The boy did not understand him, so Rohde roughly grabbed Leo’s hands, turned them wrist to wrist, and bound them tightly with a cord he took from his pocket.
The boy winced and whimpered, tried to pull his hands away, but Rohde was having none of that.
He had chosen cord no bigger than a shoelace so that he could bind the boy's wrists tightly with no chance of him wriggling free. Next, he took a rope and tied it around the wrists, where the boy's fingers could never work it free.
He had debated how to go about securing the boy in the field. He had considered, and quickly dismissed, the idea of hamstringing the boy, worried that Leo might die of blood loss before he had served his purpose.
He tugged at the rope. "Come on," he said, half dragging the boy behind him as he made his way out into the field. The Gewehr 43 was on a sling over his shoulder.
Once they reached roughly the middle of the field, Rohde knotted the free end of the rope around a grazing stake that he had brought for just this purpose. It was a simple metal stake half a meter long, shaped at the end like an upside down stirrup. Using his boot, he stamped the stake deep into the field. Farmers used these stakes to keep grazing horses and cattle in place. He was certain that the stake would be enough to keep the boy just where Rohde wanted him.
Rohde glanced toward the east. The light began to grow much brighter all at once, like the drapes of a darkened room being cast open. The sun was coming up. He had better hurry. Everything depended on him being in position before anyone could see his hiding place.
He could also hear the distant sound of mechanized vehicles from that direction. The Allies were on the move. It would not be long now.
Breathing heavily from the effort of driving home the stake, he knelt beside the boy. Rohde took a chocolate bar from his pocket and presented it to Leo, ruffling his hair as he did so.
"Au revoir," he said, and left him there.
Rohde returned to his first hide and settled down to wait. He slid the rifle across the top of the hole. He realized that it would have been better to camouflage the rifle in some way, and silently cursed himself. The light brown wood of the stock seemed to stand out, along with the fact that the finish on the stock was still new and bright. It was too late now to do anything about that.
From his sniper's dugout, he had a clear view across the field. The boy was just visible through the grass, his head and shoulders making a silhouette against the early morning backdrop of trees and sky and grass.
Using those quiet moments, Rohde took stock of his conscience. He was not so entirely lost that he did not know that his actions could be considered abhorrent. He had whored out the French girl, kidnapped a child to use as bait, and murdered old Hohenfeldt. Shining a light into the corners of his mind, he knew that he should have felt more about that, but any feelings were strangely muted. Perhaps he had been a soldier too long, or perhaps he had allowed his ambition, his burning desire for the Iron Cross, to overshadow everything else. He cast his inner eye one last time on these actions and emotions, then bundled them up and locked them deep within himself.
His opportunity for contemplation did not last long. The early morning peace was broken by an approaching mechanized rumble. Guessing that it must be a Sherman tank, he frowned. He had planned on an assault by men, not machines.
Fortunately for him, the thick boundary of the hedgerow was impregnable to the tank. He could hear it to the west, working its way around the field. The question was, were there any Americans traveling in the tank's wake?
His question was answered when he saw a shadowy figure slip through the tight-knit vegetation on the other side of the field.
The Amis had arrived.
Rohde lined up the post sight on the figure as he emerged. He wished that he'd had time to at least make a few test shots of the Gewehr. On the job training. That was the Wehrmacht for you. What else was new?
The Staber had said that it was sighted in for 200 meters, so Rohde could accept that as fact. Hohenfeldt had been a bastard, but he was exacting about the details of weapons.
Rohde had paced off the field, so he knew that where he had placed the boy was at the 200-meter mark. The far edge of the field was twice that distance.
The American soldier entered Rohde's field of view within the rifle scope.
He held his breath.
Although the telescopic sight was adjustable, all of the scopes used by the sniper were famously finicky. He could change the elevation with a few clicks, but there was no certainty that the scope would return to its current sighted-in range with any accuracy.
Instead, it made more sense to raise his aim. Normally, he aimed for the belt buckle. Now, he aimed a little higher. Complete accuracy did not matter so much; hitting a man anywhere from the chest to the groin would put him down. A man made a long target, up and down; it was mainly the windage — from side to side — that proved more challenging. That would not be much of a factor in the still morning air.
Although a bullet was a vast technological improvement over a stone or a spear, the same rules of gravity applied to the modern warrior. Any projectile was pulled down by the force of gravity, whether it was a spear or a bullet. To throw a spear any distance, one had to throw it high. The same principle applied to a bullet. Fire it along a curved trajectory, and it would travel farther before gravity worked its inexorable pull upon it.
Rohde aimed high, and fired.
Instantly, he experienced two pleasant surprises. First, the bullet struck the GI dead center and sent him spinning into the field. Second, the recoil of the Gewehr 43 was much lighter due to the operation of the semi-automatic rifle's gas recoil system. There was no working the bolt and slapping it back into place, forcing him to readjust his aim in the process. Instead, the new rifle spat out the brass casing and loaded a fresh round instantly.
For good measure, Rohde shot the GI again.
Out in the field, the boy was frightened by the sound of the shots as well as the bloodshed he had just witnessed.
Leo began to scream.
The boy’s cries worked to perfection. Almost instantly, another American appeared, and then another. Having just seen one of their comrades shot, it was likely that they would have kept their heads down if it hadn't been for the boy's screams.
Rohde fired once, twice. Two more GIs collapsed into the field. The first one lay still, killed instantly, but the second was on his elbows, trying futilely to drag himself to safety. His own pitiful cries joined those of the boy.
The devil himself could not have orchestrated a more horrible symphony.
Rohde chided himself for not thinking of shooting to wound, rather than to kill. He had been too excited about the new rifle to think clearly. At least some of the time, he realized that missing had its own rewards.
Despite the noise, the GIs were not so eager to take any action with a German sniper in play. A few shots began to zip across the field, but the bullets came nowhere near Rohde's hiding place. He guessed that there were at least a dozen GIs hidden at the edge of the field. If the GIs had opened up on him, or if they had used a machine gun, he might have been in trouble with a swarm of bullets coming at him, hiding place or not. But Rohde guessed that the GIs were afraid of hitting the boy.
That was the trouble with Americans, he thought. They were too soft-hearted. If it hadn't been for the sheer advantage of numbers and air power, they would not be winning this war.
He could see a couple of puffs or flashes where the GIs were shooting from cover. Rohde fired at those spots and the guns fell silent. After that, the return fire was only sporadic.