Winter Sniper: A World War II Novel

Chapter 19

Hess and Zumwald took at the wheel because the strain of driving in the snow was exhausting. They couldn’t take their eyes off the road for a second and their knuckles turned white from gripping the wheel so hard. Near the town of Frederick they veered south and crossed the Potomac River at Point of Rocks. Beneath the bridge, through the swirling snow, they could see the cold river rushing between boulders.

More than once, Zumwald wondered what the hell he had gotten himself into. This wasn’t like being on U-351, where he had served because he had no choice. He had cast his lot voluntarily with an assassin.

“Why are you doing this, Hess?” he finally asked, after they had stopped for coffee and more burgers at a roadside diner that had defied the storm by staying open. “We could both disappear until the war is over.”

Hess blew steam off his coffee before he answered. “This is my duty,” he finally said.

When Hess offered no further explanation, Zumwald did not press him for one. Zumwald had met plenty of his kind during the war. For a man like Hess, duty was enough.

For his own part, Zumwald wondered what was keeping him along for this insane mission. His decision back at the motel parking lot could be described as a moment of foolishness — but it was too late to take it back. Even now, he could have spoken a few words at the diner and given them both away. Maybe the Americans wouldn’t execute him if he turned them in. However, he had little doubt that Hess would get the gas chamber. Zumwald did not want that on his conscience. Hess had saved him twice — plucking him from the icy Delaware Bay and then again from the thugs at the crossroads. Turning Hess in would have broken some kind of code — not just one between two German soldiers but the kind that ran deeper than the Third Reich or even the Old West — it was a matter of honor between two men.

Walking back to the car, Hess spoke up. “Now that I’ve told you what I’m planning to do, I should probably shoot you.”

It was as if the wind had suddenly blown colder. Zumwald realized that Hess might have been having doubts of his own all during this drive. But his doubts would have been about eliminating the weak link in the mission — Zumwald.

Zumwald kept driving. The storm got worse before it got better and snow made the road virtually impassable in some places. Twice they slid off the road and it took them nearly an hour both times to wrestle the car back onto the pavement. They were ready to give up and wait for the storm to pass until they found some loose cinderblocks and loaded them into the trunk. The extra weight helped the rear wheels dig in and gave them more traction. Keeping the car on the road gave them something to do other than dwell upon the doubts each man had about the other — fighting the storm together built some bond between them that had been missing before. The snow finally quit after midnight and they drove at a crawl the rest of the way down the Shenandoah Valley.

They reached White Sulphur Springs by mid-morning. The town was surrounded by low mountains thick with snow-covered forest — it reminded Zumwald of the country around Heidelberg. Down in the mountain valleys there were dairy farms. It was one of these that caught Zumwald’s eye because where the farm lane met the country road a hand-lettered sign was posted that read, “Farm help wanted.” The farm lane was plowed, so they turned down it. The lane ran between fenced fields and Zumwald noticed black-and-white Holstein cows trudging through the snow. At the end of the lane was a two-story farmhouse with white clapboard siding and a tin roof, just a short walk from a substantial dairy barn. A couple of dogs ran out to greet them, barking at the strangers. That brought out the farmer.

“Help you boys?” He was tall and heavy, bundled in a brown work coat and a billed cap with ear flaps. The hair that peeked from under his hat was white. The old farmer’s face, weathered from a lifetime of mountain winters and summers, reminded Zumwald of a chunk of wood.

“We saw the sign out by the road,” Zumwald said, stepping forward. He took off his hat and felt cold wind gnaw at his ears. “Do you still need a couple of farm hands?”

“We’re both Four-F. I’ve got bad eyes and my buddy here is stone deaf in his left ear.” Zumwald attempted a smile. “Nothing wrong with our backs.”

“I reckon the army’s gettin’ particular about its cannon fodder,” the farmer said, just a hint of derision in his voice, but not directed at them. Maybe every American isn’t as patriotic as the war propaganda would have one believe. Zumwald cast a sideways glance at Hess, silently willing him to stop standing as if he had a ramrod stuck up his ass. The old man looked them over the same way he might inspect a couple of cattle he was thinking about buying. “Your friend don’t say much.”

