Frozen Sniper

Chapter One

If Micajah "Caje" Cole had not gone hunting on that perfect fall morning, he never would have found himself, months later, fighting for his life against a Chinese sniper in the frozen Taebaek Mountains of Korea. It was a battle that would come to be known as the Chosin Reservoir, one of the U.S. Army's greatest calamities since ol' Sitting Bull had taught General Custer a thing or two.

But on that crisp fall morning, the future was yet to come, and Cole faced nothing more threatening than coming home empty-handed. Even that wasn't a life-or-death situation. Unlike when he'd been a boy in the shack near Gashey's Creek, when he'd gone to bed hungry on many nights, the larder of Cole's cabin was stocked with canned goods: beans mostly, but also canned peaches and even a few cans of stew and chili.

Cole climbed steadily up the mountain well before daybreak, moving silently in the twilit shadows. He was so quiet that he came upon a fox scratching for mice under a fallen log. The fox didn't sense him until the last moment and then, finally catching sight of Cole, disappeared in a streak of red through the smooth gray trunks of the maples.

Cole grinned. He reckoned that he hadn't lost his touch. His ability to move quietly and unseen had kept him alive through the war. He raised his rifle, a battered but well-oiled Winchester that his old friend Hollis had left him along with the knife-making shop, but changed his mind and let the fox go. No sense wasting a bullet. He wasn’t fixin’ to eat a fox and it wasn’t fur season yet.

He planned to start high on the mountain in the early morning and hunt his way down. It had been the way that his Pa liked to hunt, and he had taught it to Cole. Stalking, you might call it, rather than holing up in a deer blind. The walk was as enjoyable as the hunt. He almost felt as if the old man was rambling alongside him this morning.

Still, Cole’s gray eyes caught every flicker of motion in the woods: a squirrel flicking its tail, flitting birds, falling leaves in their bright gold and red. His legs covered the steep ground easily. Cole was a little taller than average, lean and tough as a locust fencepost. He was built for roving the mountains. Dress him in buckskins and give him a flintlock rifle, and he could have stepped right out of the frontier days.

The sun reached down through the trees and touched his shoulders, warmth spreading through him. Deep, deep inside him, even that primitive part of Cole that he called the Critter and that had also helped keep him alive on the battlefield, finally uncurled itself and relaxed.

By noon, Cole had worked his way down the mountain without seeing much more than a few squirrels, which he wasn't about to waste a shell on and spook any larger game. In a few minutes, he would reach the paved road near the base of the mountain, but he planned to stick to the woods. Since coming home from the war, Cole preferred to keep to himself. He didn't want to meet anyone and spoil the solitude of the morning.

Up ahead, he was surprised to hear voices coming from the direction of the road. Nobody lived along this road deep in the mountains, and traffic was occasional.

He stopped and listened, knowing that sound carried far in the still mountain air. The road was still out of sight, but he could hear a woman's voice, and that of two men. He was still too far away to make out the words, but the tone of fear in the woman's voice was plain enough. Trouble, sure enough. But did he want to make it his trouble? Easiest thing to do was to keep on walking and mind his own business. Deep within him, however, some instinct made the Critter stir. Cole moved closer until he could hear the words plainly.

"Please, leave me alone," said the woman.

"Look at you, out here all by yourself," a male voice said. "Ain't nobody around."

"Scream if you want to," said a different man. He laughed roughly. "There's nobody to hear you."

"No, please don't."

Cole eased through the woods until he could see the road ahead. An old car was pulled to the side of the road, steaming — likely a busted radiator or overheated. Didn't nobody in the mountains have a new car and the steeps parts were rough on old motors.

A pickup truck was nosed in behind the car. He could see a woman backed defensively against the car. Two men stood nearby, pressing in on the woman. Cole was reminded of coyotes circling a wounded deer.

She wore a simple dress and a hand-knit sweater against the autumn chill. The two men looked big — bigger than Cole, anyhow — and one wore a denim jacket and the other had on a heavy leather coat that was too hot for the weather. Both men had longish hair slicked back with hair tonic in that rock 'n roll style that was catching on. Some called it a duck’s ass. A man ought not to fool so much with his hair, thought Cole. He fought the urge to grab them by that hair and cut it shorter with the Bowie knife on his belt.

Looking more closely, he saw something familiar about the woman. It took him a few moments to recall the face, back when it was younger and less careworn. He now recognized Norma Jean Elwood, who had stolen his clothes all those years ago when he went swimming in Gashey's Creek, then hooted at him from the bushes as he made his way home naked as a jaybird. It was what passed for flirtation among mountain teenagers.

Cole felt his jaw tighten, along with his grip on the rifle.

"Come on, now," one of the men was saying. "We'll give you a ride if you give us a ride. And we don’t mean in a car."

"Ya’ll can go to hell," Norma Jean said.

The men circled closer, boxing her in.

