Red Sniper

To Cole, it seemed like a waste, dying so close to the end of the war. Everybody talked about that, how they didn’t want to get killed when the war was sure to end any week now. Nobody wanted to stick his neck out. For the two dead guys, walking down a road in Germany had been their final act of the war.

“This guy is acting like it’s the last stand of the Reich,” Vaccaro muttered.

“I reckon for him, that’s just what it is,” Cole said.

The Germans were done. It didn’t take a general to see that. Germany’s looming defeat was obvious to the lowliest private. At the sight of approaching troops, German civilians came out of their houses, grim faced, waving white handkerchiefs. Since D-Day in June 1944, the Allied troops had pushed steadily across France and Belgium. Cole and Vaccaro had walked nearly every step of the way since June, and for most of those months all they had done was fight. The Germans’ final attempt to turn the tide of the war had come in December 1944 at the Ardennes Forest during what the Americans had labeled The Battle of the Bulge. They had been in the thick of the German breakout attempt in the Ardennes, where their sniper skills had been put to the test again and again.

Now it was April 1945 and it was only a matter of time before Germany was defeated. The Americans were on German soil. Rumors flew about what Hitler was up to, but it was likely that Der Fuhrer and his minions were holed up like rats somewhere in Berlin, probably deep in a bunker with lots of champagne and plenty to eat, hoping for a miracle.

Cole glanced up at the contrails in the sky, wispy fingers of white dragging across the blue dome above as Allied bombers made their way to the next target. The war was happening on the ground, as well as in the sky.

While the Third Reich, for all practical purposes, was over—kaput—not everyone had gotten the message or wanted to believe it. Germans were still being urged to fight to the bitter end, hence the last stands like the one taking place in this barn. Cole had been a hunter and trapper long before he was a soldier, and he knew too well that a cornered and wounded animal was the most dangerous kind.

Cole turned to Vaccaro. “You still got that tent?” he asked.

Vaccaro groaned. “You think he’s dumb enough to fall for that?”

“Unless you got a better idea.”

Vaccaro sighed and dug around in his pack for the tent. In fact, it was a canvas shelter half, or half a tent. It could be buttoned together with another shelter half to form an actual tent. Cole carried the other half strapped to the top of his pack.

“I suppose you want me to use my helmet, too.”

“Mine’s already got one bullet hole in it,” Cole pointed out. A German sniper named Kurt Von Stenger had put it there.

With a dramatic sigh, Vaccaro whipped off his helmet and jammed it onto the sausaged canvas. Through trial and error, the two snipers had found that a helmet on the end of a shelter half, raised above a wall or poked around a tree, looked convincingly like an actual GI’s head. The grungy canvas resembled a grimy face just enough to fool a distant sniper. They had tried using a helmet on a stick in the past, but it wobbled too much. A helmet held in one’s hands had the problem of there being nothing beneath it—and besides that, it wasn’t a good idea to have actual body parts anywhere near a high velocity Mauser round.

“Ready?” Vaccaro asked.

“Yep.” He drew in a breath, held it. Kept the rifle scope focused on the barn window.

The rifle was a Springfield Model M1903A4 in .30/06 caliber. Cole knew its lines and curves intimately, and the stock fit against his shoulder and jawline like a part of his own body.

He sensed the movement in his peripheral vision as Vaccaro slithered a few feet away and popped the helmet above the wall. The trick was to do it fast, before the sniper had time to think. You just wanted him to react and shoot before he figured out that he was firing at a decoy. Along with very little experience, the sniper in the barn was bound to have an itchy trigger finger.

“Here goes nothin’,” Vaccaro muttered, and popped the helmet above the wall.

Right on cue, the German in the barn fired, his bullet smacking into the helmet and shelter half with enough force to knock it out of Vaccaro’s grip. Vaccaro muttered a curse.

There. Deep back in the darkness of the barn, Cole spotted the enemy sniper’s muzzle flash, no brighter than a firefly on a July night. Locking his crosshairs on the spot where he had seen the flash, he touched the trigger at the same instant and the rifle pounded into his shoulder.

He slid down behind the stone wall next to Vaccaro. “Got him,” he said.

Cole could not say exactly how he knew that. It was as if he could feel the bullet hitting home.

Vaccaro was more cautious. He insisted on giving the helmet-above-the-wall trick one more try, although it would be a sorry sniper who fell for the same trick twice. Maybe a kid with a rifle would. This time, no shot came.

Vaccaro looked at him.