Read The Second Objective Online
Authors: Mark Frost
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #War & Military, #General Fiction
The Second Objective (39 page)
Grannit looked at him. “We can do that.”
“Always thought I’d see the neighborhood again. I dream about Park Slope all the time, you know? That’s where I always go. Think that means I’m really an American, deep down, if I dream that way?”
“Maybe so, kid.”
“That’s something, anyway,” said Bernie, watching the city go by out the window. “Beautiful place, isn’t it? Doesn’t even look like anybody lives in it.”
“It’ll outlive all of us.”
“You have to put cuffs on me when we go in, Earl?”
Grannit thought about it. “No.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
They pulled up outside of SHAEF headquarters, a ponderous bank building fronted by massive columns, commandeered after the Liberation. Grannit gestured for Bernie to get out first, then followed him, tipped his hat to the driver, and the police car sped off. Grannit took Bernie by the arm and they walked up the steps to the entrance. A heavily armed detail of MPs patrolled the front.
“Don’t say anything,” said Grannit. “I’ll lay it out for ’em and do the best I can. When they weigh in your cooperation, we can get some—”
“Don’t make any promises,” said Bernie. “I appreciate it, but I know it’s not up to you. I’ll take whatever’s coming.”
When they reached the top of the stairs, Grannit showed his badge to the guards at the door. “I need to talk to the CO, whoever’s got the watch.”
“What’s this regarding, sir?”
“The 150th Panzer Brigade.”
“Follow me.”
They entered the dimly lit lobby and waited while the MP went into the offices. Stripped of decoration, windows blacked out, the cold marble of the massive room extended to the edge of their vision. They stood under one of the columns and waited. Civilian aides and junior officers trafficked through the room, still bustling near midnight. They all wore the familiar blue SHAEF pass on a chain around their neck.
Bernie felt a cold chill run down his neck. A shaking started in the pit of his stomach and spread outward. He blinked, having trouble seeing. His mind raced, involuntarily calculating how many days and hours he had left to live. Von Leinsdorf had been right about that, too: It was worse knowing when you were going to die.
He noticed Grannit’s back suddenly straighten. Grannit pulled a charred piece of blue paper from his pocket and looked at it, then moved out to one of the junior officers crossing the room. Grannit stopped him, took the man’s blue SHAEF pass in his hand, and examined it.
The letters e and a in “headquarters” were transposed.
Grannit stopped another person crossing, to look at his pass, then another and another. Bernie went to him as the last person moved off. He looked stunned.
“What’s wrong?” asked Bernie.
“There is a mistake on the passes. But the army never corrected it.”
“The blue one?”
“Did they give you one of these?”
“Yeah, and we got new ones in Belgium from the
Abwehr
—”
“After you came across?”
“Von Leinsdorf said their forgers didn’t notice the mistake in time to fix it. He said these were the ones we were supposed to use.”
“And they were spelled correctly.”
“That’s right.”
“But Schmidt’s wasn’t corrected,” said Grannit.
“Then you must have caught him before he could pick them up.”
“God damn it, that’s what Ole was trying to tell me. The fucking passes.”
“What about them?”
“How many squads did Von Leinsdorf tell you were working on this?”
“Five.”
“The men who took Von Leinsdorf had the corrected passes,” said Grannit. “We only caught four teams.”
“You’re saying that MP, those guys from Counter Intelligence—”
“They’re the fifth squad.”
A young lieutenant came out to escort them into the CO’s office. Grannit grabbed him by the arms.
“Has a suspect in the Skorzeny case been brought in during the last hour?” asked Grannit.
“I don’t know—”
“Well, how fast can you fucking find out?”
The young lieutenant ran back toward his office. He returned at a trot leading his CO, a dyspeptic captain, who assured them that if any German operative in the Skorzeny case had been brought in, he would’ve been the first to hear about it.
“Is there anywhere else they would’ve taken him?”
“Maybe the SHAEF offices in Versailles.”
“I need to use your phone,” said Grannit.
Invalides Metro, Paris
DECEMBER 21, 11:00
P.M.
Ververt’s two men had been parked outside the Invalides metro station in an empty bakery truck for an hour when a black sedan with U.S. military plates pulled up alongside. Two men climbed out, one in the uniform of an MP, the other in civilian clothes, who brought along a suitcase he lifted from the trunk of the car. One of Ververt’s men opened the back panel door and they climbed inside. The black sedan sped off. Once the back panel of the truck rolled shut, the driver headed west toward the highway along the river, out of the city.
Paris City Morgue
DECEMBER 22, 12:30
A.M.
Inspector Massou was waiting for them at the front door. He led Grannit and Bernie downstairs to the examination room. An attendant pulled the sheet off a body lying on a slab, next to one bearing the body of the dead French patrolman.
“This is the man who was wearing Bennings’s dog tags,” said Massou.
He had taken four gunshot wounds to the chest. One had gone clear through. He’d died quickly. About Bennings’s age and with similar coloring, he had a tattoo of a knife on the back of his right hand.
