David Healey - Ardennes Sniper

She was so intent on the man in front of her that she did not see the other soldier step out of the woods behind her.

He clubbed her with his rifle, and everything went black.

The jostling of the truck awoke Jolie. Disoriented, it took her a moment to remember what had happened: the Germans stepping out of the trees, her hand around the pistol, then being clubbed on the back of her head. In the dark and cold, she wondered at first if she was already dead.

Non , she thought, shaking her aching head. Spit had drooled from her mouth and she swiped at it. When she moved, she winced when the painful knot on her head came in contact with the floor of the truck. Not dead. Only in living was there so much misery.

She tried to sit up and found that her hands were tied. So tightly, in fact, that the rough cords cut into her wrists. Her hands felt numb from lack of circulation and cold. A blanket that smelled foully of diesel fuel fell away as she sat up.

The Germans had dumped her in the back of this truck, then apparently tossed a blanket over her in a half-hearted effort to keep her from freezing to death. It was as if it didn’t really matter if she lived or died. They had not even bothered to post a guard.

Where would she run, after all, with her hands tied, in the middle of the Ardennes Forest, in the dead of winter, with an invasion taking place?

Jolie was rather surprised that the Germans had not killed her outright. She had made no secret of fighting with the American snipers. What was the point? The Germans had found the gun in her pocket.

But there was no relief in being alive, even temporarily. This only meant that when she came to, someone would drop by to interrogate her.

As a Machi or French Resistance fighter, she had seen the aftermath of a German interrogation more than once. It was not a pretty sight. Some of those interrogations had not even been conducted by the SS. Only the Gestapo was worse.

The truck moved in fits and starts, with a frequent grinding of gears. Apparently the Germans were not making easy progress.

She heard voices and footsteps. Jolie slumped down again and tugged the blanket over her. If they thought she was still unconscious, they might leave her alone. Someone leaned into the back of the truck and shouted, “Hey! You awake?” When she did not answer, the soldiers went away.

Jolie put her wrists to her lips so that she could get her teeth at the rope. Whoever had tied her up knew his business. The knots were tight as rocks. Giving up, she tried her teeth on the rope itself. It was the sort of rough, bristly rope that lacerated her lips and gums. She could chew her way through — if she had a few days to do it.

She might only have hours — or minutes. It would help if she had more light to see what she was doing.

Jolie threw off the blanket and sat on the wooden bench that sufficed as seating for the troops who would normally ride back here. She attacked the rope anew, first trying to saw it along the edge of the wooden bench. When that did not work, she tried her teeth again.

The truck came to yet another stop, bouncing her wildly on the seat. Her teeth slid off the rope and cracked together painfully. She might as well be trying to chew her way through steel cables.

It looked as if she wasn’t going anywhere.

Cole had grown up setting traps, catching animals for their skins or meat, so a trap for the German sniper came to mind immediately.

Using his hunting knife, he cut a branch about the thickness of a finger into six-inch sections, and then slashed each one to the sharpness of a rattlesnake fang.

Several saplings grew along the creek bank near his hiding place. He selected a green sapling that was big around as a broom handle, and went to work cutting it down with a few quick strokes of his heavy knife.

Next, he drove the point of the knife near one end of the sapling, neatly splitting that end. He inserted the sharpened sticks, then bound them tightly together with the tough grape vines. The result he had hoped for would have looked something like a three-pronged fork, but this was even better — the prongs stuck out at different angles like a knot of barb wire.

Staying low, and trying to keep his movements to a minimum, he wedged the other end of the sapling horizontally between two small trees at about thigh height. He tied more string to the end with the sharp sticks, then ran the string under a smooth-skinned branch to serve as a fulcrum.

The trigger was simple to make. He used the stump of the sapling he had cut down — it was embedded as firmly into the ground as a stake — and cut a groove near the end. He cut a groove in another six-inch length of wood, and tied the other end of the string to that. Then he pulled the sapling taut. It took some adjustment, but when he was done he basically had the rigging for a snare. The sapling stump and the other piece of wood were the trigger device — all the tension of the curved sapling was held in place by that floating piece of wood.

Normally, a bit of meat would bait the trap. When an animal took the bait, it released the trigger and sprang the snare. But with the trap Cole had set, there would be no snare, just the sharpened spikes whipping through the air at the end of the sapling.

He eased out of his coat, hoping he would not regret leaving it behind. A piece of string ran from the coat to the trigger, out of sight. He would use his coat as bait.

Cole sat for a while, waiting for it to get darker. The cold seeped deeper into his muscles and bones. Cole was mostly bone and sinew so there wasn’t much insulation from the cold. He put some snow in his mouth and let it dissolve. It had the double advantage of satisfying his thirst and disguising his position by preventing his breath from rising up as warm vapor.

When he was ready, he began to move ever so slowly out of his hiding place, hoping that the brush along the creek would screen him from view of the hillside above. So far, he had been lucky.

He worked backward until he reached the creek again, then eased into the water. The icy water was like an electric shock that didn’t end, but he forced himself to wade against the current, keeping close to the bank nearest the slope. He continued back to where his original footprints came down into the creek. His plan was to backtrack along the path he had used to get into the forest. He eased out of the water, praying he wasn’t in the Ghost Sniper’s sights.

He had one last thing to do. He reached down into the crystal clear water and found a smooth rock the size of a baseball. Then he pitched it toward where he had hung his coat in a tree, and set his trap.

Cole started up the hillside, shivering despite the fact that he was nearly running.

Von Stenger heard the crash in the brush below and pressed the rifle scope tight to his eye, searching for the source. Had the American fallen? Was he making a run for it?

He spotted a patch of olive drab. Exhaling, he put the crosshairs on the target and pulled the trigger.

Von Stenger waited for an answering shot that never came. Dead was dead.

He left his hiding place, not being particularly cautious, and started down the hillside. The American had been roughly where he expected, but the noise had helped him pinpoint the coat in the tangle of brush.

He kept going until he reached the edge of the creek and worked his way into the thicket. The brush was dense here; briars scratched at his snow smock and he slipped it off.

He saw the empty coat draped in the bushes — and froze. Where was the hillbilly? Gone. He sensed that he was alone in the woods. The other sniper had managed to escape by fooling him with this scarecrow.