Mark Frost - The Second Objective

“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.”

The Trianon Palace, Versailles

DECEMBER 22, 4:30 A.M.

General Eisenhower woke at 4:30 A.M. after a restless night. He showered and dressed, then walked down from the small flat he was using as a bedroom in the Trianon to his office. His orderly served him coffee while he looked over the night’s accumulated cables from the Ardennes. He looked at his watch; the Third Army’s counterattack across the southern front of the Bulge was just getting under way, but it would be hours before any meaningful reports reached his desk. A full briefing was scheduled for ten. He looked out the window at the snow that had fallen throughout the night, worried about how much was coming down in Belgium and if it would hamper Patton’s advance.

He picked up a pen and legal pad, prepared to compose the most important letter he’d written in weeks. Eisenhower had announced the night before that he wanted to issue an Order of the Day, a commander’s prerogative he seldom exercised. Addressed to every Allied soldier in the European Theater, he wanted to send an inspirational message to rally their spirits as they faced this crucial hour. He had asked his staff to compose a draft for him by morning, but he’d tossed and turned all night because he knew he needed to write such a vital communication himself. With the pen in his hand, the words stalled; he could hear the tone he wanted, but nothing flowed.

On his desk he noticed that an order had come through overnight to SHAEF high command, lowering the threat assessment from Skorzeny’s commandos. Welcome news. He told his orderly to bring his hat, scarf, and overcoat. He was stepping outside. After three days cooped up in this eighteenth-century cuckoo clock, he knew a walk in the gardens at sunrise would clear his head.

By the time the explosion drew most of the security detail toward the southern perimeter, Von Leinsdorf was half a mile inside the compound. Under thick clouds, the blanket of fresh snow on the grounds amplified the first hints of dawn, giving the light the peculiar quality of emanating from the ground up. The storm had passed, but a lingering mist gave the air a granulated texture, as if viewed through cottony gauze. Von Leinsdorf walked just inside the tree line, following the linear shore of a large, frozen rectangular body of water to his left. The woods were empty, the air still as glass; all he could hear was his own breathing and the plush turning of the powdery snow underfoot. He had memorized the maps Skorzeny had given him before the mission, but the snow had erased all low-lying landmarks and made it difficult to orient himself. He knew he was skirting the Great Canal, but it wasn’t until he reached this perpendicular intersection with another hard-edged line of water that he placed his location on the grid he’d built in his mind.

He stopped at the edge of the tree line, double rows of symmetrical beech and linden, and looked both ways. The arms of the canal, a grand cross, stretched out in all four directions nearly to the horizon. He could vaguely sense the outline of the main château looming up a slope a mile to the right. That meant he was headed north, toward the Trianon Palace. Not another soul in sight. He stepped out of the trees and crossed the canal. Halfway across the ice, he stopped, overcome with sudden awe. He had reached the geometrical center of the park, where the perfect balance and majesty of its architecture all flowed from this axis. In formal perfection, lines from every point of the compass converged where he was standing. Despite the urgency of his mission, he was stunned by this faultless ordering of space and angle, land and water and air.