by David Healey
From the corner of his eye, he saw that Jolie had stumbled, and he reached out to take her by the elbow. "Come on!"
Bullets whistled past his ear. Damn! How far was it to the next gap in the hedge? It was their only hope.
Then a blast from behind threw them both to the road, their momentum leaving Cole and Jolie in a tangle of arms and legs.
He thought the tank had fired and was surprised to see that it was now a smoking ruin behind them—a little too close behind them.
"Mon dieu!" Jolie said in awe. "How is this possible?"
They looked up at the sound of someone cackling. To Cole, it sounded like insane laughter. There were a few larger trees making their way up through the hedges, and in one of these sat a British paratrooper straddling a limb with his feet dangling down, like he was riding a rail. He was holding the smoking, empty tube of an M1A1 bazooka.
"Got 'em, by God!" he yelled. "Sent ‘em a present right down the rabbit hole, ha, ha!”
The soldier climbed down and kneeled with the bazooka over one shoulder, then nodded at a bazooka rocket propped up nearby. “I found this thing by the side of the road and thought I’d put it to good use. Lend a hand, mate, and load me up. It's the least you can do, considering I just saved your Yankee arse."
Cole fed the shell into the rear of the tube, hooked the fuse wire to the launcher, and tapped the Brit on the shoulder.
"You best look out," Cole told him. "There's a sniper in the church steeple."
"Not anymore," the Brit said, and fired at the church. The top of the steeple exploded, spewing stone and smoke, and through it all came the sharp gong of the church bell. "Now that's how to make short work of a Jerry sniper."
Having tossed down the empty bazooka tube, the British soldier got to his feet. By now, the scattered sniper squad had regrouped. Meacham had been nicked in the leg by a machine gun bullet, and came up limping, but Lieutenant Mulholland and Vaccaro had made it through unscathed.
"Private James Neville, British Sixth Airborne Division," he said, shaking hands all the way around, as if they were at a pub, rather than in the middle of a road in war-torn Normandy. "What you'll find with your Tiger tanks is that they are tough as a nut to crack, except from above, which is where the Nazis made the armor plating thinner to save on weight. Hit ‘em there and it’s like a good, swift kick in the bollocks. Of course, it’s even better if the Jerries have the top open, ha, ha!"
They gazed in wonder at the burning wreck of the Tiger. No one had come climbing out right after the tank was hit, and judging from the spreading flames, they wouldn't be getting out now.
"We were goners," Lieutenant Mulholland said. "We can't thank you enough."
"I think he got the sniper as well," Meacham said. "I haven't heard any more shots from the steeple."
"We'd better investigate," Lieutenant Mulholland said. "It's our job to eliminate snipers, and if he's not dead, we can't leave him in place to shoot the hell out of the next unit to come down this road."
"Mind if I tag along?" the Brit said.
"Suit yourself," the lieutenant said. "Where's your unit?"
"Scattered between the coast and Paris, I'd wager," Neville said. "The drop yesterday morning was something of a TARFU."
"What's that?" the lieutenant asked.
"Totally and Royally Fucked Up," Neville explained. "It's like your SNAFU but in our own special British way."
"Good to know," Mulholland said. "Now let's go see if you fixed that Nazi's wagon."
CHAPTER 12
The snipers edged their way past the burning hulk of the German tank, which popped now with exploding rounds like a Fourth of July celebration and smelled disconcertingly like a barbecue, then headed toward the steeple. The road was like the floor of a slaughterhouse with bodies scattered about. The tank tracks had squashed some of the remains into jelly, oozing now into the thick French mud.
The farm boy, Meacham, stopped, put his hands on his knees, and began to vomit.
"That poor chap has got it right," the Brit said. "It's bloody awful, is what it is."
The next landmark they passed was the still-burning wreckage of the Sherman tank. From there, they moved cautiously, just in case the German sniper was still in residence. But the tower had been quiet since the Brit had fired the bazooka at it.
"I think you cooked that Kraut," Vaccaro said.
