by David Healey
• • •
Lieutenant Mulholland was called to a briefing before the attack on Kampfgruppe Friel. It was Mulholland who had enlightened the colonel that they were facing a column of SS troops.
"That figures," said the colonel, whose name was Akers. "If they were Wehrmacht, they would have had the good sense to surrender. Now, we'll have to kill every last one of the bastards."
"There's something else you should know, sir. These are the same bastards who murdered our men at the Malmedy crossroads," Mulholland said. "Shot them down in cold blood."
That caused a stir among the gathering of officers. The colonel finally waved them to silence with the stub of his unlit cigar. "All right, all right. If we're going to be shooting fish in a barrel, the fish may as well be piranhas."
The American attack would be head on. It would not be an assault so much as a bombardment. The Germans had their backs to the river with no way to cross, now that all the bridges had been blown. The American force surrounded them in a loose semi-circle, putting the lid on the pot.
For the Germans, the only choice would be surrender—or annihilation. Of course, the Germans were far from finished. Kampfgruppe Friel still had close to a thousand veteran SS troops and several dozen tanks, along with other artillery. Already, they were dug into the village, with panzers wedged between stone buildings and machine gunners burrowed down between thick stone walls.
When Mulholland asked for orders, the colonel waved his cigar again. He had a lot more to worry about than deploying a few snipers. He had absorbed the ragtag force that the snipers had joined on the road into his own unit, but he told Mulholland to deploy as he saw fit in support of the attack.
"You know more about it than I do, Lieutenant," the commander said. "You just pick off as many of those SS bastards as you can."
"Yes, sir."
Returning to his men, Mulholland decided that a team approach would be best. That way, if there was a need to concentrate their fire, they could work together to do that.
"Listen up, I want Cole and Vaccaro on my left," he said, coming back from the briefing. He handed the young soldier a powerful pair of binoculars. "Kid, you will act as my spotter. I want you to keep those glasses on the Krauts. We are looking for any way, shape, or form to take out their machine gun nests or any gun emplacements they have set up." He looked at Jolie. "I don't suppose there's any convincing you to keep out of the fighting? It looks to me like that girl could use some help up at the field hospital."
"These Germans want to get back into France," she said. "How can I let them?"
"They had their chance to get to France," Mulholland said. "The only place they're going now is to hell. You ought to let us handle it."
Jolie lifted her chin defiantly. Even after living rough in the field, hiking through snow and sleeping in trucks, she still managed to look like a dish. "You cannot tell me what to do."
Mulholland sighed. After six months of fighting his way across Europe, there was still a lot of Boy Scout in him that didn't want to see a woman in combat. But seeing that face, Mulholland felt his resolve melt. "You do want you want, Jolie. I know you will, anyhow. But do me a favor and don't let the colonel see you, or it's my derrière."
They spread out behind a stone wall, their position anchored on the left by a butcher shop and on the right by the bulk of the old church that had been converted into a field hospital.
No sooner had they moved into position than the American guns opened up. The German guns replied. The battle of La Gleize had begun.
CHAPTER 26
Time to hunt.
Cole let his shooter’s calm settle over him, although it was hardly quiet on the battlefield. The heavy guns on both sides barked at one another like big dogs. Shells from tanks and tank destroyers hurtled back and forth, blasting both La Gleize and the woods beyond the American lines to rubble and splinters.
He wasn't worried about that. The only gun that mattered to him was the one in his hands. Between the gouges in the stock and the scratches on the barrel, the Springfield taken from McNulty was showing signs of hard use. The rifle must have been used when it was issued to McNulty in the first place. But it shot as true as ever. Cole had cleaned and oiled every inch of it—there was no machinery better cared for anywhere in La Gleize.
The snipers were scattered among the ruins of the little village on the fringes of La Gleize. The American tanks and tank destroyers were located further back. Most of the artillery being traded screamed overhead. From time to time, the Germans raked the village with machine gun fire, but most of their attention was on the encircling American lines on the higher ground.
Lieutenant Mulholland saw this as their opportunity to show the value of snipers on the battlefield.
Cole saw it as a chance to get even. To get even for the miles they had trekked across the frozen hills and forests in pursuit of the Germans. To get even for Rowe and McNulty. To get even for the Americans murdered in the snowy field at Malmedy.
"Do you think he's out there?" Jolie asked.
"Oh, I reckon he is," Cole said. He didn't need to ask who Jolie was asking about.
"How can you tell?"
"I can feel him." Jolie didn't have to ask him what he meant. She knew, because she could sense him, too. This was the German who had shot her, after all.
The thought made her shudder. Von Stenger had nearly killed her at Bienville, shooting her in order to draw out Cole and put him in Von Stenger's sights. To him, she had been nothing more than bait.
"You get him this time," she said. "Don't stop until you do."
