Iron Sniper: A World War II Thriller

Chapter One

He was a young man in a killing mood. All around him, the landscape was lush and green with summer, but all he saw in the shadowy hedges and copses of trees were sniper hides and the potential for an ambush. That limited worldview had kept him alive so far.

With Micajah Cole, there was always violence simmering just beneath the surface. That violence ran deep as a vein of silver in the Appalachian mountains he called home. Instead of the sun's caress this morning, he felt the cold metal of his rifle and the tension in the trigger beneath his fingertip.

"Will you hurry it up, Hillbilly?" muttered a voice just beyond Cole's right elbow. The voice, with its Brooklyn accent, belonged to Vaccaro. Like Cole, Vaccaro was a sniper, but he was mostly Cole's eyes and ears when he was focused on a target. "The rest of the Army is gonna be in Paris by the time you shoot this son of a bitch."

Cole stayed quiet.

It was mid-summer, 1944. The countryside beyond the Normandy beaches had become a sprawling battlefront more than 60 miles wide, spreading far from the English Channel as Allied troops pushed deeper each day into France. Men and tanks and planes clashed on a vast scale to decide the fate of Europe. Whole towns lay in ruins near the French coast. Thousands had died in the fighting.

None of that mattered just then to Cole. As a sniper, his battlefield had narrowed to 30 feet across the face of a battered stone barn some 200 feet distant. That was the field of view through the telescopic sight mounted on his Model 1903A4 Springfield rifle, manufactured eight months previously at the federal armory on the banks of the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. The Weaver scope — fabricated in El Paso, Texas — had a magnification of 2.5, which meant that the details of the old stone and the cracks of the wood framing sprang much closer. There was no indication of the German sniper within.

In point of fact, Cole's world was even narrower than the field of view of his rifle scope, for of that 30 feet he was interested only in the doorway into the barn. Maybe three feet across and six feet high.

Back home, most barns had big doors for driving a wagon or a tractor through. In his experience, most barns were wooden and even somewhat rickety from storm winds and the lack of repairs during the Great Depression.

Not this French barn, with its stone walls three feet thick. This barn was much older, with medieval dimensions from when a barn door was meant for cows and horses going in and out, rather than mechanized vehicles. A door that size could be closed up tight against wolves, which had still roamed the French countryside when this barn was built. No windows except for two openings in the gable ends. Squat and imposing, the structure before him was part barn and part fortress, really, which was likely why the German sniper Cole was trying to shoot had gravitated toward it.

The gable windows would have been preferable for the German, but the problem was that the windows faced the wrong direction, looking out across empty fields. It was the barn door that looked out over the dusty road, offering a good vantage point, much like an old 18th-century fort guarding a harbor entrance. From that barn, the German could shoot anything that moved on the road, which had become a problem for the American squad trying to reach its objective.

Vaccaro wasn't one for silence. After a moment he added, "You see him yet? These boys are getting antsy to move on. It's hot out, in case you haven't noticed."

"Then go find yourself some shade, City Boy, and leave me the hell alone," Cole muttered, not taking his eye from the scope.

"Since you asked so nice, maybe I will," Vaccaro whispered, as if the German in the barn might hear them, although that was unlikely at this distance.

It wouldn't be any problem for the German to see them, though.

"Keep your head down," Cole whispered back. The warning was somewhat unnecessary, but it made Cole feel better to say it. Although they had been working together for weeks now as a team, Cole thought that Vaccaro's occasional lapses in horse sense were going to get him killed. Maybe get both of them killed, for that matter.

Cole reckoned he had enough blood on his hands already, so he was making some effort to save Vaccaro's sorry ass. It was a measure of Cole's liking for Vaccaro that prompted him to say anything at all.

"No shit," Vaccaro replied.

Vaccaro fancied himself to be a sniper, too, and he did have a sniper rifle much like Cole's, but that was where the similarities ended. Vaccaro was somewhat better with the rifle than the average soldier, which wasn't saying a whole lot. Mostly, he scanned for targets using a captured pair of Zeiss-made 10x50 binoculars while Cole stayed behind the rifle scope. Vaccaro also kept his eyes on the surroundings so that Cole could focus on the actual shooting.

If Vaccaro ever felt like second fiddle in the shoot 'em up orchestra, he simply reminded himself that Cole was gifted with a rifle. The hillbilly could shoot the way that Babe Ruth could swing a bat or that Norman Rockwell could wield a paintbrush. They were born to it.

Cole's talent for killing Germans at long range — the Springfield could easily reach out to 600 yards — had not gone unnoticed. Just two weeks before, a famous reporter named Ernie Pyle had written a story about Cole.

"The sniper has a hunter's lean build and clear eyes that must see like an eagle's," Pyle had written in the descriptive prose that brought the war to life for thousands of readers back home. "With a laconic manner and Southern drawl to match, the sniper looks and sounds the part of a mountain man from Appalachia, right down to the Confederate flag painted upon his helmet."

They'd had to ask Lieutenant Mulholland what "laconic" meant.