"We'll see."
They moved on toward the church, spreading out and running one by one from shrubs or whatever cover presented itself. Still, there was no sign of life in the steeple. The bazooka blast, and before that the glancing shot from the Sherman, had done little visible damage to the church tower aside from stripping off the plaster veneer. The stone walls beneath still appeared sound. Built to last centuries, the steeple was indeed largely unscathed.
They crept cautiously toward the church itself, but there was still no sign of Germans.
“Cole and Vaccaro, go check it out,” the lieutenant said.
The two men approached the doorway, but paused just outside. “I wonder if there’s anybody still in there,” Cole said.
“We’ll just have to put the tip in and see how it feels,” Vaccaro suggested. “I know it always worked with my girlfriend.”
“Well, I ain’t your girlfriend, and thank God for that. You want to flip a coin?”
“Nah, I got this one.” With that, Vaccaro took a quick peek inside. “Nobody.”
Both men entered, soon followed by Mulholland and Meacham. The lieutenant started toward the stairs that led up into the tower, his .45 out and the sniper rifle slung over his shoulder. "Cole, you come with me. We'll go take a look up top. The rest of you stay here. If there's a German up there still, we don't need him tossing down a grenade and wiping out the whole squad. He could do that even if he's wounded."
Peering up into the gloom of the stairway, Lieutenant Mulholland went up one step, and then another, making his way slowly.
Cole followed, his rifle at his shoulder, ready to fire. Gradually, ready at any moment for a German baton grenade to come bouncing down the steps or for a burst of gunfire from above, they wound their way up the stairs.
The view from the top of the bell tower was amazing. They could see the distant, deep blue of the English channel, and around them was spread the French countryside, the fields dotted with dirt lanes, meandering rivers and small villages. Everywhere they looked, American and Allied troopers were moving along the lanes or across the fields. It was the perfect defensive position—a sniper holed up in the steeple could do a great deal of damage until he was eventually brought down. But that wasn't their purpose and the tower wasn't much use to American troops.
Along with the view, they discovered that there were no Germans up here. Not even dead ones.
There were signs, however, that someone had been there recently. A gold-accented cigarette butt lay on the stone floor. Cole picked up one of several brass shell casings. He counted more than twenty spent shells, nearly each one representing an American GI who was now dead in the lane below. One of those rounds had killed Chief. Like the empty brass they had found in the sniper's nest back at the hedgerow, this one had Cyrillic markings. The shots had been fired by a German with a Russian rifle. One who smoked fancy French cigarettes.
Cole held up the shell for the lieutenant's inspection.
"I'll be damned," Lieutenant Mulholland said, once he had spotted the Russian markings. "It appears our sniper friend was at work up here."
"Ain't no friend of mine," Cole said.
"I wouldn't be so sure about that," Mulholland said. "Look at this."
The lieutenant pointed out where, in the wood railing of the belfry tower, the enemy sniper had used a sharp implement, perhaps the tip of a knife, to scratch something into the wood. It was a rough outline of a Confederate flag. Just like the one on Cole's helmet.
"What the hell is that, Lieutenant? Some kind of message?"
"Hell, Cole, I don't know what it means. Maybe he j
ust wants to let you know he let you get away."
Cole knew he must have been in the enemy sniper's sights down on the road, and yet the man had spared him, shooting Chief instead. The German had his scope on Cole long enough to be able to study the Confederate flag on his helmet.
The thought made Cole's flesh crawl. It was as if the German was saving him for later. Cole had done that himself once, hunting in the mountains. There was an old buck deer he had tracked for hours, and when he finally got him in his sights, Cole didn't shoot. He admired the spread of the buck’s antlers, supported by a thick neck and powerful shoulders. A damn fine buck.
It wasn't out of pity or remorse for the deer—Cole had no qualms about killing—but he knew that if he killed the buck, he wouldn't be able to hunt it again. It was the kind of self indulgent decision a rich man might make—and it meant Cole had to settle for a couple of squirrels to fill the stew pot.
