David Healey: Winter Sniper

“Something came up and I must get back to Washington. If I can just get to the train station —”

“Come inside, Eva.” His voice was sad, resigned.

“If you will help me get the snow off —”

“You’re not going anywhere. Let’s go inside.”

Eva ignored him and kept swiping furiously at the snow until Ty reached out and took hold of the broom. She struggled for a moment, not letting go. Ty put a second hand on the broom and took it away from her. He nodded for Eva to go ahead of him and they slogged through the snow to the narrow cleared path that led to the lobby doors.

Inside, the corporal on guard duty lurched to his feet. He seemed to sense that something was wrong and snapped to attention. Petra stood watching wide-eyed by the fireplace, where a roaring blaze kept the winter cold at bay.

Ty said quietly “Give me the papers, Eva.”

“Darling, I don’t know what you are talking about.” She smiled again, then went to stand beside the fireplace, brushing snow from her fur coat. Petra moved away from her. “Does anyone have a cigarette?”

“Corporal, come over here a minute,” Ty said to the sentry. “I want you to search this woman’s coat pockets.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me, Corporal.”

The smile faded from Eva’s face and she tried to stare them down. Wrapped in fur, her cheeks tinged with blood from the cold, she looked both regal and beautiful. When no one moved, Eva laughed mockingly and reached into her pocket. She pulled out a packet of papers and tossed them into the crackling fireplace. Stunned, Ty could only watch as flames licked over the papers. Then he rushed toward the fireplace and reached into the flames to pull the papers to safety, stepping on them with his snowy boots to snuff them out. Another instant and the papers would have turned to ash. As Ty wrapped his singed fingers in a handkerchief, Eva reached into her pocket again.

This time the corporal was ready. He caught Eva by the wrist and pulled out her hand. She was gripping a small pistol. The corporal wrestled it away. “Jesus,” he said, stepping back to stare at the black, deadly looking automatic in his palm. He put his right hand on the holster of his .45 but Eva made no move to escape.

Ty unfolded the packet. He glimpsed maps covered in Ike’s familiar scrawl and also what looked like a tide table.

“I don’t know where that came from,” Eva said. “Petra must have planted it there. She must be a spy.”

“No!” Petra cried. “Frau Von Stahl, you are lying!”

“Be quiet, both of you,” Ty said. He would have liked to believe Eva, but Petra wasn’t the one he had found in Ike’s suite that morning.

“This is a German pistol, Captain,” the corporal said. “It says Walther PPK right on it. That’s what German officers use.”

“Hold onto it for me, Corporal,” he said. He nodded at Petra. “And keep an eye on this girl here. Don’t let her go anywhere. Eva, you come with me.”

He led her through the hotel. Ty found it disturbing that Eva was quiet, not even bothering to deny anything or explain herself. It occurred to him that Eva Von Stahl might be too proud for that.

“What are you going to do with me?” she finally asked.

“If we were on a battlefield, I suspect that you would be taken out and shot,” he said. Ty didn’t know if that was true or not, but the threat had a satisfying ring. At the moment, he would have been happy to pull the trigger himself. Then he had a sudden inspiration as they reached the hotel bar, where Crandall and Kit were still waiting. “Since we’re not in the middle of a battle, we can’t shoot you. But there is someone who might do the job for us. His name is Bruno Hess. He’s a German sniper and he’s watching the hotel from the woods. By any chance, do you know him?”

In Eva’s eyes, Ty thought he saw a flicker of fear.

Eva wondered if each breath she took might just be her last. The thought made every lungful of the cold, dry air seem that much sweeter.

“Keep up,” grumbled the man just ahead of her. He was breaking a trail through the snow on his cross-country skis. If he was nervous about being used as bait, he didn’t show it.

Eva found it was easy enough to follow the ruts cuts by Sergeant Crandall’s skis. It was just that she didn’t want to. If Ty was right, then Bruno Hess was hidden somewhere in the winter woods. Would Hess recognize her? Eva doubted it. She wore tinted goggles against the snow glare and her fur coat had been swapped for the battered leather bomber jacket Ty had been wearing. It was warm enough, so that wasn’t why she shivered. Up ahead, Crandall wore a camel’s hair coat and the sort of campaign hat that Ike was often photographed wearing. His ears must be freezing, she thought, but they jutted from his head in a convincingly familiar way. She and the sergeant were bait, stand-ins for Ike and Mamie Eisenhower. Desperately, she wondered how she might signal Hess not to shoot. The thought of those ice-blue eyes peering at her through a rifle scope made Eva shiver all over again.

“This is suicide,” she complained. “You must know that you are being used as a target.”

“Lady, I do what I’m told,” Crandall said without breaking his rhythm. “I suggest you do the same. You’re in enough trouble as it is. Now shut up and keep up.”

Eva forced her arms and legs to keep pumping. The skis slid through the powdery snow with a rhythmic swishing sound. One thought kept her going, which was that if she survived this and ever encountered Petra again, she would take a fireplace poker to the girl once more, and next time she would not be so gentle. As the resort fell further away and they crossed the open field, Eva felt like a swimmer being swept far from shore by a rip tide.

Up ahead, Sergeant Crandall coasted to a stop. Eva skied up next to him. He had worked up a sweat despite the cold and he smelled like coffee and stale bourbon. He took off his gloves, then shook a cigarette out of a pack and offered her one.

“What are you doing?”

“Ike smokes four packs a day and Mamie spends all her time playing bridge,” Crandall said. “How hard do you think they would ski? Like the captain said, act natural.”

Crandall cupped his hand to shelter the flame of his lighter. He took a deep breath and exhaled smoke through his nostrils. All of a sudden, Eva desperately wanted a cigarette and asked him for one. Her hand shook when she lifted it for Crandall to light.

“Does this look natural?” she asked, struggling to hold the lighter steady.

“Honey, it ain’t about what I think,” he said. “It’s all about convincing the man with the rifle.”

Ty took the stairs to the third floor two at a time. He needed to tell Ike that there had been a security breach; unfortunately, it was Ty himself who had enabled it by his association with Eva Von Stahl. He would just have to throw himself on the general’s mercy. In his pocket he carried the somewhat charred maps and notes that Eisenhower himself had made regarding Operation Overlord. It was a stroke of good luck that Petra had come to let him know what her mistress was stealing. If Eva had escaped with the documents, the entire Allied invasion of Europe might have been compromised. Nonetheless, Ty was not looking forward to telling Ike that a German spy had almost made off with a rough draft of the invasion plans.

He thought about Eva, out there in the snow, standing in as a double for Mamie Eisenhower. There was some danger that if the assassin was in the woods that she might be shot. The way Ty felt at the moment, he wouldn’t have minded. Not only had he been betrayed but he had been made a fool of as well. Eva had used him and he had blindly allowed himself to be led by certain parts of his anatomy. He might not have been the first guy that had ever happened to, but Ty was supposed to be smarter than that. Just thinking about it now made his face burn red.