David Healey - Ghost Sniper

“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.

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.”

“Americans 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.”