The snipers were spread out in an uneven line, hidden among the various buildings and stone walls in the village. Lieutenant Mulholland had chosen a spot where a shell had torn through a couple of small buildings, leaving a jumble of timber and stones. The Kid was spotting for him, using a huge pair of field glasses. Vaccaro was to his right, hunkered behind a stone wall.
"The thicker, the better," he had announced in picking it out.
Cole wanted height. So he had chosen the second floor of a bakery. It offered a good view of La Gleize. The thick stone walls helped, too.
He did not go to the window, where he would have been an obvious target. Instead, he put a wooden table in the middle of the room, put a folded blanket on top of the table, and rested his rifle on that. His view of the town across the field was limited, but that's where Jolie came in. Armed with binoculars, she could move freely between windows, if need be, trying to spot the Ghost Sniper.
"How will you know where to find him?" she asked.
"Give it some time."
They did not have to wait long. The snipers were not the only American troops in the village. Other soldiers were busy setting up defensive positions or ferrying messages between points on the battlefield. For the snipers, these other soldiers were the canaries in the coal mine.
A soldier passing below Cole's window crumpled and fell. The shot had come just as a German tank fired, so it was impossible to tell the location of the shooter.
"Anything?" Cole asked Jolie, who was low to the front window, looking out with the binoculars, trying to see some clue as to Von Stenger's location.
"I see nothing."
Cole swept his telescopic sight over La Gleize, located across the snowy fields that were now a no-man’s land. He saw targets—mostly German machine gunners and a few tank commanders with their heads out of their hatches, directing their fire. He left those targets to Mulholland and Vaccaro. There was just one target he had in mind. Das Gespenst.
In the streets below, another soldier fell. This one did not die cleanly, but dragged himself to the base of a wall, then lay still.
Cole moved his scope across the edge of La Gleize once again. There was no sign of Von Stenger.
He thought again about Bienville. The man had been clever, slipping into the town and then occupying the church steeple. Another time in Normandy, he had occupied a church steeple and managed to pin down an
entire American company almost singlehandedly.
Cole realized he had been looking for Von Stenger in the front lines of the fighting, which was far too obvious for Von Stenger.
"Jolie, do you see any church steeples in La Gleize?"
There was a pause while she looked. "Yes. Ten o'clock. But you will have to move closer to the window to see it. "
Reluctantly, Cole slid his table forward several feet until he could see the church steeple. It was stone, substantial, and offered a commanding view of the countryside around La Gleize. He judged the distance to be maybe 300 yards—far behind the front lines.
You would have to be a very good shot to hit anything reliably at that distance. Das Gespenst had proven himself to be a good shot—and then some. The last thing that Cole wanted was to end up in those crosshairs.
The same went for Jolie. She had already been in Das Gespenst's sights once before, and it wasn't going to happen again, if he had anything to say about it.
"Jolie, I want you to go up to that church here in the village and see if you can help that girl we saw. There's an awful lot of wounded."
"You are as bad as the lieutenant, wanting to send me away."
"Aw, don't go arguing with me now. Go out the back and keep every building you can between yourself and those Germans over there. Go in the back door of that church. I reckon it's got one. And once you're in that church, don't so much as stick your nose out. Stay inside those stone walls."
"You found him, didn't you?"
"I reckon I did. Trouble is, he'll figure out where I am right quick once I shoot at him."
"Let me stay and help you."
"No, Jolie. Remember what happened last time? He might just use you to get at me, and I can't let that happen."
"Cole—"
"The best way that you can help me is not to be here. That is, unless you've got a cannon up your sleeve. This is between me and him."
She slid back from the window, careful to keep her head down. "You are stubborn like a horse's ass."
"The expression is 'stubborn as a mule,' " he pointed out.
"I know what the expression is, you horse’s ass," she said. "Do not get shot."
Then she slipped out the door and down the stairs.
Once she was gone, he put the scope on the church steeple. Cole waited. Long years of hunting had taught him how to let minutes, even hours, pass without notice. He was nothing if not patient. Part of his mind drifted. The other part stayed locked on the small field of view afforded by the scope.
Then he saw what he was looking for. Not so much a stab of flame as a shifting of the air around the distant, open windows in the stone steeple above La Gleize.
Got you now, you son of bitch.
But Von Stenger was not standing at the window with a swastika painted on his chest. That would be too much to hope for. No, like Cole himself, he would be farther back in the room to avoid becoming a target.
Cole put his crosshairs on the window, moved them up and to the right to allow for elevation and windage. He exhaled. It was a hell of a long way to shoot, but he tried not to think about that. His finger took up tension on the trigger.
Slowly, slowly.
When the Springfield kicked his shoulder, it felt like a surprise.
• • •
High above La Gleize, the bullet whipped through the window of the church steeple and struck the stool that Von Stenger had rested his rifle upon. Splinters swarmed up and stung his cheek, drawing blood. The impact was startling enough to knock him down, which was just as well, because seconds later another bullet came through the window and struck the far wall. The sound of the ricochet in the small space made Von Stenger tighten his sphincter.
