Ghost Sniper: A World War II Thriller Page 13

  "Right up this road?" Mulholland asked. "It looks like we're headed that way. Might as well see if we can help out."

  "Shoot a Jerry for me," the driver said, and let his foot off the clutch. The Jeep shot forward and careened down the road between the tall hedges.

  Lieutenant Mulholland turned to look at his squad. His command now consisted of two snipers (or maybe one and a half considering Vaccaro probably couldn't hit a target smaller than a barn), a French girl, a captured German boy and an English paratrooper so gung ho that the lieutenant suspected the Tommy had maybe landed on his head coming down. Somewhere along the line they had become a seriously motley unit. All they needed now was for a stray dog to tag along.

  "Jesus," he said out loud to no one in particular. He didn't normally use the lord's name lightly but that was par for the course since coming ashore at Omaha Beach; he was beginning to question what sort of person he had become over the last few days. Nobody had prepared him for this at OCS.

  The little group stood in the road, waiting for him to tell them what to do. Getting antsy, Vaccaro shifted his rifle to his other hand and spoke up, “Lieutenant?”

  At times like this, the lieutenant sometimes thought of his grandfather, who had served with General Grant during the Civil War. He recalled a family story about his grandfather saving the famous general from a Confederate sharpshooter. Had Brendan Mulholland ever felt this overwhelmed? It had been a different time and a different enemy, but the lieutenant took strength from the fact that he wasn’t the first Mulholland to fight a war. His grandfather hadn’t let General Grant down, and Mulholland wasn’t about to give up on his ragtag squad.

  "You heard the man,” Mulholland said. “Let's go rescue us a town."

  • • •

  The town of Bienville was a deceptively quaint and sleepy French village. With its old stone houses, shops with brightly painted signs and doors, church steeple, and narrow cobblestoned streets, the village was the sort of place a traveler on the road to Carentan might have used up a frame or two on a precious roll of film to capture.

  Indeed, the town thrived mainly on commerce because it was surrounded by wet, boggy marshes that did not make good crop or grazing land. To make matters worse, the Germans had flooded the marshes to ensnare paratroopers. The flooded fields and marshes around Bienville now held the drowned bodies of scores of American paratroopers.

  The flooding also had created a bottleneck so that anyone bound for the key Norman city of Carentan had to stay on the road through Bienville. Skirting the town through the flooded fields surrounding it would be impossible. Beyond the marshes were the hedgerows to contend with. Essentially, the Germans had managed to make the village into a key strategic point. Nobody was getting anywhere by road in Normandy unless they came through Bienville.

  And yet the Germans had lost the village in a short, sharp battle the day before. The invasion at the beaches had caused such confusion that the German High Command in Normandy had overlooked the defense of the town. The small force in the village had been taken by surprise when a unit of Americans suddenly came up the road and raced into town.

  The German defenders fled or were killed; a Wehrmacht doctor and several medics had stayed behind to care for the wounded on both sides, turning the church into a makeshift hospital. There was no hope yet of transporting the wounded back to the beach head for more advanced medical care.

  No stranger to conflict, the village had grown up around the church founded in the eleventh century. Other troops had marched through; other battles had been fought nearby. Though this was a French village, the combatants were now Germans and Americans, and the weapons were rifles and machine guns rather than spears and broadswords, longbows and crossbows.

  The old stone walls were pockmarked by bullets. In the narrow streets between the buildings, the smell of cordite mingled with the scent of fresh-baked bread.

  The American defenders had set up a machine gun nest overlooking the main road into town, which the snipers approached cautiously.

  "Hold your fire!" Mulholland shouted, then waved. Somebody waved back, and they approached the town.

  "Don't tell me you're the freakin' cavalry," one of the machine gunners said. "We're gonna need a few more guns to hold off the Germans if they send Panzers at us."

  "Hey, buddy, we can turn around and leave if you don't want us," Vaccaro said.

