David Healey - Ardennes Sniper

“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 hole 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.