The Second Objective

by Mark Frost

  “When did they operate?”

  “Last night when he came in.”

  “But I just admitted him fifteen minutes ago.”

  “What’s the first name?” asked the surgeon, looking at the chart. “We can’t be talking about the same Mallory.”

  “First name’s Vincent,” said Grannit. “Vincent Mallory.”

  “Sergeant Vincent Mallory, that’s him,” said the admitting nurse. “I just took the information off his tags—”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the prep tent.”

  “Show me,” said Grannit.

  They hurried toward the tent, burst through the flaps, and searched down the busy rows, the doctors following.

  “Did he come in alone?” asked Grannit.

  “No, a couple of soldiers brought him in—”

  The admitting nurse pulled back the curtain isolating his cubicle. Gunther Preuss lay on the cot, an IV in his arm, bright red blood sliding from his mouth and nose, his body racked with convulsions.

  The nurse and doctors hurried to the patient’s side, calling for help. Grannit caught movement out of the corner of his eye. An officer in uniform walking against traffic out of the tent at a rapid pace. Grannit took off after him, pulling his Colt, holding it aloft so people would notice.

  “Out of the way!”

  The crowd parted, some hitting the floor in alarm. The officer heard the shouts and, without looking back, sprinted out the front of the tent. Grannit hurdled a cot, bowled over a couple of soldiers, and jammed his way out after him.

  A jeep was pulling out of the parking area, wheels skidding in the mud. Two men on board. Grannit saw the officer he’d followed haul himself into the front seat as it slipped away. The glint of silver bars on his collar. A lieutenant. No stripes on the driver’s jacket, a private.

  Grannit gave chase to the edge of the parking area, aiming the pistol but unable to sight a clear shot. He waved down a motorcycle dispatcher, flashed his badge to the driver, then yanked him off the bike when he slowed and jumped on. Jacking the bike around, he downshifted to gain torque in the mud and slid onto the narrow road heading into Malmédy. He spotted the jeep a quarter of a mile ahead crossing a small bridge into town. Grannit downshifted again and opened the throttle.

  “Keep going,” said Von Leinsdorf to Bernie. “Head southeast.”

  “What happened? Where’s Preuss?”

  “Just do as I tell you,” said Von Leinsdorf, glancing behind them.

  Bernie whipped the jeep around the town center, a welter of narrow, ancient streets, avoiding collisions, wheeling around obstacles, ignoring traffic signs. The sidewalks were packed with citizens carrying suitcases and bags, pushing carts full of possessions, fleeing from the German advance. Twice he narrowly missed civilians who darted suddenly into the street, one carrying a bright green parrot in a cage. As they reached a narrow bridge leading out of town, they came face-to-face with an American half-track headed the other way. Bernie steered to the right without slowing and accelerated past it, only inches to spare, the jeep’s right fender sending up sparks as it scraped against the stone wall.

  Behind them, Grannit dodged through oncoming traffic, weaving around slower cars and trucks. Crossing the first bridge into town, he veered into an intersection and nearly collided with a stalled wagon. Turning hard right, he jumped the bike up onto a sidewalk, leaned on the horn, and shouted for people to clear out of his way. He skirted a group of Allied soldiers organizing a defense along the town’s eastern perimeter on the near side of a second bridge. Halfway across the bridge, he slammed on the brakes when a column of American vehicles barreled into the village. Grannit stood up on the bike, looked ahead, and caught sight of the jeep across the bridge, moving down a long straightaway into the country. Some MPs jumped out of a jeep to set up a roadblock and direct traffic. Grannit shouted at them, showed him his badge.

  “Clear this bridge, god damn it!”

  The MPs waded into traffic and cleared a path for him. Soldiers riding into the village shouted at Grannit that he didn’t want to head that way. Paratroopers had taken the towns to the east, and columns of panzers were coming up behind them.

  As their jeep cleared the outskirts of town, Bernie steered onto the shoulder. American military vehicles crowded the westbound side of the road, carrying soldiers on hoods of jeeps and hanging off the sides of trucks. The men wore the haunted look of battle fatigue and many were wounded. Bernie could hear the boom of artillery and the rattle of small arms to the east. Von Leinsdorf lit a cigarette and couldn’t keep a smile off his face.