He'd never come across the buck again, and for all he knew, it was still out there, roaming the mountains back home. Sometimes, laying awake at night in his narrow Army bunk, with the sounds of snoring and farting men around him, Cole had thought about that old buck. He liked to imagine being alone in the cold mountain woods. It was a kind of waking dream you could have, going over that hunt again in your mind. Hunting him again was something Cole looked forward to. In some ways, he reckoned that buck had kept him from going crazy.
Cole hadn't thought of war as hunting. It was different in his eyes. It was about staying alive as much as it was about killing. But what if this German sniper had made it through Russia—the worst kind of fighting, from everything Cole had heard—and now saw war the way Cole had seen that hunting trip? As a game? As a challenge? As a test of one's skills?
A sniper like that had to be very good, very sure of himself. And very deadly. And now the wily son-of-a-bitch was hunting him.
• • •
Cole was born in 1920 near a placed called Gashey’s Knob. To call the Cole homestead a house would be a stretch of the imagination. It was a shack with tarpaper siding and rusty metal sheets for a roof. An old wood stove kept it more or less warm—mostly less, to tell the truth—in the winter. There was a front porch where dogs and pigs slept underneath, out of the rain. Sometimes Cole slept there to keep out of the way when his old man was on a bender. Normally, Cole crowded inside the cabin with four skinny younger brothers and sisters, and he went to bed hungry too many times to count.
His father made a kind of living as a trapper and bootlegger, but it wasn’t enough to keep the family fed, much less to buy twentieth century conveniences like electricity and indoor plumbing. If you needed to take a shit, you did it in the outhouse out back and wiped your ass with a page torn out of an old Sears Roebuck catalog.
Cole’s old man was mean as a rattlesnake and drunk half the time on his own moonshine, and it wasn’t until he got to the Army that he realized it wasn’t normal for your daddy to beat the hell out of you on a regular basis. For all his faults, Cole’s pa was also a skilled outdoorsman, what people would have called a mountain man in an earlier time. When he was sober, he taught Cole what he knew.
In the summer of 1933, times were hard all over the country, but they were petty much always hard in Gashey’s Knob. Cole was somewhere between a boy and a man, like he had one foot on each side of a stream and was wondering which way to step. He would always remember it as the Summer of the Bear, and it was one of his most painful memories.
An old black bear had come down out of the mountains and was lurking around cabins, raiding vegetable patches and breaking into chicken coops. Likely the bear was old or sick, and driven by hunger. Old man Thompkins had caught a glimpse of the bear sniffing around his hen house. He reckoned that bear weighed 400 pounds, its muzzle scarred and grizzled with gray. He peppered it with bird shot so that now the bear was old, sick, hungry—and mad with pain.
Cole and his pa came across that bear on their way back from squirrel hunting. They were crossing the high meadow to the west of their cabin and there was the bear in the middle of it, blocking their path home, rising out of the tall grass. He had killed a calf and was feeding on the carcass, muzzle dripping gore like something out of a nightmare. The bear stood close to seven feet tall.
He roared and charged.
Cole ran, but you can’t outrun a bear. Even an old one can sprint fast as a horse. He could still feel his fear, the taste of it in his mouth like pennies.
He worked his jaw. Spat.
Pa had an old double-barreled shotgun with two double-ought buckshot shells. That was all the ammunition he had. He stood his ground and fired when the bear almost had his nose in the barrel.
Sheepishly, heart pounding, Cole came back to where his single-shot .22 rifle lay in the grass.
“Pick it up,” Pa said. “Now give it here. You ain’t man enough yet to carry that.”
Those words hurt worse than any fist the old man had ever hit him with.
Less than a year later Pa was found shot dead in the mountains. The local sheriff called it a hunting accident, but Cole knew different. Like as not, Pa had been sniffing around someone’s still.
