Righteous Sniper

CHAPTER TWELVE

Brock Sumner had managed to find one of the few bottles of booze still available in the city, then claimed it by eminent domain.

The bottle had started out in the possession of a young soldier who’d had the good luck to find it in the ruins of a café. Brock had quickly relieved him of his burden upon spotting the soldier carrying the bottle.

“Gimme that,” he’d said after approaching the other GI.

“Finders keepers,” said the GI, who was already feeling the effects of the couple of pulls he had taken from the bottle. If he noticed Brock’s tone, he didn’t seem concerned about it. The booze seemed to have gone straight to his head.

But it was clear from Brock’s body language, as well as the menacing presence of three or four of his rough-looking buddies, that the rule of finders keepers no longer applied. It had been supplanted by the law of the jungle. The jungle, in this case, being the bombed and blasted streets of Bastogne.

Brock squared his shoulders and stood directly in front of the GI, blocking his path. The GI’s giddy smile faded. He was sobering up fast. Brock held out his hand for the bottle, and the GI acquiesced.

However, the GI lingered, seemingly uncertain as to what to do next.

Brock gave him a shove, and the smaller man stumbled back a few steps.

“Get lost before you get worse than that,” Brock growled. “Maybe you can find yourself some milk and cookies.”

Brock and his cronies laughed as the confused GI scurried away, processing the fact that he had just been the victim of a strong-arm robbery.

“You sure told him, Brock,” said a soldier to his right. Everybody in the squad called him “Brock” — no nickname necessary. Deep down, he took pride in the fact that “Brock” had a certain ring to it, like one of those movie stars who always played a tough guy.

As for the squad itself, it was more like his personal gang than a military unit. The boys did what he said, no questions asked. Vern was more or less his right-hand man, with Walt “Boot” McCann a close second. Boot had gotten the nickname because a girl at a roadhouse bar had turned him down when he’d asked her to dance, saying he was ugly as a boot. His army buddies weren’t about to let that one go.

“Damn straight, Vern,” Brock replied. “No sense lettin’ good liquor go to waste on that poor excuse for a soldier.”

They made short work of the bottle even before they reached the impromptu hospital where one of his buddies from home had ended up.

His buddy’s name was Charlie Knuth. Charlie had been a star athlete and popular guy in high school, one of those genuinely nice guys everybody liked, but more than that, he was one of the few people who had actually seemed to like Brock, somehow seeing past his bullying facade to a quality in him that was worthy of friendship. Maybe it was the fact that Brock was loyal to a fault.

They had played baseball together and even gone out on a couple of double dates, which usually ended up with Brock and his girl making out in the front seat, and Charlie and his date making out in the back seat.

They had kept in touch during the intervening years after high school, playing baseball or going out for a beer from time to time. Then the war had come along, and like so many old friends, they had lost track of each other as young men from home headed in different directions, either to fight the Krauts or the Japs.

Whatever good qualities Charlie had seen and encouraged in Brock had not been improved by army life, and he had mostly reverted to his bullying ways.

Inside the hospital was nothing but confusion and misery. Wounded covered the floor in rows, bandaged and in various stages of suffering. Brock searched for his old friend but was soon distracted.

“Hello, beautiful,” Brock said rudely to a young woman working as a nurse. He made no effort to hide the fact that he was ogling her from top to bottom, though the nurse was barely more than a teenager. “What are you doin’ after the show?”

She hurried past, ignoring Brock, her arms loaded with bandages. Most of the American men were respectful and kind, grateful for her efforts, but she had learned that there were always exceptions to the rule.

As the light from a window she was passing caught her face, Brock could only stare, coming to the sudden realization that the nurse he’d just seen appeared to be a young Black woman. Light skinned, to be sure, but Black all the same. Someone of her race was a rare sight in Belgium.

He wondered what she was doing here. Back home in Florida, the Jim Crow laws ensured that there were separate hospitals for Blacks and whites. Separate schools and water fountains too. He was taken aback by the color of her skin, not to mention the fact that she had given him the brush-off.

“Uppity broad,” he said to her retreating figure, with little care as to whether she overheard him. He turned to an orderly nearby. “Hey, bub.”

“What is it?” The orderly wore a white armband and the haggard expression of someone who had seen too much grief and heartache in too little time.

“How come we’re letting a Black girl look after our boys?”

“If any of them don’t like it, they can join the corpses outside,” replied the orderly, who hurried on, his demeanor suggesting he had no patience for fools such as the one he had just encountered.

Little did Brock and his cronies know that this was the young woman who would go down in history as the “Angel of Bastogne” for her tireless care of the wounded. Years ago, her mother had fled war in the Belgian Congo to begin a new life in this peaceful town — only for her daughter to find war on her doorstep here in Bastogne.

Being a nurse was dangerous work, not to mention exhausting. Just two days before, her friend and fellow nurse had been killed — along with several helpless American wounded — when a stray German bomb struck a house where the men were being cared for.

Instant death was a constant threat they all lived under. She could just as easily have been sheltering with her family in a cellar like so many civilians in Bastogne, but she had volunteered to do what she could for the men fighting the German invaders. Perhaps peace would return to Bastogne, but it seemed hard to believe with the occasional artillery bursts as a reminder.

Meanwhile, it was clear that no help would be coming from the orderly. Brock shook his head in disgust and kept going. Inside the dark reaches of the hospital, Brock asked around until he’d tracked down his old friend.

