June 16, 1945

Alice looked down at the papers shuffled her way. She stood in a room filled with other members of intelligence as well as three officers from the USSR. Sink and Strayer had gathered everyone together to do some discussion on what they felt would be a good way to maintain order in occupied Austria. She'd said her piece, reminding everyone of how the collapsed economy in Germany after the Great War had led to the Nazi regime. Not many had taken to that kindly, so she'd sat back and kept her mouth shut.

They didn't want her opinions, really. Least of all the three Soviets. Not that she could really blame them; her name was enough to tell them she was German. On the bright side, they hadn't been bothered by her sex. One of them had even mentioned a few women in the context of the Soviet military.

So as they droned on, Nixon currently talking to one of the three Soviet men with Sink, Alice just sorted papers. She grabbed a file from the table and moved off to the side. This one was in German with only loose English translations. Mostly the translations were Russian. As she half-listened to Strayer and another Soviet arguing over Berlin like dogs over table scraps, she flipped open the file.

A photo had been paperclipped to the dossier. Becker, Franz. Rank of Oberstleutnant. Dark hair, greying. Large build. Fifty-seven years old. Commandant.

She read through the German report. With each sentence, she felt herself trembling more and more. Commandant. The man had been in charge of a labor camp in southern Germany. A labor camp just like Kaufering. Her grip on the file tightened. A note in Russian had been scribbled at the bottom.

Glancing up, Alice caught sight of the last of the three Russians. He stood by the table, reading through other files. She picked her over.

"Could you translate this, please?" she asked him. "Unfortunately Russian is not one of the languages I'm familiar with."

As he turned towards her with a small smile, he looked from her face to the document. He nodded. "It's a location. About ten miles East of here, up the mountain, a small house. One of our informants believes it may be this man." He pointed to the picture. "We've not been able to confirm. But I believe it is true."

Alice stared from him, to the black and white photo on the page. When he pointed out the location on a map, Alice nodded. Ten miles east. A commandant of a camp that had been built to eradicate her people lived quietly in a cottage ten miles east. With all her willpower, Alice forced herself to stop visibly shaking. She thanked him.

She moved away. Shutting the folder, she lay it back down on the table. Sink stood to the side. With a grimace, Alice went over to him. "Sir?"

"What do you need, Lieutenant?" he asked.

She sighed. "Sir I'm feeling a bit under the weather. May I be excused from the rest of this meeting?"

Sink looked at her with pity. "Of course. Go find one of the docs."

"Thank you."

At the thought of the commandant living in peace while her sister wasted away from labor and disease and starvation for two years, Alice wanted to throw up. She couldn't decide what she felt more: anger, or disgust. When she grabbed her Ike jacket off the back of a chair, Nixon caught her eye. She couldn't even fake a smile. Instead, she just nodded to him and ducked out of the room through the glass-paned doors.

He didn't deserve the live. He didn't deserve to breathe while the men and women in his camp had been buried together as rotted corpses in mass graves, or burned until nothing remained to point to and identify. Fury coursed through her. She rushed out of the building.

Alice's boots slammed against the concrete as she started down the stairs to the street. A few men saluted her as she hurried past. Alice missed them. She knew what she had to do. She knew what to be done. And she knew who would be happy to do it, too.

Grant, Bull, and Johnny were sitting around in the lounge of Easy's hotel playing cards when she burst in through the doors. They looked over, snickering at something. When they saw her they stopped.

"Where's Liebgott?" she demanded.

Johnny shrugged. He turned to the other two. Grant gestured down the hall. "I think he was grabbing lunch. What's up?"

"Nothing you need to concern yourself with," she assured him. Without waiting to invite more questions, she hurried off. A large kitchen and dining room sat off the main level. When she moved inside, she found Liebgott and Skinny chatting over food, while Webster stood behind them making his own. "Lieb, come here."

He glanced up at her harsh tone in surprise. But He did as asked. When they stood in a small side room, she looked at him. "I have a job for you."

"Whatever you need, as always," he joked.

"I have a lead on a camp commandant not far from here from one of the Soviet officers," she told him. "I want you to take two men, people who will follow your orders. I don't care if they listen to you because they like you, or because they have to. Find the man, and execute him for crimes against humanity."

Liebgott stared at her in surprise. When she didn't say anything else, he nodded. "Where's the bastard living?"

"I wrote the coordinates here. Ten miles east, up the road into the mountain. Take a right at the fifth junction, it'll bring you to a small house." Alice handed him a small piece of paper.

He smirked. "He won't be livin' there for much longer, I can tell you that."

"That's what I want to hear," she agreed. "Get it done, quietly."

"Whatever you say, Lieutenant."