  "Don't get sore," the machine gunner said. "We'll take what we can get. We've only got about eighty men to defend this place. How many do you think the Germans are going to send at us in the morning?"

  "More than eighty," Vaccaro said.

  "Yeah, it's like Custer's Last Stand all over again," the machine gunner said. "Lucky for us the Jerries don't take scalps."

  The snipers moved into the village itself. Everywhere they looked, the American troops were scrambling to set up defensive positions, using wooden carts, even mattresses and tables to create firing positions at the street corners. Some were busy rigging so-called “sticky bombs” to use against the Panzers that would surely be there by morning. A few soldiers occupied second or third floor windows, getting ready with grenade launchers. The thick stone walls made each house a fortress in its own right.

  Mulholland reported to the captain in charge, who agreed that the snipers should be placed wherever Mulholland thought best.

  "All right, listen up, here's our plan," Lieutenant Mulholland said. "Neville, I want you to position yourself and your Tommy gun in one of the upstairs windows near the edge of the town. That will add some firepower to what's already covering the road into the village. The Germans will likely be coming out of the south, so Vaccaro, you get yourself up on one of the rooftops. The higher up, the better, because you'll have a longer field of fire. You start trying to pick off Germans as soon as they come into sight. Cole and I will go up into the church tower, which is the highest point in the village."

  "What about me?" Jolie asked.

  "There's a hospital set up in the church," he said. "Maybe you and Fritz can help."

  They made their way over to the church, which was by far the largest structure in the village. The massive stonework and squat architecture gave the church a brooding appearance, and the square gray tower at one end of the church resembled a castle keep more than a steeple.

  The church doors were open, and they started inside, but were stopped by a young man wearing a red and white medic armband. His uniform was spattered with blood. "No guns in the church," he said. "This is neutral territory, sir."

  "All right," Mulholland said. "I can't argue with that. It is a church, after all."

  "Thank you, sir."

  They left their weapons behind and the young medic led them inside. After the bright light of the French countryside, it took a while for their eyes to adjust to the dark interior, lit only by the sunlight through the tall, narrow windows that were little more than slits in the deep stone walls. The air was cool, and smelled of rubbing alcohol and unwashed bodies. The pews were being used as hospital beds, and in many places blood had soaked into the ancient wood. It soon became apparent that Germans and Americans were among the wounded. Mulholland looked around, and saw that several of the other medics—marked by their white arm bands with medical crosses—were Germans.

  "You've got Jerries in here?"

  "Yes, sir. Our own boys and Jerries, along with a couple of French civilians who got caught in the crossfire. I guess technically the Germans are prisoners of war, but we've called a truce to help the wounded. You know, I was their prisoner at first because my parachute came down almost in the middle of the town, when the Germans still had control of it. They treated me all right. One of these Germans is a doctor, and he really knows what he's doing. There would be a lot more dead without him."

  "Word has it that the Germans might try to take back this town in the morning," Mulholland said. He nodded at the massive double doors that opened toward the steps leading into the church tower. "Defensive positions are be
ing set up outside. I want to set up a sniping post in the church steeple."

  "Sir, you're an officer, so I suppose I can't tell you what to do, but the fact is that if you start shooting from that steeple, the Jerries are going to hit back, maybe with mortars, maybe with Tiger tanks. They'll turn this place into rubble. With all due respect, sir, is that really what you want with all these wounded men in here?"

  Mulholland took a moment to look around the interior of the church. Fritz moved among the wounded, speaking with them in German. The German doctor heard him, waved him over, and set him to work helping bandage a leg. Jolie kneeled beside a girl, no more than eight or nine, who lay wounded on one of the church pews.

  "I suppose you're right," Mulholland said. "I'll leave the woman and the German with you. That's two extra pairs of hands."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Mulholland turned to Cole. "OK, there's a lot of hours between now and dawn. Get something to eat, get some sleep, and then we'll get into position before sunrise. Obviously, the church steeple is now off limits, so we'll have to find ourselves a roof top."

