Righteous Sniper

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cole and the others did not get much of a break after defeating the German attack toward Bastogne. They were pulled back after the German attack had shattered upon the hillside like waves upon the rocks. The field was littered with German dead, the snow stained red, the corpses of the destroyed panzers still smoking. As terrible as it was, no man present would ever forget the gruesome tableau before them. Decades later, it would be a story to tell their grandchildren. But for now they simply felt numb from the cold and glad to be alive.

Already more snow was falling, as if nature wished to hide humankind’s sins. If you got close enough, you could hear the snowflakes sizzle as they melted on the hot metal. If hell froze over, Cole reckoned that this was what it would look like.

“That’s a lot of dead Krauts,” Vaccaro remarked.

“Dead, stupid Krauts,” Cole emphasized. “They marched across that field like they owned it. What the hell did they expect?”

“They expected us to run, that’s what.”

“The Krauts got that part wrong.”

“Fine by me,” Vaccaro said. “Word is that they’re sending us back to Bastogne. Maybe we can find some more hot grub. A fire would be nice too. I’m not sure that I’ll ever feel my toes again.”

Nearby, young Hank was doing jumping jacks to get his blood moving.

Cole shook his head. Where the hell did the kid get that kind of energy? Cold as it was, now that the fighting was over, Cole was half-tempted to crawl back into his foxhole, pull a blanket over himself, and go to sleep.

To their surprise, several of the Germans had surrendered, including their commanding officer. Many of the new POWs were wounded. The Germans looked battered and broken after the punishing attack and the harsh weather conditions that took a toll on both sides. Given the appearance of the vanquished, it was hard for the surrender to feel like victory. Close up, the enemy simply looked like regular human beings.

But more than a few of the Krauts, along with their remaining panzers, had managed to slip away. Perhaps hoping to put the Americans at ease, the captured officer claimed that the survivors of the attack were on their way back to Germany. At least that was the rumor flying around.

“Too bad we didn’t wipe them all out,” Cole said. “We’ll just have to fight them later.”

They left their foxholes and returned to Bastogne. This time there were no trucks, and they had to walk.

Although the arrival of the Sherman tanks indicated that relief forces were finally about to break through, German troops still ringed the town. The ring was no longer impenetrable, but it was there all the same.

More than a few artillery shells still fell from time to time, indiscriminately killing soldiers and civilians, a reminder that the Germans were not ready to abandon their assault on the town. So far the Luftwaffe had not returned for another bombing run like the cruel Christmas Eve pounding they had delivered. That much was a relief.

Artillery wasn’t the only indicator of the German presence. A sniper had set up on the edges of the town, in an area that US forces did not yet control. From there, the sniper was able to pick off troops seemingly at will. His bullets always seemed to arrive when least expected.

When a fella stood still a moment to light a cigarette. When a tired GI leaned against a wall.

Death reached out and found them from an impossible distance.

The constant sniper fire wasn’t helping morale any. When it came to Bastogne, between the bombs and the bullets, there just didn’t seem to be anywhere that was safe from the reach of the enemy.

For that reason, it shouldn’t have surprised Cole when he was called in to deal with the problem.

He found himself summoned to headquarters with Lieutenant Mulholland. They brought Vaccaro along as a mascot.

Cole followed the lieutenant into a cramped house that had been commandeered as HQ. Outside, a clerk was using a hatchet to break apart a bomb-damaged chifforobe, which he carried in to fuel a huge fire blazing in the fireplace. More pieces of furniture stood nearby, awaiting their fate like cattle at the slaughterhouse. Despite the clerk’s best efforts, the fire couldn’t seem to warm the air.

A harried captain quickly explained the situation.

“Just when we think we’ve got the bastard, he moves on us,” the officer complained.

“That means he knows his business,” Cole replied. “It’s how German snipers are trained, sir. They don’t sit still for long.”

The captain didn’t look impressed. “Look, I don’t give a damn what they trained him to do. Hell, maybe they taught him to play the fiddle and knit socks too. I just want him gone. I understand that you’re the man to do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain opened his mouth, perhaps to express his doubts, but he took a moment to look Cole up and down. His gaze lingered on Cole’s battered sniper’s rifle, then moved to Cole’s gray-blue eyes. Their eyes met briefly, but the captain looked away, unable to hold Cole’s gaze. He wouldn’t have been the first man to detect something chilling in those eyes.