Cole stepped from the woods onto the hard macadam road.

Both men spun, startled. Cole had come out of nowhere. The young woman's face showed relief, but not recognition. That day on Gashey's Creek had been a long time ago.

"You boys run along now," Cole said. He held the rifle balanced in the crook of his left elbow, not pointing at the men.

"Best mind your own damn business," said the one in the leather coat, ignoring Norma Jean as he focused on Cole, his initial surprise giving way to anger.

The other man just glared.

Cole held his ground. "It's a hell of a thing, seeing two men like you bothering this woman, when you ought to be helping her."

"Like I said, mind your own business unless you want to get hurt."

"I reckon I done decided to make this my business," Cole said. "And I ain't the one that's gonna get hurt."

A car came by, the first one yet, slowed down at the sight of four people standing in the road, then the driver seemed to sense the trouble that was coming and sped up, racing off toward town.

"The sheriff will be coming now," Norma Jean said.

The two men looked at each other, and Cole could almost see the message flash between them. Even if the sheriff was coming, it would take him another twenty minutes to get here — and that’s if he happened to be in town and not clear on the other side of the county. In the meantime, they reckoned that two against one was good odds.

The fact that these two didn't seem trouble at the sight of Cole’s rifle made him realize that at least one them was armed. He took the rifle in two hands now and leveled it at the man in the leather coat, who had started to move, reaching for something under that heavy coat.

"Don't," Cole said.

Grinning, the man ignored him. The man's hand reappeared with a pistol in it.

Cole shot him through the heart.

The second man in the denim jacket went running for the pickup truck. Cole was happy to let him go. He levered another shell into the chamber, but stupidly, he lowered the rifle. He’d lost his edge since the war.

Instead of jumping into the truck and driving off, which is what anybody with a lick of sense would have done, the second man grabbed something from under the seat and came running at Cole. Nearly too late, Cole spotted the sawed-off shotgun. He just had time to step in front of Norma Jean before the man fired.

Lucky for Cole, the man had been in too much of a hurry to aim — as much as you even had to aim a short-barreled shotgun loaded with buck and ball. Part of the blast plucked at Cole's sleeve and the rest hit the front of Norma Jean's car, shattering the headlamp. Glass showered down on the road with a tinkling sound that trailed the shotgun blast.

"Shit!" the man shouted.

Cole didn't give him a chance to empty the other barrel, but fired from his hip like an Old West rifleman. Cole's bullet caught him square in the chest. The man flew back against the open door of the pickup truck and then slid down into the roadside weeds. Lucky shot, Cole thought, a bit impressed with himself. Not so lucky for the dead man.

He turned to the woman. "You all right?" he asked.

"Damn them," she said. "Look what those two gone and made you do."

To Cole's surprise, Norma Jean was not breaking down into hysterics, but had a grim set to her face as she studied the grisly scene.

"I didn't mean to kill them," Cole said. He knew that sounded foolish, looking at the two dead men, but instinct had kicked in as if the rifle had a mind of its own.

"You sure did a good job of shooting them dead for someone who didn't mean to," Norma Jean said, matter-of-factly. "But if ever two men needed killing, it was them two. If I'd had a gun, I would of done it myself. You won’t catch me without one again, let me tell you.”

Cole raised an eyebrow. Stated in her matter-of-fact tone, it did not sound like boasting.

He looked around at the scene they were now in the middle of. The beautiful fall morning had gone to hell in a handbasket. Without a breeze, a tang of gunpowder hung in the air. A trickle of blood ran down the road from under the man in the leather coat, from where his heart had pumped it out. If someone hadn't known better, it would have almost looked like water spilled onto the road.

The dead man's pistol lay nearby. Cole wasn't surprised to see that it was an Army-issue Browning 1911—a lot of those had made it home from the war, although he doubted that these two had actually been soldiers.

They heard the noise of a motor approaching and both looked in that direction. A lumber truck rolled to a stop, seeing the trouble.

"You best be gone before the sheriff shows up," Norma Jean said. "Those two had it comin’, but the sheriff might not see it that way."

Cole nodded, but he couldn't yet bring himself to disappear into the woods. "I reckon you don't remember me," he said. "I'm—

"I know who you are," she interrupted him. "You're that Cole boy I used to know, come back from the war a hero. But I ain't goin' to tell the sheriff I seen you, now am I?"

"Thank you."

"Go on now, before that truck driver gets a look at you," she said.

Cole took one last glimpse of the two bodies on the road. They lay in the shapeless way of the dead that he knew all too well. He had thought he was done with killing.

Then he nodded at Norma Jean and slipped into the mountain forest. In the distance, he could hear the wail of a police siren, rising and falling, almost like a hunting dog chasing its quarry. Coming after him. Maybe Norma Jean would either tell the sheriff what he'd done, or she wouldn't, but either way, Cole had a feeling that everything was about to change.