing. Attack windows. Two-wave approach laid out in precise military detail.
First wave: pathfinder aircraft, already overhead, marking targets with incendiary devices.
Second wave: heavy bombers, following the pathfinders' marks, delivering the payload that would reduce Hut X to splinters and ash.
Window between waves: approximately fifteen minutes. Time for pathfinders to confirm hits, for bombers to adjust approach, for us to die or find a way to survive.
If we killed all lights. If we moved the emergency markers. If we could confuse the pathfinders into thinking they'd already hit us, or that we were somewhere else entirely...
We had a chance. Slim. Desperate. But real.
Needed to tell Finch. Needed to get this information to someone who could act.
Explosion closer. Much closer. The hut shook, windows rattling in their frames. Papers flew from desks, scattered across the floor like dying leaves.
Grabbed the decoded intercept. Stood. Started toward the door.
Another explosion. Directly outside.
The world became noise and light and pain.
Pressure wave hit me like a physical blow, lifting me off my feet, throwing me backward. Glass shattered inward, thousand tiny blades catching the light as they flew. Wood splintered. The ceiling groaned, cracked, began to collapse.
I hit something hard. Floor or wall or desk, couldn't tell. Stars exploded across my vision. Ears screaming with a high-pitched tone that drowned out everything else.
Tried to move. Couldn't. Something heavy across my legs, my chest, pinning me down. Looked up through swimming vision and saw the ceiling beam that had fallen, thick oak timber that had supported this hut for decades now pressing me into the floor.
Dust everywhere. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't see. Could only feel the weight crushing down on me and the warm wet spread of blood from wounds I couldn't locate.
The intercept. Where was the intercept?
Twisted my head, ignoring the pain that lanced through my neck. There. Crumpled paper a few feet away, just beyond my reach. The information that might save everyone, lying useless on the floor while I lay trapped beneath debris.
Tried to reach for it. Arm wouldn't cooperate. Something wrong with my shoulder, something grinding that shouldn't grind, pain white-hot and nauseating.
Another explosion. Further away this time, but the hut shook again. More debris falling. More dust. More darkness as the remaining lights flickered and died.
“Help.” The word came out as a whisper. Throat raw from dust, from screaming I didn't remember doing. “Someone. Help.”
Nothing. No one. Everyone else had evacuated. Everyone else had listened to the sirens, followed the drills, made it to shelter while I stayed behind trying to be a hero.
Stupid. So stupid. Tom would be furious. Tom would find me and shake me and demand to know what I'd been thinking, staying in a building marked for destruction just to finish one more line of code.
If Tom found me at all.
The thought brought tears that I couldn't wipe away, couldn't do anything about except let them track through the dust on my face. Tom out there somewhere, fighting to defend the estate, not knowing I was trapped. Not knowing I might never see him again.
All those words I'd never said. All those moments I'd held back, too afraid of what feeling them meant. Too careful to risk the heartbreak of hope.
And now hope was all I had.
Hope that someone would come. Hope that the beam wouldn't shift and crush me completely. Hope that the bombers overhead would be confused by killed lights and moved markers and wouldn't drop their payload directly on the spot where I lay pinned and bleeding.
Time became strange. Seconds stretching into hours, hours compressing into heartbeats. I drifted in and out of consciousness, pulled back each time by pain or fear or the stubborn refusal to give up that had carried me through three years of this war.
Tom's watch was in my pocket. Could feel it pressing against my hip, still ticking, still counting time that might be running out. His luck, he'd called it. Given to me because he'd believed I was worth protecting.
Worth saving.
Worth loving.
I'd never told him. Never said the words out loud, never admitted that what I felt had grown beyond anything I knew how to contain. Had hidden behind coded confessions and careful distance, too afraid of what openness might cost.
And now the cost of silence might be everything.
“Tom.” His name scraped past my lips, prayer and confession and desperate plea all at once. “I'm sorry. I should have... I should have told you...”
Explosion overhead. Closer than any before. The hut collapsed further, debris raining down, and I curled in on myself as much as the beam would allow, arms over my head, waiting for the final blow.
It didn't come.
The sound faded. Dust settled. Silence fell, thick and absolute, broken only by the crackle of flames somewhere nearby and the distant wail of sirens that seemed to be moving away.
Moving away. Which meant the bombers were leaving. Which meant the first wave was over.
Which meant we had maybe fifteen minutes before the second wave arrived to finish what the first had started.
Tried to move again. The beam shifted slightly, pressure easing on my chest enough to draw a full breath. Pain flared everywhere, too many sources to isolate, but I was alive. Still alive.
The intercept. Still there, crumpled but intact.
Reached for it with my good arm. Fingers brushing paper. Stretching. Straining.
Got it. Clutched it to my chest with the desperation of a man holding onto the last piece of himself.