David Healey: Ghost Sniper

She led him into one of the bedrooms upstairs. Neither of them spoke a word. She unbuttoned her blouse, took his hand, and placed it on her breast.

“You call yourself a lone wolf,” she said. “Show me how a wolf makes love.”

Jolie stepped out of her trousers, revealing milky white legs. Cole had heard rumors that the French girls didn’t shave, but her legs were a smooth alabaster. She guided his hand between her legs. Cole’s fingers opened her up and Jolie moaned happily at the realization that he had done this before. This was not the night for virgins. She fumbled for his belt and shoved his fatigues down.

They did not bother to undress all the way. He laid her across the bed and Jolie hooked one leg around him, resting her foot at the small of his back. It was a good thing they were alone in the house because the headboard was soon banging rhythmically against the walls. A framed picture shook loose and fell, but they ignored it.

Noise carried far in the almost deserted town, so Jolie took his fist and put it in her mouth, biting down as a shudder ran through her. When they had both finished, they lay tangled together for several moments, hearts pounding, breath jagged.

Cole noticed the broken picture frame on the floor. He figured the French owners would suppose a bomb had shaken it off the wall; he had to smile at what they would think if they knew the real reason—and what had happened on their bed while they were hiding in the bocage.

Cole rolled over and held her, but there was nothing possessive in his embrace. His lean arms were corded with muscle; Jolie was sure he could have crushed her if he had chosen to.

She wondered how it would have been to have made love to the lieutenant. His body would have been softer, his touch gentler. He would have felt guilty; he would have apologized. He might have proposed marriage. Cole just stroked her contentedly without saying a word. For a night such as this she had chosen the right man.

They lay there for several minutes, catching their breath. Then the sounds of a countryside at war began to drift in—the distant chatter of machine gun fire, and much closer, in the streets below, the noise of soldiers shouting to each other as they readied their defenses for the German assault that was sure to come at dawn.

Jolie slapped his bare ass and pushed him off, though she was smiling as she did it. “I have heard from the other French girls that you Americans do not have much technique. You make love like you were storming a beach all over again,” she said. “Still, you are not bad for a wolf.”

He shook his hand painfully. Her teeth had left a semi-circle of tiny bruises across his knuckles and a fleck of blood showed where the skin was broken. “Damn, but you French girls have got a bite.”

Jolie smiled. “Maybe there is a little panther in me, after all.”

After the French girl left, Von Stenger sat for a long time smoking, looking into the fire, and finishing the wine. It was, quite clearly, a trap. The maquis hated the Germans; the girl had not given him the information for any other reason than to make sure he would be at Bienville in the morning. Once there, of course, she planned for the American sniper to kill him.

Von Stenger wondered about the American. From what he had seen, this hillbilly sniper was a good shot, and he was too clever by far. He would be some backwoods person, a skilled hunter, a deadly marksman. He would have little education, but enormous cunning. He knew this kind of sniper because he had faced them before, in Stalingrad. And he had shot them. Because while they were talented, most of the Russian snipers were not trained. There were methods and tactics they knew by instinct, but not in the textbook way that Von Stenger knew them. Training beat instinct every time—or almost every time.

Like the Russians, the American would have had very little real training as a sniper. The American had come to play a deadly game of checkers, but what Von Stenger had in mind was a game of chess.

The first rule of sniping was to keep one’s enemy off balance by doing the unexpected. Von Stenger planned to take part in the attack on the village, but not in the way that the French maquis or the American marksman expected.

He finished his cigarette and flicked it into the fireplace, then went out into the hall where soldiers slept along the old stone walls.

It took him a while, but finally Von Stenger found the man whom he had overheard talking about his escape that day from Bienville. The soldier was sharing a bottle of schnapps with a comrade, and both of them appeared well on their way to being drunk.

“You there,” Von Stenger said, and the man blinked up at him in surprise. “Tell me about this tunnel you used to escape from the church today.”

It took a pot of strong black coffee to sober up the soldier, who sat at a table in the bustling kitchen of the chateau while Von Stenger packed himself some food. Von Stenger put together a ham sandwich, an apple, and a flask of coffee.

The soldier was reluctant to go out into the night. “The maquis are everywhere in the bocage country,” the soldier said. “They would like nothing better than to cut our throats.”

“You can take your chances with the maquis, or I will shoot you now for disobeying an order,” Von Stenger said nonchalantly. The look in his eyes, however, was more than convincing. “If you are lucky, the maquis won’t ever see you, but I won’t miss.”

The soldier did not say much after that, but led him down a road toward Bienville. The soldier was something of a clumsy oaf—noisy as he was, he was probably justified in being worried about the French Resistance—but he tried to follow Von Stenger’s example of moving almost silently along the road.

The towering hedges at the sides of the road pressed against them like a vise of blackness. Normally, Von Stenger would have carried his rifle slung over one shoulder, but he kept it at the ready, his finger on the trigger. At every step, he expected to be ambushed by the maquis or the Americans, or possibly shot at mistakenly by German troops.

Something skittered in the brush and his rifle flicked toward the noise. Von Stenger caught a flash of liquid blue eyes in the starlight. Feral eyes. He looked more closely at the still, dark form on the ground nearby. The animal was feeding on a corpse.

“What is that?” the soldier whispered, sounding close to panic.

“Just a fox,” Von Stenger replied. “You see, it must be a good night to be prowling the countryside.”

The hedges fell away as they entered the marsh country around Bienville, and soon the lights of the village came into view. It was not a bright night, but there was just enough light to pick out the roof tops and church tower against the lighter backdrop of the French sky. Von Stenger sensed that they were now surrounded by water.

“The marshes were flooded to make it harder on the enemy paratroopers,” the soldier said. “I saw them coming down in this mess. The water isn’t deep, maybe up to chest height. A lot of them drowned when their harnesses and gear pulled them under.”

“Shut up,” Von Stenger whispered. “We are almost close enough for them to hear us in the village.”

Over the centuries, the road had been built up into a kind of causeway above the marshes, so that it wouldn’t flood when the nearby rivers occasionally overflowed their banks. It was good they were crossing the causeway under cover of darkness; by day they would be an easy target.

“Here,” the soldier said. “I think this is the place. We need to move off the road.”

They couldn’t risk showing a light, and so had to grope their way through the dark. The ground here was swampy rather than flooded, covered in thick clumps of marsh grass and stunted shrubs that tore at their clothing.