Righteous Sniper

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

They had survived one attack from two different directions and had forced their attackers to retreat, licking their wounds. But they had a few wounds of their own. Rupert had been grazed by a bullet — nothing too serious, but painful all the same. Vaccaro had caught some glass in the face thanks to a bullet going through a window. Cole helped him pick out the glass. Vaccaro had insisted on inspecting the damage in a mirror.

“You think that’s gonna leave a scar? I don’t want it to spoil my good looks.”

“No worries there,” Cole said. It was well known that Vaccaro operated under the illusion that he bore some resemblance to the silent film star Rudolph Valentino. “Besides, you can tell all the girls back home that you got that scar in the war.”

“Better than a medal,” Vaccaro agreed.

The sun was getting lower. Under cover of darkness, it was likely that one side or the other would be back, and the defenders would no longer have the advantage of being able to pick them off as they crossed the open ground between the forest and the château. Once it got dark, things would get ugly.

They would hold out as long as they could, and then fight to the end. Try as he might, Cole couldn’t come up with a better plan.

Cole had always wondered whether he would make it through this war. He just hadn’t expected to be making his last stand in an old château, protecting the life of a German prisoner.

Out the windows, the unseen sun sank lower in the winter sky. The wooded hills seemed to march closer. The daylight faded like sand running through an hourglass. Soon enough, they would be out of time.

Cole would not have pegged Madame Jouret as a military strategist, but she seemed to grasp the situation as well as any of them. This house was like her Fort Sumter and Fort McHenry all rolled into one.

She set down her shotgun and approached Cole with her daughter in tow as an interpreter. She looked at Cole and said something in French, then looked expectantly at her daughter.

Reluctantly, Lena translated. She didn’t seem to like the information that her mother was sharing. “My mother says it will be much worse for us once it gets dark.”

“She ain’t wrong about that.”

Lena translated Cole’s reply; then the two women looked at each other. They both seemed to have agreed already on a course of action, because this time Lena spoke without waiting for her mother. “She also says that there is a way out.”

Cole wasn’t sure what she was saying. The house was surrounded, watched from all sides by Germans and Americans waiting to pounce on them. “A way out?”

“I can show you.”

Lena explained that there had not always been peace in the Ardennes, even before the current war. Great armies passed through, or sometimes local rivalries and conflicts escalated into bloodshed. There were even times when it was convenient to bring people in or out of the house unseen, whether it was a dalliance or a political alliance that was better kept from prying eyes.

They descended into the cellar. There were no electric lights down here, and nary a window, so that they had to rely on candles and flashlights. The dancing light revealed thick stone walls dripping with moisture, massive floor beams, some with the bark of ancient trees still clinging to them or hanging down in crumbling strips, and a dirt floor. The air smelled of dirt and damp, not to mention decaying wood. It was not an inviting place. Madame Jouret stopped in front of an ancient wooden cupboard that was dripping with cobwebs. With surprising ease, the cupboard was pushed out of the way to reveal a thick wooden door.

And beyond the door, a tunnel.

The dark tunnel was not inviting, to say the least.

Dirty spiderwebs ringed the entrance, and Cole noted a fat, pale spider that must have lived its whole life in darkness retreating into a crevice. Beyond the bit of light from their candles and flashlights, the tunnel looked black and pitiless as the muzzle of a cannon. The still air wafting from the tunnel depths smelled even more musty and earthy than the old cellar.

“This emerges in the woods, near a springhouse in the forest,” Lena explained. “You must go now, while there is still time before the next attack on the house.”

Madame Jouret poured forth more unintelligible words at a feverish pace and began pushing Lena toward the tunnel entrance. It became clear that Lena and her mother were arguing, but in the end, Lena appeared to relent. Her face had become a mask of twisted emotions, both tears and anger.

“What is it?” Lieutenant Rupert asked with concern.

“She says that I must go with you, as a guide. You will need to find your way through these woods to a road, and it will be difficult to do so on your own. I know these woods well.”

As they prepared to leave, Madame Jouret made no effort to join them. Rupert noticed and asked, “What about your mother?”

“My mother will stay here. She says she is too old to flee through the forest. She will hide again in the attic, this time in a place where no one will find her. And if they do, they will not harm her. Or so she would like to believe.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he said.

