David Healey: Ghost Sniper

As he waded toward the island, careful to keep his Mosin-Nagant out of the flood waters, he bumped into something that floated just beneath the surface. He used his knee to push it out of the way, but the submerged object shifted and rolled, and he had a terrible start when the thing bobbed up to reveal a human face.

“ Scheisse! ” he shouted, and jumped back, ready to defend himself.

But the face was pale and bloated, the blue eyes blank. He saw that the corpse wore the uniform of an American paratrooper and that the body was still entangled in parachute cords. The dead man was outfitted with a steel helmet, an M1 strapped across his chest, and a fully loaded haversack. Von Stenger surmised that the poor bastard had become tangled in his parachute lines, then was dragged under by the weight of his gear and drowned. This fate was exactly what the Germans had intended by flooding the marshes and fields in the Allied drop zone. For this soldier, the trap had worked all too well.

He contemplated the body for a moment, then nodded to himself.

Von Stenger drew his combat knife. Working quickly, he cut the drowned man free of the parachute cords and haversack. Then he dragged the body along behind him and continued on his way toward the island.

“Come along, Ami, ” Von Stenger mused aloud to the corpse. “You and I are going to be good friends.”

Wood chips were still flying when Cole came running up with Jolie and Vaccaro. He watched the lieutenant swinging his ax like a mad lumberjack. The oak doors shuddered under each blow but still did not budge.

“Who would have thought the son of a bitch had grenades,” Vaccaro said. “He’s a sniper, for crissake. But I think maybe I got him.”

“Nobody got him,” Cole said. “I reckon he’s still up there waiting for us.”

“In that case, you go first.”

“You know, for a city boy, you ain’t so dumb as you look.”

The axes opened a jagged hole through the door. Someone shoved a pry bar through and got it under the crossbar, but it took three men and some cursing to shift the weight enough to get the doors open.

Cole was the first one through, his rifle at the ready. The room at the base of the tower was no more than fifteen feet on each side, and empty. Although it was bright daylight outside, the interior was chill and shrouded in semi-darkness because the only light came from the few window slits cut into the ancient stone walls.

“Anybody bring a flashlight?” the lieutenant asked.

“No, but I eat a lot of carrots,” Cole said, and started up the stairs. Mulholland started to pass him, still carrying the ax, but Cole stopped him with a wave of his hand. “Are you goin’ to throw that there ax at him? I got this, Lieutenant.”

From a few steps behind, Vaccaro bellowed up the stairway. The words echoed and carried like smoke up a chimney: “We’re comin’ to get you, you goddamn sneaky Nazi sniper son of a bitch! How do you like that, huh!”

Cole looked down and fixed him with a pale stare. “Vaccaro, what I just said about you bein’ smarter than you look? Well, you ain’t. If he didn’t hear them axes, you just sent him a telegram that we’re on our way up the stairs.”

There was no helping that now, so Cole continued up the ancient steps, worn smooth by centuries of priests going up to ring the bell and summon the faithful to mass.

It would be easy enough for the enemy sniper to ambush them from any of the landings above, but that would have to happen at very close quarters, exposing himself to return fire. If Cole had been the German, and he’d had any more stick grenades, he’d bounce them down the steps. If he had a crate of grenades, the sniper could defend himself up in that steeple until he died of old age. But Cole doubted he had lugged that many up there.

No sense worrying about it. With his finger on the trigger of the rifle, he forced himself up another step, and another. Soon, he could see the rectangular opening into the belfry itself. Cole slung his rifle and drew a .45 automatic, then crept silently up the last few steps.

Back when he was a boy, Cole used to hunt woodchucks. They were animals that resembled a beaver but that dug burrows from which they poked their noses, sniffing for predators.

He had often seen how a fox would wait patiently beside the hole for a woodchuck to put its nose out and provide dinner. Hunting them, Cole had learned the same technique. All you needed to shoot a woodchuck was a nose and maybe an eye showing.

If Cole stuck his nose above the floor level, he was fairly certain he would get shot. So he stuck the .45 up instead and sprayed shots in several directions. The noise was deafening. He surged up the steps and into the belfry, both hands on the gun, ready to fire.

Nobody there.

He was soon followed by Mulholland, Vaccaro and Jolie. “He really is the Ghost Sniper,” Jolie said.

“He was here, all right,” Cole said. He had noticed a gold-trimmed cigarette butt on the stone floor. With his boot, he toed at an empty shell casing. The Cyrillic markings were just visible. “Our sniper shoots a Russian rifle. It was him.”

“He didn’t just vanish,” the lieutenant said. “He could be hiding.”

They made a quick inspection of the tower room. The windows were too narrow to crawl out. There was no attic to hid in. Down below, the oak doors had been barred shut from inside—which meant the sniper hadn’t slipped out at the last instant just ahead of them.

“Huh,” Cole said.

Vaccaro, still panting from the climb, looked around the empty room. “Reb, I know you’re a man of few words, so let me say them for you: Where the hell did he go?”

Cole lingered at one of the slit windows long enough to see the advancing German column. There were an awful lot of Germans heading for Bienville. However, they were forced to stay on the road because of the flooded fields surrounding the town and roadside.

If he could have stayed up in the tower, there was no telling how many he could pick off. Then the Tiger tank fired and a shell whistled close by the tower. If their aim got better, the tower would not be standing much longer.

He started back down the stairs.

“Cole, where are you going?” Mulholland demanded.

“Well, sir, he ain’t up here.”

They descended quickly, not worrying about an ambush on the stairs this time. But the room below was as empty as ever, with a bare stone floor. The only furnishing was a tattered rug on the floor.

“Did you expect to find that Jerry down here making coffee or something?” Vaccaro asked.

Cole looked at the rug more closely, saw that one corner was flipped up. He reached down and tugged at the rug, revealing the trap door set into the stone floor.

“I’ll be damned.”

The trap door was awfully heavy, and it helped to have two men to swing it all the way open. A shaft led down into a dark tunnel that smelled of dank, musty earth. Over Cole’s shoulder, Vaccaro lit a wooden match and dropped it down the shaft. The sputtering flame revealed the ladder and tunnel below, but no sign of the enemy sniper.

“I’m going after him,” Cole said.

“Huh,” Vaccaro said.

Nobody had a flashlight, so Vaccaro gave Cole his Zippo lighter.

“Hey, I want that back, so don’t get shot.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that.”

Cole went down the ladder and then stood on the floor of the shaft. He could see the others looking down at him, including Jolie—she had not done very well in following the lieutenant’s orders to stay out of harm’s way.

“I will meet you at the other end,” she said.

“Where’s that?” Cole asked.