Hidden in the tall summer grass, Dieter Rohde did not look like a stone-cold killer. He was apple-cheeked and baby-faced, making him appear even younger than he was. It was a face that could best be described as boyishly pretty, rather than handsome.
With his helmet off, his dirty blond hair was wavy and too long for a soldier's. Women of all ages often had an irresistible urge to reach out and brush the unruly strands away from his face. They were rewarded with a smile, complete with dimples.
He had the warm brown eyes of a puppy, disguising the fact that he saw with the acuity of a hawk. And Rohde, having been spoiled all his life by women, viewed them in much the same way that a hawk saw a rabbit. Beneath his handsome adolescent appearance lurked a cruel heart.
Peering now with one of those keen eyes through the 4x Zeiss ZF42 telescopic sight on his Mauser K98 rifle, Rohde aligned the single-post reticule on a soldier in the distance. An American.
He had been watching the GI for a while. An entire squad sheltered in the thick hedgerow behind this one soldier. But this unlucky bastard had been designated as the point man. The scout. If there were Germans guarding this particular field, it was his job to reveal their presence.
To put it another way, the lone Ami was sniper bait.
Rohde could easily have taken him, but he bided his time.
Maybe the enemy soldier took some pride in his skills as a scout. He was half hidden behind a stone wall, peering across the field. If he was trying to spot Rohde, he was out of luck. The sniper had hidden deep in the underbrush. He wore a camouflage uniform, which made him stand out from most of the Germans in his unit, but which blended perfectly with the brush. Netting covered his Stahlhelm, and he had affixed bits of branches and grass to the helmet to break up his outline even more.
Rohde's rifle rested on a stone. He had put a rag under the wooden forearm to cushion the stock yet more. Anchored by the stone and the French earth itself, Rohde could not have asked for a better rifle rest. Steady as a rock, he could wait all day if need be.
From the brush that disguised him to the sun at his back, it was the perfect sniper's lair. Many of his fellow German snipers working to stop the relentless American advance after Operation Cobra preferred taking up positions in trees so that they had a better vantage point. However, a sniper in a tree could be trapped. It was not convenient to take one shot and move on, which was the best strategy for a sniper who wished to survive another day. Once discovered, a sniper in a tree was nothing more than target practice. The Americans had more than a few marksmen of their own.
Maybe this lone American was one of those marksmen, hoping to set his sights on a German sniper. Rohde kept watch through the scope. Although he handled it with the utmost care, even going so far as removing it at night to secure the optic in a wooden case, moisture had gotten inside and the lens had recently started to cloud over. Consequently, Rohde saw everything now through the scope as if a sea fog was rolling in. But for now, it would have to do. Unless it was the exact same Zeiss optic, affixing a scope to a K98 required the work of a machinist, so it was not a quick battlefield adjustment. Hohenfeldt, his unit’s miserly armorer, wasn't about to issue him another telescopic sight, no matter how many Ami soldiers he bagged. For whatever reason, fat old Hohenfeldt had taken a dislike to Rohde.
Acrimonious thoughts would not help his shooting, so Rohde put his feud with Hohenfeldt out of mind and focused on what he could see through the slightly foggy scope.
Still, the American lookout had not spotted him. Slowly, the soldier eased over the stone wall and crept into the field.
Rohde let him, keeping watch through the scope.
Next, the American began to cross the field, running in a crouch, his rifle held to one side. Rohde guessed that the weapon was an M1 and he frowned. Like Rohde, most German soldiers were equipped with the bolt action Mauser K98. This was an incredibly accurate and reliable weapon, based on decades of use and refinement since the days of the Kaiser. In fact, the Americans had long ago stolen the bolt action design for use in their own Springfield rifles. Back before the Great War, the Mauser brothers had taken the federal Springfield Armory to court and won a judgment against the armory. It became one of history's ironies that even as the war raged, the United States continued to honor its legal obligations by paying royalties to the Mauser firm.
But in many ways, the Mauser was a weapon from an earlier era, better suited to colonial occupations and the trench fighting of the First World War than to modern warfare.
The rifle had one major shortcoming, which was its reliable and much-copied bolt action design. Each time a soldier fired a shot, he had to manipulate the bolt, which ejected the spent shell. The spring in the magazine then fed a fresh shell into the chamber. Then the bolt was pushed forward, and with a swift downward motion, locked into place. Now the rifle could be fired again. In practice, it took just a second or two to complete this action in the hands of a competent soldier. Unfortunately, working the bolt action often meant that the shooter had to acquire the target all over again.
Given the opportunity for multiple targets, Rohde found this to be a huge disadvantage.
His rifle also had its own quirk in that the bolt tended to stick, forcing him to lock it down using a quick whack with the heel of his palm. Again, the motion cost precious time.
The M1 carried by the American was a semiautomatic. This meant that the weapon fired every time that the trigger was pulled. The rifle ejected the spent shell, loaded a new round from the clip of eight bullets, and cocked itself in a fraction of a second. The gas operation of the action slightly reduced the recoil. All the while, the shooter could keep his eye on the target. In terms of elapsed time, the advantage of the M1 over the K98 would seem to be an infinitesimal one, but in combat conditions the improved rate of fire was a huge asset.