Cole knew that Madame Jouret was gambling with her life if her hiding place was discovered. He decided that the Americans wouldn’t hurt her. He trusted that even someone like Brock must have some basic morality, but then he thought about the Germans. All bets were off, considering that Messner and his men had already murdered American POWs. This Belgian lady would be the least of their worries.

More arguing between Lena and her mother ensued, but once again, Lena yielded. Madame Jouret was staying behind and would not be swayed. The rest of them would escape through the tunnel.

“She insists that there is no other way,” said Lieutenant Rupert, who had been listening in.

“I’ve got to agree with the old lady on this one,” Vaccaro said.

The others looked to Cole. There were two officers present — although the opinion of the German didn’t really count — but they had all come to view Cole as their best hope to get out of this mess.

It looked to Cole as if they had two choices — either make a last stand in the château or plunge themselves into the gloomy tunnel.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Cole was prepared to lead the way, but Lena slid ahead of him without hesitation. Vaccaro followed Cole, then Bauer, with Lieutenant Rupert bringing up the rear. Bauer still carried the lieutenant’s Webley revolver, but Cole had long since stopped worrying about that. The German would have had plenty of opportunities to use it on his captors if he had chosen to do so. Instead, he had joined them in fighting for their lives.

Behind them, Madame Jouret pulled the door shut. They heard the cupboard sliding back into place. The darkness inside the tunnel was complete, but he could sense the damp walls and low ceiling. Cole couldn’t avoid the sensation of moving through a long, narrow grave.

The girl did not seem intimidated by the darkness ahead. This was probably not Lena’s first time using the tunnel. It occurred to Cole that this could be why they had seen no tracks in the snow leading to or from the château. Using a tunnel would have been a clever way to give the appearance that the château was abandoned by avoiding any footprints around it.

He had to admit, the two women of the house had been full of surprises.

“It’s dark as the inside of a black alley cat in here,” Vaccaro muttered. Although they had candles and flashlights, the intense darkness beyond the reach of their candles and flashlights seemed ready to snuff out their lights. “Do you think this actually comes out somewhere?”

“I sure as hell hope so,” was all Cole could say. They had put their trust in Madame Jouret and Lena to get them out of the château. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them — they had fought tooth and nail alongside them today — but Vaccaro was right that the tunnel was so dark that it seemed possible that it didn’t lead anywhere but deeper into the darkness, maybe all the way to the center of the earth.

Cole had no choice but to follow the girl through the dark confines of the tunnel. The walls seemed to shrink in on them, and the ceiling grew lower so that he had to duck his head. Initially, near the doorway into the cellar, the tunnel walls had been lined with bricks, though they were damp and crumbling.

The deeper into the tunnel that they went, the more rudimentary its construction became. Soon the walls were only bare dirt, laced in places with tree roots. A few boards held the roof up; these boards were themselves shored up with posts they had to squeeze past without jostling for fear of bringing the roof down on their heads.

Vaccaro managed to bump into one of these posts, bringing a shower of dirt onto their heads. Then a few rocks fell, followed by the entire board, which glanced off his helmet with an audible clang.

“Watch where you’re going, city boy,” Cole grumped as a few small stones pinged off his helmet. “You’ll bring the whole damn roof down on our heads.”

They kept going, careful not to bump into anything. Nobody liked the thought of being buried alive.

Finally, Lena halted at the foot of a short ladder. Just beyond the ladder, the tunnel ended in a seeping dirt wall. It was quite damp here, with a few drops of water filtering down through the ceiling. Cole gulped in spite of himself — he couldn’t wait to get out of this place.

“Give me some light, please,” she said.

Cole shined the flashlight up to reveal a hatch of some kind hammered together out of heavy boards. The girl went up the ladder and pushed at the hatch. It appeared that the weight might be too much for her and that they were all trapped.

Slowly, a crack appeared at one edge. She paused to listen, her arms trembling with the effort of holding up the heavy hatch.

Cole wanted to help her, but there was no room on the ladder for more than one person. He did, however, draw his pistol, just in case somebody was waiting on the other side.

However, Lena seemed to have judged that the coast was clear. With a grunt, she shoved the hatch the rest of the way open. A square of gray dusky light appeared. Cold, fresh, winter air filled the stagnant tunnel, and Cole breathed deeply.

Lena went up the ladder and then beckoned for Cole and the others to follow.