  “Quite a sight, Brooklyn,” said Von Leinsdorf. “Your amateur American Army. What did I tell you? Retreat’s too dignified a word—they’re bugging out after only four hours.”

  Bernie didn’t respond, alarmed by an image he was picking up in the rearview mirror.

  The moment the MPs opened a path, Grannit muscled the bike across the bridge, accelerating through the gearbox as he roared past the retreating American column. He caught sight of the jeep again, at the top of a rise less than a mile ahead, where the road headed into a stretch of gently rolling hills. He tried to coax more speed out of the jeep as they crested another hill.

  “Somebody’s following us,” he said.

  Von Leinsdorf looked back and saw the motorcycle clear the hill behind them. He picked up his rifle. When they reached the top of the next rise, the bike had closed the gap to less than half a mile.

  “Who is it?” asked Bernie.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we forgot to pay our bill at the hospital,” said Von Leinsdorf, screwing a telescopic sight onto the rifle. “Pull over at the bottom of the next hill.”

  When they reached the base of the hill, Bernie pulled off the road onto a hidden drive that led to a farm house in a stand of pines. Once they were out of sight, he cut the engine. Dust settled. Over the country silence, they could hear the buzz of the approaching motorcycle. Von Leinsdorf steadied the barrel of the rifle on the back of the windscreen and waited. The buzz grew louder. He looked down the sight, settling the crosshairs on the peak of the hill.

  Bernie swiveled around when he heard a clatter of breaking dishes from inside the farm house. The face of a GI appeared in a window, then the door swung open; a group of six young soldiers hurried toward them.

  “Jesus Christ, get out of sight,” said one of them. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Von Leinsdorf took his eye off the sight and looked over, annoyed.

  “They’re right on top of us, get out of sight!”

  A rumble shook the earth, along with it the high-pitched whine of steel grating on steel. On the far side of the woods to the east three Panther tanks appeared and wheeled to a stop on the summit of the next hill, straddling the road. Walking alongside and behind them, in skirmish formation, were a column of black-jacketed soldiers. On their collars Bernie saw the double-lightning insignia of the SS Panzergrenadiers.

  Aboard the bike, Grannit hit the top of the incoming hill and skidded to a halt when he saw the tanks astride the next rise, a quarter of a mile in front of him. Behind them, stretching as far as he could see, was a solid column of soldiers, mounted artillery, and half-tracks filled with infantry. In a hollow below and to the right he spotted the jeep he’d been chasing. A squad of GIs was trotting toward it from a nearby stone farm house.

  Von Leinsdorf found Earl Grannit in his sights as he crested the hill, and nestled him right in the center of the crosshairs. As he was about to fire, Bernie grabbed the barrel, yanking it off target.

  “I think that’s one of ours, Lieutenant,” he said, for the benefit of the approaching GIs.

  Von Leinsdorf glared at him but didn’t respond. Bernie refused to let go of the rifle.

  “You don’t want the Krauts to know we’re down here, do you?”

  The soldiers from the farm house reached the side of their jeep. They were all Bernie’s age or younger, frightened and confused.

  �
��You got to get us out of here,” one of them said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” snapped Von Leinsdorf.

  “Rifle company, 99th Infantry,” said their sergeant. “We were mining a logging road near the Skyline Drive. Krauts started coming out of the woodwork. Our jeep got hit. We’ve been dodging ’em for hours, trying to get back to our line.”

  “They’re all over the fuckin’ place,” said another. “What the hell are we supposed to do, Lieutenant?”

  One of the young Americans, wearing a bandage on a leg wound, started crying. They all looked to Von Leinsdorf for guidance, like a lost pack of Boy Scouts. Von Leinsdorf could barely conceal his disgust.

  “They haven’t spotted us yet,” said Bernie. “Hop on, we’ll make a run for it.”

  The six GIs crowded into the backseat and jumped onto the running boards as Bernie turned the engine over.

  Looking down into the valley, Grannit saw the officer he’d been chasing since the hospital stand up in the jeep and hold up his rifle. The man met his eye and waved jauntily, just as the jeep turned and headed onto a dirt road behind the farm house.