He found Charlie stretched out on blankets on the stone floor, which could not have been comfortable. Brock had seen his share of wounded, but he was still shocked by the sight of his old friend from home. Charlie Knuth had always been handsome and athletic, but now he looked emaciated, his good looks marred by ugly frostbitten patches. One side of his head was wrapped in bandages that looked suspiciously as if they had been strips torn from bedsheets, now hardened with dried blood. More bandages covered his torso. The skin of his hands was blistered and cracked from frostbite, revealing raw meat inside the cracks. Brock looked away, keeping his eyes on Charlie’s, because they were the only part of him that seemed unscathed.

It turned out that Charlie was in a distressed state, but not only because of his wounds. After expressing his initial delight at setting eyes on a familiar face from home, he struggled up out of his blankets and grabbed hold of Brock with his blistered hands.

“You won’t believe it, Brock. I just saw him in here. That goddamn Nazi!”

“Who?”

“The bastard who tried to kill me, that’s who!”

Obviously distraught by his experiences, Brock’s old hometown friend quickly shared an upsetting story of how his own unit had been captured and then gunned down somewhere on the road to Bastogne. He couldn’t even say where, exactly, on the snowy road that the massacre had taken place. He just knew that he’d been the only survivor among the prisoners.

“It sounds to me like you’re lucky to be alive.”

“They shot me, but I faked being dead.”

Brock listened with something close to disbelief. He had heard rumors about these sorts of things — the execution of prisoners — but it had always been a “I knew a guy who knew somebody who” type of situation. This time was different. Bastogne was still isolated, but they had heard about the Malmedy massacre perpetrated by Kampfgruppe Pieper. More than eighty Americans had been gunned down. There wasn’t a GI who wasn’t outraged about it.

In a separate incident, his buddy had seen another slaughter of POWs and still carried the wounds of the encounter. Maybe the Germans hadn’t massacred as many as they had at Malmedy, but it was a massacre all the same. Already, in the aftermath of Malmedy, angry Americans had retaliated by refusing to take prisoners. All the rules of war seemed to have gone out the window where the Battle of the Bulge was concerned.

To make matters worse, Charlie had spotted the Nazi officer who’d been in charge, visiting wounded Germans in the hospital.

“What did they do with the son of a bitch?” Brock asked.

“When I told him, the surgeon raised hell about the German being a war criminal, and they hauled his ass off to HQ.”

“Is that so? They should have taken him outside and shot that Kraut.”

Knuth grabbed Sumner’s sleeve. “He killed them all! Every last one of our guys! You’ve got to make sure justice is done, Brock. Promise me you’ll do that.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Brock said. He clenched and unclenched his fists, as if aching to hit something. He couldn’t think of anything worse than being a helpless prisoner and having the enemy gun you down. They were sons of bitches, every last one of them.

Deep down Brock recognized that he hadn’t always been the best person, having used his brawn to bully people all his life. Just a few minutes ago he had stolen a bottle of booze from another GI. He knew that was wrong, but during a war, what was the point of doing what was right? Also, he knew that he was small potatoes compared to the likes of Adolf Hitler, the biggest damn bully the world had ever seen, along with all his Nazi minions.

Thinking about helpless Americans being gunned down by the Krauts made his blood boil.

“Promise me!” Charlie repeated. It was clear his strength was fading after his sudden desperate burst of anger. Brock’s sleeve slipped from his grasp, and he suddenly faded back into his sweaty blanket, his eyes still bright in his hollow, frostbitten face.

Brock nodded down at him, his expression grim. “If there’s any justice in this world, somebody has got to put that Nazi in the dirt,” he agreed. “And the sooner, the better.”

Corporal Brock was a mixed bag as a soldier. On the one hand, he got the job done, and that job was fighting the enemy. Looking at his combat record, it would be hard to find a better soldier. He and the rest of his squad always seemed to be in the thick of it. Wherever they went, they gave the Germans hell.

However, he was the kind of soldier who was surly to officers and gave anyone who outranked him a hard time. Then again, he knew better than to cross the line, knowing when not to push his luck. There were plenty of tough officers and seasoned sergeants who would’ve chewed him up and spit him out. He either steered clear of these men or kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t stupid, after all.

On the other hand, Brock could smell weakness like a shark smelled blood in the water. When he smelled that weakness, he went in for the kill.

If he had been stronger of character, he might have made an excellent sergeant himself. But everybody in any position of leadership knew that Brock Sumner was trouble, a good man in a fight but unreliable when the bullets weren’t flying.

He also wasn’t one to make idle threats. He hadn’t made hollow promises to his wounded friend from home just to make them both feel better.

Not long after leaving the hospital where he had seen Charlie, Brock was hanging around the kitchen area that was being set up to prepare hot grub, hoping for some coffee, talking to a couple of guys doing the same thing. It wasn’t just coffee that Brock was after. He had found that the best way to learn anything in the army was to keep your ears open. A lot of guys ran their mouths to show off how much they knew and how important they were. Unless it was top secret, somebody gossiped about it eventually.

“All we want is some hot coffee,” a soldier groused. “Is that too damn much to ask?”

“I hear they’ve got some Nazi officer that they captured in there. I’ll bet they give him all the hot coffee that he wants.”

Brock’s ears pricked up. “You say they’ve got a German officer in there?”

“Sure they do. I heard he’s locked up in the cellar at HQ. They’re keeping him down there because it would be an awful shame if a bomb from his own side killed him.”

“Sounds more like justice if you ask me,” another soldier said.

Brock picked up his rifle, which had been leaning against the building, and started walking away.

“Hey, where you goin’? Don’t you want that coffee?”

“I’ve got somewhere else to be,” he said gruffly.

Suddenly Brock wasn’t interested in hot beverages. He had bigger fish to fry. If the German officer really was being held at HQ, then Brock knew what he had to do.