Ghost Sniper: A World War II Thriller Read online

  • • •

  The dead paratrooper's body shuddered as the bullet struck it. Von Stenger saw that the shot must have come from the log floating near the tunnel entrance. He did not have a clear view of the American. Instead, he aimed for the water just in front of the log and fired, hoping a lucky shot might hit the enemy sniper.

  A bullet lost most of its energy almost immediately upon hitting the water. It was like shooting into wet concrete. But all he needed was a few inches.

  Other than the splash where the bullet had gone in, there was no movement. A body slumping under the water would have caused enough displacement to move the log. So he had missed.

  The American sniper must now have realized that the body he had shot was nothing but a decoy. Now he would be looking for the actual shooter. Von Stenger, however, was confident that he was well hidden.

  In spite of the predicament he was in, he had to smile. This is why he loved sniping. It was a game of chess with rifles. The next shot could be a matter of checkmate.

  Von Stenger could have waited all day—he was on a dry patch of land. The American was standing in water—it was not a position a man could hold for long, no matter how tough he was. However, the increasing sound of gunfire was a reminder that the attack on Bienville was growing in intensity. It was only a matter of time before the tank shells began to rain into the flooded fields, and Von Stenger did not wish to be around when that happened.

  A plan began to take shape. My move.

  Working himself backward, one inch at a time, Von Stenger slipped back into the water. Making not so much as a ripple, he began to wade to the right of the island and then toward the causeway. His plan was to approach the American sniper from the side and surprise him.

  A couple of factors worked in his favor. The first was that the American sniper's attention and the narrow field of the rifle scope would all be on the area around where the decoy body lay. He would not take his eyes off that. The second factor was the glare on the water that would mask Von Stenger's movements like the best sort of camouflage. Finally, he still had the length of plastic tubing in his pocket. He took it out now and put it in his mouth, and then slipped beneath the water while keeping his rifle held just above the surface. With the glare and some luck, it would look like a piece of wood.

  • • •

  Cole kept the scope trained on the island. The enemy had tricked him into shooting a corpse. But he had to be somewhere nearby.

  He heard a sound on the bank to his right. He took his eye off the sight long enough to watch incredulously as Jolie slid down the side of the causeway and climbed into the wooden rowboat. What the hell was she doing? Looking for him? He groaned.

  If he moved, if he tried to warn her, he had no doubt that the German sniper would shoot him. And then he would shoot Jolie. The German wouldn't dare give away his position by taking a shot at Jolie. Why bother? The German was after him, not Jolie.

  The sounds of fighting increased as the Germans advanced toward town. A tank shell landed in the streets, exploded. Another overshot the town and landed in the marsh, blasting water and mud high into the sky. The shock wave was like a door slamming in your face.

  Cole was still debating what to do when, incredibly, a figure rose up out of the water near the boat.

  The German.

  • • •

  Von Stenger moved in the general direction of the causeway. The water was not all that deep, so by crouching down he was able to stay submerged while keeping his feet under him. After at least ten minutes under water, when he thought he had gone far enough, he rose very slowly.

  Not twenty feet away was a boat. He remembered seeing that boat on shore. At the oars was the French Resistance fighter who had come to his room the night before. Their eyes locked. She fumbled in the bottom of the boat, started to come up with a weapon.

  Von Stenger shot her.

  • • •

  "No!" Cole was amazed that he had actually screamed. The son of a bitch had shot Jolie. He saw the German work the bolt action and swing the rifle toward Cole's hiding place.

  Cole shoved the log away and stood up, rifle raised, looked right through the scope at the German. The German was looking back at him.

  Cole put the crosshairs on the German's head. He could almost feel the other sniper's crosshairs on him.

  He fought the urge to fire quickly. He took a breath, held it, struggled to hold the rifle steady. The German would be doing the same. His finger took up more slack on the trigger. The crosshairs danced, came back. He was dimly aware of a tank shell screaming overhead.