When he did speak, it was to say, “All right, if you say you can nab this Kraut, then I believe you. The only help I can give you is to have one of my men point out where this Kraut sniper has been operating.”

Back outside, Mulholland had no words of advice except “Be sure and get that bastard. Oh, and try not to get shot.”

With that he trudged off and disappeared.

Cole had to wonder if the lieutenant had meant that last part. He recalled how Mulholland had sent him down to parley with the tanks. That had been a somewhat dicey situation.

The message seemed to be that Cole was seen as expendable.

He had to wonder just when the hell Mulholland would get over Jolie — if he ever did.

Cole and Vaccaro weren’t alone for long. The captain had promised to give them a guide, who appeared soon after in the form of a scruffy sergeant named Gifford, who looked as if the last time he had shaved was late summer. He was leading a couple of other men who hung back.

Gifford was about average height but solidly built, his cheeks covered in reddish-brown stubble. He looked to be in his early thirties. He had two greenish eyes, one a slightly different color than the other. Both eyes burned with intensity as they first swept over Vaccaro and dismissed him, then settled on Cole.

“So you’re the sniper who is gonna solve our problem,” he said, not sounding particularly convinced.

“I reckon.”

Gifford shook his head like he’d just bitten into a lemon. “You reckon? From the sounds of it, you’re a goddamn hillbilly. It just figures. Everybody in this army thinks you have to be a hillbilly to be a good shot.”

Vaccaro spoke up. “Hey, take my word for it, this fella can shoot.”

“If you say so,” Gifford said. Keeping his eyes on Cole, he dipped his chin and spoke over his shoulder to the men behind him. “What do you think, fellas? Twenty bucks says this peckerwood gets himself shot by the end of the day.”

One of the GIs snorted. “Nobody is gonna bet against that, Sarge.”

Gifford turned his attention back to Cole. “The thing is, we don’t need any help to get this sniper.”

Cole shrugged. “Fine by me. Sounds like you can handle it.”

He started to turn away.

“Hold on. Where the hell do you think you’re going, huh? The captain gave an order, and we’re gonna make sure it’s carried out. Now, follow me, and when I say to, keep your head down.”

Following the prickly sergeant, they headed for the northeastern quadrant. The town itself soon gave way to more widespread buildings and a few stone walls that enclosed small fields. In the distance stood a church, the tall steeple providing an ideal vantage point for a sniper. Surrounding the church was more open ground broken up by stone walls and some barns or cowsheds. The forest lay beyond, showing itself as a brooding gray presence.

“This would be a good time to keep your heads down,” the sergeant said as they entered the backyards of small houses on the outskirts of town. “He’ll have seen us by now if he’s looking.”

“I reckon he’s looking,” Cole said, keeping low. “Wouldn’t be much of a sniper if he wasn’t.”

Right away Cole was impressed by the sniper’s obvious skill in being able to reach the steeple without being seen. According to the sergeant, the sniper was also a tremendous shot.

“The son of a bitch never misses,” the sergeant said. Having taken Cole’s measure, he had changed his tune a bit and seemed friendlier. “He’s already shot a few of our guys. This is personal. Think you can get him?”

Cole looked toward the church steeple in the distance. “I’ll get him. I need to get closer to him, which means going out there in no-man’s-land. Make sure your boys don’t shoot me.”

“I’ll pass the word. Listen, when you come back in, the company password is ‘black strap.’ The countersign is ‘molasses.’”

The sergeant left them alone, scurrying back through the alleys and along stone walls to avoid falling under the sniper’s sights. For all his talk, he seemed glad to be getting out of there.

Vaccaro was already studying the church steeple through binoculars. “Not so bad,” he said. “What would you say, three hundred yards?”

Cole studied the distance and gave a slow nod. “Give or take.”

“I know you weren’t blowing smoke just now when you said you could get him. But, you know, can you get him? You’d have to be able to see the son of a bitch, and right now all I see is a church steeple with solid stone walls. Maybe we could just bring up some mortars and blow the shit out of that church.”

“Where would the fun be in that? No, I’m gonna get him. We’re gonna get him. You and me, city boy.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“I can thread the needle, all right. But you’re right that I need to see the needle in the first place. Hand me those binoculars a minute.”

Vaccaro carried Zeiss field glasses, taken off a deceased German officer. The optics were superior to any US Army — issued binoculars. Back home, they would have cost the average working man at least a month’s salary.