Hess flicked his eyes up, then down again, trying for a humble note. “We could use the work, sir.”

Zumwald cringed at Hess’s accent. Ve could use the vork.

The old farmer raised his bushy eyebrows. “Where you boys from?”

“We’ve been staying in Maryland but we’re from Pennsylvania,” Zumwald answered quickly. “Lancaster County.”

“Yup. Dutch country. Might have guessed. In that case, I reckon you boys know your way around a barnyard.” The farmer seemed satisfied. “You can bunk in the barn. It’s warmer than it looks. Get to work now and you’ll earn your supper.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The farmer just shook his head when Zumwald explained that they didn’t have so much as a blanket between them. “You boys travel light, huh? Well, I’ll fix you up. Now, let’s get to work.”

To his surprise, Zumwald found that he enjoyed pitching hay and even milking the cows. Exhausted though he was, he was glad of the physical work after his long period of inactivity in Washington. Hess performed his own chores with his customary efficiency. The farmer seemed more than pleased with their efforts and after nightfall brought them heaping plates of food — ham slices, fried potatoes, green beans that the farmer explained had been “put up” by his wife the summer before. He brought them both a couple bottles of Iron City beer to wash it down. Their bedroom consisted of two cots in a corner of the barn that served as a kind of office and workshop for the farmer. The barn was only marginally warmer than the cold night outside, but at least they were out of the wind.

Sure that he would not be seen in the darkness, Hess brought in his rifle and wrapped it carefully in a feed sack before hiding it out of sight on top of a beam. “Do you think that farmer will snoop around?” Hess asked quietly in German.

“If you want him to, let him hear you talking like that,” Zumwald said. “I wouldn’t worry about him finding your rifle.”

“I will have to sight it in again,” Hess said. He took his pistol and put it under his pillow. “My rifle got knocked around pretty hard.”

Zumwald had lost patience with plots and rifles. He had a full belly and he was exhausted. This wasn’t quite the adventure he had imagined, but he could think of worse. He wrapped himself tightly in the old quilt the farmer had given him. “Best get to sleep,” he said. “That old man said he was going to wake us up at four in the morning to start milking these damn cows.”

As he drifted off to sleep, Zumwald was dimly aware of Hess on the cot nearby, hands propped under his head, pale eyes wide awake.

Ike’s staff had a respite now that he was trying to spend time with Mamie. Ty passed that first morning hiking through the forests surrounding the resort, getting the lay of the land. The landscape was covered in six inches of fresh snow. He didn’t have boots, just his street shoes, and they quickly filled with snow. The patent leather soles didn’t provide much in the way of traction and two or three times he slipped and fell. It didn’t help that the blow to his head had done something to his sense of balance. He still had dizzy spells and sometimes his eyes refused to focus so that it seemed he was viewing the world from deep underwater. He tried to ignore the symptoms at first, but then he quietly went to see one of the doctors treating the wounded in the field hospital that had been set up on the resort grounds.

He felt sheepish as soon as he saw what looked like acres of gauze covering the soldiers’ wounds. It didn’t help that Ty recalled how his own father had bragged about staying in the field with two German machine gun bullets in him at Belleu Wood. We were out of bandages, so I wrapped my leg with newspaper and picked up my rifle again. Now, your granddaddy got shot out of the saddle at Gettysburg. He got right back on his horse. His old man wouldn’t think much of a son who went to see a doctor over a headache and dizzy spells. But if there was a way to fix what was wrong with him before Ike found out and kept Ty from returning to England, it was worth swallowing his pride.

“You’ve got a concussion, son,” the doctor said after a brief examination. The army doctor, a major whose hair was shot through with gray, didn’t seem to notice that Ty was a captain. “A hard knock to the head will do that. Anybody ever take any x-rays?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, if you had fractured your skull I guess we’d know it by now, mainly because you’d probably be dead from swelling on the brain.”

Ty felt a little sick to his stomach. His appetite was gone because he spent whole days feeling nauseous.

“How long will this last?”

The doctor took off his glasses and polished them with a corner of his white coat. “Anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months. Until then, best thing to do is get plenty of rest, avoid booze and cigarettes — and try not to get knocked in the head again.”

