by David Healey
"Omaha."
The captain dragged on his cigarette. "We were at Utah, thank God. I heard what you went through. Sounds like a goddamn nightmare."
The captain spoke loud enough for them all to hear, and Cole's thoughts went back to poor Jimmy, shot on the beach. It sure was a long way to go from home just to get killed by the Germans. Cole didn't really understand what Hitler or the Germans wanted, but he understood the empty stare in Jimmy’s dead eyes.
"So what's your plan here?" the captain asked.
The lieutenant was taking a while to answer, so Cole spoke up. "I reckon I might have an idea, sir," he said.
"All right, Cole. It's got to be better than the plan I've got right now, which is nothing."
"Let me bring two men through that gap to draw the snipers' fire, and you can locate their position and take them out."
"Sounds like a good way to get three men killed."
"We'll split up and run in different directions. The way I figure it, the Germans will probably miss. It’s hard to hit a running target. Three running targets is confusing. But when they fire, they'll reveal their positions. We'll have our boys at the edges of the gap to take them out."
"Hell, Cole, the only one here who's good enough to do that is you."
"Meacham is a good shot. Chief can at least make them keep their heads down."
The lieutenant thought it over. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was better than nothing. "Take Vaccaro with you," he said quietly. "With any luck, he can run as fast as he can run his mouth. The captain here will have to volunteer one of his men to come with me."
"One more thing," Cole said. "I need me a ball of twine."
It took a couple of minutes to organize the attack. The twine was normally used for marking off landing zones and trenches, but Cole had another idea. Meacham slid along the grass to take up a position so that his rifle just peeked out from the edge of the gap. His field of fire was limited by the tall June grass, but the grass in turn hid him from the enemy snipers already in position. He would just have to be lucky and get a clear shot.
Chief would cross the gap and take up position on the other side once Cole started running. Nobody could pass in front of the gap now because the snipers had it covered.
Cole and Vaccaro stripped off their packs and prepared to run like hell through the gap, into the field, toward the enemy snipers. They were joined by a kid from the other squad who had the build of a rabbit.
"Reb, you are about to get us killed," Vaccaro said.
"When you get in that field, you two run like hell and zigzag to make a poor target. Run at an angle if you can, not right toward them. Whatever you do, don’t bunch up." He tied the end of a piece of twine to a stick that was about two feet long and handed it to the rabbit-looking kid. The rest of the twine was wound lightly in Cole's utility pocket so that it would unwind as they ran.
“What’s the stick for?” the kid asked.
"That there’s our decoy. Now, you look like you can run fast. If I was you, I'd run like there was hornets after you. I want you to drop that stick about halfway across."
On the face of it, running into the field in front of the German snipers seemed crazy and foolish. But the key was to split up. Once, when hunting high up in the hills, Cole had startled a pack of coyotes feeding at a deer kill. He had raised his rifle to shoot one, anticipating that they would flee in one direction, when the coyotes did a curious thing. They split into three or four different directions. He'd been so surprised that he hadn't got off a good shot at any of the coyotes. They all got away.
Also, he knew it was considerably harder to hit a running target than a stationary one. If the Germans had been using a machine gun, he and the other two runners would be killed in a single burst of automatic fire. But a man with a rifle had to pick a target, lead it, and fire.
Not so easy to do.
Cole used to practice on old truck tires that his sister would roll downhill with a paper target strung up in the middle. It was hard enough to hit a rolling tire, let alone a zigzagging, running man.
He was sure the Germans wouldn’t be much better at it than he was. His life was counting on it.
Cole took a deep breath. His heart pounded.
"Go!" he shouted.
CHAPTER 9
Von Stenger was watching the gap through the telescopic sight, which narrowed his field of vision significantly, but enabled him to keep a close eye on any effort by the American troops to break through. He knew, with satisfaction, that three bodies already lay in the field. Corporal Wulf, who was somewhere to his left, had shot one. Von Stenger had shot the other two. The third sniper, Schultz, would get his turn soon enough. They had the Allied advance into this field pinned down—at least for now.
There. Three men came sprinting through the gap in the hedgerow. All at once they ran in three different directions. Von Stenger was taken by surprise, and the men ran so quickly that he lost track of them in the scope's limited field of vision. One's eyes could sometimes notice small details faster than the brain could process them, and that is what happened now. He saw that two of the three carried rifles with telescopic sights. Snipers.
The one farthest back had some kind of flag painted on his helmet. He had to pull the rifle away from his eye long enough to acquire the targets again. He then used the hunter’s trick of keeping his gaze on the runners as he raised the telescopic sight to his eye, thus keeping them in view.
One of the runners turned left and he heard Wulf's rifle fire on this left, and then Schultz fired once, twice, three times. Stupid. Making himself a target. Then someone fired from the direction of the gap and Schultz’s rifle fell silent.
He couldn't think about that now as he tracked the two remaining runners. The first one was a smallish man who dodged and twisted like the world's fastest drunk. In an instant, the crosshairs lined up on the chest and Von Stenger blew his heart out. He moved his shoulder and chin slightly as he readjusted his aim to take the other runner, who should be slightly to the right.