Cole studied the church steeple through the binoculars, looking for something, anything, that indicated where the sniper was hiding. Like many of the buildings in Europe that they’d come across, the age of the church seemed to be somewhere between old and ancient. Even the oldest buildings back home were nothing compared to structures that dated back centuries.

The square tower offered a cold facade, topped with a slate roof. At the very top, beneath the roof, were several long slits. They were intended to let out the sound of the church bell used to summon worshippers, or perhaps to warn of danger, but the openings also happened to make perfect firing slits for the hidden sniper.

The only real sign of age and decay exhibited by the church was that the cross at the top of the steeple was weathered and missing pieces, perhaps thanks to the recent bombardments, with cracks running through it from years of exposure to the elements. One more strong windstorm and it looked as if the damn thing might blow down.

“What are you thinking?” Vaccaro asked.

“We’ll have to get closer.”

“That’s just what I was thinking. But how do we do that without getting our asses shot off?”

“Let me think about it a minute.”

The two men began to strategize quietly, using gestures as much as words. They had done this together before. Vaccaro would point out a path toward the steeple or a landscape feature. Cole would either grunt in reluctant agreement or shake his head in disapproval. It wasn’t all that different from how a pair of cavemen would have planned their hunt.

Once again Vaccaro handed him the binoculars, and Cole studied the scene, taking in every detail. The church steeple loomed against the gray sky, its stony features brooding and somehow menacing. Above them in that steeple, the sniper would be hidden in the freezing shade, still as the stone around him, his rifle at the ready, waiting for a clear shot.

Cole thought about the differences between German and US snipers. First, he knew that he and other Americans had a lot to learn from their German counterparts. The US Army did not have a sniper training program beyond the basic marksmanship training that all soldiers received — or were supposed to. In the early months of the war, thousands of troops had been rushed through basic training without more than a cursory introduction to their rifles. The approach could be termed on-the-job training.

To be fair, not all these men were intended to be combat troops, and the army had desperately needed every warm body it could get its hands on for jobs from clerks to cooks to truck drivers. US snipers were men like Cole who had been found to be crack shots and kept their cool under fire. They were given rifles with telescopic sights and told to get to work.

It wasn’t that easy. The enemy snipers they faced had often gone through specific training in the subtle art of targeting the enemy. He’d heard that to pass sniper training, the Krauts had to undergo a test in which they remained undetected by their instructors. They learned to camouflage themselves. They learned patience. They learned tricks to fool their prey. They learned to sleep and eat and relieve themselves in a hole in the ground. If they failed these tests, they did not earn their Scharfschütze badge.

German snipers were not just marksmen, they were trained killers.

That’s what we’re up against, Cole thought.

Americans liked to see themselves as great hunters and crack shots, and there was some truth to the fact that compared to most Europeans, many Americans had grown up with rifles and firearms. Wasn’t every American supposed to be a cowboy at heart, or maybe Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett all rolled up into one?

For every Cole who had grown up hunting, it seemed like there were just as many men like Vaccaro who had only known pavement under their feet.

However, the Germans and the Russians also had a great tradition of hunting and a culture around firearms. German snipers tended to have been hunters in their youth. Most had grown up in the countryside. Their skill with a rifle had been honed by training. Some of the sharpshooters had experienced battle against the Soviet Union, and that included taking on the highly skilled Russian snipers.

You either learned quickly, or you died.

Cole and Vaccaro had learned their trade the hard way — by trial and error. It helped that Cole also had a natural cunning.

Looking at that church steeple, Cole knew that he would need all his skills to nab the German hiding up there.

“Let’s go have us a look,” he said.

Cole started off through the space between them and the church steeple, moving cautiously across the yard and even small barnyards. He constantly kept something between him and the sniper’s position, whether it was a stone wall or the corner of a building.

They moved carefully and quietly through the maze of narrow alleys that crisscrossed the town. The frozen ground was hard and uneven, dotted with rocks and clumps of torn earth from the shelling. These threatened to trip up Cole’s feet, but even in the ruts he managed to move lightly. Vaccaro clumped along behind him, making enough noise for them both.

Cole exhaled a cloud of breath in the cold air, his stomach tight with anticipation. Battle-worn after these months of war, he had experienced more than a few moments like this, those moments where life and death hung in the balance. It wasn’t fear but the thrill of the hunt.

