The Second Objective (40 page)

36

The Trianon Palace, Versailles

DECEMBER 22, 4:30
A.M.

G
eneral 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.

After the brutality and chaos of the last week, his mind resonated in harmony. The secret meaning he had detected the day before hidden in the design of the Parisian boulevards broke through here in explicit expression. The landscape’s spiritual precision meshed in his mind with the sure prospect of completing the mission he’d been given, and he knew in that moment that fate would guide him to the finish.

It would happen here, within sight of the palace where they’d signed the treaty that began Germany’s long, slow humiliation at the hands of the Allies a quarter of a century before, setting in motion the chain of disasters that had brought him to this place and time. The insult would be answered at its source. Meaning and culmination merged in him as one, even in the same breath, an exaltation that caused his soul to soar.

The panzers would march on Antwerp. He would complete the Second Objective. The death of the American commander would fatally split the Allied alliance.

He continued on to the northern shore of the canal. Safely inside the cover of the tree line, he stopped and opened the attaché case. The ID cards he carried would get him close enough to the building to detonate the explosive device inside, but he was prepared if a better opportunity arose. He quickly screwed a wooden stock to the handle of the machine pistol and then attached the silencer and scope to the barrel. The assembled gun slid into the pocket he’d sewn inside the front left flap of his overcoat. He closed the coat, picked up the case, and continued walking.

Bernie tried to keep Grannit in sight before him as they sprinted through the snowbound gardens, past emptied round ponds and statuary and strange conical trees, down broad steps and around a frozen fountain. A long avenue opened up straight ahead of them leading to what looked like a frozen canal that extended beyond the end of the lane as far as the eye could see. They covered the ground between a dense narrowing of trees to another larger, empty circular pool. Startling sculpted figures, a godlike creature being drawn by wild horses, burst out of the snow in its center. On the far side of the pool, they reached the edge of the canal and Grannit stopped for a moment.

“Where’s the Trianon?” he asked as Bernie caught up to him.

Bernie quickly placed them on the map, found the Trianon Palace, then pointed toward the first of two diagonal lanes branching away from the canal to the right at a forty-five-degree angle.

“That way. About half a mile.”

Grannit looked back in the direction where they’d seen the explosion, calculating distances and times. He looked straight down the canal, then pulled a small pair of field glasses from his pocket and pointed them in that direction.

A single set of footprints in the pristine snow, crossing the canal.

“Get there as fast as you can,” he said. “Tell them he’s coming. Go on!”

Grannit pulled his pistol and started toward the second diagonal path that ran closer to the canal. Bernie kept pace with him until the paths diverged, and he took the one bearing right. They ran at the same pace, Bernie glancing to his left, watching Grannit until the bare trees between them grew thick enough to obscure his view. Bernie slipped once on a patch of ice below the snow, and when he got back on his feet Grannit had disappeared.

Grannit sprinted down the symmetrical pathway, chuffing for breath, his lungs burning in the frigid air. He stopped briefly when it intersected with another diagonal that angled back toward the center of the water. He looked both ways, then pressed forward, the northern terminus of the crossbar of the Great Canal coming into sight at the end of the path.

Von Leinsdorf stopped in the woods just short of the water’s northern shore. Fifty yards beyond the end of the canal a series of empty fountains cut into the slope of a gentle rise, framed on either side by curved staircases that led to a flat terrace and gardens on the upper level behind the Trianon. A solitary figure was walking through the snow in the formal gardens on that terrace, moving in and out of sight behind an intermittent line of trees and high hedges. Von Leinsdorf dropped his attaché case and pulled the rifle from the slot in his coat. Keeping the man in view, he walked steadily forward into a small grove of conical evergreens, dropped to one knee, and focused down the barrel through the telescopic sight.

The figure came into focus, his face turned away. A middle-aged man wearing an American officer’s cap, walking with a slight limp.

Grannit sprinted to the end of the diagonal pathway, where it reached the canal, saw the line of footprints continuing to the north, then spotted a leather case in the snow beside them twenty yards to his right. He hurried to it, opened the case, glanced inside, and knew who had brought it here. Movement against the white snowfield drew his eyes farther to the right.

A soldier in an overcoat kneeling in a nearby thicket held a rifle, pointed at the northern terrace.

