Page 134 of The Words Beneath the Noise

I checked the timing window against my watch. My stomach dropped.

“Hours. Maybe less. The intercept was sent last night. If they're on schedule...”

Sirens.

The sound cut through everything, rising and falling, mechanical scream that transformed theoretical threat into immediate reality. Air raid. Incoming bombers. Attack beginning now.

For one frozen moment, nobody moved. The sound hung in the air like a physical weight, pressing down on all of us, stealing breath and thought and the ability to react.

Then chaos.

People scrambling from desks, grabbing coats, running for exits. Typewriters abandoned mid-word. Papers scattering as bodies collided in the narrow aisles. Voices shouting instructions that nobody could hear over the sirens.

Noor appeared at my shoulder, yanking on my arm. “Art! Move! We have to go!”

“Not yet.” I was still writing, pencil flying across the page, trying to capture everything I'd decoded. “Almost have it. Just need to finish?—“

“You'll be dead before you finish!”

“I need five minutes. Maybe less. If I can complete the targeting sequence, Finch can use it to redirect defenses?—“

“Five minutes might be all we have!” She was pulling harder now, physically trying to drag me from my chair. “Please. Please, Art. I can't watch you die for stubbornness.”

“Go.” I shook her off, kept writing. “Get to shelter. Get everyone out. I'll follow.”

“Art—“

“Go!”

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 bestätigt. Primärziel.

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.