But the man was nowhere to be seen. At more than a foot tall, the late spring grass was just high enough to hide someone. He scanned the grass, looking for movement. Something twitched in the grass. Von Stenger did not have a clear target, but he fired anyhow, trusting to luck.
In response, a bullet flicked past his ear, so close that it made every nerve of his body tingle and quiver. His first reaction was to roll or move, but he forced himself to stay still. He was certain the shot had not come from the other side of the field, but from the tall grass. The second American sniper was still out there. Had the man seen him, or like Von Stenger, had he simply made his best guess at the target? If the American sniper had simply missed, he would shoot again. He braced himself for a second shot. When it did not come, he thought don't move.
"Herr Hauptmann?" Fritz had crawled up behind him. "The Americans will be coming."
"Keep still." Von Stenger exhaled the words more than saying them. "Do not move a muscle."
He kept his eye pressed to the sight, hoping for some movement in the grass, which swayed gently in the breeze. He felt a stirring of excitement he had not felt in a while, not since Russia, when he had faced a particularly cunning enemy sniper and taken a bullet through his leg as a result. The wound was serious enough to get him flown back to Berlin to recuperate.
That wound had saved his life. Not long after that the Russian noose had tightened and evacuations ended. Legions of poor Wehrmacht bastards had been left behind to starve or freeze.
He sometimes wondered what had become of the Russian who shot him. The Russian liked to leave behind playing cards—a rather flashy trait for a Soviet sniper. Had he been one of the famous ones? Or just some lucky peasant?
Von Stenger liked a clever opponent. A sniper duel was much like a deadly game of chess. Von Stenger had boxed in his youth and taken part in vicious, if foolish, fencing matches at the military academy that left him with a jauntily scarred face, but this was th
e most exciting game there was. If he moved, the American might shoot him. If he did not move, the American might shoot him. Checkmate. But if the American made some movement in the grass, it would be as bad as exposing his own king piece.
He played back in his mind how the men had run into the field. Only two were carrying sniper rifles. The man Von Stenger had shot had been running ahead with an open sight M1. A decoy then. A pawn. Could the American sniper really be as ruthless as that? Not even Russians were that bad. Or should he say, that good.
Then the chess board changed abruptly. The American squad came pouring through the gap in the hedge. From the field behind Von Stenger a barrage of Wehrmacht mortars came rolling in. They were firing blind, but it was enough to send the Americans scrambling for cover.
He waited until two more mortar rounds thumped down in the field, then quickly rolled to the left and scooted backwards like a crab until he was down the other side of the thick, ancient wall inside the hedgerow. Briars clawed at his face and the trunks of scrawny trees and saplings grew so close together it was almost like being in a cage. Crawling, Von Stenger could just get through the dense underbrush.
"Come on," he said to the boy.
"Herr Hauptmann, what about Wulf and Schultz?"
"They will catch up if they are not dead," Von Stenger said. "Now bring my gear along. We are going hunting."
• • •
"Good God almighty," Meacham said. It was as close as he could come to swearing. He was trembling, white faced, on the edge of shock. "I just killed a man."
"That was some fine shooting," Lieutenant Mulholland said.
"I really killed that German."
"Killed the hell out of him," Vaccaro agreed.
They were looking down at the dead body of a German private. Meacham had fired from the gap in the hedge when the German sniper opened up on Cole and the others running across the field. Meacham's bullet had caught the sniper in the cheekbone, killing him instantly. The dead man's hands still grasped the Mauser with its telescopic sight.
Meacham was looking very pale, so Mulholland grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard, the way a coach might get a player to get his head back in the game. "This is a war, Meacham. You were doing your duty. You got him, so he didn't get you or anybody else. Good work."
Cole hadn't gotten his German. The mortars coming down in the field had given the other sniper cover to slip away. Cole was fairly certain that if he'd gotten some hint of movement from the sniper, then he would have been able to hit him. No such luck. The German had evaporated like the morning mist.
When the mortars stopped, the squad moved across the field and Cole worked his way back into the hedgerow until he found the spot the German had been using as a sniper's nest. He spotted the stub of a fancy French cigarette, bright white against the leaf mold, along with the bright brass wink of several empty shell casings. He picked one up and realized that it was not German. They had seen plenty of Mauser casings strewn around the beach fortifications, but none like this.
He bent closer to the earth and found boot prints. He touched them, wondering at the fact that the man he'd been trying to kill—and who had tried to kill him—had made them just minutes before. He guessed the man was somewhere from average height to maybe six feet tall, probably 180 pounds. Farther back he found a different set of boot prints. They were about the same size, but they were made by the cheaper hobnail boots issued to German enlisted men, and these didn't go as deep into the soil, so it was a lighter man. Maybe a spotter? He understood that the German snipers often worked in teams.
Both sets of boot prints showed where the two men had scrambled and slid down the far side of the ancient wall at the center of the hedge. Clearly, they had gone into the next field, but Cole could glimpse nothing through the thick brush.
He worked his way back out of the hedge and rejoined the other men in the squad.