  As Grannit turned back to the hill, a turret on one of the tanks turned in his direction. He spun the bike around and accelerated down the hill back toward Malmédy, just as the first tank round came whistling over his head and exploded off to the side of the road.

  11

  67th Evacuation Hospital

  DECEMBER 16, NOON

  The naked body of Gunther Preuss lay on a stainless steel countertop behind curtains near the back of the surgery tent, a makeshift morgue. Vincent Mallory’s corpse, already examined, lay on a second counter, covered with a bloodstained sheet. Earl Grannit had persuaded the head surgeon he’d spoken with earlier to examine both men’s bodies. While the doctor opened them up, Grannit sat off to the side and lit a cigar to kill the stench, a technique he’d learned during visits to the New York City morgue.

  After making his way back to the hospital, Grannit had sought out a senior combat officer and given him a detailed report about the German battalion he’d seen on the road east of Malmédy. Returning to his own assignment, he found that Ole had secured the scene, quarantined evidence before it got tossed, and collected statements from witnesses. Among the evidence, Grannit took particular interest in the two plastic IV bags. Both had been cut open in identical fashion.

  The doctor called Grannit over and pointed out unnaturally bright pink mucous membranes lining the man’s exposed throat and lungs. Even over the cigar, Grannit noticed a faint odor of bitter almonds emanating from the body.

  “They were both poisoned,” said the doctor. “Some toxin caused the hemorrhaging that destroyed all this soft tissue.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  “Judging from the smell, if I recall my rudimentary chemistry correctly, hydrocyanic acid. Prussic or cyanide.”

  “Something you could pour into an IV bag,” said Grannit.

  “Comes in liquid form. It’s a clear substance, so nobody’d notice.”

  “How big a dose?”

  “Wouldn’t take more than a few drops—don’t get too close with that cigar smoke, Lieutenant, or you’re gonna get a nasty taste in your mouth; that stuff forms a bad compound with tobacco.”

  Grannit stood back. “You keep that here in the hospital?”

  “No, we do not, sir.” The doctor snapped off his gloves and looked at him sharply. “You’re a cop, aren’t you? Back home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You like to tell me what’s going on? We don’t have enough carnage, some sick son of a bitch has to come into my hospital and kill wounded soldiers? Why in the hell should that happen?”

  “I’ll have to get back to you.”

  “I’m going back to work,” said the surgeon. “They’re saying we got big trouble out there. That what you saw?”

  “Trouble doesn’t cover it.”

  “There’s talk we might have to pull out of here, if the damn army doesn’t chase its tail around before they’re on top of us. My staff can’t save lives in a German prison camp.”

  The doctor left him alone with the bodies. Grannit set the cigar down and took a close look at the false Vincent Mallory. A second soldier with no ID killed in two days. Wearing a captain’s bars. Soft hands, a wedding ring. A new pair of boots, taken off one of the dead GIs at the checkpoint.

  This was that second officer the MP spotted in the jeep at Elsenborn.

  So why’d you kill this one, Lieutenant? He gets tagged along the way to wherever you’re going, all of a sudden he’s expendable, too? A superior officer? This wasn’t a fatal wound like your other man—buckshot in his shoulder and neck—but still you took him out.

  Then why run the risk of taking him to a hospital? If you wanted him dead, why bring him here when you could just shoot him by the side of the road?

  Unless you were still after the real Mallory. Is he what brought you here, you needed to finish the job? But how could you have known he survived Elsenborn? The way you left him, what were his chances? And why would you give this other man of yours his tags unless you thought the real Mallory was dead?

  Because the sergeant’s surviving was a loose end you didn’t realize you’d left hanging until you got here, when your friend checked in wearing Mallory’s tags. Once you were inside, you found this out and killed them both.

  He could leave the why for later. Grannit had seen the man who’d done this. The blond lieutenant. Standing in that jeep, waving at him.

  Five murders in two days. A killer with the nerve to cut open Mallory’s IV and pour that poison into him, then do the same to his own man on his way out before Mallory was even dead.