"If you don't know, then you probably are," he explained. "It's a man of few words."

"That's Cole, all right," Vaccaro said. "Shoot first and talk later."

Vaccaro and the other soldiers had ribbed Cole plenty about the article and about being famous — up to a point. Cole wasn't somebody that you wanted to kid too much. He was laconic, after all.

It was a matter of pride to Vaccaro that Cole had made a point of mentioning him to the reporter, saying that they were a team. It wouldn't do Cole much good to be one of the deadliest snipers in Normandy if some German sneaked up behind him, which was where Vaccaro finally became really valuable. At the moment, however, with an entire squad pinned down behind him, it was highly unlikely that any Germans were going to crawl up Cole's ass.

Vaccaro snorted and muttered something that might have been a commentary on Cole's mother, and then started to reverse crawl back toward a stone wall, behind which sheltered the squad. Silently, they willed Cole to hurry up and shoot the sniper before some officer came along and told them to get moving — right into the line of fire.

For weeks now, American and Allied forces had pushed across France, their objective being to sweep German forces ahead of them. Their ultimate objective was to cross the Rhine and enter Germany, where they could finally put an end to that madman, Adolf Hitler. But the stubborn defense by SS and Wehrmacht troops meant that there was always another field to cross, another barn to capture. Americans had paid for each small victory with blood and lives.

While Cole was well aware of the big picture, none it much concerned him. He was content to leave strategy to the officers. He was focused on that swath of barn that he could see through his rifle scope.

Heat drilled down at midday. While Cole's eyes were focused on the barn, he was aware of the country smells all around him. As a country boy himself, he was reminded of home. He smelled green grass in the sun. Manure. Wet hay moldering where the farmers had abandoned their haystacks to flee the fighting. He registered the stink of a nearby carcass rotting in the heat — maybe a cow, but maybe not.

Cole lay still as a copperhead.

From a strategic viewpoint, the fact that there was just one fairly narrow door into the ancient stone barn had its plusses and minuses. In the plus category was the fact that there was just one approach to defend. In the minus category was the fact that a grenade lobbed through the open door of the barn would turn the German into raw goetta, which to the uninitiated was a dish that consisted of loose sausage and mush. Scrapple, Cole would have called it.

At least one brave idiot in the squad had tried that direct approach. Trouble was, not even Dizzy Trout could have hurled a pineapple grenade from the road through that barn door, even though the Detroit Tigers pitcher was leading the American League that summer in strikeouts.

It had been necessary for the soldier to creep much closer, then spring up to throw the grenade. He had been in the process of cocking his arm back for the pitch when the German shot him, causing the grenade to bounce just a few feet away and detonate.

Flies buzzed around the bloody remains. The squad had not sent in a relief pitcher.

Fortunately, Cole and Vaccaro had happened along and were in the process of solving the sniper problem.

Cole thought about where that sniper would be. Deep enough into the barn so that he was hidden in shadow, but not so deep that his own view out would be any more limited than necessary. He would be using something to rest the rifle on, maybe the top of a stall.

Cole did not lack for imagination, but he was equally good at concentration. He had grown up on a hardscrabble mountain homestead where absently walking behind a mule could mean getting kicked in the head, where missing a shot with the one bullet you had in your rifle meant that the family went hungry that night, and where a wandering thought meant that an ax landed the wrong way and took off a foot. A boyhood spent swinging a sharp ax trained one's mind wonderfully in the art of staying focused.

Cole stared into the rectangle of velvety darkness, hoping for some flicker of movement. The sniper, however, did not betray his position. Cole could fire blindly into the barn, but his odds of hitting the German would be slim at best. In the process, he would be giving away his own position for the German to shoot back. He was going to need another plan.

"Hey, City Boy—"

"Goddammit, Hillbilly."

"What? I ain't even asked you for anything yet."

"But I know what you are gonna ask."

This was another reason why it helped to work as a team. One man could set up a lure. Snipers relied on subterfuge almost as much as marksmanship.

"Helmet on a stick?" Vaccaro suggested.

"These boys done tried that and he didn't fall for it. Best use Gertrude."

"Poor Gertrude."

Gertrude was the nickname for the mannequin head that Vaccaro had found in what was left of a dress shop. He dug around in his haversack and pulled her out. Made of plaster, with bright yellow hair and lips painted into a red pout, the mannequin head made for such a startling sight as it popped above a wall that more than one German sniper had fallen for the trick, firing at the lure and revealing his position. Gertrude herself had paid a heavy price. There was a bullet-sized divot in her forehead. Most of her right ear had been shot away, so Vaccaro turned the head so that the good ear was toward the barn.

"Get ready, Hillbilly," he whispered. "Here goes."

He lifted the head, keeping his hands below the wall, and almost instantly a shot struck Gertrude. One of her prominent cheekbones vanished in a puff of pulverized plaster. Vaccaro lost his grip on the dummy head, which fell to the dusty road and split in two.

Cole fired at the enemy sniper's muzzle flash.