Ardennes Sniper: A World War II Thriller

CHAPTER 7

Hundreds of miles away at Allied headquarters in Paris, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower tossed the latest communiqué from the front down on his desk and lit another cigarette.

“It’s just a feint,” Ike said. “The Germans are stirring the pot, but it’s nothing serious. It can’t be. They don’t have enough men to staff a Rotary carnival, let alone an offensive.”

Eisenhower inhaled the smoke deeply. He was up to four packs a day. Not to mention the endless cups of coffee and terrible diet. He was too busy to eat properly. Yet for a man in his mid-fifties he looked quite fit — if one overlooked the fact that he was balding and carried a small potbelly — but it did not take much to imagine him as the West Point football player that he had once been.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, sir,” said Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, his chief of staff. His nickname was Beetle, although by nature he was much closer to a Doberman — woe to anyone who interfered with Ike’s schedule or tried to waste the general’s time.

“When’s Kay getting back? We’re supposed to see a movie tonight.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Ike’s pretty Irish driver, Kay Sommersby, was out doing some Christmas shopping on Ike’s behalf. It was a poorly kept secret that she was the general’s mistress. Yet neither Ike nor Sommersby found anything odd in having her pick out something nice for the general’s wife, Mamie, safely out of the way stateside.

Ike smoked and thought. All day long reports of German activity in the Ardennes had been coming in. None of it made sense. “Listen, Beetle. You know as well as I do that the Germans are finished. It’s just a matter of time. They don’t have the resources for a counteroffensive. Why they don’t just do us all a favor and give up is anybody’s guess.”

“Because it’s Adolf Hitler, sir. That’s why.”

Ike was a man who operated on percentages and forecasts and compromise. He admired brilliant military strategists, particularly General Robert E. Lee, but Eisenhower’s great talent was as a politician and administrator. He was the glue that held together sometimes prickly Allied forces. He relied on Omar Bradley and George Patton to lead troops on the field. They were Ike’s equivalent of James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, both of whom had been Lee’s top generals during the Civil War.

Intellectually, Ike understood that Hitler was a fanatic, and yet the concept of ignoring the percentages was hard for him to grasp. Why go on fighting a war you couldn’t win?

Hitler had missed his chance. If the Germans had bid for peace six months before, in the weeks leading up to D-Day when Ike had lost sleep over the dismal casualty projections, the terms of a peace agreement would have been quite favorable for the Germans. But there was no need to negotiate terms with the losing side.

An aide entered with another report. Ike read it, his eyes going wide.

“The Germans have broken through our lines. Damn it, Beetle! Reports are coming in of hundreds of tanks, thousands of men, even Luftwaffe planes. I can’t believe it.”

Beetle Smith got up and spoke to the MP guarding the door. And then he shut the double wooden doors into Ike’s office. He walked over to the windows and drew the blinds. “These stay closed from now on, sir. And we’re going to triple the guard.”

“What the devil are you taking about? It’s no secret that we’re fighting a war. You think we’re being spied on?”

“It’s not to protect information, sir. It’s to protect you. Those reports about Otto Skorzeny’s assassins and saboteurs—

“Hogwash.”

“Well, we didn’t think the Germans could launch a counteroffensive, either.”

“All right, let’s get Bradley and Patton in here pronto,” Ike said, stubbing out one cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and immediately lighting another. “One thing for sure — Hitler has a lousy idea of a Christmas present.”

“Not if you’re German, sir.”

In the heart of the Ardennes, the American snipers didn’t need intelligence reports to know that the Germans were up to something. The sound of gunfire in the distance made them uneasy. Something was up. Something big, from the sounds of it.

"Keep your eyes open," Lieutenant Mulholland said to his squad, though the warning was hardly necessary.

"What's going on, Lieutenant?" asked Billy Rowe, scanning the woods nervously.

"To hell if I know, but it's not good," Mulholland responded. "Like I said, keep your eyes open."

Rowe was new to the squad, but so far he had proved to be adept at the job, mostly because he had managed to stay alive, which was harder than it looked when you were hunting German snipers.

Since D plus 1 the snipers had been assigned within the 29th Division as a counter-sniper unit. They had done their job well — perhaps a little too well, because someone at headquarters had gotten the bright idea that the squad needed to be larger. And so they had sent Rowe and two other soldiers to fill out the ranks. Both men were good shots — Mulholland had given them an impromptu marksmanship test when they were assigned to the unit.

But it took more than being a marksman to be a good sniper. One of the replacements had died that first day in the field when he made the mistake of peeking over a log to see if he had hit anything. The German sniper on the other side of the field had picked him off. It was the kind of dumb mistake that always got the new guys killed.

Cole had hunted down and shot the German during the course of a long, tense afternoon. You could count on Cole to get even. He was from that southern hill country where people still held grudges and fought feuds. Cole was serious about that eye for an eye thing. Dead serious.

That was how sniper warfare went. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It felt personal, even when death was delivered at long distance by a nameless German with a Mauser.

Sometimes, Mulholland felt like it was all similar to an endless chess game in which you lost a pawn here or there to expose the enemy's rook. Both sides had won and lost an awful lot of pieces, and checkmate didn’t seem any closer.

