Righteous Sniper

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cole led the way up the road, all his senses tense as a fiddle string, rifle at the ready. Even his nose sniffed the air for any whiff of German. They hadn’t gone far before he heard the steady whine of an approaching engine, undercut by the clanking of steel treads.

Tanks.

More than one, and moving fast.

“Get off the road!” he said urgently, waving the others toward the trees. He pointed his rifle squarely at the German. He didn’t want the prisoner getting any ideas about using that moment to escape. “Don’t get any ideas, Herr Barnstormer. If you try to make a run for it, I’ll put a big fat slug right through your back.”

The look on the German’s face indicated that he’d processed that mental image. He nodded curtly at Cole and followed Vaccaro and Rupert into the trees with the rifle aimed squarely at him.

It was hard to say whether the tanks were German or American and Cole, wasn’t going to wait around to find out. The area was still hotly contested, with both sides probing and fighting in the countryside beyond Bastogne. It came down to the fact that the Americans were trying to send reinforcements and the Germans were trying to stop them. Cole didn’t want to get caught in the middle of that meat grinder. He just wanted to deliver the Kraut like he’d been ordered and get back in one piece.

There was also the possibility that a tank patrol from either side would shoot first and ask questions later if they spotted men on the road. The tank commander would be worried about an ambush — a handful of men on the road more than likely meant snipers, mines, bazookas, or Panzerfaust. Mighty as a tank was, a lucky grenade throw could mean a tank tread getting knocked out. Out here on the front lines, repair was impossible, and the tank would need to be abandoned.

Whether the tanks were German or American, it wouldn’t matter to Cole and his squad — the tankers wouldn’t be taking any chances, which meant they would get machine-gunned all the same.

Vaccaro and Rupert took cover behind a fallen tree, their rifles over the log, trained on the road. The Kraut was down in the hole where the tree roots had ripped out of the ground. Cole slid in next to him. The snow was several inches deep here, kept from melting in this shady spot, the cold amplified by the shadows.

He kept his rifle ready but drew his knife. Silently, he cursed himself for not tying the German up again. If the tanks proved to be German, there was nothing to stop him from shouting a warning to his comrades or making a run for it.

“Make one peep and I’ll slide my bowie knife between your ribs, easy like,” Cole warned.

“Those tanks will be expecting an ambush,” Bauer said. “It does not matter if they are German or American. The smartest thing to do is to be quiet and let them pass.”

Cole nodded, glad that he and Bauer were on the same page regarding self-preservation.

Time stretched on and Cole had the nagging thought that they were once again falling behind schedule. What the hell was taking those tanks so long to go by? It sounded as if they had stopped. They seemed to be moving cautiously. The sound of engines grew louder before the tanks finally came into sight up the road. He was trying to tell from the engine noises whose tanks they were, but the echo off the hills distorted the sound.

Cole and Bauer were out of sight in the depression left by the windfall, gazing out from between the twisted tree roots at the rim of the hole. Wisely, Vaccaro and Rupert had their heads down behind the tree trunk. He was counting on Vaccaro to prevent the young British officer from doing something stupid, like deciding to take on the tanks and enemy soldiers single-handedly. Rupert didn’t seem like the heroic type, but now would be a terrible time for him to get any notions that he was Prince Valiant.

Cole’s heart sank when he saw that the approaching tanks were German panzers. This close, the things looked massive. Their 88 mm guns appeared big as tree trunks. The tanks carried machine guns as well, looking beastly and sinister.

There were three tanks, surrounded by a knot of supporting infantry. The soldiers were busy scanning the woods along the road for any sign of trouble. Wearing their white winter camouflage, some with white scarves over their faces, the German soldiers appeared inhuman or almost otherworldly, like wraiths moving through the woods. The businesslike dark stocks of their weapons stood out in sharp contrast. A few carried Panzerfaust to help the tanks deal with any US armor they encountered.

The name “stormtrooper” seemed apt as the wind blew and snow swirled around the foot soldiers. In this world of white, they were no longer men; it was as if they had been reduced to killing machines.

The harsh reality of the situation was that if it came down to a fight, Cole’s group was outnumbered and seriously outgunned. But they had to stay put. If they tried to make a run for it now, they would be seen and chopped into mincemeat.

He took his eye off the scope long enough to glance over at Bauer, who watched the German troops on the road intently, calculation evident in his eyes as if weighing his chances of escape.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Cole whispered.

