by David Healey
Praise for Ardennes Sniper
by David Healey
“Ardennes Sniper will transport you to the place, the time, the struggle that was the Bulge, with a novel that has the crosshairs dead center on a well-told tale.”
—David L. Robbins, best-selling author of War of the Rats and The Devil's Horn
“In Ardennes Sniper, David Healey continues the duel he began in Ghost Sniper, once again capturing the science and cunning of those who wage war one well-aimed shot at a time.”
—William Peter Grasso, author of the Jock Miles WW2 series
Copyright © 2015 by David Healey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotation for the purpose of critical articles and reviews.
Intracoastal Media digital edition published 2015. Print edition published 2015.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Streetlight Graphics
BISAC Subject Headings:
FIC014000 FICTION/Historical
FIC032000 FICTION/War & Military
ISBN:0692547045
ISBN:978-0692547045
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
CHAPTER 1
Caje Cole looked through the rifle scope at the Germans.
Six Wehrmacht infantrymen, passing around a pack of cigarettes in the gray winter dawn. From a distance of two hundred feet, the four power scope wasn’t powerful enough to pick out the brand, but from the flash of red and white Cole guessed they were smoking Lucky Strikes.
Taken off a dead American, he reckoned. No shortage of those, thanks to these Krauts.
One of the Germans laughed, and the sound telegraphed across the frigid air, making the enemy sound much closer. These were battle-hardened Wehrmacht soldiers, wearing winter gear filthy with the mud of a hundred fox holes. They couldn’t see Cole, who had crept all night with Vaccaro toward the German lines, finally burying themselves in a rotting wood pile at the edge of an abandoned farm. Dirty white strips of cloth, wrapped around their rifle barrels, disguised the outlines of their weapons.
The cloth strips were Cole’s idea. Even after months as a sniper, Vaccaro was still a city boy at heart, so it had taken all of Cole’s considerable skill as a hunter to get them this close.
Right now, it felt a little too close. The Germans laughed again. Cole smelled their cigarette smoke.
He had figured on picking off a German or two, but this group was too good to pass up. The Germans stood around a machine gun. If they got to it in time, Cole and Vaccaro would be dead.
“Take the shot already,” Vaccaro muttered. “I’m freezing my ass off.”
Cole did not reply, but let his crosshairs settle on the German handing out the Lucky Strikes. He let out a breath. Squeezed the trigger.
Gentle-like, he reminded himself. The pad of his finger added a fraction of tension.
When the rifle fired, it almost surprised him.
The German collapsed. Vaccaro took the next shot and knocked down another German.
Cole worked the bolt. Fired again.
Vaccaro’s next shot missed, and the last German went for the machine gun. Cole put the crosshairs on him and fired. His ears told him that his bullet had struck the German. When a brass-jacketed round hit a human body it made a solid whunk sound like a ripe watermelon being split with a big knife.
Seconds after the first shot, all four Germans lay dead in the snow.
“You missed your second shot,” Cole said.
“That’s why you’re here, Hillbilly.”
The two snipers extricated themselves from the wood pile, then followed a stone wall toward the ruins of a barn. Keeping low, they were careful to maintain a distance between themselves. Always good to make a hard target.
Now came the dangerous part, crossing nearly one hundred feet of open field between the barn and the edge of the Ardennes Forest.
“You go first,” Cole said.
“Easy for you to say and me to do.”
Vaccaro took a big breath and ran. Cole raised his rifle to cover Vaccaro as the city boy dashed for the trees. Once there, he covered Cole as he ran across.
Safely in the trees, Vaccaro produced a hip flask filled with calvados. He had gotten a taste for the apple brandy right after the D-Day landing in June. Christmas was in a few days, and then the new year of 1945.
“Wish we could have gotten us an officer,” Cole said.
“Look at it this way, Cole. If things go according to plan, those are the last Germans you’ll have to shoot this year.” He handed the flask to Cole.
Cole looked at him with eyes that seemed cut from glass, then took a long drink from the flask and tossed it back. “I reckon we’ll see about that,” Cole said.
• • •
In the winter of 1762 when the Ardennes froze hard, wolves crept down from the mountains and out of the deep shadows of the forests. At first, the people in the isolated villages noticed only the paw prints in the snow beyond the houses and barns, but the wolves themselves remained unseen. The hungry beasts became more bold and visible, attacking sheep, children, even grown men. In local legend it was remembered as der Winter von den Wölfen des Ardennes, the Winter of the Wolves of Ardennes.
It had been a long time since a wolf had attacked anyone in the hills and forests, but that did not mean danger wasn’t present. In the winter of 1944 the wolves were two-legged, and they were once again about to sweep across the sleepy forests and villages.
One of these wolves was named Gunther Klein. Walking alone at dusk it was easy to believe the legends about the forest that he remembered from his boyhood. But he did not feel much like a wolf at the moment. Truth be told, he was downright nervous and jumpy, because he was a German soldier well behind the American lines—a wolf, perhaps, but one in sheep's clothing. Or, in his case, an American uniform.
