CHAPTER 3

Kurt Von Stenger slept until just past midnight. He had gone to bed unusually early, thanks to half a bottle of burgundy and a delicious rabbit stew. But he always had been a light sleeper, a trait that had helped keep him alive through several years of war, and something woke him in the night.

He lay very still and simply listened. Airplanes. Many, many of them, droning high overhead. And yet he did not hear the sound of bombs, which was puzzling.

Unfortunately, he knew they would not be Luftwaffe planes. The Allies had more or less dominated the skies, though there were still a few Junkers and Messerschmitts to keep the Tommies and Americans on their toes. But that many planes could only mean one thing — the Allies were up to something big.

He eased out of bed — the rich, red wine had been a good sedative, though now he found that it had given him a mild headache — but did not turn on the light. No point in giving the Allies a target, not even so much as the pinprick of light his bedroom window would make. Let them grope their way over France in darkness.

Though the night was cool, Von Stenger did not bother to dress, but only tugged on a silk smoking jacket and slid his feet into slippers. His bedroom was on the second floor off an old Norman farmhouse. It had been home to generations of gentry, and had some fine touches, such as the balcony off the bedroom that was a pleasant place to take his morning coffee.

He went out and looked up at the sky. The breeze had a cold, damp edge and there was a great deal of cloud cover because few stars were visible, but there was just enough ambient light for him to see that the night sky was filled with parachutes, creating a Milky Way of silk. Dimly, he could see them floating down as plane after plane roared overheard, spilling its cargo.

Von Stenger was not particularly alarmed or surprised. There had been rumors for some time of an Allied invasion. It was really only a matter of where and when, because the Americans and English needed some toehold on the continent. Tonight, they had finally come to Normandy.

He lit a cigarette — no Allied pilot was going to notice the glow of a Sobranie from that high up — and watched the parachutes float down. There were far too many jumpers for this to be another one of the British SAS's nuisance raids. No, this must be the start of something big. Already, far, far in the distance, he began to hear submachine gun fire.

With the gold-tipped cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Von Stenger padded back into his room and returned to the balcony with his Mosin-Nagant rifle. This was a Russian rifle that he had taken off a dead sniper in the frozen rubble of Stalingrad, where Von Stenger had earned the nickname Das Gespenst—The Ghost — for his ability to slip silently through the ruins of the city, putting bullets into enemy snipers.

It was a rather battered weapon, but it was as familiar to Von Stenger as his own reflection in the mirror. The rifle had served him well in Russia. He could tell a story about each of the nicks in the stock and scratches on the barrel, though none of them would have been particularly good bedtime stories. They were perhaps more suitable as nightmares or horror stories.

His service in Russia had won him the Knight’s Cross. While Von Stenger was not an ardent Nazi — he had little use for politics — he was very proud of the medal at his throat. His experience in Russia also earned him a stint teaching at the Wehrmacht’s sniper school, and the rank of captain. It was somewhat unusual for a sniper to be an officer — for the most part, snipers worked in teams or were expected to operate as jaeger—the German military tradition of lone hunters or scouts. A sniper had no need to order anyone around, and he generally did his duty without needing anyone to tell him how to go about it.

Von Stenger came from an old German family with friends in the right places, and they had seen to it that he now wore a Hauptmann’s insignia.

As one of the top snipers in the Wehrmacht, Von Stenger easily could have procured one of the newer, semi-automatic sniper rifles like the Walther K43. But this rifle had taken him far. It was now like part of him. He would not have traded it any more than he would have willingly parted with an arm or a leg.

There was an old chair on the balcony that Von Stenger sometimes sat in while he smoked. He pulled it closer, sat down, and rested the rifle on the railing. The parachutes were quite far, and it wasn't easy finding them with the telescope, which offered a very limited field of view. So Von Stenger picked out a parachute with his naked eyes, and then keeping his gaze on it, brought the telescopic sight up to his eye. The parachute was now visible in the telescopic sight.

He took aim at the figure dangling at the end of the parachute harness, moving the rifle down to keep pace with the parachute as it settled lower, and squeezed the trigger. The parachute was much too far away to determine if the bullet had hit home, but it had certainly come close enough to give the airborne soldier something to think about as the bullet zipped past.

He picked out another parachute, took aim, fired. The parachutes themselves were much easier targets, but where was the challenge in that? Besides, a bullet hole was not going to bring down a parachute. He noticed that they drifted to earth in about forty seconds, which was plenty of time to pick out a target — sometimes two or three — from the same plane.

In the distance, small arms fire increased in intensity. Von Stenger smiled. He was not the only one giving the parachutists a warm welcome to France.

In the house below him, he could hear movement as the gunshots near and far brought the farmhouse awake. There would be no more sleep for anyone in the house tonight. The old farmer who owned the place had long since been taken away by the SS on suspicion of helping the maquis—the French Resistance — but his wife and daughter still lived there. They kept Von Stenger and the other German officers billeted there well fed in the futile hope that it would help the farmer's case.

He called for coffee, lit another cigarette, then picked out another parachute. There did seem to be an endless supply. More planes moved overhead, emptying their cargo, the parachutists spilling out like down from a milkweed pod.

As one parachute after another bloomed in the sky, Von Stenger targeted them out and fired. Dawn was still some hours away, but it was shaping up to be a pleasant morning.

* * *

Corporal James Neville took off his steel helmet, placed it on the jump seat of the glider, and then sat back down.

