Free The Second Objective by Mark Frost Page B

floor of the balcony, panting like a puppy, slick with sweat.
    “Fifteen minutes,” he said, and walked out of the room.

    By six o’clock that night the urge to confess had spread through the 724th like old-time religion. Whenever Earl Grannit returned to the ballroom, he found more willing volunteers to take upstairs. He’d seen this before, panic spreading through a pack of crooks on some silent animal wavelength. By mid afternoon, he no longer needed to speak to suspects personally and handed them off to teams of junior CID officers like Ole Carlson, who needed the experience. As confessions piled up on their desks, the Army Intelligence men in charge felt as if they’d witnessed Grannit turn water into wine.
    The CID brass organized dinner for their investigators that night in the hotel’s private dining room. Grannit made it clear he didn’t want anybody making too big a deal, but there was no doubt about who they were celebrating. CID had cracked its biggest case of the war, and Earl Grannit made it happen.
    During the main course, a radio message came into the communications center downstairs for CID’s commanding officer. Three GIs from the 394th stationed at a checkpoint outside a small village called Elsenborn fifteen miles due east had gone AWOL overnight. Local MPs were on their way to investigate, so the radio operator didn’t feel it was important enough to interrupt the dinner.
    An hour later, the radio man burst into the room during coffee and dessert with a second dispatch: The missing men’s bodies had been found in the woods a mile outside of town.

 

    9

    The Road to the Meuse, Belgium
    DECEMBER 15, 7:00 A.M.

    T he three other commando teams working under Erich Von Leinsdorf crossed into Belgium before midnight and passed through American lines without incident. Gerhard Bremer’s team spent the night with a family of German sympathizers in the town of St. Jacques. American deserter William Sharper’s team, posing as a forward recon unit for Fifth Army, reached their safe house in Ligneuville. Karl Schmidt’s team lost their way, fell in behind a convoy of American vehicles heading west, then peeled off after midnight and spent the remainder of the night hidden in a forest. All three teams were up and on the road, heading west, before first light.
    Von Leinsdorf’s squad spent the night on the floor in the parlor of Frau Escher’s apartment over her butcher shop in Waimes. Bernie Oster drifted between sleep and consciousness, disturbed by a persistent vision of their fleshy hostess storming into the room with her meat cleaver while they slept. Every time a floorboard groaned, a blast of adrenaline went off in his gut like a firecracker. By five A.M. Bernie couldn’t lie still any longer and went downstairs to piss.
    The woman was already working at the bench in the shop’s back room. He could see her distorted shadow splashed against the far wall and heard the rough rasp of a bone cutter. He stepped quietly outside into the frigid morning air, his feet crunching on a crust of muddy frost. Their jeep sat just around the corner. The International Highway stretched out in front of him. The impulse to bolt hit him so hard he couldn’t catch his breath.
    But which way should he run? Back toward the German line, into the teeth of the offensive that was about to be unleashed? Not as long as Erich Von Leinsdorf had access to a radio; they’d shoot him as a deserter, or take him for a GI and kill him on sight. Maybe if he lay low for a day and changed into civilian clothes, he could slip across once the attack began. But the odds of making his way home to Frankfurt without papers or travel passes were low. He tried to put the thought from his mind, but after months of Allied carpet bombing, for all he knew his parents were already dead.
    No, he should head deeper behind the American line, try to hook up with one of their units, and tell them the Krauts were about to invade. Would they buy it?