  When the rifle fired it came as a shock, punching into his shoulder. He saw a flash from the German's muzzle.

  Then the world exploded.

  • • •

  His ears ringing, his nose and mouth full of mud, Cole sputtered and coughed until he could breathe. The shell from the German tank had thrown him into the water and showered him with gunk and debris from the sunken marsh.

  But he was still holding the rifle. Frantically, he put it to his shoulder and scanned the marsh, looking for the German. The scope was useless, spattered with mud, but he prayed the muzzle wasn't clogged.

  Nothing. Had his shot killed the German? The German had fired at him in the same instant that the Panzer shell had come screaming in. Cole's ears rang and his head throbbed, but he was fairly certain he didn't have a rifle bullet in him. His cheek did feel like it was on fire, and when he touched it his fingertips came away bloody. With a shock, he realized that's where the German's bullet had grazed him.

  Goddamn close.

  No time to think on that now. He had to get to Jolie. Move, he told himself. He waded toward the boat, going as fast as the muck stirred up by the shell would allow. He could almost feel the German’s crosshairs on his back and thought that each step might be his last.

  Another shell ripped into the marsh, exploding not fifty feet away. Somewhere close by a heavy machine gun chattered. Being out in an open, flooded field was not a good place to be right now. It was a little too much like standing under a lone pine during a lightning storm.

  He slung the rifle and struggled the last few feet, trying to run through the water. Each slogging step was like trying to lift a heavy weight with his legs. He finally reached the boat and forced himself to look inside.

  He expected the worst and wasn't far wrong. Blood ran across the bottom of the skiff. He took a quick look at the wound and saw that the German's bullet had caught Jolie in the side as she was lifting her rifle—dead center, the bullet would have killed her, but it had struck a glancing blow. There was a lot of raw meat there, a lot of blood. But she was alive.

  He knew he had to stop the bleeding, but first he had to get them out of there. With the Panzers advancing, the flooded marsh was about to become a killing field. Climbing into the boat would be impossible. The skiff was floating too high for him to lever himself into it, so he started pushing the boat toward dry land over at the causeway. He chanced a look back over his shoulder, still worrying about the German sniper, but the flooded field was empty.

  Another Panzer shell exploded, flinging mud and water everywhere. Cole ignored that and kept moving until he got the boat to shore.

  "Don't die on me, girl, you hear!"

  Jolie groaned, which he took to be a good sign, but she was losing a lot of blood and she was in shock. His own mud-covered jacket and shirt were useless, so he unwound the scarf Jolie wore around her neck and stuffed it into the wound. It was the best he could do for now to staunch the bleeding.

  He looked down the road toward the German position. He could see German soldiers moving forward with rifles and machine pistols, so close that he could lock eyes with them. Too close. Too goddamn close.

  The entrance to the town, barricaded and defended with a .50 caliber machine gun, was only two hundred feet away. Some brave fool stood up, popped off a few shots at the Germans to drive them back, and then waved at him frantically. He realized it
was Lieutenant Mulholland. There was no mistaking Mulholland's gesture. It meant hurry up.

  Cole slung Jolie across his shoulder like a sack of oats and ran like hell.

  • • •

  The explosion lifted Von Stenger and threw him into deeper water. He sank, his ears ringing, his eyes full of mud and grit from the blast. It happened so fast that he didn’t even have a chance to get a breath before going under. He tried to swim toward the surface, but the weight of his gear held him down. The water was not deep, just a little over his head, but it was enough to drown him.

  He started to flail his arms, desperate to reach the surface. What little air he had in his lungs released in a train of bubbles. Stop. He willed himself not to panic. Fear and panic was what got you killed. Methodically, he stripped off his tunic that had pockets weighted with shells, undid the strap of his helmet, unbuckled the utility belt that held his canteen and knife. He floated free of the muck on the bottom.

  The surface was right there, but Von Stenger forced himself to swim a little farther away. The American was still out there. What if he was just waiting for Von Stenger to surface? He rotated and put his face out of the water, sipping air like a guppy.