Rohde wanted one of those semiautomatics. He wished for something new and modern. Not an M1, but the German version known as the Gewehr 43. There were even a few sniper versions outfitted with telescopic sights. They were few and far between in Normandy, but Rohde knew for a fact that that fat sausage of an armorer Hohenfeldt had one such rifle sitting unused, if one could believe it.
Again, Rohde forced himself to focus on the task at hand. Through the scope, he followed the progress of the American across the field.
Now that the soldier was halfway across, the American appeared to relax. He stood straighter. Before, he'd been hunched over. His gait seemed easier. He seemed to be thinking that if he'd made it this far, then nobody was going to shoot at him.
The sun was shining; it was too nice of a summer day to die.
The soldier kept going, and again, Rohde let him.
The sun beat down and turned the exterior of Rohde's helmet as warm as a teapot. Rivulets of sweat ran down his handsome face. Some of that sweat dripped past his eyebrow and into his eyes, the salt stinging. He blinked to clear his vision.
Attracted by the moisture, an ant crawled up Rohde's neck. Its tiny mandibles sank into the sweetness of human flesh, sampling the possibilities it offered. Rohde ignored the stinging. A red welt blossomed on his neck.
Other insects buzzed in the tall grass around him. A bird landed in a nearby bush, oblivious to the motionless human just feet away. Farther off was the chatter of a machine gun, a reminder that instant death lurked on this summer day.
Two hundred feet away, the American was now halfway across the field. Obliviously running at an oblique angle closer to the sniper.
This was as close as Rohde ever been to an American, not counting dead ones.
He heard a sound behind him. Someone heavy crawling through the brush. Trying to be stealthy about it, but making as much noise as an entire squad. He didn't take his eye off the scope because he knew who it was. If it had been an American coming up behind him, Rohde would already be dead.
"What are you waiting for? Shoot him, Rohde."
The disembodied voice belonged to Hauptmann Fischer.
Fischer had displayed a fascination on more than one occasion with snipers, or Jäger as they were sometimes known in the Wehrmacht. The German word meant hunter. Rohde half expected the impatient captain to take the rifle himself. It was Fischer, after all, who had seen Rohde's talent and put the sniper rifle in his hands. Rohde had become his special prodigy, his secret weapon.
Up close, Fischer had a masculine smell of Sandalwood-scented aftershave mixed with tobacco and fresh sweat. Even now, he managed to be cleanly shaven, his uniform neat except for a few burrs that now clung to it thanks to his crawl toward Rohde's position.
His neat appearance could have seemed prissy or affected in another officer, but Fischer had made it clear to the men in his command that appearance was synonymous with competence.
Rohde liked Fischer, even if he was wary of his increasingly frequent fits of temper. He was a capable officer from a Prussian military family, but like the Mauser rifle, he belonged to an earlier age. The Hauptmann would have been happier walking shoulder to shoulder in organized ranks toward the orderly files of Napoleon's army, for example. Volleys of musket fire could then be exchanged at close quarters, with the engagement settled by a bayonet charge. The officers might seek each other out and fight with swords, like gentlemen.
While the Hauptmann might have preferred a more organized form of battle, he remained a realist. Fischer seemed to find this business of crawling about on one's belly to be distasteful, even undignified, but that was modern warfare for you. He did not find it at all odd when German generals swallowed sodium cyanide — or the muzzles of their own pistols — when they had failed in their duty. It never occurred to a disgraced American or English general to shoot himself; most of them went home and ran for political office. Fischer took this as another indicator of German military superiority.
Fischer was a good soldier, but the long war was wearing him down. Still in his twenties, he was only somewhat older and more worldly than most of the troops he commanded. Lately, the replacement troops tended to be younger and younger to the point that he felt more like their father rather than an older brother. He had been a lieutenant for much of the war, but promotion was coming more quickly these days. At the rate the Wehrmacht was losing its officer corps in battle, he liked to joke that he might be a general by the end of the year.
He was a little too smart for his own good and in the heat of the moment he sometimes made deprecating comments about the German war effort that would have been dangerous if overheard by the wrong people.
Lately, he had developed a very bad temper. He had punched or slapped more than one soldier, and his men were sure that it was only a matter of time before he shot someone as a disciplinary measure. Such things were allowed in the Wehrmacht. In Fischer's case, his anger was a symptom of combat fatigue. But like his men, he had no choice but to go on until the bitter end.
While Fischer was Rohde’s champion in granting him sniper status, he had also made it clear that he was still passing judgment on Rohde as a soldier. This guarded view was based entirely on the rumors surrounding Rohde's older brother. Those rumors had left Rohde tainted goods in the eyes of his fellow soldiers, but the captain had given him a chance to be his own man. Fischer was pragmatic in that any good officer knew that his most important task was to make himself look good. Rohde helped him do just that.
"Why don't you shoot, for God's sake!" the captain muttered again. "He's going to make it across the field."
Rohde had come to realize that a good sniper was disconnected from time in a way that made others impatient.
There was no hurrying a good shot, but he couldn't keep the Hauptmann waiting forever.
Rohde whistled. The noise was just loud enough for the GI to hear. It was a noise that was out of place in a field where the primary sound was the buzzing of insects.
Startled, the American pulled up short and listened. In doing so, he unwittingly presented the perfect target. He must have thought that he was hearing one of his own men signaling him. He looked in Rohde's general direction, but could not see the concealed sniper.
Rohde fired.