Cole crept forward, slowly untangling himself from the dense brush where he had hidden himself. He moved toward the stream. He hoped to find the German's body in the water. But Cole found no sign of him, except for his helmet where he had lost it among the brush on the river bank. Cole took that as a good omen. Maybe that last shot had finished him off, once and for all. The dollar bill that he'd used as bait was nowhere to be seen.
Keep the change.
He felt let down that there was no body. Cheated, somehow.
The German’s rifle must have fallen into the water. He had caught a glimpse earlier of the scoped weapon. Cole suspected that the rifle was a standard-issue Mauser K-98 sniper model. Cole had seen them before. The Germans issued a lot of them, as opposed to the U.S. Army, which had been slow to figure out the value of a sniper. The Germans seemed to have no shortage of good snipers.
The mystery was, how had Cole managed to shoot this son of a bitch, not once, but twice, without stopping him? The German had been big and solid, but he wasn’t Superman. Besides, a rifle that would drop a huge buck or a bear instantly was no match for any man.
Fortunately, Cole's final bullet must have done its job.
Stealthily, he began to move downstream, following the bank of the stream. The rushing water masked any nearby sounds, but in the distance he could hear shooting from the direction of the village. Things must be starting to heat up if the Germans had resupplied with all that ammo. He moved more quickly, expecting at any moment to see the German sniper's body hung up on a snag in the rain-swollen stream, but there was no sign of him.
He moved more slowly, sensing that something wasn't right. Had the German's body been swept completely away? Finally, he caught a glimpse of something caught on a branch in the current. Keeping his rifle raised to his shoulder, he approached cautiously. The silhouetted figure moved sluggishly, but Cole thought that maybe the current was causing the movement. As he drew closer, he became convinced that it was not the enemy sniper's body, but a sodden German poncho. Carefully, he leaned out over the water and reached for the poncho. Cole didn't much want to go for a swim. He caught the poncho and pulled.
Under the surface, something weighed down the poncho, but it seemed too light for a body. He tugged harder. The force of the current pulling back nearly dragged him in. With a final grunt of effort, he managed to get the poncho and whatever it held free of the creek and swung it up on the bank.
To his surprise, the poncho was tangled around a chunk of metal. It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at. This was some sort of armored plating, like maybe a knight would wear. He had never seen such a thing before. All that Cole could do was stare at it.
"Don't that beat all," Cole said.
Then everything fell into place and caused him to chuckle. He felt relieved that the problem hadn't been his shooting, after all. The problem was that he'd been shooting at thick steel plating. The German had armored up.
He examined the armor more closely, truly amazed. He had never seen such a thing as body armor. There were dents, and one of the bullets appeared to have gone all the way through. Maybe he had gotten the son of a bitch, after all. He didn't see any blood, though. Had the German stopped to take off the armor to keep it from pulling him under, or had it simply separated from the body as it tumbled in the current?
He looked out toward the rain-swollen stream, which had enough of a current to sweep a body away. Had he actually killed the German? Cole might never know. He hated to think that the German had escaped with his rifle, but that remained a possibility.
Leaving the sodden poncho and armor on the stream bank, he straightened up and started walking downstream in the direction of the village. He had no doubt that this creek flowed directly into the Moselle and that the village would be nearby.
The firing was stronger and more rapid now from that direction. He reckoned that the Germans had launched another attack.
There had been a lot of Germans compared to the number of defenders. And the Jerries now had no shortage of ammo.
Cole hurried.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Nearly breathless from his dash through the woods, Cole reached the outskirts of the village and then plunged through the backyard vegetable gardens and sheds into the single main street, where a sharp fight was taking place between the defenders and the Germans. The number of men engaged was small, but the fighting was as intense as any that Cole had seen since wading ashore four months before. These men had faced each other previously. The two generals had met face to face. This wasn't just war. This was personal.
He saw that the road into the village had become like a raging torrent of steel and fury as the Germans attacked. Cole ran out from the woods to join the defenders in the village. Nobody paid him any attention because all their focus was on the German attack. Cole could see German soldiers, bent low, advancing toward the village. Some fired from the hip at a run, while others paused to throw their Mauser rifles to their shoulders when a target presented itself. The muddy road precluded any dust, but the damp air stank of gunpowder and was filled with smoke, creating a fog through which the soldiers ran, appearing as shapeless dark silhouettes, their muzzle flashes bright against the gloom.
Would the defenders hold? Flip a coin, Cole thought. They were standing on the edge of a knife blade. This fight could go either way.
Not for the first time, Cole felt that they were lucky to have Tolliver in charge rather than that idiot, Captain Norton. Norton would have lost the fight quicker than a hound sucks an egg.
General Tolliver had made a good effort in erecting barricades at the edge of town, using horse carts and hand carts, dining room tables, and even an upholstered chair or two. In effect, he had turned the whole village into a fort. Several defenders hunkered behind the defenses, shooting back at the Germans. Mixed in with the American GIs were a few civilians. Like most men in rural France, they had a tendency to dress in battered old suit coats, and it was a strange sight to see the village men in these coats running to and fro with rifles and shotguns.
While the makeshift barricades provided some defense against small arms fire, they were no match for the vicious stream of lead from the German MG-42 mounted on the Kübelwagen. Splinters and stuffing from the furniture filled the air like snow. A couple of stick grenades hit the barricade and turned chairs and boxes into kindling. Something in the piled debris caught fire, and flames began to lick at the gloom, sending up a plume of greasy black smoke.
As the flames spread, the defenders began to fall back, running for the sturdy stone houses or to the fallback position that Tolliver had created as a second line of defense. Some didn't make it. As Cole watched, the MG-42 reached out and knocked down two men running away from the crumbling barricade. One wore an Army uniform, and the other man was a civilian. Both lay very still, their bodies twisted at odd angles on the cobblestones, killed instantly by the machine gun.
Cole spotted Vaccaro behind the fountain in the village square, busy with his scoped rifle. He ran for the fountain and slid in next to Vaccaro. Bullets smacked into the decorative stonework, scattering chips of granite, but they were a lot better off behind it than behind one of those makeshift barricades.
"It's about time you showed up, Hillbilly," Vaccaro said, looking up in surprise to see that Cole had returned. "Took you long enough."
"I would have been here sooner, but I ran into some Germans," Cole said.
"Did you find those kids and old Pierre?"
Cole just shook his head. He didn't want to explain about that right now.