"Neville, what the hell are you doing?" asked Dooley, who occupied the seat beside him. He had to shout the words to be heard over the roar of the twin 1,200 horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines powering the Douglas C-147 Skytrain bearing them aloft.

"Insurance," Neville explained. "When the Jerries start up with their flak guns, I don't want me arse shot off."

Dooley snorted, and shook his head. You could always count on Neville to do something, well, unusual. He was a bit gung ho, even for a paratrooper. "We're about to jump out of a glider at low altitude behind enemy lines — at night, mind you — and you're worried about a random piece of shrapnel biting you in the arse?"

"It’s best to be prepared for all contingencies," Neville said. He patted his front pocket. "I've even got a couple of rubbers in case my chute comes down in a brothel."

"In your dreams, Neville."

“A man can hope, can’t he?”

That was the last they spoke, because the light flashed giving them the two minute warning to the drop site. Neville's stomach did a little flip-flop in time to the blinking light. Some of the men had actually vomited with fear and anxiety. Neville didn't blame them. The way Dooley had described what they were about to do made it sound, well, like a suicide mission. But they had trained again and again for this night. In other words, they had done it all before.

Some men now bowed their heads in prayer, but he didn't go in for that sort of thing. To keep his mind occupied, Neville went over his mental checklist. He had his rifle and ammunition, the standard-issue knife to cut his chute away once they landed, and rations.

He had added extensively to the basic equipment they had been issued. He also had a short, very sharp knife tucked into the top of each boot, a length of garrote wire wrapped around his canteen, a wristwatch with a dial that glowed in the dark, and an American .45 automatic because he loved the fact it had been nicknamed "the flying ashtray" due to its slow, fat bullets. You couldn’t hit a thing much more than twenty feet away, but if you did hit something with a lead ashtray moving at just under the speed of sound, you tended to knock it down.

He also had the rubbers he'd mentioned to Dooley, just in case any French girls showed special gratitude at being liberated. All things considered, he was about as prepared as any man could be to jump out of an aircraft into hostile territory.

Now the jump light stopped blinking and glowed with its steady, red light. The door to the glider slid open. If anyone's thoughts had been wandering, the sudden rush of cold night air brought them into sharp focus.

The men stood and silently attached the static lines that would automatically open their parachutes as they hurtled from the aircraft. Dooley was in line in front of him. They had all been through this so many times that there was barely any need for orders other than the jump master shouting, "Go, go, go!"

Then it was Neville's turn, and he tumbled out into the darkness. He positioned himself as he had been trained to withstand the sharp snap of the parachute deploying — it was a little like going off a diving board into a pool of nothing. They were jumping one after the other and he saw Dooley's chute blossom into a sudden puff of silk in the darkness. Then his own 'chute opened behind him with a sound like whuff and he was drifting with all the rest of the boys, the ground coming up fast.

He strained to see the landing zone. The area had been mapped carefully. The intent was that they would land in open fields. But the fields were ringed with trees, so that landing required a bit of maneuvering. Neville saw branches reaching up at him and pulled the cords to spill some of the air from his parachute to bring him down even faster, before he could drift into the trees at the edge of the field.

Something zipped past his head and a distant part of his mind thought bullet, but he was too busy trying to miss the trees to dwell on the fact that he was being shot at. He hadn't seen a muzzle flash or heard the report of a rifle over the roar of wind in his ears, so the shooter must have been far away.

He missed the field. The trees clawed at him, attempting to snag him, and he swung his legs up like a child trying to go higher on a swing. A branch snatched at the seat of his pants, but he kept out of the worst of the branches. Then he was coming down again, dodging a hedge, and the ground came up so hard that it seemed to swat Neville out of the sky. He was spinning a bit and going sideways, so he was disoriented. He rolled and rolled just as he had been trained, breaking his fall as much as possible. He came to a stop and took stock.

All right then, Neville old chap, you seem to be in one piece. Rapidly, he began struggling out of his parachute harness. He stayed down on his knees to present a small target, just in case any Jerries were out and about with their Mauser rifles. But aside from that bullet while he had been in the air, he didn't hear a sound. So far, so good.

He gathered up his parachute and ran to the edge of the field, where he stuffed the tangle of silken fabric and ropes deep into the brush. In the starlight, he could see that he had come down in a small field that appeared to be ringed by high hedges. A crop of wheat was just barely ankle high this early in the growing season.

He appeared to be alone, which was a good sign in some ways — no German soldiers about — but neither were there any British troops visible. That was definitely not part of the plan. There were supposed to be at least some men nearby. These groups of men were to join up into squads, and then the squads would become platoons and regiments to become a genuine fighting force. Looking up, Neville could see more parachutes coming down, but much too far away from his own drop zone. He could hear a distant rifle, measured and deadly, firing at them. Probably the same Jerry who tried to do for me, he thought.

Scattered about the French countryside, it might take the British countless hours to find each other.

It's all a bloody cock up. In Neville's experience, almost every large military operation had that very outcome, which was why he had paid so much attention to his own training. The knives, garrote and the .45 were added insurance.

He started off through hedgerow country, hoping to find some of his own troops to join. But if he did not, Corporal Neville was fully prepared to be a one-man fighting force. He clicked off the safety on his rifle and started trudging toward the sounds of firing.

If it was a fight the Jerries wanted, it was a fight they were bloody well going to get.

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