As they inched closer, they passed through a dense thicket of rosebushes encircling a house, the branches bare and twisted, grasping with thorns, like the gnarled hands of ancient whispering souls. The scent of damp earth and decaying leaves filled Cole’s nostrils, a reminder of the funk from which all men sprang and to which they would return.

Not that Cole was in any hurry for that. So he took his time working closer to the church steeple.

As Cole and Vaccaro continued to analyze the situation, they noticed a small group of civilians gathering in the distance, near the church, their heads bowed in prayer. It looked like a funeral. A sudden gust of wind blew through the town, sending a shower of snow across the ground. The townspeople turned up their coat collars and kept praying.

They would have made easy targets, but the sniper seemed content to ignore them, saving his bullets for American soldiers.

Vaccaro whispered urgently, “Even if we get close enough, we can’t risk firing near those people. They’d be caught in the cross fire. The last thing we need is any collateral damage.”

“Yeah,” Cole agreed. “Let’s go at him from the other side. Maybe he won’t be expecting us then.”

As they scoped out the situation, they spotted a civilian wearing a tweed beret, picking his way through the landscape of low stone walls and outbuildings. Clearly he was headed in the direction of the German lines.

“Where the hell does he think he’s going? Maybe he’s a German spy.”

“No Kraut would be caught dead wearing a beret, even if he is a spy. That’s one of the locals. He must be friends with the Jerries.”

“We ought to shoot the bastard.”

“Let him go. No point attracting attention to ourselves.”

Their stealthy efforts weren’t enough. A shot rang out and struck the corner of a house just as Cole slipped behind it. Dust and bits of stone chips flew.

“Dammit! Another split second and that bastard would have gotten me.”

“You’re lucky it’s starting to get dark or he might not have missed.”

Cole nodded, thinking that Vaccaro was right about the fading daylight. His eyes flicked back and forth between the church and the distant hills. He wasn’t sure whether it was the movement or something else that had caught the enemy sniper’s attention. All he knew was that his heart was pounding. The sniper’s bullet had been close.

Keeping low, he eased the rifle scope up to his eye. He ached to return fire, but there was no target visible.

Another shot came from the direction of the tower. No bullets struck nearby, and Cole had the sinking realization that the sniper had probably just shot another unsuspecting GI on the streets of Bastogne. It was just what they had been sent to prevent.

They didn’t have much time before dark. As the hidden sun began to dip below the horizon, the shadows deepened and the light faded, making it more difficult to see the sniper’s position. The church steeple was being cloaked by the darkness. Darkness had come slowly, but it now seemed to accelerate like a flood tide.

Then, a small miracle. The setting sun sank below the level of the clouds, revealing itself like the smiling face of a lover under the covers. The final beacon of light illuminated the entire town, bathing the rooftops of Bastogne in glowing light. The church steeple stood out like a lighthouse. They were close enough now that he could see footsteps in the snow, leading away from the church across the fields. He followed the footsteps out and glimpsed a figure trotting across the field, carrying a rifle with a scope.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. He put his rifle to his shoulder, desperate to settle the crosshairs on the Kraut sniper, but the man was too far away.

It’s still worth a try, he thought. He raised the sights to a point above the man’s head, allowing for the drop of the bullet.

Then the sun dipped behind a hill. It was like pulling down a window shade.

The enemy sniper in the distance faded to a gray blur and was gone.

Behind the rifle, Cole grinned his feral grin, his sharp white teeth showing.

It was just as well that he hadn’t fired and warned off the Kraut. The man must have thought that he’d made his getaway unseen.

He knew that the enemy sniper would return in the morning. It went against the rules to shoot from the same position again, but Cole suspected that the church steeple was simply too good to pass up.

No, the enemy sniper would be back in the morning, intending to claim more American lives. And when he returned, Cole would be waiting for him.

They made their way back toward the American lines. The winter darkness was falling, and he couldn’t see the sentries, although he knew they were there. He and Vaccaro kept to cover just in case the sentries proved trigger-happy.

“Black strap,” Cole called out, giving the sign.

After a moment he heard a soldier shout the countersign: “Molasses.”

Cole stepped out and waved. The scruffy sergeant he’d met earlier appeared opposite him in the dim light and waved back.

“Did you get him?” the sergeant asked. Curious soldiers stood behind him. Word must have gotten around that a sniper had been sent to settle the Kraut’s hash. “I didn’t hear any shooting.”

“Don’t you worry none, Sarge,” Cole replied in his mountain drawl. “First thing tomorrow, I’m gonna tree him in that steeple like a coon.”