The officer on the terrace turned, and Von Leinsdorf glimpsed Eisenhower’s face. As he squeezed the trigger and heard the muffled snort of the silencer, he felt a sharp slap on the back of his left thigh and a jolt of searing pain rocked him forward. His bullet fired off-line, kicking snow off a branch above and to the right of the general. In that frozen moment, as a gunshot cracked the clear cold air, Von Leinsdorf realized he’d been shot from behind. He spun around onto his back, saw a man advancing toward him, pistol in hand, and fired the rifle at him. The shot caught the man between the neck and right shoulder and punched him off his feet.

Bernie had nearly reached the end of the path to the Trianon Palace, the barbed wire and defensive gun emplacements around the building in his sight, when he heard the single shot ring out through the trees in the distance to his left. He stopped and looked both ways, then turned to his left, the direction Grannit had gone, and kept running.

When Von Leinsdorf looked back up at the terrace, the general was out of sight behind the line of hedges. Von Leinsdorf limped out of the trees toward the staircases and fountains beyond the canal. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear shouts coming from the terrace above. Looking to his left, he noticed a gap in the back of the empty fountain complex and remembered something pleasing from his study of the maps.

Grannit pulled himself to his feet. His right arm hung uselessly at his side, the collarbone shattered, pain exploding along the arm, through the shoulder, and up into his neck. He bent down awkwardly to pick up his gun with his left hand and staggered after Von Leinsdorf, following a trail of blood and footprints in the snow. At the base of the stairs, the trail veered to the left into some empty fountains at the foot of the slope and toward a narrow three-foot gap at the bottom of the back wall, where it met the base of the hill. Grannit advanced to the opening, bent down to look inside, and saw smooth concrete walls below. He stuck the gun in his belt and lowered himself with one hand toward the edge, inched himself back over the lip, and then let go and dropped about four feet, stifling a cry of pain as he landed on a smooth concrete floor.

He had landed in an ancient reservoir below the fountains and terraces, emptied of water. A series of low keystoned arches branched up to form the ceiling from rows of square pillared foundations, stained by ageless watermarks. A distant light source illuminated the symmetrical edges of the pillars as they marched away in both directions. The air felt glacial and stagnant, as if it hadn’t been disturbed in a hundred years. Grannit pulled his gun and stood up, nearly to his full height under the center point of the arches. He listened and heard nothing but a distant, steady drip of water. He saw no movement or shadows in either direction. He set down his gun, switched on the small flashlight and held it between his teeth, then picked up the gun again.

The trail of blood continued ahead of him on the smooth stone floor. The reservoir seemed to have no end, extending into infinite darkness. He advanced slowly, following the blood from pillar to pillar with the light. His right arm felt dead, hanging as if by a string, its every involuntary movement shooting pain out through his upper body that took his breath away. He crept forward, half a step at a time, cautiously approaching the edge of each pillar before inching into the open again.

He heard footsteps moving ahead of him in the dark, then the sound of a scuffle, followed closely by two booming gunshots and a groan. He heard something heavy hit the ground.

“I got him!” he heard an American voice yell. “I got the son of a bitch!”

The fragile beam of the flashlight caught the edge of something moving two pillars ahead. Grannit leaned out, took the light into his good hand, focused it along the trail of blood, and followed it. His eyes blurred, refusing to focus, and he knew he was going into shock.

“Can I get some fucking help down here! He’s still alive, I got him!”

Grannit saw the soles of a man’s boots around the corner of the pillar. He took another step forward and saw the man in the overcoat moaning in pain, writhing on the ground in a spreading pool of blood. An MP stood over Von Leinsdorf, holding his gun pointed down at the body with both hands.

“Anybody there, god damn it! I need help!”

Grannit rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, trying to will them to work. He took the gun back into his left hand, held it along with the light, and stepped forward with the barrel raised. It looked as if Von Leinsdorf had been shot in the face; he was covered in blood, his hands reaching up frantically to his head as he moaned in pain.

“Don’t fucking move again!” said the MP, lowering the gun at him.

“Where’d you hit him?” asked Grannit.

“Head and neck, I think. I had patrol down here,” said the MP. He pointed deeper into the darkness. “There’s a door connects to the basement inside. I heard the shot outside so I came through. He jumped out at me; I was lucky I got some shots off.”

“Is the general all right?” asked Grannit.