She watched him go back into the kitchen area. The nausea returned. For a brief moment, the fact that maybe this man wasn't the suspect she'd decided he was entered mind. Had she just ordered the execution of an innocent man? But then her chest tightened. No, the Soviet officer had been convinced. It was. And Alice knew she'd never be able to sleep again if she let him live.

Alice refused to consider that ordering his death may mean she never slept again. They were at war. The treaty may have been signed, but the punishments hadn't been doled out. And after several hours of listening to political posturing and lack of actual work, she knew she did what she had to do. Or at least, that's what she told herself.

And she kept telling herself that for hours.

George and Malarkey found her nursing her third glass of wine outside a cafe in town at around 1600 hours. The two of them were strolling by, laughing. Catching sight of her, they hurried over.

"What's new?" George asked, pulling a chair over to put his feet up, and plopping down on another. "You looked pissed."

"Do I?" she snarked. "Go away."

Malarkey snorted. "George, don't piss her off further."

"Ah, that's my job though," he said. Leaning forward, he grabbed her wine glass and finished it off.

Alice gaped at him. "Hey! What the fuck, George!"

"Something tells me you didn't need any more," he pointed out. As his teasing turned serious, he put the glass back down and wiped his lips. "If you're angry enough to finish three glasses of wine before dinner, you need to get cut off right now."

She didn't have a response. Turning from him to Malarkey, she wanted nothing more than to curse them out and go milk her anger in solitude. She groaned. "What do you two want."

"Did you hear that Major Winters got denied his transfer?" George asked.

Alice turned to him in surprise. "What?"

"Yeah, I was up at HQ. Caught him talking to Speirs and Nixon about it," he said. "That's when Webster showed up. He asked somethin' about orders to take out a suspected Nazi."

"Did he now."

George nodded. He passed a cigarette to his left to Malarkey. The latter just watched them chatting, clearly already aware of where George was going with this. With a yawn, George pointed at her. "Just thought I'd give you fair warning that Speirs was a little pissed off that you gave orders to Easy without asking him."

A mix of emotions flooded her. Relief that Dick and Nix wouldn't be jumping right away, anger that they had the nerve to be upset with her, shame for what she'd done, and more anger that she even felt ashamed. When she didn't respond, George sighed.

"I'm going for a walk," she finally told them. Pushing out her chair, Alice stood from the table. "If the officers need me, I'll be back after dinner."

"Going by yourself?" Malarkey asked.

"I'll go-"

"No," she insisted. With a sigh, she shook her head. "No, I'm going alone. I've got a sidearm. I'll be fine." When George looked to object again, she insisted. "No, George."

To her surprise, he agreed after a few moments of hesitation. Alice left them at the cafe. Her mind worked overtime as she wandered through the city and finally out to the lake. A thousand thoughts, all of them culminating in the realization of just how tired she felt.

Her dreams had been filled with death. Some days it was Bastogne, the wet-cold seeping into her clothes, frostbite on her fingers. She could see the stark contrast of red blood against white snow. The screams of artillery and men alike echoed in her ears until she woke in a sweat.

Other times, the bullet wound on her left arm ached. She relived the haze, the smoke and flames and rubble of Eindhoven. The baby crushed beneath the fallen bricks played like a newsreel in her dreams. Her screams mingled with Elsa's own as Alice tried, desperately, to reach her. She never did.

She never reached Bernadette either. She'd never been able to reach her in her dreams in training, and in Austria nothing changed. Except instead of a Nazi putting a bullet in her brain in Paris, the nightmares involved gaunt camp prisoners grabbing at her and dragging her down, and Bernadette along with her.

She thought a lot about Robert, too. The realization that she had let her anger start controlling her, just as she scolded her older brother for time and again in the Maquis, hit her hard. Anger made her reckless and impulsive. She'd yelled at him for that. Now that's what she was doing.

Alice stopped at a small picnic area that had been set up near the lake. The sun had started to set. She'd need to turn around. With a small sigh, Alice sat on a bench and looked out over the lake. Alice stood up after a minute. She walked to the edge and looked down.

Nix said Adelaide was in there somewhere. He said Adelaide hadn't been weak. She sighed again. For a moment, all she wanted was to be Adelaide again. Carefree, happy, worried about her next exam, not about whether or not the choices she made held terrible moral implications. She wanted to go back to when she and Juliette and Genevieve had worried more over what dress to wear to a party, not if the newspaper they'd written held enough anti-propaganda to be effective.

The sun had started to set. She turned from her reflection. Every single one of her friends would probably kill her if she stayed out too long after dark. So she started back to the resort.

Author's Note:

There will be a second chapter tonight. Originally they were combined, by the word count was getting way too high.