If caught, he would be executed immediately as a spy.
Klein was one of a specially trained unit led by none other than Otto Skorzeny, the dashing six-foot-four SS commando with the dueling scar or schmiss on his cheek. Eisenhower had called Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe,” and it had been Skorzeny’s brainstorm to form this team of one hundred and fifty saboteurs.
In addition to wearing an American uniform, Klein carried a captured M1 rifle. He was making his way toward one of the crossroads villages where it was rumored the Americans had a large fuel depot. His orders were quite simple—blow up the fuel, cut any telephone lines, spread misinformation. Basically, he was a one-man sabotage squad. His secret weapon was that he spoke English fluently.
Klein had slipped through the thin American lines without any trouble. To keep to his schedule, he decided to follow the road into the village. He would have preferred keeping to the woods, but the snow was already knee deep in places. He would just have to take his chances on the road.
"Verdammt, es ist kalt!" he muttered, teeth chattering, then chided himself. English, you fool. One slip of the tongue in front of American troops and that would be it for him. There would likely be no trial, but only a roadside reckoning. Skorzeny had made that much clear to everyone.
So far he hadn't seen a soul. The situation changed abruptly when he rounded a bend in the winding road and a figure materialized from behind a tree and stepped into the road. Klein swung his rifle at the Ameri
can GI.
"Easy there, pardner! I was just taking a leak. I saw you coming and wanted to make sure you weren't a German."
"No Germans around here." Klein’s heart pounded so loud he was sure the American could hear it.
"You never know. But I'll bet they're holed up somewhere nice and warm, waiting for us to come to them." He coughed, and Klein smelled alcohol on the man's breath. "Cold as a witch's tit!"
"Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey," Klein said. He was not quite sure what it meant, because it certainly didn't make any sense, but he had been taught that it was a popular American saying.
"That's why I was trying to keep warm in one of the local taverns," the GI said. "I'm headed back to the village. How about you?"
"Yes, the village sounds like a fine idea." Klein winced as soon as he said it. He knew he had come off sounding stuffy. Skorzeny himself once said that Klein spoke English like he had the queen's royal scepter up his ass. He needed to work on sounding more American.
The GI gave him a sidelong look. "Say, what are you doing out here, anyhow?"
"Same as you. Running errands for HQ."
"What unit you with?"
"The two hundred and ninety-sixth engineers."
"Engineers. Huh. I thought you guys were back on the other side of the Meuse River." They trudged along in silence for a minute. The American seemed to be thinking something through. Klein could almost hear the cogs of his brain spinning in the winter quiet. "It is real peaceful out here, though, with all this snow. It's almost like I can hear Frank Sinatra singing White Christmas. You know that song?"
Klein knew it was a trap. The American had been working up to it. He kept his answer vague: "Who does not like Sinatra?"
The GI stopped in his tracks and stared hard at Klein. "Hey, who are you, buddy? Everybody knows it's Bing Crosby who sings White Christmas."
The GI took a clumsy step back and his heavily gloved hand slipped toward the holstered .45 on his belt.
Too slow. While the GI fumbled with the gun, Klein pulled a knife from a sheath at the small of his back and jabbed it at the GI's heart. But the heavy coat interfered and the point struck a rib. Stupidly, the GI kept trying to get the pistol out of the holster. Klein got a better grip on the knife and struck again.
This time the razor-sharp blade slipped between the sixth and seventh rib, driving into the GI's heart. Just like Skorzeny had trained him to do. The man's eyes blinked in shock as his heart stopped. Klein stepped back and let the man topple into the snow. He bent down and wiped the blade on the man's coat, then returned the knife to the sheath.
His own heart hammered in his chest. He had never killed anyone with a knife before and the experience was both sickening and somehow exhilarating.
Klein looked around, but the road remained empty and silent except for the whisper of falling snow.
Using the knife was taking a chance because it was less certain than a bullet, but it was better to avoid a gunshot that might attract attention.
Klein looked down at the body. He decided not to waste time moving it off the road. Better him than me, he thought. To his immense satisfaction, he had thought the words in English.
Klein had no way of knowing it, but the dead soldier was the first casualty in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hidden on the other side of the mountains, nearly two thousand German tanks and two hundred thousand men waited for the order to attack.
The lone wolf on this lonely road would soon be joined by the pack. It was to be the winter of the wolves all over again.
CHAPTER 2
If snow was money, every GI in the Ardennes Forest would have been filthy rich by now. All it did was snow. Then freeze. Then snow some more. It was hard to tell where the dull leaden sky ended and the whitened fields and woods began. A group of soldiers trudged along a road through this gray landscape, shoulders hunched, resigned to the cold.
There were six of them, all carrying rifles with telescopic sights. Snipers. They wore dirty white ponchos made from bedsheets in an effort at camouflage, and the snow that dusted their shoulders helped them blend into the backdrop of forest. Some of the trees hung over the road so that in patches the frozen mud was nearly bare. Most of the men kept their heads down, trying to keep the snow out of their faces.