  When there was no slap of a bullet, he moved so that he could look toward the spot where the American had been located. He was surprised to see him moving away, toward shore, pushing the rowboat that the French girl had been in.

  The American’s back was too him. Such an easy shot. But Von Stenger had lost his rifle. Another shell dropped into the marsh and exploded in a geyser of mud. He could feel the shock of it through the water. Von Stenger slipped deeper into the marsh, away from the rain of shells and the stray fire coming from Bienville. Another day, he thought, watching the American slog toward shore.

  EPILOGUE

  On June 29, 1944, Lieutenant General Karl-Wilhem von Schlieben surrendered the city of Cherbourg to the Americans. The last German stronghold on the Cotentin Peninsula had fallen. The battle for Normandy that had begun before dawn nearly a month before with the assault on Omaha Beach was over.

  The struggle for Cherbourg had not been easy, with nearly 3,000 Americans killed and thousands more wounded in the final days of fighting. Losses for the Germans, who had their backs to the Atlantic, were even more severe with nearly 8,000 killed or missing. In the end, almost 30,000 German troops surrendered in those last days of June. As the city fell, General Friedrich Dollman, commander of the German Seventh Army, was informed that he faced a court martial. It would never be carried out—the loss of the city brought on a heart attack and he died within hours.

  Among the troops who streamed into the captured city was a trio of American snipers. Their uniforms were dirty and shredded from weeks of crawling through brambles and sleeping rough in the bocage country. Even their rifles looked battered, the sheen gone from the barrels, the paint on the scopes scratched. But the weapons retained a well-oiled, deadly appearance. Until a few days ago they had been accompanied by a certain British paratrooper, but Corporal Neville had finally rejoined his own unit.

  “It’s not much more than a pile of bricks,” said one of the snipers, a dark-skinned Italian who was even darker after the long days of fighting in the French sun. Something else had happened to him in the field—he had become a much better shot thanks to lots and lots of practice.

  “Those big Navy guns turned it to rubble,” said the lieutenant. He was referring to the Allied fleet that had anchored offshore and bombarded the Germans. Anyone who had not seen the lieutenant in the last month would scarcely recognize him. He looked leaner and careworn, with permanent lines etched into his face. A bandage soaked through with dried blood was wrapped tightly around his upper left arm. He now gave direct orders without thinking twice about them. “They anchored off shore and gave them a good pounding.”

  “Speaking of pounding, I wonder if there are any French girls here who need a good one,” the sniper said.

  “Shut up, Vaccaro,” the lieutenant said. By now, the words were a reflex, like shooing flies.

  The third sniper walked alone, moving with an easy lope through the streets of the ruined city. He wore a Confederate flag painted on his helmet, though the image of the flag was nearly hidden by a layer of dust and grime. The helmet had a bullet hole in it.

  Though Cole was more at home in the woods and fields, he had seen enough ruined towns that he was familiar with what to expect. St. Lo, Caen, Carentan, Bienville—he had been through more than a few of those towns that most Americans had never heard of until a few weeks ago, and now they would never forget.

  The sniper’s eyes never stopped moving across the roof tops and the upper windows of the half-ruined houses. Unlike the others, his rifle was held at the ready so that he could put it to his shoulder in an instant. It just so happened that he still carried a Mauser.

  They had been operating as a counter sniper unit, fighting mostly on their own, for weeks now. Sniper warfare across the bocage had been vicious, mainly because what they increasingly encountered was a variety of SS sniper that did not move strategically, but who buried himself like a tick. He occupied a sniper nest with a supply of ammunition and rations, and stayed until he was killed—or sometimes captured. Sadly, most of these stubborn German snipers were teenage boys who were so brainwashed about heroism and the glory of defending the Fatherland that they fought to the death. Unfortunately, they took the lives of too many Allied troops first.

  Cole often wondered about the Ghost Sniper. Das Gespenst. Had he died in that flooded marsh? That was only weeks ago, but it seemed like years. Cole would have liked to have searched for the body, but the fighting had been too fierce for that. He could only trust that his bullet had struck home.

