by David Healey
Soon, the Americans would find the tunnel entrance in the church. They would want revenge for the blood he had spilled. They would be coming after him. Von Stenger would be ready when they did.
One hundred meters out he spotted an island of sorts in the flood—a clump of trees and brush encircled by the flood waters. It was perfect for what he had in mind. Eventually, his plan was to rejoin the German forces once they had recaptured Bienville. Until then he would hide in the flooded fields and marshes.
As he waded toward the island, careful to keep his Mosin-Nagant out of the flood waters, he bumped into something that floated just beneath the surface. He used his knee to push it out of the way, but the submerged object shifted and rolled, and he had a terrible start when the thing bobbed up to reveal a human face.
"Scheisse!" he shouted, and jumped back, ready to defend himself.
But the face was pale and bloated, the blue eyes blank. He saw that the corpse wore the uniform of an American paratrooper and that the body was still entangled in parachute cords. The dead man was outfitted with a steel helmet, an M1 strapped across his chest, and a fully loaded haversack. Von Stenger surmised that the poor bastard had become tangled in his parachute lines, then was dragged under by the weight of his gear and drowned. This fate was exactly what the Germans had intended by flooding the marshes and fields in the Allied drop zone. For this soldier, the trap had worked all too well.
He contemplated the body for a moment, then nodded to himself.
Von Stenger drew his combat knife. Working quickly, he cut the drowned man free of the parachute cords and haversack. Then he dragged the body along behind him and continued on his way toward the island.
"Come along, Ami," Von Stenger mused aloud to the corpse. "You and I are going to be good friends."
CHAPTER 26
Wood chips were still flying when Cole came running up with Jolie and Vaccaro. He watched the lieutenant swinging his ax like a mad lumberjack. The oak doors shuddered under each blow but still did not budge.
"Who would have thought the son of a bitch had grenades," Vaccaro said. "He's a sniper, for crissake. But I think maybe I got him."
"Nobody got him," Cole said. "I reckon he's still up there waiting for us."
"In that case, you go first."
"You know, for a city boy, you ain't so dumb as you look."
The axes opened a jagged hole through the door. Someone shoved a pry bar through and got it under the crossbar, but it took three men and some cursing to shift the weight enough to get the doors open.
Cole was the first one through, his rifle at the ready. The room at the base of the tower was no more than fifteen feet on each side, and empty. Although it was bright daylight outside, the interior was chill and shrouded in semi-darkness because the only light came from the few window slits cut into the ancient stone walls.
"Anybody bring a flashlight?" the lieutenant asked.
"No, but I eat a lot of carrots," Cole said, and started up the stairs. Mulholland started to pass him, still carrying the ax, but Cole stopped him with a wave of his hand. "Are you goin' to throw that there ax at him? I got this, Lieutenant."
From a few steps behind, Vaccaro bellowed up the stairway. The words echoed and carried like smoke up a chimney: "We're comin' to get you, you goddamn sneaky Nazi sniper son of a bitch! How do you like that, huh!"
Cole looked down and fixed him with a pale stare. "Vaccaro, what I just said about you bein' smarter than you look? Well, you ain't. If he didn’t hear them axes, you just sent him a telegram that we’re on our way up the stairs."
There was no helping that now, so Cole continued up the ancient steps, worn smooth by centuries of priests going up to ring the bell and summon the faithful to mass.
It would be easy enough for the enemy sniper to ambush them from any of the landings above, but that would have to happen at very close quarters, exposing himself to return fire. If Cole had been the German, and he'd had any more stick grenades, he'd bounce them down the steps. If he had a crate of grenades, the sniper could defend himself up in that steeple until he died of old age. But Cole doubted he had lugged that many up there.
No sense worrying about it. With his finger on the trigger of the rifle, he forced himself up another step, and another. Soon, he could see the rectangular opening into the belfry itself. Cole slung his rifle and drew a .45 automatic, then crept silently up the last few steps.
