The Second Objective

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 stu

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 Gra

“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.”

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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!”

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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.

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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 Gra

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.

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