“Now you tell me what the fuck is going on,” said Eddie. “Or you’re not leaving this car.”
“Eddie, Eddie, I thought we understood each other.
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!”