  "I reckon there's plenty of roof tops," Cole said. He smiled. "Plenty of Jerries to shoot, too, once that sun comes up."

  • • •

  Jolie waited until dark, then stole a bicycle and peddled toward the chateau that now served as Wehrmacht headquarters. At first, she tried to be stealthy, but that seemed ridiculous to attempt on a bicycle when every rut and pot hole sent the machine rattling like a bucket of bolts.

  It was hard to tell if she was riding through territory held by the Germans or by the Americans—at night, with trigger happy and exhausted soldiers everywhere, running into troops from either side would be equally dangerous.

  If anyone stopped her, she planned to pose as a French girl on a desperate errand—a sick relative perhaps. The Americans might stop her, but the Germans would be more wary. With luck, any German sentries she came across wouldn’t shoot her.

  Fortunately, the small lanes she kept to were deserted except for the occasional owl, fox or rabbit.

  Jolie knew these roads well. She had grown up in Normandy, of course, but it was her role in the French Resistance that had truly taught her the best routes to travel the bocage by night, undiscovered.

  The Allied invasion had been long awaited by Jolie and the other French maquis. She recalled the grim days of June 1940 when the Germans had arrived. She had watched in disbelief as the truckloads of German troops drove in with their square steel helmets and harsh, guttural orders. German was truly a soldier’s language.

  Many French had accepted the Germans with a grudging shrug. For the most part, the Germans were easy to get along with—unless you happened to be a Jew. All of the Jews in Normandy were quickly rounded up, never to be seen again.

  There were some French, like Jolie, who would not give up so easily—at least not in their hearts. This became the French Resistance and she had quickly joined. There had been nighttime raids on supply trains and radio centers. Small groups of soldiers traveling at night might not reach their destination.

  But the Germans made the French pay dearly for these acts of rebellion and the maquis soon limited operations to gathering intelligence for the Allied invasion to come. They bided their time.

  Jolie’s first real lover was a young Resistance fighter named Charles. He was tall and had dark, Gallic good looks. He took terrible chances on missions, yet he was shy in bed. She still recalled the feel of his skin against hers—there was no better feeling in the world.

  He was captured one night while counting gun batteries at the beach. The Germans shot him in the courtyard of the very chateau she was riding toward tonight.

  Jolie had gone with some women of the village to collect the body. She never cried for Charles. They both knew what they were doing was dangerous, and Charles had paid the ultimate price.

  Thinking about Charles, Jolie peddled harder, until her heart raced. She was beyond tears for her handsome lover, dead at the hands of the German occupiers. What Jolie craved now was revenge.

  CHAPTER 20

  After escaping the woods, toward nightfall Von Stenger returned to the chateau in hopes of some food and rest. In the room that he had shared with Wulf and the boy, there were now three enlisted men. They lounged on the battered furniture, resting their muddy boots on the upholstered chairs. He mused that one didn't need bombs to destroy buildings, just soldiers.

  "Get out," Von Stenger said.

  The men were unshaven, battle-hardened veterans and they might have argued, considering that his rank insignia was hidden beneath his camouflage smock, but they took one look at the scoped rifle, the Knight’s Cross at Von Stenger's throat and the cold blue eyes, then cleared out.

  "Ich habe über der sniper," he overheard one of the men say out in the hallway. "Dieser Mann ist ein kaltblütiger Killer." That man is a cold-blooded killer. "Ich mag es nicht sniper. Das Gespenst."

  He looked around the room, which now felt very empty. Wulf was dead and the boy was either captured or dead. He did not mind being alone; in fact, he preferred his own company.

  The enlisted men had lit a fire in the old fireplace. Von Stenger took off his boots and his camouflage smock, then put them by the fire to dry. His belly rumbled. Even Das Gespenst got hungry. He wished he could order up room service. He smiled to himself. Room service. Wouldn't that be something! That might be the perfect war, he thought, if one could hunt the enemy by day and then return to one's hotel to a good meal.