“Be quiet,” Bauer snapped. “They will shoot us both.”

That had sounded an awful lot like an order, which rankled Cole. The German officer seemed to have forgotten just who was in charge here.

Who the hell did this Kraut think he was? Cole debated going ahead and sticking that knife between Bauer’s ribs just to shut him up for good.

But this was not the time for that. Reluctantly, he had to admit that Bauer was right about the need to keep quiet. The tanks would pass no more than fifty feet away from their hiding place at the side of the road. This was a time to hide rather than fight.

He looked over at Vaccaro, who seemed to be doing his best to sink into the snowy ground behind the log. Vaccaro caught his eye with an expression that seemed to say, How the hell did we get into this mess?

Cole felt the same way. He wished that they had retreated deeper into the forest. Better yet, not to have left Bastogne in the first place. They would just have to lie low until the Germans went past.

Vaccaro didn’t give any indication that he was planning anything stupid. Cole still gave him a shake of his head to encourage that line of thinking.

Cole returned his eye to the rifle scope and scanned the approaching column. As soon as he did so, he felt Bauer go tense beside him. Obviously the man did not like the idea of watching idly while an American shot his comrades.

“Don’t get riled,” Cole whispered. “I’m just keeping an eye on your friends there.”

He sensed Bauer relax ever so slightly.

Cole moved the reticle from one target to the next, but held his fire. The men weren’t far away to begin with, and they sprang much closer through the scope to the point where he could see the details of their faces. These were not old men or boys rushed into uniform. They had the look of battle-hardened troops.

His sights settled on the lead tank. It would be so easy to pick off the tank commander, who stood exposed in the hatch. Cole’s finger itched on the trigger, resisting the urge.

One comforting thought was that the panzers were so close that their 88s might be useless at such close range. But the Germans wouldn’t need those big guns. Machine guns were mounted on the panzers, not to mention the detachment of infantrymen, several of them armed with Schmeisser machine pistols hanging from leather slings over their shoulders. At this range, their automatic weapons would be more than effective.

If we so much as sneeze, we’re goners, Cole thought.

Again, he took his eye off the scope long enough to glance at Bauer. The man appeared to be holding his breath.

One thing Cole didn’t see were any German snipers, which wasn’t surprising. Who needed a scalpel when you were moving through the woods carrying a sledgehammer?

Once again he let the scope linger on the commander standing in the hatch of the lead tank. The man was gazing intently at the road ahead, not in the least aware that he’d be dead if Cole so much as twitched his finger.

The Germans seemed to be taking forever to go past. Seconds stretched into what felt like minutes. The cold from the frozen ground and snow had already seeped into Cole’s elbows, cramping them, but he ignored the discomfort.

The panzers made an awful racket. In the quiet of the winter forest, that noise carried for a long distance.

Dimly, Cole became aware of more tank sounds. Were they coming from the opposite direction? Maybe it was just his ears playing tricks on him. With all the shooting and battles that he’d been through, it was a wonder that he wasn’t completely deaf. The surrounding hills might be echoing the tank noises.

Bauer grabbed his arm to get his attention. “Down!” he urged. He turned toward Vaccaro and Rupert and repeated the command as loudly as he dared, adding a hand gesture for emphasis. In Vaccaro’s case, the order wasn’t necessary, because he held the log he was hiding behind in a lover’s embrace. Foolishly, Rupert was still peering over the log. He held the carbine, the small rifle looking like a toy compared to what they were up against. At Bauer’s urging, he ducked down.

Once again Cole felt annoyed that their prisoner thought that he could issue orders. But the reason for Bauer’s urgency soon became clear.

It turned out that the sound of more tanks approaching wasn’t simply in Cole’s imagination. He knew something was up when he saw the Germans spring into action.

The commander of the lead tank shouted an order, and the infantrymen scattered, some running for the shelter of the trees and others staying on the road but dropping to one knee, using the panzers for cover. A couple of men unlimbered the unwieldy Panzerfaust and aimed them up the road at whatever was coming at the Germans.

Next, the tanks did their best to spread out, although there wasn’t much room for that on the narrow forest track. The lead tank managed to race ahead, and the second nosed into the trees at the side of the road. The third tank stayed right where it was, swiveled its gun, and fired.