  Grannit’s eye was drawn to a magnifier mounted on a stand attached to the autopsy table, and he remembered the photograph he’d found in the other man’s boot. That led him back to this man’s boots, sitting under the table. He searched through them, found nothing inside; then, following a hunch, he pulled his knife and pried away at the heels.

  The right heel came away in his hand. Hidden inside he found a folded piece of paper. On it was a hand-drawn map of a river and a bridge crossing, detailing access roads on both sides and defensive emplacements. A few words had been scribbled hastily in the margins, but Grannit couldn’t make them out. Arrows pointed to two other bridges, on either side, that were only sketched in, without detail.

  Ole Carlson hurried into the tent, excited, holding up a plastic bag. “It took some doing but I found ’em, Earl. These are the bullets from Mallory. The real Mallory, not the fake Mallory.”

  “I get it, Ole.”

  Carlson’s eyes settled at the body on the table and turned away as if he’d been hit in the stomach, blood draining from his face. He opened his eyes and was looking straight down at Mallory on the other table. “Oh Lord.”

  “You all right there, Ole?”

  “Not so good, actually.”

  “Close your eyes and breathe.”

  “I would, but the smell is sort of a problem.”

  “Can’t help you there,” said Grannit.

  Grannit put the spent shells under the magnifier. One was badly damaged, little more than a shapeless lump, probably the shot that shattered Mallory’s jaw. The others were pistol rounds, and at first glance he knew they were .45s from a Colt, a U.S. officer’s sidearm. But they also bore peculiar rifling, as if they’d passed down an unusually long barrel.

  “They pulled some buckshot from the fake Mallory there,” said Carlson, trying not to retch, keeping his eyes off the bodies. “Kind of strange, isn’t it? Who the heck is using shotguns out there? It ain’t duck season, I know that much. Dang, that smell could take down a bull.”

  “You want a cigar or something?”

  “No, thanks, a cigar would definitely make me puke.”

  Grannit pulled out the photograph he’d found on the first John Doe and held it under the magnifier.

  “Anyway, I finally got thro
ugh to Twelfth Army,” said Carlson. “The phone lines are down; they think that’s the Krauts’ doing, so I got through to Twelfth Army dispatch on the radio. Krauts are coming at ’em down there, too—”

  “Did you ask about the patrol?”

  “Yeah. The Twelfth has no record of any patrol in this sector answering that description.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” said Grannit.

  “What is it?”

  Grannit waved Carlson over to look at the photograph of the woman at the seaside scene under the magnifier.

  Among the structures lining the dock behind her was a civic office building, probably the port’s customs house. Carved into the stone entablature over its entrance, in the center of a laurel wreath clutched in the talons of the German imperial eagle, was an elaborate swastika.

  “Because they’re Krauts,” said Grannit.

  12

  Versailles, France

  DECEMBER 16, 3:00 P.M.

  Dwight Eisenhower was nursing a same-day champagne hangover. His valet, an ex-bellhop named Mickey McKeough, had married his Women’s Army Corps sergeant girlfriend that morning in the gilded Louis XIV chapel of the Trianon Palace Hotel on the grounds of the Versailles compound. Eisenhower told a friend that the diminutive bride and groom looked cute enough to decorate the top of their own cake. The reception went into the early afternoon, and when the bubbly ran out they dipped into the general’s private wine cellar. With only nine days left until Christmas and the front firmly in Allied control, few of the overworked staff at Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces needed an excuse to let off steam, but wishing Mickey and his wife well was better than most.

  General Eisenhower had a more personal reason for indulging himself. A cable had arrived that morning informing him that President Roosevelt had placed his name in nomination before Congress for the post of General of the Army. This new rank would bring with it a fifth star and sole authority over the Allies’ entire armed forces in Europe. That much power had not been conferred on one soldier since the First World War. After sixteen years as a desk-bound major, Eisenhower had risen from lieutenant colonel to the army’s highest rank in a little over three years. The affable fifty-four-year-old Kansan had planned a private dinner that night to celebrate with some drinking buddies, among them one of his best friends and colleagues, General Omar Bradley. Bradley had arranged for a bushel of Ike’s favorite oysters to be flown in from the Normandy coast. Given their recent successes in the field, for the first time in two years, Eisenhower felt he could allow the weight of the war to slip slightly off his shoulders.