The coroner showed Grannit the bullets he’d taken from the body. They matched the one Grannit had dug out of the alley wall. Each bore the same distinctive rifling as the silenced shots that had hit Sergeant Mallory.
“This isn’t Bennings,” said Grannit.
Versailles
DECEMBER 22, 3:00
A.M.
E
ddie dozed off in the back of the truck during the ride out from Paris, which was slowed by the snowstorm blanketing the city. Von Leinsdorf pretended to sleep, listening to the two men up front speaking in French. They said little, but he gathered enough to know they’d been given orders from Ververt to kill them as soon as the goods from the train were on board their truck.
Von Leinsdorf woke Eddie as they neared the supply depot in Matelot. Bennings directed them to their rendezvous point near the back gate of the train yard. Moments after the truck came to a stop, Von Leinsdorf shot each of the Frenchmen in the back of the head with his silenced pistol.
“What the hell,” said Bennings.
“They had orders to kill us, Eddie,” said Von Leinsdorf. “I heard them on the drive.”
“What the fuck we supposed to do with Ververt now?”
“Live in hope our paths cross again so we can make it up to him. I’ve arranged for the men who helped us out of Paris to meet us at the drop. They’ll take the delivery off our hands and pay us on the spot. We’re done.”
Troubled that he still lacked a satisfactory explanation for exactly who those men were, Eddie followed Von Leinsdorf into the train yard. Eddie’s two contacts in the depot’s railway battalion were waiting, as instructed, inside the gate. Eddie sounded anxious, but they were used to that, and in the dark of the train yard they couldn’t see the sickly sheen of sweat on his face. The GIs led them to the Christmas train, waiting on a side track near the edge of the yards. Von Leinsdorf paid them out of Ververt’s advance, and beyond that they showed no interest in the aftermath of their transaction.
Von Leinsdorf helped Eddie up into the last boxcar holding the luxury goods, and the train rolled out of the yard just after twelve-thirty. Eddie propped himself up against a stack of whiskey boxes in the corner. He watched Von Leinsdorf set down and open his suitcase, turn on a flashlight, and go to work.
“How long to the drop?” asked Von Leinsdorf.
“An hour, maybe more, depending on the switches,” said Eddie. “Trouble you for a smoke?”
“A million cigarettes in this car and you’re bumming one off me?”
“Old habits die hard.”
Von Leinsdorf tossed a pack of Luckies over to him. Eddie fumbled through his pockets.
“Shit, sorry, you got a light?”
Von Leinsdorf moved over to him, taking out his lighter.
“This is a one-night career, Eddie. We collect our end, work our way down to Portugal, and buy passage home out of Lisbon.”
“I can’t wait to get back to New York. You can have fucking Europe, they’re all out of their minds. There’s some important guys I want you to meet in the city, Dick. Connected guys.”
As Von Leinsdorf leaned down with the lighter, the car jolted sideways and he stumbled slightly and bumped into Eddie. When he straightened back up, Eddie was holding a pistol at his head.
“Now you tell me what the fuck is going on,” said Eddie. “Or you’re not leaving this car.”
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He sprinted across the road, used bolt cutters to hack a small opening through the lines of barbed wire, and slipped through it into the compound. He ran forward into the shelter of a stand of evergreens. The heavily falling snow quickly erased his footsteps as he headed deeper into the trees.
Versailles
DECEMBER 22, 5:20
A.M.
After clearing security, Grannit and Bernie entered the provost marshal’s office, a large, drafty room in the château at Versailles. Grannit presented his dossier on Von Leinsdorf to the provost’s second in command and a junior officer from Army Intelligence, who looked like he’d been dragged out of bed. The men listened patiently while Grannit explained that they believed Von Leinsdorf had been taken from police custody in Paris by an undercover German squad posing as U.S. Counter Intelligence officers. They might try to gain access to Versailles with Von Leinsdorf as their prisoner, or perhaps posing as the British lieutenant he’d killed at the Hotel Meurice. Without telling them how, Grannit also mentioned that these men now knew that General Eisenhower had been moved from his regular quarters to the Trianon Palace.
Appearing to take their report seriously, the two officers reassured Grannit that security surrounding Versailles and the general had been elevated to extraordinary levels following the initial threat of Skorzeny’s commandos. Eisenhower had spent every minute of the last few days inside the Trianon Palace, almost a mile across the gardens inside the compound. They appreciated this new information, but the idea that any alleged or actual assassin could endanger the general there was inconceivable, no matter what guise he arrived in or who was escorting him. They also mentioned that in just the last few hours, thanks to CID’s efforts, the recent arrest of Skorzeny’s last squad in Reims had resulted in a lowering of the threat assessment. The general was chomping at the bit to get back to his usual hard-driving schedule. With that, the senior officer indicated their meeting was at an end.
