David Healey
Iron Sniper: A World War II Thriller
Blood only serves to wash ambition’s hands.
Chapter One
He was a young man in a killing mood. All around him, the landscape was lush and green with summer, but all he saw in the shadowy hedges and copses of trees were sniper hides and the potential for an ambush. That limited worldview had kept him alive so far.
With Micajah Cole, there was always violence simmering just beneath the surface. That violence ran deep as a vein of silver in the Appalachian mountains he called home. Instead of the sun's caress this morning, he felt the cold metal of his rifle and the tension in the trigger beneath his fingertip.
"Will you hurry it up, Hillbilly?" muttered a voice just beyond Cole's right elbow. The voice, with its Brooklyn accent, belonged to Vaccaro. Like Cole, Vaccaro was a sniper, but he was mostly Cole's eyes and ears when he was focused on a target. "The rest of the Army is gonna be in Paris by the time you shoot this son of a bitch."
Cole stayed quiet.
It was mid-summer, 1944. The countryside beyond the Normandy beaches had become a sprawling battlefront more than 60 miles wide, spreading far from the English Channel as Allied troops pushed deeper each day into France. Men and tanks and planes clashed on a vast scale to decide the fate of Europe. Whole towns lay in ruins near the French coast. Thousands had died in the fighting.
None of that mattered just then to Cole. As a sniper, his battlefield had narrowed to 30 feet across the face of a battered stone barn some 200 feet distant. That was the field of view through the telescopic sight mounted on his Model 1903A4 Springfield rifle, manufactured eight months previously at the federal armory on the banks of the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. The Weaver scope — fabricated in El Paso, Texas — had a magnification of 2.5, which meant that the details of the old stone and the cracks of the wood framing sprang much closer. There was no indication of the German sniper within.
In point of fact, Cole's world was even narrower than the field of view of his rifle scope, for of that 30 feet he was interested only in the doorway into the barn. Maybe three feet across and six feet high.
Back home, most barns had big doors for driving a wagon or a tractor through. In his experience, most barns were wooden and even somewhat rickety from storm winds and the lack of repairs during the Great Depression.
Not this French barn, with its stone walls three feet thick. This barn was much older, with medieval dimensions from when a barn door was meant for cows and horses going in and out, rather than mechanized vehicles. A door that size could be closed up tight against wolves, which had still roamed the French countryside when this barn was built. No windows except for two openings in the gable ends. Squat and imposing, the structure before him was part barn and part fortress, really, which was likely why the German sniper Cole was trying to shoot had gravitated toward it.
The gable windows would have been preferable for the German, but the problem was that the windows faced the wrong direction, looking out across empty fields. It was the barn door that looked out over the dusty road, offering a good vantage point, much like an old 18th-century fort guarding a harbor entrance. From that barn, the German could shoot anything that moved on the road, which had become a problem for the American squad trying to reach its objective.
Vaccaro wasn't one for silence. After a moment he added, "You see him yet? These boys are getting antsy to move on. It's hot out, in case you haven't noticed."
"Then go find yourself some shade, City Boy, and leave me the hell alone," Cole muttered, not taking his eye from the scope.
"Since you asked so nice, maybe I will," Vaccaro whispered, as if the German in the barn might hear them, although that was unlikely at this distance.
It wouldn't be any problem for the German to see them, though.
"Keep your head down," Cole whispered back. The warning was somewhat unnecessary, but it made Cole feel better to say it. Although they had been working together for weeks now as a team, Cole thought that Vaccaro's occasional lapses in horse sense were going to get him killed. Maybe get both of them killed, for that matter.
Cole reckoned he had enough blood on his hands already, so he was making some effort to save Vaccaro's sorry ass. It was a measure of Cole's liking for Vaccaro that prompted him to say anything at all.
"No shit," Vaccaro replied.
Vaccaro fancied himself to be a sniper, too, and he did have a sniper rifle much like Cole's, but that was where the similarities ended. Vaccaro was somewhat better with the rifle than the average soldier, which wasn't saying a whole lot. Mostly, he scanned for targets using a captured pair of Zeiss-made 10x50 binoculars while Cole stayed behind the rifle scope. Vaccaro also kept his eyes on the surroundings so that Cole could focus on the actual shooting.
If Vaccaro ever felt like second fiddle in the shoot 'em up orchestra, he simply reminded himself that Cole was gifted with a rifle. The hillbilly could shoot the way that Babe Ruth could swing a bat or that Norman Rockwell could wield a paintbrush. They were born to it.
Cole's talent for killing Germans at long range — the Springfield could easily reach out to 600 yards — had not gone unnoticed. Just two weeks before, a famous reporter named Ernie Pyle had written a story about Cole.
"The sniper has a hunter's lean build and clear eyes that must see like an eagle's," Pyle had written in the descriptive prose that brought the war to life for thousands of readers back home. "With a laconic manner and Southern drawl to match, the sniper looks and sounds the part of a mountain man from Appalachia, right down to the Confederate flag painted upon his helmet."
They'd had to ask Lieutenant Mulholland what "laconic" meant.
"If you don't know, then you probably are," he explained. "It's a man of few words."
"That's Cole, all right," Vaccaro said. "Shoot first and talk later."
Vaccaro and the other soldiers had ribbed Cole plenty about the article and about being famous — up to a point. Cole wasn't somebody that you wanted to kid too much. He was laconic, after all.
It was a matter of pride to Vaccaro that Cole had made a point of mentioning him to the reporter, saying that they were a team. It wouldn't do Cole much good to be one of the deadliest snipers in Normandy if some German sneaked up behind him, which was where Vaccaro finally became really valuable. At the moment, however, with an entire squad pinned down behind him, it was highly unlikely that any Germans were going to crawl up Cole's ass.
Vaccaro snorted and muttered something that might have been a commentary on Cole's mother, and then started to reverse crawl back toward a stone wall, behind which sheltered the squad. Silently, they willed Cole to hurry up and shoot the sniper before some officer came along and told them to get moving — right into the line of fire.
For weeks now, American and Allied forces had pushed across France, their objective being to sweep German forces ahead of them. Their ultimate objective was to cross the Rhine and enter Germany, where they could finally put an end to that madman, Adolf Hitler. But the stubborn defense by SS and Wehrmacht troops meant that there was always another field to cross, another barn to capture. Americans had paid for each small victory with blood and lives.
While Cole was well aware of the big picture, none it much concerned him. He was content to leave strategy to the officers. He was focused on that swath of barn that he could see through his rifle scope.
Heat drilled down at midday. While Cole's eyes were focused on the barn, he was aware of the country smells all around him. As a country boy himself, he was reminded of home. He smelled green grass in the sun. Manure. Wet hay moldering where the farmers had abandoned their haystacks to flee the fighting. He registered the stink of a nearby carcass rotting in the heat — maybe a cow, but maybe not.