Back when he was a boy, Cole used to hunt woodchucks. They were animals that resembled a beaver but that dug burrows from which they poked their noses, sniffing for predators.
He had often seen how a fox would wait patiently beside the hole for a woodchuck to put its nose out and provide dinner. Hunting them, Cole had learned the same technique. All you needed to shoot a woodchuck was a nose and maybe an eye showing.
If Cole stuck his nose above the floor level, he was fairly certain he would get shot. So he stuck the .45 up instead and sprayed shots in several directions. The noise was deafening. He surged up the steps and into the belfry, both hands on the gun, ready to fire.
Nobody there.
He was soon followed by Mulholland, Vaccaro and Jolie. "He really is the Ghost Sniper," Jolie said.
"He was here, all right," Cole said. He had noticed a gold-trimmed cigarette butt on the stone floor. With his boot, he toed at an empty shell casing. The Cyrillic markings were just visible. "Our sniper shoots a Russian rifle. It was him."
"He didn't just vanish," the lieutenant said. "He could be hiding."
They made a quick inspection of the tower room. The windows were too narrow to crawl out. There was no attic to hid in. Down below, the oak doors had been barred shut from inside—which meant the sniper hadn't slipped out at the last instant just ahead of them.
"Huh," Cole said.
Vaccaro, still panting from the climb, looked around the empty room. "Reb, I know you're a man of few words, so let me say them for you: Where the hell did he go?"
Cole lingered at one of the slit windows long enough to see the advancing German column. There were an awful lot of Germans heading for Bienville. However, they were forced to stay on the road because of the flooded fields surrounding the town and roadside.
If he could have stayed up in the tower, there was no telling how many he could pick off. Then the Tiger tank fired and a shell whistled close by the tower. If their aim got better, the tower would not be standing much longer.
He started back down the stairs.
"Cole, where are you going?" Mulholland demanded.
"Well, sir, he ain't up here."
They descended quickly, not worrying about an ambush on the stairs this time. But the room below was as empty as ever, with a bare stone floor. The only furnishing was a tattered rug on the floor.
"Did you expect to find that Jerry down here making coffee or something?" Vaccaro asked.
Cole looked at the rug more closely, saw that one corner was flipped up. He reached down and tugged at the rug, revealing the trap door set into the stone floor.
"I'll be damned."
The trap door was awfully heavy, and it helped to have two men to swing it all the way open. A shaft led down into a dark tunnel that smelled of dank, musty earth. Over Cole's shoulder, Vaccaro lit a wooden match and dropped it down the shaft. The sputtering flame revealed the ladder and tunnel below, but no sign of the enemy sniper.
"I'm going after him," Cole said.
"Huh," Vaccaro said.
• • •
Nobody had a flashlight, so Vaccaro gave Cole his Zippo lighter.
“Hey, I want that back, so don’t get shot.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that.”
Cole went down the ladder and then stood on the floor of the shaft. He could see the others looking down at him, including Jolie—she had not done very well in following the lieutenant's orders to stay out of harm's way.
"I will meet you at the other end," she said.
"Where's that?" Cole asked.
"It must come out in the marsh," she said. "The priests would have wanted a way to reach the river without being seen."
"I wish we had known about this goddamn tunnel before now," Cole said.
Jolie shrugged. "France is full of secrets."
"Cole, you are one crazy mountain man," Vaccaro said, peering down from above.
Lieutenant Mulholland spoke up. "I won't order you to go after that German," the lieutenant said. "But I won't tell you not to."
"In that case I reckon I'm going to nail that son of a bitch's hide to a barn door," Cole replied.
He had to get down on his hands and knees to enter the tunnel. He flicked the Zippo to get his bearings. The roof and sides of the tunnel were shored up with damp bricks and ancient boards that looked punky with rot. It smelled like an old root cellar. He peered into the darkness that pressed up against the dim light from the flame. The tunnel seemed to go on and on. How long was it and where did it lead? The flickering lighter flame did not reveal much beyond a few feet ahead.
