She cocked her head and listened. "Nothing important, just something about how it's colder than a polar bear’s asshole."
"For once, we can agree with the Krauts on something."
Then the first vehicles emerged from the woods. A couple of smaller vehicles appeared first, followed by a truly massive tank. Cole recognized it as a King Tiger, which was a sort of battleship on land. The tank churned into the field and took up a position beside the road, swiveling its 88 mm gun across the field to cover the rest of the column. Even from this distance, the muzzle looked big enough to fit a watermelon. This was the closest he had been yet to a King Tiger tank.
"Holy shit," Cole muttered.
He played his crosshairs over that iron behemoth, but the hatch of the King Tiger was not open, so there was no kind of target.
The Germans poured from the wood now like angry ants. He picked out another tank, this one with a German in goggles standing in the hatch. Cole breathed out, put his finger on the trigger, and fired.
The tank commander went down. Quickly, he picked out another target, the driver of one of those German jeeps. He hit the man, causing the car to veer off course into the field as the passenger clutched at the wheel in an effort to regain control.
One by one, the other snipers opened up. It was not a heavy fire, but it was a withering one. Much to the Germans' credit, the sniper attack did not slow them down. After all, these were mostly veterans of the Eastern Front. They were well used to snipers. A few Germans deployed to counterattack.
Fortunately for the Americans, it was hard for the Germans to pick out their individual attackers. Looking across the fields, all they could see was a vast stretch of snowy landscape, punctuated here and there by stone walls and hedgerows. The grinding diesel engines drowned out the individual crack of the rifle shots. The Germans knew they were being shot at, but it was impossible to tell where the shots were coming from.
Cole fired again and winged a soldier standing ready at a machine gun mounted on the back of a German vehicle.
"A little to your left," Jolie said, peering through the binoculars.
Cole worked the bolt and fired again, hitting him so solidly that the German somersaulted backwards off the vehicle.
It was all a little too easy, and Cole worried when things were easy — in his book easy didn’t last long, or worse yet, something with teeth and claws was sneaking up behind you.
He glanced to his right, where Rowe was located behind another stone wall similar to Cole’s. Rowe was alone, but he was picking out and shooting targets just like Cole. But Rowe was still new to being a sniper. So far the attack on the German column had the air of a Mason Lodge turkey shoot, and Rowe was caught up in the excitement, firing as fast as he could without giving enough thought to keeping behind cover.
"Keep your head down, you damn fool," Cole muttered.
Von Stenger lay stretched out on the raised log, feeling the cold seep into him. He longed to tug his coat collar tighter to keep in as much body heat as possible, but the first rule of the sniper was to minimize any movements. Motion drew the opponent's eye. Although he felt confident that he was well hidden, there was no point in tempting fate.
"Herr Hauptmann?" the driver whispered up. "What do you wish me to do?"
"When I want you to do something, I will tell you," he said. "Now get down and don't move a muscle."
The driver did not have the patience of a sniper. He coughed softly once or twice, and even had the audacity to sneeze, which surely would have given away their position if there had not been a column of panzers churning through the woods and filling the air with a tumult of diesel engines and clanking tanks treads. There was no one in sight, so Von Stenger considered shooting the driver just for being annoying.
He ignored the fidgeting SS driver and kept his attention on the wintry field. At any moment, the enemy would reveal himself.
His predictions of an ambush had been correct. No sooner had the column emerged from the woods than the firing began. Friel’s men were met with a handful of well-placed shots, rather than a barrage of machine gun fire and mortars. Snipers, then.
He peered out across the field, trying to see where the shots originated. As Von Stenger knew from personal experience, locating a well-hidden sniper in a country landscape was like trying to find a flea on the belly of a shaggy dog.
He held his fire and watched. As he had often lectured his students at the SS sniper school, the chief skill of a sniper was not necessarily his ability with a rifle, but his capacity for patience. One had to wait out the enemy until he gave himself away with a sudden movement or even a muzzle flash.
Patience. Then accuracy.
Meanwhile, bullets continued to chew up the German ranks. But these were bullets, not bomb shells. In the end, a few snipers were just a nuisance to an armored column. Like bees on a bear. Like flies on das scheisse.
To his surprise, Friel came barreling up the road in another Schwimmwagen. Even from this distance, Von Stenger could hear him shouting. "Keep moving! Forward! Get going! Let the panzer finish them off."
Bullets flicked around the commander, but Friel gave no sign of noticing. He really was a brave bastard, Von Stenger admitted. A real fire eater. Under Friel's verbal lashing, the column ground forward, once again an unstoppable force, like a glacier of steel.
Von Stenger returned his attention to the field.
Instead of binoculars, he used his telescopic sight to explore likely sniper nests. A fallen tree. A notch in a stone wall. A hay rick.
There. A flicker of movement caught his eye. Near the foot of a haystack. He was not sure, but it might have been the motion of someone working a rifle bolt. The air was gray and gloomy, flecked with snow, but he was sure he saw something else — the telltale puff of warm breath on the winter air.
The American sniper was well hidden, because Von Stenger could not see a clear target. He sent a bullet just below where he had seen the vapor of someone's breath. Even if he missed, it would give the Ami something to think about.
No other targets presented themselves. The field, after all, was vast. Then he saw a head and shoulders showing above a stone wall. He put the sights over the sniper’s heart and fired. The man slumped forward. A machine gun opened up and continued to riddle the body. Then the column continued its advance.
Bullets kept coming at them. Where were the other snipers?
Rowe never expected the bullet that killed him, but felt it bury itself in his chest like a stake being driven into his heart. His body shut down the way a fan stops when the cord is yanked from the socket. His thoughts kept spinning even as his body fell across the stone wall in front of him. At least it doesn’t hurt, he thought. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. Then everything got far away, like looking through binoculars from the wrong end.
His body had slumped forward over the top of the stone wall. There was a burst of machine gun fire from the King Tiger. The Germans kept pumping bullets into him.
From his own hiding place, Cole watched helplessly.
“Goddamn,” he said. The sight of Rowe’s body jumping and quivering from the impact of the bullets made him angry. They weren’t just killing him. They were mutilating him. He yanked at the bolt action on the Springfield.
Cole was sure a single bullet had killed Rowe, not the burst of machine gun fire. Where had it come from? That was some fine shooting to hit him from the German position.
While he thought about that, Cole noticed a squad of SS soldiers taking cover behind the tank that was chopping up Rowe. Cole picked one off. Worked the bolt. Scanned for the next target.
"Nine o’clock," Jolie said.