He saw that the hatch opened into the interior of a stone-walled springhouse. He was familiar with springhouses from his own upbringing in the rural mountains, where folks didn’t have electricity, much less an icebox. A springhouse provided cool storage for your milk and butter, maybe even fresh meat. He looked over and saw the shallow, stone-lined pool that would have held bottles of milk and cream in summer. This explained the water dripping into the tunnel below.

He had to hand it to the previous château residents who had built this tunnel. It was likely that it had come in handy more than once. There was no doubt that it had saved their lives tonight.

There wasn’t enough space for them all inside the springhouse, so they stooped to go out the low door and found themselves looking back at the château some distance away through the trees. It seemed impossible that they had traversed this distance underground.

Silhouetted against the old stone walls of the château, he could see a figure at one of the lower windows. The sound of breaking glass reached them, followed by several quick shots.

“I reckon they’ll be disappointed when they find out we ain’t there,” Cole said. “Then they’ll surely come looking for us. We’d best get a move on.”

“This way,” the girl said, and slipped away through the trees like a nymph, so that even Cole had to hurry to keep up.

The Germans had managed to get inside the château. They had been disappointed to find it empty. Their search of the house had mostly been fruitless, although they had come across a half-empty decanter of brandy in the drawing room, along with clear signs that the group must have spent the night there.

“They have not disappeared into thin air,” Messner announced. “Once it is daylight, we will search for them.”

They camped out in the empty house, sleeping on the furniture and polishing off the brandy. The next morning Dietzel’s skill as a Jaeger eventually rewarded them with being able to find their quarry’s trail. They had been searching in larger and larger rings around the perimeter of the château, but so far had found nothing.

Where Bauer and his escort had gone was a mystery — until now.

“Over here!” Dietzel shouted.

The Jaeger stood by a stone springhouse with a low roof. Several sets of tracks in the snow led away from the springhouse, but none went toward it.

Messner confessed that he was mystified.

“A tunnel, Herr Hauptmann,” Dietzel explained. “There is a hatch inside the springhouse. The tunnel must lead to the château.”

“We searched that place high and low!”

Dietzel shrugged. “Old houses have their secrets. This one, at least, has been revealed to us.”

Impatiently, Messner called Gettinger over. He had also been searching the snow for some clue as to where their quarry had gone. Gettinger was limping a bit, having been wounded in the first attack on the château the previous day.

“There is no time to lose,” Messner said. “They must have given us the slip during the night, so they could have a head start of several hours.”

Dietzel smiled and gestured toward the tracks with the muzzle of his sniper rifle. Clearly he was enjoying himself. “Let the hunt begin,” he said.

Messner realized that for the Jaeger, perhaps this was simply a game. He was enjoying the thrill of the hunt. Messner himself had not lost sight of his desire for revenge. There might still be hope of catching up to Bauer.

Dietzel was studying the tracks. “It is interesting that they have added someone to their party,” he said. “The shoes are different. Smaller. I would say that these are the footprints of a woman.”

“What are they doing with a woman?” He realized that the house had not been unoccupied after all. At least it hadn’t been when the Americans arrived.

“Perhaps she is their guide,” Dietzel said, guessing the situation correctly. “No matter. We don’t need a guide. We can follow these tracks easily enough.”

“Good, because there is no time to lose. Let’s go!” Messner ordered, and started off at a trot, following the tracks as easily as he might follow the road signs down a highway.

Brock watched the Germans from a distance. By now he had come to realize that they very likely wanted the same thing — the German prisoner. Nothing else about their pursuit of the same group made sense.

He wasn’t sure why they wanted the German officer, but it clearly wasn’t to play tiddlywinks. The way that they had attacked the château with a vengeance made it clear that they weren’t all that interested in taking anyone alive — even one of their own.

If he was going to guess, it was that they also wanted the German officer dead.

This didn’t mean that he was willing to team up with the Germans. They were Krauts, after all. The enemy.

Unseen, they watched the Germans from the cover of the surrounding trees.

“Should we shoot them?” Vern wanted to know.

Brock thought about it. “No, let’s see what they turn up. Let them do the hard work, you know.”

Their patience was rewarded a short time later when they heard a shout from the woods. You didn’t need to speak German to understand the meaning of the tone. The Germans had found something, and they sounded excited about it.

“All right, let’s go check it out.”

First, they did a quick check of the château but found nothing of interest. Once some time had passed, they crept around and found the springhouse and tracks. They could see the footprints left by the escort patrol and the pursuing Germans.

All that they had to do now was follow the trail.