It was awkward trying to crawl forward on his hands and knees while juggling the rifle and a burning lighter. He snapped the lighter shut and was immediately enveloped in darkness. He kept one hand wrapped around the rifle, keeping it more or less pointed ahead of him and ready to fire. He pushed on into the tunnel, less worried about where he was going than by the thought that the Ghost Sniper might be somewhere just ahead, waiting to ambush him.
Cole was totally helpless in the tunnel—there was no way that the German could miss if he suddenly opened fire. Briefly, Cole considered firing a few shots into the darkness ahead in case the German was up there, but decided against it. If the German didn't know he was being followed, Cole would only be tipping his own hand.
Don't give nothin' away. Whoever had the element of surprise held all the cards.
He crept deeper into the tunnel. The dim light from the trap door faded until it was like crawling through a blacksnake's belly.
While the floor of the tunnel felt damp to the touch, the crumbling ceiling was powder dry, so that when his head accidentally brushed the bricks overhead, bits of dirt and mortar rained down. Judging by the debris in his path, someone had recently been this way. He moved ahead blindly, feeling the tunnel seem to press in around him.
Then came a rumbling sound and Cole was enveloped in choking dust. He crawled faster, knowing without seeing it that part of the roof was coming down. Faster, faster. Bricks bounced off his shoulders, but he managed to outpace the crumbling ceiling. The sound he heard was much like a shovelful of dirt hitting the bottom of a hole—that whump sound—only a whole lot louder.
He stopped panting, and half turned in the cramped tunnel to light the Zippo.
"Christ on a cross," he muttered.
It didn't look good. The lighter flame was tiny, but in the depths of the tunnel the flickering light was bright as an explosion, revealing the fact that a good portion of the tunnel had collapsed behind him.
No turning back now. There was only one way out, and that was forward. He felt that his chances of running into the German were slim now, so he took his knife and cut a strip of cloth from the tail of his uniform shirt and wrapped it around the Mauser’s muzzle to keep the mud out. Then Cole kept going.
His hand touched water, and soon he was making his way across a wet, slippery floor. The water grew deeper as he moved ahead, rising around his wrists, his knees, his shoulders. He slung his rifle across his back.
For the first time since entering the tunnel, he stopped.
Water. Why did it have to be water?
His thoughts went back to the day he had almost drowned in Gashey’s Creek while trapping beaver. He had been under a long time, all tangled up in rope and the submerged branches of drowned trees. By all rights he should have died. Feeling the water all around him now and the same blackness, Cole fought back a momentary panic as the darkness seemed to take on weight and viscosity like some tangible thing—oil or a heavy wet blanket. He felt it close in around him and the cold water felt like it was squeezing his chest. He found it difficult to breathe and his heart raced. Even now, the water seemed to be rising. Every fiber of his being screamed get out, get out, get out.
The German sniper had come this way. Cole was sure of it, and he was going after him no matter what.
But where the hell had the German gone? There. Up ahead, barely visible in the distance, Cole could see that the tunnel brightened. He understood now that he was looking at the only way out.
The flooded river and marsh covered the tunnel entrance. He could see that the tunnel angled sharply up from the entrance and that the water covered the entrance much in the same way that water fills the bottom of a tilted glass.
If Cole held his breath and swam—hard—he might just make it out.
More chunks of the ceiling pattered down on his helmet like rain on a tin roof. Ping. Ping. Then bigger chunks of brick. Pang! The whole goddamn roof felt about ready to collapse and there was nowhere to go.
Swim or die.
Cole made sure the rifle sling was secure across his back, took a deep breath, and dove.
The water was cold, cold and black, and he imagined something like dead hands reaching for him to pull him under for good. He kicked wildly and flailed his arms, trying to propel himself forward but mainly managing to skin his knees and elbows in the process. Cole ignored the pain. He swam toward the light. His lungs burned. Just a few more feet. His rifle stock got hung up, catching on a loose brick. He paused long enough to wrench it free. The effort meant a few precious bubbles of air escaped his lungs.