Keeping low, he crawled to a window to the right of the one he had been shooting through. He used a monocular periscope to chance a peek so that he would not need to expose his head. Where had the shot come from?
His opponent was eager to kill him, so the third shot was not timed to be disguised by the noise of a simultaneous tank round. The crack of the rifle directed him to the cluster of buildings just beyond La Gleize.
A fourth shot.
Von Stenger was impressed. He had no doubt that this was the hillbilly sniper. He knew that the American was using a bolt action Springfield rifle. To fire four shots in rapid succession over a distance of 300 meters into a space no larger than a coffin lid was good shooting.
Yes, the enemy truly wanted to make sure that he was dead.
Von Stenger had the quick eyes of a hawk. In the gloom of a second-floor window in a shop, he spotted the muzzle flash, magnified by the periscope.
He did not bother to slide his own rifle into the window, just in case the other sniper also had good eyes or a spotter with powerful binoculars.
Crawling on his belly, he reached the stairs and then descended from the bell tower itself. Rivulets of blood ran into his mouth, filling it with a salty, coppery taste. He touched his cheek and his fingertips came away bloody.
Annoyed, he shook out a pocket handkerchief and touched it to the wound. Had the bullet been just a few centimeters higher, he would have caught a lead slug in the face rather than a few shards of wood.
Von Stenger ran through the town, keeping low.
In the hours before the attack, he had set up a total of three shooting locations. One in the church steeple, one on the roof of a warehouse, and one in the attic of the Rathaus, or town hall.
He would keep the American guessing.
• • •
Cole fired the fourth shot and rolled off the chair onto the floor. If the Ghost Sniper returned fire, Cole had given away his position.
No shots answered, but he slipped from the room in a crouch and went down the stairs, then out the back as Jolie had done.
Four shots from the same position was taking an awful chance when confronting someone like this German, but no one had fired back. That meant he had killed or at least wounded his opponent. He sure as hell hoped so. But the Ghost Sniper was nothing, if not patient. What if he had only been biding his time, lining Cole up in his crosshairs?
Cole did not plan on giving him that chance.
• • •
Von Stenger was disappointed to leave the church steeple. It was such a superb sniper's nest because of the commanding view. But the first rule of staying alive as a sniper was to stay on the move.
He was nothing if not prepared. Having already set up his other sniper’s nests, he felt like the hunter rather than the hunted, even trapped within the confines of La Gleize.
It was toward this nest in the town hall that he moved now, keeping the handkerchief pressed to his face.
The hillbilly sniper had found him. The shot had been good, but it had been a roll of the dice. At the distance involved, the hillbilly was only guessing at the target.
But with luck, Von Stenger would turn the tables. He knew where the sniper was hiding.
And unlike the American, he would not miss.
• • •
Having abandoned the church steeple, Von Stenger went up the stairs to the top floor of the town hall. The space had long since been cleared of any town officials. SS troopers occupied the first floor, using it to set up a machine gun. Von Stenger nodded at them, and they gave him a grin in return.
“Das Gespenst!” one of the SS men shouted heartily.
The story had spread about how he had driven right into a nest of American snipers, and wiped them out.
He had gone about preparing this second sniper's position with some care.
On a desk near the center of the room he had placed a stack of books and topped it off with a helmet. From a distance, in the shadows of the room, the dummy might very well resemble a sniper.
There was a row of three large double-hung windows. He had opened one window directly in front of the crude dummy. It was just the sort of anomaly that an enemy sniper would notice.
During the night he had taken a large knife and gouged a ho
le in the plaster and lath near the bottom windowsill of the far right window. The exterior was covered by wood sheathing and then clapboard. He had started to carve his way through that wood, but quickly lost patience. So he had gone down and found a 12-gauge fowling gun some townsperson had left behind in a nearby house. It took four shots, but he blasted a hole right through the side of the building.
He used the big blade of the knife to widen the hole.
It was through this hole that he extended the rifle. He hoped that a sniper would focus on the obviously open window. Meanwhile, Von Stenger would have his sights on whoever opened fire at the top floor. If that bait was not sufficient, he planned to set up the old shotgun to blast from atop the desk. That should draw fire like lightning to a lightning rod.
Von Stenger settled into his hidey hole and found what he was looking for—the shadowy second floor where he had last seen the hillbilly sniper.
He did not hurry—he was savoring the moment.
Through the scope he could see into the room. He could make out a table and a chair.
But there was no one there. Was the American gone? Like Von Stenger, he must have moved on to another location. It would be up to Von Stenger to draw him out. He set to work rigging the shotgun to do just that.
CHAPTER 27
Cole crossed the street, being careful to put the taller buildings and a few trees between himself and the line of sight from the steeple. Just in case. The back of his neck crawled with each step. He could almost feel Von Stenger’s crosshairs on him.
He found Vaccaro just where he had left him, down by the wall that ran parallel to the hamlet’s central cross street. The church stood directly behind him. He felt better with a stone wall between him and the German.