Meacham still looked pale, while Vaccaro glared at him as he walked up. "Reb, your trick with that stick actually worked."
"I tugged at the string to make the stick move in the grass so the sniper would shoot at it and give himself away."
"Holy shit, Reb, you are one backwards son of a bitch," Vaccaro said, but with something like admiration in his voice. "We’ve got Sherman tanks and bazookas, and you’re fighting the Nazis with sticks and string. The question is, did it work?"
Cole shrugged. "Well, he fired, all right, but I didn't have a clear shot and I missed. He left a few of these behind."
Cole held out the brass he'd found in the German sniper's nest. Lieutenant Mulholland took it, looked at the markings that read 7.62 Л П С r ж and announced, "That's Cyrillic writing on the casing. I don't know what it says, but it's Russian ammunition. He must be shooting a Mosin Nagant, which is a Russian sniper rifle. I don't know why."
"I've heard it's a better rifle. Sturdier and more accurate than the Mauser," Cole said. He thought about that. "The only way to get one would be if you served in Russia."
"How the hell could some German take away a Russian sniper's rifle?" Vaccaro wanted to know.
"By shooting him," Cole said.
CHAPTER 10
The next field was held by German machine gunners that had dug themselves in like ticks, eager for blood and just as hard to remove. The squad that the snipers had met up with went in first and got halfway across the field when the German gunner opened up, chewing several GIs into raw meat. The rest found themselves pinned down, unable to move as bullets whipped overhead.
"It's a goddamn slaughter," Mulholland announced, watching in horror through a gap in the hedge as one soldier tried to rush the Germans and was nearly cut in half by a burst. "If we don't do something, the next squad through here is going to walk into the same trap."
Cole had the solution. He crawled back into the hedgerow to where the German sniper had been and followed his tracks down into the killing field. From there, it was hard to tell where the sniper had gone, but he could see the German machine gunners at work from his concealed position.
He heard a noise behind him and spun, crouching low and pulling his .45 at the same time, but it was only the French girl following him.
"What are you doing?" he snapped, annoyed.
"Same as you," she said. "Killing Germans."
She carried a battered old rifle that looked as likely to blow up in her face as shoot straight, but Cole supposed that was the best that the French Resistance could get. It reminded him a lot of some old mountain rifle from back home. He looked the rifle over doubtfully, but liked the determined expression on her face. It was her country, after all, so as far as he was concerned she could have at it if she wanted to snipe at the Jerries with that antique. He nodded, and they crept out of the hedge together.
The machine gunners were busy shooting up the squad and they didn't notice Cole hunkered at the edge of the field. He got the German gunner's helmet in his sights and punched a bullet through the steel. Another man grabbed for the machine gun, and Cole shot him as well. He was about to shoot the third man reaching for the handles on the machine gun when something went bang off to his right. He'd damn near forgotten the French girl.
Her bullet only kicked up dirt at the edge of the German foxhole, which got the machine gunner's attention. He swiveled the weapon in their direction and the black hole of the machine gun's muzzle looked as big as the moon through Cole's rifle sight. He let his breath out, fired, and nailed the German before he could depress the trigger on the machine gun.
"That was my target," he muttered.
"You shoot too slow," she said.
"At least I hit what I shoot at."
What was left of the American squad out in the middle of the field got up and dusted themselves off. Several torn, bloody bodies lay scattered in the grass where the German machine gunners had caught them.
"So far we've captured two fields and lost maybe ten men," Cole said. "This war ain't goin' so well, if you ask me."
"Amer
icans have no stomach for a fight," Jolie said. "Where is your anger at the enemy? You do not know how to hold a grudge."
For the first time since leaving the English coast, Cole laughed. "Darlin', you don't know the half of it. My people back home invented that there word. We got grudges against other families, we got grudges against Yankees, we got grudges against the government. And right about now, I got a serious grudge against Germans."
"Then let us go shoot some more," Jolie said.
"Keep talkin' like that and you're goin' to get me all hot and bothered, missy."
Jolie snorted like a horse, which Cole thought wasn't very French lady like, but he followed along as they headed back to join up with the other snipers. They hadn't been able to do much good in the last firefight, but at least Meacham had recovered somewhat and didn't look so pale.
They crossed the field and went through a gap in the hedge that opened onto a narrow dirt road. A large American squad was moving along it in the distance, and at the head of the unit Cole could see a Sherman tank. It was the first one he had seen in action away from the beach, but he wasn't sure how much good it could do out here. The hedges were so dense and the openings between fields were so tight that tanks were confined to the country roads, which were heavily mined. In addition, German squads armed with anti-tank rockets lay in wait.
To make matters worse for the tanks, somewhere out there were heavily armored German Tiger tanks, which would be more than a match for the Sherman tanks. Above the distant rumble of the tank engine, Cole could hear the rattle of small arms fire and the heavier thump of artillery. Somebody was catching hell somewhere.
"Miss Molyneux, where does this road go?" Lieutenant Mulholland wanted to know.
"We are moving toward St. Lo," Jolie said. "But this road does not go there directly."
