Ardennes Sniper: A World War II Thriller (29 page)

The rifle kicked again.

This time, he did not miss.

• • •

Friel did nothing without a plan—even his marriage had been arranged by the SS, after all—and the retreat from La Gleize was no exception. He gathered his officers for a briefing at two a.m. Von Stenger was included as an officer, although he commanded no one but himself.

No one wanted to call it a retreat, so Friel used the term "tactical withdrawal." Orders were reviewed. All of their equipment would be left behind. The men would take rations and their small arms—it was likely they would have to fight their way back into Germany, but using the panzers was out of the question. There was no petrol and their ammunition was mostly spent. The remaining petrol would be used to douse the trucks and panzers, then a small team would move from tank to tank, setting them ablaze. By then, the bulk of Friel's men would have slipped out of town and into the safety of the forest.

"We move out at five a.m. under cover of darkness," he said. "Soon after that, we should have enough light to find our way through the woods. Is everything understood."

"Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer!" Not everyone agreed with the retreat, but now that there were clear orders, they would be followed. They were SS; they were good at that.

"Kurt, come with me," Friel said.

Von Stenger fell into step with Friel as they left the makeshift headquarters. He waited for Friel to speak.

"I see that you brought your rifle. In fact, I have noticed that you rarely go anywhere without it. One of the men told me that you shot your nemesis in the fighting yesterday. What did you call him? The hillbilly sniper? If you shot him, why are you still carrying that rifle everywhere?"

It was true that Von Stenger had seen the American sniper fall. His bullet had hit hard. Nonetheless, he would keep his rifle close.

"One must always be prepared," Von Stenger said. He did not admit it to Friel, but the truth was that he felt like a part of him was missing when he did not have the rifle with him. There was something reassuring about the feel of cold iron and solid wood, as well as the smell of gun oil and gunpowder. "It is how one stays alive on a battlefield."

"You are a hunter at heart, Kurt, which is why I want you in the vanguard, in case we run into any American scouts. They are not to make it back to the enemy lines to give us away. We need all the time we can get. If we have enough of a head start, the Americans may not bother to come after us. They will be satisfied with capturing La Gleize."

"Very well," Von Stenger said. "I will shoot any Americans I see."

They made their way toward the town hall, where the wounded were receiving care. It was on the top floor of this building that Von Stenger had made his sniper's nest yesterday. There were many more wounded now—the day-long battle with the American forces had taken its toll.

Just inside the doorway, Friel paused and took a deep breath. The air inside the claustrophobic space smelled of blood, antiseptic, and unwashed bodies. "This is very hard for me," Friel said quietly. "So many brave men."

He went from man to man, shaking hands, offering a word of encouragement, or even a cigarette. Some lay unmoving, swathed in bandages, and Friel knelt beside them on the floor for a few moments, simply touching a shoulder or a knee and uttering a few quiet words. If Friel's God had not been the party and Adolf Hitler, Von Stenger would have thought he was praying. He spent more than an hour there. Von Stenger did what he could, handing around a few mugs of coffee and lighting a cigarette for a teen-aged Schütze whose hands were bandaged, but he did not like hospitals.
 

He had suffered through one in Stalingrad after getting unlucky with a Russian sniper. That hospital stay had been the exception to the rule for snipers. Usually, when a bullet came for a sniper, death was swift and final.
 

Among the wounded, those who could would make the retreat with the rest of Kampfgruppe Friel. But the rest would be left behind. Friel had no choice. He wished them goodbye and good luck.

When they left the hospital, Friel had tears in his eyes.

• • •

Cole spent most of the evening drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and thinking. The battle for La Gleize was still going on, but the few bullets he might contribute seemed paltry compared to the artillery that the American forces rained down on the heads of the Nazis.
 

With their tanks, the Germans gave as good as they got. But for how long could they keep it up? It was only a matter of time before they ran out of ammunition.

Just before dusk, a handful of Luftwaffe planes had attempted to drop supplies to their beleaguered ground forces, but most of the parachutes had missed the town. The failure to resupply the kampfgruppe had not taken the fight out of the Germans.

The soldiers getting killed on both sides were anonymous to Cole, but there was one German he wanted in his sights.

Das Gespenst.

So, he sat this fight out. He wanted to keep a low profile. After all, some fights you had to plan if you wanted to win them, and being dead—at least, he hoped Das Gespenst would think he was dead—gave him time to consider his next move.

Cole knew there were two ways to hunt. The first method was what some back home in the mountains called long walking. The hunter moved through the woods quietly, rifle or shotgun at the ready, in hopes of flushing out game. If a hunter was lucky and very quiet, he might come across a deer, spook a rabbit, or startle a covey of quail.
 

A hunter covering ground felt like he was doing something, but there were days when no game showed itself and mostly he just tired himself out.

The second form of hunting required that the hunter himself become the trap. It took some knowledge of the quarry. A man had to know the habits of what he was hunting, which trails his quarry would follow, where it would stop to drink.
 

Unseen, he could hide himself in some vantage point overlooking the path—and wait.
 

This second approach required tremendous patience. A man might sit for hours before his quarry appeared. It helped to have some bait to draw the game in, like a salt block, shelled corn, or fresh meat.

It was this second method that Cole planned on using against Von Stenger. In place of a game trail, he planned to use the old road where it came out of the woods into the clearing he had found.

He planned to use some bait. But he would need some help to do that. He needed someone he could trust to keep his mouth shut.

Vaccaro.

At nightfall he made his way to the hospital. Earlier, he had liberated a bottle of rough red wine and a pencil and paper from the ruins. He brought these along with him to the hospital.

