said and took off down the wharf. Jonathan rigged a gangway. The soldiers began stumbling off the boat.
“Do you happen to know how one goes about finding one’s unit?” Hardy asked. “I wonder where I’ll be sent next.”
North Africa, Mike thought, but you aren’t supposed to be there. You were supposed to have been killed on that beach. Or captured by the Germans.
The sailor was back, leading orderlies with stretchers and an officer who knelt as soon as he was on deck and began bandaging a soldier’s leg.
“Fetch us some petrol,” the Commander said to the sailor. “We’re heading back to Dunkirk as soon as we get this lot unloaded.”
“No,” Mike said, starting toward him. He swayed and nearly fell. Hardy grabbed him to steady him and helped him over to the locker to sit down. “I’ll fetch the captain,” he said, but the Commander was already heading toward him.
“I can’t go back to Dunkirk,” Mike said to him. “You’ve got to take me to Saltram-on-Sea.”
“You’re not going anywhere, lad,” the Commander said. He turned and called, “Lieutenant! Over here.”
“You don’t understand,” Mike said. “I’ve got to get back to Oxford and tell them what’s happened. He wasn’t supposed to make it back. He saw the light.”
“There, now, Kansas,” the Commander said, putting his hand around Mike’s shoulder. “Don’t go upsetting yourself. Lieutenant!” he bellowed, and the officer who’d been tending the wounded stood up and started toward them.
“You don’t understand,” Mike pleaded. “I may have altered events. I’ve got to warn them. Dunkirk’s a divergence point. I may have done something that’ll make you lose the war,” but they weren’t listening. They were all looking down at the deck, at the bloody mess that had been his right foot.
He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and He hath set darkness in my paths.
—JOB 19:8
London—20 September 1940
IT CAN’T HAVE BEEN HIT, POLLY THOUGHT, LOOKING STUPIDLY across the expanse of rubble at the exposed drop. Mr. Dunworthy would never have approved the drop if it had been. And Badri had said he’d insisted they find a site that had been untouched during the entire Blitz, not only during her six weeks.
But it wasn’t hit, she realized. Only the buildings on the other side of the alley were, and they would have had Lampden Road addresses. Badri and his techs must only have checked the buildings on the passage’s side of the alley, and it hadn’t occurred to them that one side of an alley could be damaged and the other side untouched. They didn’t know how erratic blast patterns could be. The passage—at least as far down it as she could see in the fog—looked undisturbed, and the rickety staircase on the back of the next building was still intact.
She needed to get a closer look. She walked across the road and up to the rubble, stepping carefully over a rope barrier with a small square sign suspended from it that read Danger—Keep Out.
Danger was right. On closer inspection the rubble was studded with jagged-ended timbers and broken roof slates, and was nearly head-high. Polly walked rapidly along the roped perimeter, looking for a way up onto the mound. But there wasn’t any, though the rubble wasn’t quite as deep on the north side, and a few feet in, there was a sort of path made of a door—which must have been flung on top of the mound by the force of the blast—and a torn piece of linoleum.
Polly took hold of a half-buried timber and climbed up onto the rubble. It was less solid than it looked. Her feet sank into the plaster and pulverized brick up to her ankles, and one of her stockings snagged on a large wooden splinter. She took another cautious step, and the whole mound seemed to shift.
She grabbed for a broken-off bedpost. Plaster and pebbles rattled down for several seconds, then stopped. She stepped forward cautiously, not letting go till she had to, and testing each hand and foot before she put her weight on the unsteady wreckage till she reached the piece of linoleum.
She’d been wrong. The linoleum hadn’t been flung there by the bomb, and neither had the door. A rescue squad had laid them there, and they didn’t lead to the drop. They led to a square-sided hole. Polly knew instantly what it was—a shaft dug to reach a victim, or a body, buried there. Which, presumably, they had got out.