  There had been reports of a sniper who operated in a way much different from the young SS fanatics. Outside Caen, this sniper had pinned down a large American unit, causing many casualties before slipping away. Similar sniper attacks had decimated an entire company on the approach to Cherbourg just a couple of days before.

  Das Gespenst? The thought nagged at Cole. If the Ghost Sniper wasn’t dead, it was unfinished business.

  Jolie Molyneaux had survived being shot, but she was still recovering in an Allied hospital. If this Von Stenger was still alive, Cole reckoned he owed it to Jolie to kill him. Revenge wasn’t a casual idea to someone like Micajah Cole—the notion of it coursed through his veins like blood.

  “How come you never tell Reb to shut up, Lieutenant?” Vaccaro asked. “He never stops talking. You’d think he was trying to talk the goddamn Germans to death.”

  “Shut up, Vaccaro,” Cole said.

  The snipers moved on through the ruined city. Huge numbers of captured Germans moved in the opposite direction, their hands locked behind their heads, weary GIs marching beside them with weapons at the ready. Though the victors marched alongside the defeated, it was hard to say which side looked more exhausted.

  “Where to next, Lieutenant?” Vaccaro asked. It just wasn’t in his nature to shut up.

  The lieutenant stopped and looked around at the streets, now filled with American troops and German prisoners. A few French civilians had ventured out, looking with dismay and wonder at the piles of bricks and the broken streets. Beyond the town they could see the harbor, filled with American Navy ships. Someone had raised an American and a French flag in the city square. They snapped side by side in the breeze off the sea.

  “I’d say we’re done here,” the lieutenant announced. He smiled. “So what’s next? Germany. I’d say we’re on our way to Germany.”

  • • •

  Despite the defeat and surrender of Cherbourg, not all the German troops on the Cotentin Peninsula had been captured. It was too big a place and there were too many woods and fields in which to elude the enemy.

  Those who were left were now joining the retreat across the Seine into Belgium, dodging Allied aircraft and patrols.

  A truck carrying battle-hardened Wehrmacht troops rolled down
a dirt road through the countryside. Up ahead, a lone figure in a German uniform emerged from the woods and stood in the road, forcing the truck to stop.

  Puzzled, the driver leaned out the window. He was surprised to see that the soldier carried a sniper’s rifle with a telescopic sight and that he wore a captain’s uniform. In the Wehrmacht, there were a few legendary soldiers, known for their bravery or prowess. With a start, the driver realized this must be the Ghost Sniper he had heard about.

  “Are you on your way to fight or surrender?” the lone sniper asked.

  “We are going to fight,” the driver said. His face was grim and determined. “The Amis have not won yet.”

  “Do you have room for one more?”

  “Of course, Herr Hauptmann. Do you wish to ride up front, sir? We can make room.”

  “Thank you, but the back is fine.”

  The sniper walked around and climbed in, taking care with the rifle and its telescopic sight, which he had been lucky to find on the battlefield after losing his prized Mosin-Nagant in the marshes around Bienville. He nodded at the grizzled German troops sitting there on benches. Then the truck lurched into gear and drove off toward Belgium.

  ~The End~

  Historical Note

  Back in the 1990s I had the opportunity to spend some time interviewing D-Day veterans for a series of newspaper articles. Many of these men went ashore at Omaha Beach with the 29th Division, but a few of the men I interviewed were paratroopers, Coast Guardsmen who crewed landing craft, and even a clerk or two armed with typewriters. While I’ve read several books to gain a better understanding of D-Day operations, it’s really these first-hand accounts of men who were there in 1944 that have helped in creating the details of the Normandy campaign. Several of the incidents and descriptions of events come from their narratives. Experts on the Normandy campaign will see that I have taken some liberties in combining the events and geography of Carentan and Angoville au Plain in the final encounter between the Germans, Americans and British, at the fictional town of Bienville.