They trudged along the frozen, snowy road until they came to a crossroads. The signs were like something out of a storybook — simple white with the names Malmedy and St. Vith painted on them in black, pointing in the direction to take. Say what you wanted about the German occupation, but they had been sticklers for maintaining the roads.

"Which way, Lieutenant?" Vaccaro asked. He nodded at the road toward St. Vith. The snow was nearly pristine and untrammeled. "Looks quiet down that road. There's probably a nice little tavern at the end and some warm calvados."

"We'll head toward where we heard that gunfire," Mulholland said. "That's where they'll need us."

"I was afraid you would say that, sir."

It soon turned out that they were not the only travelers on the road. In the distance, they heard the whine of a vehicle approaching at high speed over the wintry roads.

"Sounds like a Jeep," Mulholland said. "But I'm not taking any chances. Everybody off the road. Now!"

Cole had already taken a position down in the ditch, his telescopic sight trained on the road they had just come down. The others hurried to join him. "Looks like one of ours, but you just can't tell for sure."

"Is it one of our Jeeps or not?" Vaccaro wanted to know.

"It's one of ours, but maybe it's a German driving."

"What are you talking about?"

"You saw that dead man in the road back there," Cole said. "He damn sure didn't die of frostbite. Maybe the Germans sent some guys behind the lines to soften us up. That could be them now, coming to link up with their Kraut buddies."

"Cole, you have got one devious mind, but I like how you think." Vaccaro worked the bolt action of his Springfield. "Shoot first and ask questions later, I aways say."

The Jeep came closer, headed toward the hidden snipers. If there were Germans at the wheel, they were driving straight into an ambush. Then the Jeep began to slow as the crossroads came up.

Cole had been watching the approaching Jeep intently through his telescopic sight, but he suddenly lifted his head away and blinked. "Cover me," he said, and stepped out into the road.

"Cole," the lieutenant said. "Get back here!"

But the sniper was already standing in the middle of the road, rifle lowered, waiting for the Jeep to come closer. It rolled to a stop just a few feet from him.

The passenger got out, threw a pair of arms bundled in a great coat and mittens around Cole's neck, and kissed him.

Still watching from the ditch, the other snipers had to pick their jaws up out of the snow.

It was Lieutenant Mulholland who recovered first. He stood, brushed the snow and frozen mud from his knees and elbows, then approached the Jeep. The others followed.

The passenger was Jolie Molyneaux, a French resistance fighter who had been assigned as the sniper unit's guide in the days following D-Day. Jolie was as pretty as a girl straight from a pin-up calendar, an asset that had served her well in dealing with the Germans during the occupation. Most of the time, a smile and a flip of her hair were all she needed to get out of a tight situation.

But that was not the real Jolie at all. She was tough as a boot and sharp as the blade of a knife. Jolie was initially just as skeptical about the American liberators as she was bitter toward the Nazi occupiers. However, she had quickly become a vital part of the unit and had struck up an unlikely romance with Cole, who by most appearances was about as friendly as a copperhead. A bullet from the German known as the Ghost Sniper had nearly killed her outside Bienville. The last time Cole had seen her was when he loaded Jolie into an ambulance nearly six months before.

"What a bunch of assholes," Jolie said in heavily accented English. “I never got one letter.”

"Uh, you picked one heck of a time to show up for a visit, Mademoiselle Molyneux," said the lieutenant. Like a compass needle spinning in the presence of a magnet, the look on his face bounced between delight at seeing her and outright annoyance. It was no secret that he once had romantic intentions toward the French fighter, but those had been dashed by her interest in Cole.

“But there is not supposed to be fighting,” she said. “Everyone knows this is a quiet zone.”

"In case you haven't noticed, we are in the middle of a German offensive.” Mulholland’s tone indicated that his internal needle had moved closer to the annoyed category. “All hell has broken loose. You need to get back in that Jeep and return to HQ."

The driver spoke up. "Whoa, whoa, sir. I can’t just turn around. There are Krauts back that way and we barely got past them. I have a message for the company that came this way."

"Well, you'll have to take her with you."

"That's impossible, sir. She made such a pest of herself at HQ that I was told to leave her with your squad, just to get her out of there. I took her this far, and that's as far as she can go."

"Now look here, Corporal—"

Jolie spoke up. "I am where I should be," she said. "I am back with all of you. I want to be fighting Germans again."

"This is ridiculous," the lieutenant said. “You’re a civilian.”

"It is my country they are trying to invade again. It is my fight. Do not tell me what is ridiculous." She reached to get her bag, but Cole beat her to it, lifting a battered rucksack from the back of the Jeep.

"She can't come with me," the driver repeated, then eased his foot off the clutch so that the tires started to catch on the frozen surface, kicking out slush. "Orders are orders."

"Then get the hell out of here, if you're in such a goddamn hurry."

"No need to get sore, sir." Then the Jeep driver hit the gas. The wheels spun momentarily on the slick icy surface of the road, but the chains soon dug in and the Jeep shot away toward St. Vith.

As the noise of the engine faded, the winter stillness seemed to envelope them as they stood in the middle of the empty road, staring at one other.

"Well," Cole finally said, in an uncharacteristic display of conversation to break the silence. "Ain’t it just a Merry Christmas."