The blast made the ground shake, but that was nothing compared to the impact. Looking up the road, Cole was astonished to see the round from the panzer strike an American tank that had come into view around the bend. The round punched right through the armor, nearly dead center.

At first nothing happened, and Cole thought that maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him or that the shell was a dud. Then the tank seemed to hop up off the ground, followed by an explosion that sent flame and smoke shooting from every gap and chink in the armor. Seconds later, flames engulfed the tank. Nobody came crawling out of the inferno.

Cole was horrified at the destruction of his own side’s tank, thinking that the poor bastards on the tank crew never had a chance, yet some part of him still admired the good shooting on the part of the panzer crew. Clearly they knew their business.

A second Sherman tank appeared around the bend, and this one seemed intent on kicking ass and taking names later, unperturbed by the fate of the tank that had been destroyed, firing as it advanced. This tank had supplemented its own armor with several medium-size tree trunks lashed across its front, the logs so green that some had branches with pine needles waving in the wind and crusted snow between the logs, like chinking in a log cabin. Cole didn’t know how effective the logs would be against a direct hit, but they’d be better than nothing. The Shermans didn’t have a good reputation for withstanding direct hits from the heavier German guns. The fate of the first tank had made that abundantly clear.

One shot from the Sherman struck one of the panzers but didn’t penetrate its armor. Instead, the round bounced off the armor plating with an earsplitting karoom and detonated among the trees.

The Sherman kept advancing toward the three panzers. To Cole’s way of thinking, it was nothing short of a suicide mission. Incredibly, the commander in the first German tank still stood in the hatch, almost resembling a soldier charging on horseback. He wasn’t sure whether the German was brave or foolhardy. Then the panzer skidded to a halt and lowered its barrel, taking aim at the Sherman.

It was practically point-blank range. There was no way that the panzer could miss, even if the gunner had been blind in one eye and couldn’t see straight in the other.

Cole made a split decision to do what he could to help the Sherman tank. He was well aware that a rifle was a puny weapon against a tank. Still, he had to try. He lined up the crosshairs on the commander standing in the hatch.

He felt Bauer jolt his shoulder, spoiling his aim.

“Do that again and I’ll shoot you,” Cole snarled.

“Wait,” the German said. “There is another way.”

To Cole’s astonishment, the German stood up and started waving to get the attention of the tank commander.

Cole reached up and tugged at Bauer with such force that the man’s officer’s hat fell off into the snow. “Get down, you stupid Kraut!”

But Bauer ignored him and kept waving to get the attention of the Germans on the road.

His tactics worked a bit too well. The tank commander shouted something and pointed. The panzer’s massive gun swiveled in their direction to face this new threat. If that wasn’t bad enough, some of the soldiers on the road directed their fire at them, and bullets tore through the trees.

Now that the attention was momentarily off them, the Sherman tank crew seemed to realize that it might be better to live to fight another day. Like an indignant banty rooster, the Sherman reversed direction and retreated. It did still get off a couple of shots, one of which struck one of the panzers, enveloping it in a cloud of detonating high explosives. The tank survived, but certainly its crew would have been left with ringing ears and a headache.

Cole rolled out from his hiding place. Keeping low, he ran, yelling “Go! Go!” to the others.

He ran deeper into the snowy woods, aware of Vaccaro and Rupert crashing through the trees on his left. He wasn’t sure where Bauer had gone. Cole really didn’t give a damn about him anymore.

Back on the road, the panzer fired with a sound like the sky ripping open. The shell struck somewhere ahead of Cole, ripping open the ground and scattering clods of dark earth across the white snow. Cole ran through while some of the clods were still raining down.

Bullets still tore through the trees around them, but the firing was more sporadic and higher overhead. He was sure that the Germans had lost sight of them. It wasn’t long before the firing stopped altogether, and thankfully the panzer didn’t take another shot at them.

Cole kept running. He didn’t stop until he emerged on a snow-covered lane that cut through the forest. He looked in both directions, but there wasn’t so much as a footprint. The snow lay undisturbed.

No, that wasn’t quite true, he realized. He spotted the telltale triangular pattern of rabbit tracks and the single-file trail left by a fox that was going after that rabbit. These forest creatures were going about their business, following the endless cycle of hunter and hunted, oblivious to the fact that there was a war on.

