Ghost Sniper

Cole spat into the pine needles. “You saw how that Jerry gut shot those boys on the bridge and let them suffer. I reckon he can stay up there and rot. They got buzzards here, same as home.”

There was a tense silence as Mulholland looked from the tree to the hardened faces around him, and then back at the tree again. After a while he just shook his head and walked away.

Corporal Neville came over and one of the Americans gave him a cigarette. “You are one crazy Tommy,” the American said. “The way you rushed that bridge—well, you’re damn lucky you’re not dead.”

“I couldn’t stand leaving those wounded men out there another minute.” Neville nodded up at the tree. “This lot here were using them for bait to draw us out. Besides, I’m not half as crazy as this hillbilly here. He swam the river and took out the snipers for us.”

One of the paratroopers looked at Cole. “That must feel good, huh, knowing you got one.”

Cole looked up into the tree and shrugged. He had shot this man, killed him with a single bullet, and he looked inside himself for some feeling about that, but he felt nothing—neither good nor bad about it. It was pretty much the way he felt about killing a fox—it was simply something that needed killing.

The paratrooper had more to say: “If you ask me, we ought to grease that little Nazi right over there. He’s a sniper too, which I don’t count as a regular prisoner.”

Cole flicked his cigarette away so he could get both hands on his rifle. He settled his ice chip eyes on the paratrooper. “I captured him, so I reckon that makes him my prisoner, and I ain’t goin’ to let you shoot him.”

“Easy there, Reb,” the paratrooper said, taking a step back from Cole. “I’m just saying, is all. If you want him, then hell, you can have him. He’s your prisoner.”

Cole looked over at the German kid—who dutifully kept his hands on his head—and noticed that the German kept looking around the woods as if searching for someone.

“Jolie, jabber at that boy and ask him who he’s looking for,” Cole said to their guide.

Jolie did just that, asking a few questions in German. The boy answered at length and with some excitement, gesturing wildly, and talking to the point that Jolie finally had to cut him off.

“What’s he goin’ on about?”

“He says there was another sniper, but the boy doesn’t see him, so he must have gotten away. Fritz here says that one’s name is Captain Von Stenger, and he is some kind of super sniper. His nickname is The Ghost. He taught at the sniper training school and he fought against the Russians on the Eastern Front. The boy says this sniper is the one who shot Chief—and one of our snipers up on the hill.”

Cole walked over to where the boy had been pointing. He looked up and had a start when he saw what he thought was someone in a tree overhead. But as he swung his rifle up he saw that it was only a dummy made out of a German uniform stuffed with pine needles. Up close it wasn’t very convincing, but seen at a distance through a rifle scope it would have fooled him. Cole’s position in the mill had kept him from seeing anything but the two rifle flashes, but the dummy would have tricked Vaccaro and Meacham, who had a clearer view up on the hill. Cole had gotten lucky in shooting the real sniper.

Cole couldn’t help but be impressed by how sly these Germans were. The boy had said the other German was some kind of super sniper. He reckoned the boy was right.

He walked among the trees, looking for some clue as to where this sniper had been hidden. Something bright winked at him from the mossy forest floor, and he stooped to pick up a spent brass rifle cartridge. The base was marked with the strange Cyrillic characters.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. He looked around some more and spotted one of the gold-tipped stubs of a fancy French cigarette, just like the ones he had found in the sniper’s nest back at the hedgerow and in the church steeple. It was too much to be a coincidence. They had to be dealing with the same sniper here.

Cole waved Jolie and the boy over. “Tell me more about this Von Stenger,” he said. “I have a bad feeling that we’re goin’ to run into him again.”

“There is a good chance of that,” Jolie agreed. “According to our prisoner here, Von Stenger is bivouacked in an old chateau. I know just where it is.”

“Considering that it’s probably surrounded by Jerries and Tiger tanks, that don’t do us much good.”

Jolie showed her teeth in a smile. “Leave that to me,” she said.

“What are you planning to do?”

“Kill him,” she said. “What else would I do with him? But first, I want you to give me a shooting lesson.”

• • •

Soon after they had overrun the snipers’ nest, the paratroopers prepared to move on. Their captain shook hands with Lieutenant Mulholland, then tried to talk Neville into coming with them.

“We’re heading for St. Lo to link up with the rest of the 101st Airborne. We could use a crazy Tommy bastard like you,” their captain said. “We lost a lot of good men in the drop.”