“You men are welcome to bunk down here if you like,” said the major. “Or grab a meal before you head back to town.”
Grannit knew it was an order, not an invitation.
“Would you mind if we had a look around?” asked Grannit.
“Around the grounds?” asked the major. “It’s five in the morning.”
“The compound covers over fifteen hundred acres,” said the intelligence officer. “There’s an entire battalion stationed around the perimeter. A bedbug couldn’t get into Ike’s quarters without our knowing it. You think you’re going to find something out there we’ve missed?”
“No. I’m really beat. Thinking it might help me sleep.”
“Why don’t you wait until after the war’s over and come back as a tourist,” said the intelligence officer, out of patience.
“No, that’s all right, they’re welcome to take the grand tour,” said the major. “We’ll arrange an escort as soon as someone’s up and around. Save you the price of a ticket down the road.”
Two MPs walked Grannit and Bernie through the palace’s long corridors to the officer’s mess. A long buffet table of breakfast food for early risers was being laid out by the kitchen staff. Grannit pulled cups of coffee from the silver urn and stood with Bernie next to a wall of windowed doors looking out onto the fabled gardens. The first light of dawn filtered into the eastern sky. Snow fell softly outside, accumulating in powdery drifts around the steps of a broad terrace outside, lending the marble of the columns an otherworldly glow. Bernie glanced through an old tourist brochure with a map of the grounds, then looked back at the two MPs, sitting at a table near the door.
“They’re not going to leave us alone, are they?”
“No.”
“I could try to distract ’em.”
“Don’t push it, kid. You got too much to lose.”
“So we’re just going to leave it up to them,” said Bernie. “The army and the MPs—”
“We did our job.”
“We didn’t finish it.”
Grannit looked at him, not disagreeing. He tried the door and to his surprise found it open. He held up a pack of cigarettes to show to their MP escorts at the rear table, then pointed to the terrace. The MPs nodded. Grannit stepped outside and Bernie followed him.
Standing under a portico on the terrace, they lit cigarettes and shivered against the cold. In the faint predawn light, they could just discern the enormous outline of the château spreading out around them. When they’d arrived earlier, it had been too dark to see the massive scale of the buildings.
“What a joint,” said Bernie, looking at the map on the brochure. “Guess some big shot built this for himself way back when, was that the deal?”
“Labor was a little cheaper.”
“No unions.”
“In New York, they’d still be pouring concrete.”
Bernie smiled. Their MP escorts stepped out to join them and borrow cigarettes.
Eddie Bennings’s eyes opened with a jolt. He was lying in the dark and couldn’t move, but he felt something cold and metallic in his hands. He identified it as his own automatic pistol. He heard the sound of a car engine approaching outside. His finger inched toward the trigger.
The GIs patrolling the compound perimeter heard a gunshot, then another. They pulled off the road and listened. Another shot. They appeared to be coming from a train car parked on the spur line to the south of the fence. They drove the jeep close and approached cautiously, with weapons drawn. Two boxcars sat on the tracks. The doors of the first car stood open, boxes of ammunition stored inside. They heard a muffled voice issuing from the second car, then noticed that the door was partially open.
A call came in on the MPs’ walkie-talkies about an abandoned train car that had been found near the southern perimeter. The officer reported that shots had been fired and they were moving to investigate. One of the MPs listened on his walkie-talkie as the officers advanced on the train.
Grannit leaned in to listen.
With weapons drawn, the two soldiers slowly rolled open the rear boxcar door.
If they’d been alive long enough to register it, they would have caught a brief glimpse of Corporal Eddie Bennings lying on the floor of the car, bound hand and foot, a gag in his mouth, and a pistol taped into his hands. His body was surrounded by a chain of small gray bricks connected by fuses. Eddie looked up at them and screamed through the gag just as the opening door snapped a small cable, which set off a detonating cap and fired the fuses attached to the plastic explosives packed around his body.
In the next instant the explosion atomized Eddie Bennings, the two officers, and the boxcar. The explosion set off an even bigger secondary blast in the adjoining boxcar, which carried a full load of artillery shells. An arc of flame shot two hundred feet in the air, and the concussive blast knocked out windows in a row of suburban houses over a thousand yards to the south. Along the perimeter of the Versailles compound, American soldiers manning the guard houses and entrenched defiles saw the flames, heard the explosions, and left their positions to investigate.
The MP escorts on the back terrace heard the explosion distort through their walkie-talkie. An unnaturally bright glow caught Grannit’s eye on the southern horizon. A moment later a muffled thump echoed across the flat landscape in front of them like distant artillery. Bernie turned in time to see a lick of flame above the distant tree line and hear a second, larger concussion. Both their MP escorts rushed down the stairs toward the explosion, pulling their weapons. “Go back inside!” shouted the MPs. “Back inside now!”
Grannit waited until the MPs were out of sight. Then he took a spare pistol from his pocket and handed it to Bernie.
“Fuck that,” he said, and started down the steps. “Bring the map.”