Cole became the family provider. They ate what he could shoot or trap, and they ate all right for a change because he turned out to be a good hunter and an even better shot than his old man. Bullets cost hard cash they didn’t have, and sometimes he had one bullet, one shot, and those skinny brothers and sisters went hungry if he missed.
Cole did not miss.
Later on he got wind of who killed Pa. Pa had been no good, but blood was blood, and revenge ran through his veins like snow melt down an icy creek.
If it was possible, his father’s killer was a meaner rattlesnake than Pa had been. He went gunning for Pa’s killer and the two stalked each other for several days in the deep mountain country. Cole walked back out; the other man’s body was buried where no one would ever find it.
Back in the mountains, you had time to think. Cole reckoned that he was always trying not to run from that bear. Since then, he had never run from anything. He was already hard and stubborn like a knot of tree root, and the Army training made him even harder. Like his old man, he had dark moods when meanness radiated off him like it did off a stray alley cat.
One day in boot camp he’d had enough of Jackson bullying the other mountain kid, Jimmy Turner, who was as different from Cole as a deer is from a wildcat. He put a can of beans in a sock and caught Jackson alone one night after lights out. Sent him to the infirmary for a few days.
The drill sergeant was no fool and suspected that Cole had done it. “Goddamnit Cole, Jackson is an asshole and he had it coming.” He stuck his finger in Cole’s face. “But the next soldier you fuck up had better be a German.”
Cole had taken the sergeant’s message to heart.
CHAPTER 13
The German snipers slept that night in an old chateau commandeered by the Wehrmacht. The French owners had fled, leaving the German army to inhabit its rooms and grounds. The house was neglected and damp, but it was far better than the cold woods and fields. The mansion had been converted into an indoor campground by hordes of weary, muddy troops. The Germans had also occupied the kitchen, so there was plenty of hot soup and even fresh-baked bread.
As an officer, Von Stenger was able to secure a room that was grand enough to have been the domain of some long-ago Norman baron. The room was able to accommodate Von Stenger, as well as Wulf and Fritz. He took a chance that the chimney still worked and started a small fire in the fireplace, then worked to clean the Russian rifle.
"Do you need help, Herr Hauptmann?" Fritz asked.
"A man always cleans his own weapons. Of course, they need to be fired first," Von Stenger said, giving the youthful soldier a sideways look. At the church steeple today, the boy hadn't fired so much as a single shot. He tossed his boots at the boy. "These could do with a shine. Make sure you do it out in the hallway."
Fritz frowned down at the muddy boots. "Yes, sir
."
The boy took the boots and went out. Over in his corner, Wulf gave a low laugh. He was cleaning his own weapon, the standard-issue Mauser that had been converted to sniper use with the addition of a telescopic sight.
"Honestly, sir, I don't know where you got him. That boy has his head in the clouds the whole time."
"You might say I inherited him," Von Stenger said, thinking back to his old companion Willi, whose body was now likely mouldering in some mass grave the Allies had dug. That was duty for you.
"You should send him away, sir," Wulf said. "He will only cause trouble for us."
"He will prove useful when the times comes," Von Stenger said. "Until then, who else would I get to shine my boots?"
Wulf made a guttural, mirthless sound that Von Stenger took to be a laugh. "Are we going back to the church steeple in the morning, sir?"
"A sniper never returns to the same place if he can help it," Von Stenger said. He was a little surprised Wulf had thought that's what they would be doing, but he reminded himself that while Wulf had been to sniper training, this was his first time in actual combat.
Earlier that day, he had worried briefly about being trapped in the church steeple by the enemy, or perhaps once the American tank opened fire. The tank crew had proved to be terrible shots, and then the Tiger tank had come along and destroyed the Sherman with a spectacular show of German superiority. If that was the best that American tanks could do against Panzers, an awful lot of them were going to be turned into burning wreckage.
He found himself lapsing into the instructor tone he would have taken at the sniper school. "Never use the same sniper's nest two days in a row. Never come and go by the same route. If you can, fire and move on. Those are the rules a sniper must follow if he wishes to survive long on the battlefield."