Inside, he nodded at Jolie, who was busy helping the wounded. After the death of the local girl who had been helping the wounded, there was no one else to do the work. Jolie moved around the interior of the church, carrying bowls of soup or new bandages. She gave Cole a weary smile.

Vaccaro was going to be all right. The bullet had only grazed him, but he didn't seem to be in any hurry to get back to the fighting.

"How long you fixin' to be in here?" Cole asked. "Looks to me like you’re patched up."

"It's all about the exit wound," Vaccaro said. "This is my
exit
from having to put my ass back out there in that freezing weather. Did you get the bastard who shot me? I'll bet you a hundred bucks it was Das Gespenst."

"I'm workin' on it."

"How about this—you get him and then I'll come out of the hospital."

"Vaccaro, I never pegged you for a coward."

Vaccaro smirked. "It ain't that, Cole, and you know it. Look around you. This sure as hell ain’t the Taj Mahal but it's warm and dry. I got plenty to eat. Nobody is shooting at me. Hell, I plan on staying in here until they kick me out or we get sent home."

"Then I reckon your hospital stay just got better," Cole said, producing the bottle of wine and a corkscrew, which he considered a fiddly thing. In his opinion, a bottle of liquor ought to have a cork you could pull with your teeth. He opened the bottle and filled tin mugs for them both.

"You're all right, Cole. I don't care what Jolie says about you."

"What does she say about me?"
 

"Jee-suz, Hillbilly. Relax, will you? It's a joke that people from civilization use."

Cole gulped down a cup of wine, which was another surprise. He never was much of a drinker. "Listen, I got a favor to ask."

"Sure—as long as I can do it without getting out of bed."

Cole handed him the pencil and paper. "I need you to write me a note."

"What the hell are you talking about, Cole? Do I look like Ernest Hemingway?"

"Who's that?"

"Never mind. What I mean is, I'm not much of a writer. The nuns in school always smacked my knuckles because my handwriting was so bad."

"But you can read and write?"

"Do I look like an idiot? Sure I can read and write." Then it dawned on Vaccaro. He stared at Cole. "You mean you can't?"

"Why the hell do you think I’m here."
 

Vaccaro nodded, any thoughts of gloating having vanished at the edge in Cole’s voice. "Don't get sore. I'll do it. Listen, where I grew up there's book smarts and street smarts. One can be as good as the other, depending on the situation. You got plenty of street smarts. Or maybe woods smarts in your case."

Cole handed him the pencil and paper, then told him what to put in the note. "Make the letters big enough so the son of a bitch can see it."
 

"Cole, he shot me from three hundred yards. I don't think there's anything wrong with his eyes." He handed the paper back to Cole. "That's it? I don't get the twelve o'clock part. How you know what position you'll be in?"

"It don't matter where I am. It matters where I put this here note. With any luck, it will be the last thing ol’ Das Gespenst reads."

CHAPTER 31

Under cover of darkness, Cole slipped across the fields and into the woods. He dressed warmly against the bitter cold, with a white smock made from a sheet to camouflage his uniform. Over a wool cap, he wore his Confederate flag helmet with the bullet hole in it. He carried his rifle in his hands.
 

Strapped across his back were a half dozen fence pickets with names painted on them. He had put aside his pride to have Vaccaro write him that note, but he could manage to scrawl last names on a scrap of wood. He had used the names of dead snipers: Rowe and McNulty. He also used the name of Jimmy Turner, the simple country kid who had died in the first minutes on Omaha Beach and who had no more business in a war than a choir boy had in a prize fight. The last name scrawled on a picket was Cole’s own.

The forest was absent of any human sounds. The artillery had fallen silent for the night, and it was hard to know that thousands of men were nearby, dug into foxholes, waiting for a German breakout attempt that would never happen. The pine trees whispered in the night breeze. He heard an owl, then the screech of some animal hunting.

Cole felt right at home. Where others would feel spooked in the woods at night, alone, he knew that running across an animal was the least of his worries. The two-legged kind were the ones to fear tonight.

Fortunately, anyone in the forest would have a hard time seeing him in the nearly pitch blackness. Cole's night vision was good enough for him to see the looming tree trunks against the snow for several feet ahead. He stopped periodically to check his compass, because it would be easy to get off course in the dark—the stars above were hard to see through the pine canopy. He had coated the inside of the compass lid with a dusting of powder made from ground-up fireflies. It was just enough light to make out the compass needle without affecting his night vision.

The ground grew steeper, forcing him to move more slowly. However, he stayed off the old sunken road through the woods and walked parallel to it instead, keeping to the trees. The last thing he wanted to do was leave footprints on that road. It took him a while in the dark, but he managed to cross two miles of woods and emerged in the clearing he had scouted yesterday. The Germans would walk right into it if they followed the sunken road through the woods, as they surely must.

He could still hear the whisper of pine trees overhead, but the other night sounds had fallen quiet. Not so much as a rabbit stirred. Was someone—or something—in the forest?

After the darkness among the trees, the open field was almost blinding, even at night. Surrounded by nothing but snow, he felt very exposed. He stepped back into the trees. Something did not feel right.

He waited, rifle at the ready, biding his time. A minute passed. And another.

Then he saw a flicker of flame in the trees to his right. Soon, the smell of the cigarette drifted toward him.

He was not alone.

Who else would be in the woods at this hour?

His plan depended on no one else seeing him, of course. He thought about what he needed to do.

He unslung his load of pickets and placed his rifle on top. This had to be done quietly. He didn't want to fire a shot and take a chance that there were other scouts nearby. He slipped off his mittens. Pulled his knife free of its sheath.