Leaving the doctor’s office, Ty almost laughed. Plenty of rest. That doctor had a sense of humor.

Two days after Hess and Zumwald arrived, the farmer drove into town in his old truck to pick up supplies, leaving them to work the farm alone. As soon as the old man’s truck was out of sight, Hess dropped the grain shovel he had been using to clean up after the cows and retrieved his rifle from its hiding place. Between being dropped and then used as a club, the weapon had taken an awful beating the night of the assassination attempt in Washington. Aside from a fresh nick or two in the stock, the Mosin-Nagant looked no worse for wear. But Hess wanted to make certain that the rifle still shot true. He would sight it in again before chancing a stray bullet during his second attempt on Eisenhower.

The farmer fed his hogs from a supply of half-rotten vegetables that had been caught by the frost. Hess picked out a pumpkin and a couple of round acorn squashes, then put them in a sack. With the rifle in one hand and the sack over his shoulder, he trudged off through the snow.

He crossed through the bare winter woods to an empty pasture out of sight of the house and barn. He guessed he had an hour or so at least before the farmer returned — should be plenty of time. At the edge of the pasture was a windfall. Hess set the pumpkin and squashes on the log so that they perched like birds on a wire, then walked to the woods on the opposite side of the pasture and found another log that he could lay the rifle across. He put the balled-up burlap sack under the stock first to cushion it.

The Mosin-Nagant looked more brutal than elegant. Compared to the finely machined adaptation of the Mauser Infanteriegewehr 98 issued to German snipers, the Russian weapon looked considerably more primitive, almost like a club. The heavy wooden stock, chosen for the straightness of the grain, was made of especially dense wood harvested from slow-growing trees in the Ural forests. This was wood that thrived on the cold. The sling was made of canvas webbing trimmed in leather. The heaviness of the rifle compared to the Mauser gave it more accuracy, plus the barrel was a good nine inches longer. With a rifle like that, a good sniper could regularly reach out to one thousand meters. Among the German snipers at Stalingrad, the Mosin-Nagant had become highly prized. If you shot a Russian sniper, it was worth risking your life to retrieve his rifle. There was even a saying among the German snipers at Stalingrad that you were issued a Mauser but you earned a Mosin-Nagant.

The only aspect of the rifle Hess did not like was the Type PU telescopic sight in 3.5 power. With its single-post sight, fixed focus eyepiece and simple adjustments, it was not nearly as expensive as the as the Busch Visar sight that came as standard issue with the Mauser. But there were always tradeoffs when it came to equipment. Hess was willing to live with the adequate Russian sight in exchange for the rifle’s improved range and accuracy.

Hess aligned the single-post sight on the center of the pumpkin and squeezed the trigger. The rifle gave a satisfying jolt against his shoulder and the roar of the shot echoed in the bowl of the mountain valley. The bullet kicked up snow far to the left of the pumpkin. Damn. The rifle was even more off kilter than he had thought.

He took out an American dime and used the edge to turn the windage screw on the side of the scope. His next bullet splintered the log just below the pumpkin. He turned the top windage screw one click. This time, the frozen pumpkin shattered. Hess smiled. He had to admit that the Russians had gotten something right. The Mosin-Nagant was a damn workhorse of a rifle.

Two bullets gone. In the sinking of U-351, Hess had lost most of his cartridges, leaving him with the five rounds in the magazine plus a handful he had stuffed into his pockets. He would need just one to finish Eisenhower. He put the sight on one of the gourds, a much smaller target. It exploded in a burst of bright yellow pulp. I have not lost my touch. Then Hess got up from behind the log and moved in front of it, spreading the burlap bag on the snowy ground. He sat down with his knees bent in front of him, one foot slightly farther out than the other, then put his elbows on his knees. He inhaled, let the post sight dance across the gourd until just the right moment, and then took up the slack in the trigger. The gourd disappeared in a spray of pulp.

Hess got up and retrieved two of the empty cartridges. The third was lost somewhere in the snow. No matter. From what the old farmer had told him, he knew this was hunting country. No one would think twice about a few rifle shots. He picked up the burlap sack and headed back toward the barn. He would try for a real target soon enough.