But there was no sign of any two-legged critters. No Germans. No panzers. Even the trees around them were still and quiet except for the taller bare branches clacking together in the winter wind. Nobody had been this way in some time.

Away from the sound of the fighting on the road, the lane felt secluded and peaceful. The tree branches above the lane wove together overhead to form a sort of tunnel through the forest, inviting them to follow it.

Cole bent over and caught his breath, panting. Vaccaro and Rupert came up beside him, doing the same.

“Damn, that was close,” Vaccaro said. “Was that German trying to get us killed?”

“He didn’t want me shooting that panzer commander, that’s what.”

“You were going to shoot at them?” Vaccaro asked, sounding incredulous. “That might have been worse than waving at them. Still, I don’t know what the hell Herr Barnstormer was thinking.”

Rupert interrupted them. “Here’s our German, chaps. You can ask him yourself.”

Bauer emerged from the trees, his hands raised to indicate that he was still their prisoner. Like them, he was panting and badly winded. One coat sleeve was torn where he’d caught it on a branch.

Cole stepped forward and hit Bauer in the chest with the butt of his rifle, knocking him down. With the German sitting in the snow, breathing heavily, Cole pointed the rifle at him. “Try anything like that again and I’ll shoot you. Hell, I ought to just shoot you now.”

Cole let the muzzle linger no more than a couple of feet from the Kraut’s head, finger on the trigger. He narrowed his eyes.

Their orders were to get the Kraut to HQ, but Cole felt like the incident on the road had left those orders null and void.

What was one more dead German?

Lieutenant Rupert cleared his throat, seemingly reluctant to speak up. “Erm, Private Cole, may I remind you of your duty?”

Cole’s finger tightened on the trigger.

“Private Cole⁠—”

Still, Cole ignored him.

“Hold on there, Cole,” Vaccaro said quietly. “Maybe you don’t have to shoot him. Not yet, anyhow.”

Cole kept the rifle pointed at the German for another half a minute. If the British officer hadn’t been present, he decided that maybe he would have pulled the trigger. He’d had enough of this Kraut, who had risked all their lives just to keep Cole from shooting that tank commander.

Also, the Kraut was supposed to be responsible for shooting those prisoners outside Bastogne. Maybe he deserved to die right here, right now, in these snowy woods.

But orders were orders. Lieutenant Rupert would have had no choice but to report that Cole had intentionally shot the prisoner. Rupert didn’t seem like the type who would make up a story about the prisoner trying to escape. Though young, he definitely had a stiff pole up his ass in addition to the famous British stiff upper lip.

“You don’t seem scared,” Cole said.

“I am fairly certain that I am already a dead man,” Bauer said, sounding resigned to his fate. “Die now, die later, what is the difference? Any soldier knows that.”

Cole lowered the rifle.

Bauer looked down at the snow, nodding as if in silent thanks, or possibly surprise.

“You lucky son of a bitch,” Vaccaro said, looking down at him. “You get to live another day. Well, maybe not a whole day. Another hour, anyhow. Possibly just on a minute-by-minute basis. We’ll see how it goes.”

Vaccaro turned away and lit a cigarette, the burst of smoke expanding in the cold, heavy air.

Cole didn’t smoke, but fumes seemed to be coming off him anyhow.

“Hold out your hands, please,” Rupert said to the German.

Bauer did as he was told, and the lieutenant bound his wrists together with a length of cord, though it wasn’t nearly as tight as Cole would have made it. Still, the rough cordage bit into his wrists. Then the lieutenant stepped away and lit his own cigarette. He was smoking a Craven A, a brand of cigarette issued to British troops and named after the late Earl of Craven. Generally speaking, the British cigarettes were considered inferior to Lucky Strikes, but Rupert was a loyal Brit and not one eager to admit that anything American was superior.

Nobody offered Bauer a cigarette. Having his hands tied again made it harder for Bauer to get up, but nobody moved to help the German. He struggled slowly to his feet, his movements stiff and heavy with exhaustion from the race through the trees, underlining the fact that he was a good dozen years older than the others. Not such a young man anymore. He had lost his officer’s hat somewhere and his face was crisscrossed with scratches from the tree branches he had run through escaping the hail of gunfire.

“This way,” Cole said, his voice brittle as an icicle.

He started up the lane, his footsteps carving a path through the untrammeled snow.

Silently, the others fell into step behind him.