  Well, perhaps he could do something about that. He went out into the hallway in his stockings and found a fresh-faced orderly who was properly intimidated by the sight of a Wehrmacht captain, and sent him down to the kitchen with orders to bring him a plate of food.

  There was an air of excitement throughout the old chateau. Like Von Stenger, many of the men here were resting for the night before getting back into action at daybreak. Though battle weary, no one showed any indications of being defeated. While the Allies had landed in force—Americans, Canadians, Scottish and English—the Germans had far from lost the fight. Reinforcements were pouring in, including SS units and Panzer divisions, all under the command of General Rommel. The Allied air superiority combined with the sheer numbers of enemy troops might push the Germans out of Normandy, but they would make them pay for every acre between the hedgerows.

  The Allies were learning what war meant—it was the kind of war some of these German troops had been fighting for years. They were professional soldiers who were good at killing, Von Stenger included. No one bore any particular grudge against these invaders—it wasn't as if they were fighting the hated Red Army—but they were simply the enemy.

  The crowd at the chateau included a few women, most of them tearful. These were French women who had cast their lot with the occupiers—out of love or the advantages that having a German lover brought. Now that the Germans might be leaving, they were fearful. There would be repercussions—shaved heads, drumming out of town—that consorting with the enemy would bring. Frantically, they were either looking for their men who were now dead or somewhere in the field. Some of the unluckiest ones now had bastard babies fathered by German soldiers.

  Everywhere, Von Stenger heard stories being traded about exploits that had taken place earlier that day. He lit a cigarette and lounged in the hallway and listened.

  "You should see how the Tiger tanks make short work of the Sherman tanks being used by the Americans and Tommies," one soldier said. "One shot and that is it for them. Kaboom!"

  Another soldier was talking about the battle at Bienville, a village on the road to Carentan. Von Stenger was well aware that Carentan was one of the larger towns on Normandy's Cotentin Peninsula and the Allies were eager to capture it, but first they had to collect the little towns that dotted the road like beads on a string. Bienville was one such place and there had been a hot skirmish fought there that day.

  "We were the last ones out," the soldier said. He had a bloody band
age wrapped around his upper arm. "We found ourselves trapped in the church and so we planned to make a last stand there. We would have been captured or killed, I suppose, but the priest showed us a tunnel that led out into the marshes. He said there had been enough bloodshed for one day. We had to leave our wounded behind. The Americans are holding Bienville now, but we are taking it back in the morning."

  The orderly reappeared with a plate of food. The plate was piled high with steak, potatoes and red cabbage. There was a tall mug of black coffee. Von Stenger was impressed. It was more than he could eat. He had the orderly bring it to his room. If this had been a hotel, Von Stenger would have given him a tip. But one did not tip soldiers. Instead, he gave him half a bar of chocolate. The orderly was still young enough that his face lit up at the sight of the candy. "Thank you, Herr Hauptmann!"

  Von Stenger pulled a chair and a small table close to the fire and had just sat down when the orderly returned.

  "Herr Hauptmann, there is someone downstairs to see you."

  "Who?"

  "A woman." The young orderly blushed a bit. "She asked for you by name."

  Von Stenger was puzzled as well as curious. He was certain that he did not know a single woman in France, so who could it be? "Well, bring her up."

  He took out his Walther P38, set it on the table beside the plate, and put a newspaper on top of it. The orderly appeared in the doorway, followed by a French woman Von Stenger did not recognize. He guessed that she was in her early twenties, and she was good looking rather than pretty. She wore trousers, which was in itself unusual, and an unflattering sweater the color of old dead leaves; her hair was pulled back in a business-like bun and she wasn't wearing any makeup. The dark eyes that glanced at him were wary and sly, like those of a fox. This was no simple local girl. One of the maquis, he thought. French Resistance. He stood out of politeness as she entered, but as he did so he kept one hand on the table beside the newspaper.