Almost there. He shoved forward—and then he was outside the tunnel, about to come up for air.
Mixed with relief was a question—where was the German?
Cole hovered for a moment beneath the surface. The water was not all that deep—definitely not over his head. He got his feet under him. His lungs ached, every molecule in his body wanted air, but he would not let himself come up just yet. He unstrapped his helmet, then holding it by the bottom rim lifted it above the surface, while simultaneously pushing his face out of the water, just enough to get a breath.
Then Cole dove again.
He was just in time. He felt the helmet nearly plucked from his grasp with terrible force. With his eyes open under the water, he saw a bullet leave a contrail through the water.
He swam as long and as far as he could, his lungs burning again, but at least this time he wasn't in that goddamn black tunnel.
Another bullet streaked down where his helmet had been. He was already several feet away.
He picked out a log floating above him and popped up behind it, keeping his head down. Peeking from behind the log, he could make out a small island a couple hundred feet distant. If he were the German sniper, and he'd had time to choose his position, that's just where he would be, ready to pick off whoever came out of that tunnel.
Missed me, you son of a bitch. Now it's my turn.
CHAPTER 27
Von Stenger saw a helmet decorated with a Confederate flag clear the water. He fired. The helmet sank, a black hole in its center where the round had punched through. He fired again into the water just where the sinking body should be.
The natural inclination was to think that's that and call it a day, but Von Stenger did not move except to work the bolt action. Then he settled down to wait.
He had a strong shooting position there on the island. While the river lay in the distance, the dammed waters had flooded the marshes and fields, forming a tremendous shallow lake that spread for hundreds of acres around Bienville and beyond. The water was filled with the flotsam and jetsam lifted by the flooding—logs, fenceposts, mats of straw.
The sun was at his back and the sparkling glare across the water gave anyone approaching from the raised roadway—or the sunken tunnel entrance, for that matter—a distinct disadvantage in having to squint into the diamonds of sunlight reflected on the water's surface.
Von
Stenger was using the dead body of the American paratrooper as a decoy. Partially hidden and in the prone position, with a rifle grasped in its bloated fingers, the corpse appeared to be lying in wait on the island. Von Stenger himself was hidden in the brush several feet behind the corpse, hoping that another shooter—half blinded by the sun-dappled waters—would think the body was actually the sniper. With the enemy’s crosshairs elsewhere, Von Stenger could then pick him off.
He believed that there was just one man who would have made the effort to track him through the tunnel. The hillbilly sniper. The distinctive flag on the helmet was proof. Von Stenger realized that he had missed killing the man on the roof top.
By all appearances, he had been more successful this time in killing him. He had certainly hit the American sniper's helmet. But some gut instinct told Von Stenger to hold back.
It helped to be a good shot, but the first rule a sniper learned was patience.
And so he waited.
• • •
Cole wondered if the rifle would fire, after getting a good dunking. Fortunately he had thought to wrap the muzzle with a strip of cloth. That kept out the mud. The water would drain out. The cartridges were water tight. But if the scope had water in it, he was out of luck.
Carefully, working behind the shelter of the floating log, he lifted the rifle parallel to the water and took off the cloth. He opened the action to drain any water, but was surprised to find it dry. So far, so good. Finally, he put his eye to the telescopic sight. The seal had held—not a drop had penetrated the scope. Not for the first time, he was amazed by the quality of what the Germans made. An American scope would be junk by now.
The floating log had a kind of knobby fork in it, and Cole rested the rifle there, trying hard not to move the log too much. Easy, easy. He now had a good view of the island where the German sniper must be hidden.
Then he saw him. Partially obscured in the brush he could make out the outline of a helmet. He grinned. Cole settled the crosshairs on the helmet and gently squeezed the trigger.