Only one man, who walked last in the line, further back from the others, scanned the surrounding trees constantly. Cole was unofficially the deadliest sniper in the United States Army. Unofficially, because the Army didn’t track such things, not like they kept track of the number of planes a pilot shot down, for example. But word had gotten around. Just hours ago, he and Vaccaro had taken out a squad of Germans that strayed too close to the American lines.
Cole had pale eyes with so little color that they resembled ice. He was taller than average and lean like a fence post. Though covered in grime, a Confederate flag was just visible painted on his helmet. In a nod to their Southern heritage it had been painted by Jimmy Turner, another country boy whom Cole had tried to keep alive at D-Day—and failed.
Vaccaro looked back. He was an Italian-American of average height and build from Brooklyn. In his own mind, he thought he looked like Rudolph Valentino and somehow managed to wear his helmet at a jaunty angle. "Cole, what's eating you?"
"Too quiet," the other sniper said.
"Quiet is fine by me," Vaccaro said. "But I would give my left nut for some sunshine and warm weather." He stuttered the words because he was shivering in the cold. "Hell, I'd give both nuts to be at Coney Island on a July day rubbing coconut oil into some girl's shoulders. Mmmm."
"Vaccaro, if you give away your nuts that's all you’re gonna be able to do to her," Cole said. "Unless you plan to talk her to death, which wouldn’t be no surprise."
"Cold as my Johnson is right now, I'm not sure it's ever gonna thaw out, anyhow."
A moment of silence passed as the men mentally checked the status of their own Johnsons. It was definitely cold enough for concern. For weeks now they had been battling the cold and its consequences—everything from frozen gear to frostbite to shivering all night in their blankets. And it was only mid-December, with the heart of winter still ahead.
These men had been at D-Day and fought their way across France and into the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Germany was nearly on the horizon. They could almost taste the end of the war. It was warm and sweet in their mouths like the mulled wine the locals drank at Christmas, or maybe the lips of that girl Vaccaro dreamed about, with a little tongue slipped in. These snipers had been through hell and back. But now they were in a quiet backwater of the war that even offered a few opportunities for some R&R. Some soldiers had even seen Marlene Dietrich performing nearby with a USO tour. The snipers would settle for spending Christmas someplace indoors, sleeping and eating. Real turkey dinners, if they were lucky.
Lieutenant Mulholland signaled for a stop. The weary men flopped down in the snow, except for Cole, whose eyes continued to scour the woods, looking for any sign of movement.
"Cole, you need to relax," said Vaccaro. "There ain't a German around for miles."
Cole ignored him and searched the trees with his rifle scope until he was satisfied that they were alone, then joined the others in munching chocolate bars and smoking cigarettes. In the cold, the brittle Hershey bars tasted like wax. He sat a little apart and kept his rifle across his knees. In the Ardennes Forest in December 1944, staying alert was just part of staying alive.
• • •
Sometime after midnight on December 15, the highly decorated German sniper Hauptmann Kurt Von Stenger sat in the back seat of a staff car roaring through the night. He was wedged between a nervous Wehrmacht general named Rothenbach and SS Obersturmbannführer Aldric Friel, who was so relaxed that he seemed to have fallen asleep. Handsome as a Nazi poster boy come to life, Friel was a firebrand who had made quite a name for himself, first as an adjutant to Heinrich Himmler and then as a ruthless tank commander in Russia. Even asleep, Fri
el seemed to radiate energy.
Von Stenger stared out into the trees that loomed in the headlights. No one knew where the winding road would take them. He had been on leave from the fighting in France and Belgium when the summons came in the form of an SS driver appearing at his door. So much for a Christmas holiday.
No one knew why they had been summoned to this mysterious meeting in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, piled into staff cars driven by grim young SS soldiers. Clearly, the general thought they were being taken out to the woods to be shot.
It was not out of the question.
"Relax, Herr General. Here, have a cigarette," Von Stenger said. He offered the man one of his trademark gold-tipped Sobranie cigarettes. "Why drive us all the way out here to shoot us? It seems like a waste of petrol."
The general's hands shook when he tried to light the cigarette. Maybe it was just the bumpy road. Von Stenger lit it for him with a Zippo lighter taken from a dead American. As the general leaned in, Von Stenger caught a whiff of alcohol and garlicky sausages.
On the other side of him, Obersturmbannführer Friel gave a low laugh. So, the SS Wunderkind had awakened. "You always had a sense of humor, Kurt. Still reading your Goethe?"
"Of course. I appreciate a man who tries to make sense of the world but admits when he can't. We could use more of that these days."
Von Stenger felt the Wehrmacht general beside him stiffen in alarm. It was getting dangerous to make any criticism of the beleaguered Führer, implied or otherwise. There were rumors that the wrong words could get you strung up on a meat hook in some dark Gestapo dungeon.
Or driven out to the woods in the middle of the night.
