The day promised to be a sunny one, enabling the flyboys to do their job. With the planes flying sorties overhead, the German Panzers would be run to ground.
Cole himself felt edgy. Like something was about to happen. He had learned to trust that instinct. It had kept him alive so far.
Their orders were simple. He and Vaccaro were assigned to counter sniper measures. As they moved toward Falaise, there seemed to be no shortage of enemy snipers.
Cole hoped to meet one sniper in particular. When he thought about it, maybe hoped wasn't the right word. He itched to put a bullet in that sniper.
He looked up for another bird to shoot, but the sky was empty.
This morning, they had taken along a kid named Harper to serve as a spotter. More than two months after D-Day, fresh troops like Harper were being rotated into combat units. Rumor had it that Harper had been in the typing pool and asked for a transfer to the field. That either made him brave, or awfully stupid.
Harper had claimed to have some skill with a rifle, so Lieutenant Mulholland had gotten the bright idea to send the kid along with Cole and Vaccaro this morning.
"Maybe you can teach him a thing or two," Mulholland had said.
"We don't need no help, lieutenant," Cole said.
The lieutenant had shot him a look. "It's not a suggestion, Cole. It's an order."
"Yes, sir," Cole said through gritted teeth. Lately, there had been a lot of tension between Cole and Mulholland. It didn't take a genius figure out that it was over that French girl, Jolie Molyneux.
There wasn't an extra sniper rifle, so Harper carried an M1 with open sights. So far, nobody had figured out how to put a scope on one of those, which was a shame, because a semi-automatic sniper rifle wasn't a bad idea.
Unlike the Germans or the Russians or even the English, the United States Army did not have an official sniper school. Soldiers with an aptitude as marksmen were simply given a scoped rifle and on-the-job training.
"Got any advice?" Harper had asked as they moved out.
"Yeah," Vaccaro said. "Don't get shot."
Cole looked Harper up and down with those weird eyes of his, but said nothing.
Now, Harper hung back and walked for a while with Vaccaro, letting Cole take point.
Every now and then, Harper glanced almost furtively at the sniper. Cole made him nervous. The U.S. Army wanted every soldier to see himself as lean, mean, fighting machine, but there was a fine line between being a soldier and being a killer. Whatever that special something was that made someone a killer, Cole radiated it like an Old West gunfighter.
"What's with him, anyway?" Harper asked Vaccaro.
"Just leave him alone and stay out of his way," Vaccaro said quietly. "He's in one of his moods."
"What mood is that?"
"The kind where he wants to shoot something. You wanna volunteer?"
"No thanks."
"You see, kid, Cole's got himself a feud going with that German sniper who shot him up. He's a hillbilly, so he's never happier than when he has a feud going. This is real Hatfield and McCoy stuff."
"The one I feel sorry for is the German, because he doesn't know yet that Cole is out to get him."
Harper gestured at the woods and fields surrounding them. "And just how are they going to find each other?"
"You ever been at a USO dance and run into a guy from the same high school?"
"Yeah, something like that."
"Thousands of guys on the other side of the ocean, and you run into one you know. What are the odds, right? It’s a small world, kid. It's even smaller when Cole is looking for you."
They walked on. In the distance, they could hear shooting and the dull thud of artillery that meant somebody was catching hell. So far, it was quiet in their neck of the woods.
They passed a body lying in a ditch. It was a dead American.
"Goddamn Krauts," Cole said bitterly, looking at the body. He spat.
Harper and Vaccaro hung back a little farther.
The sound of gunfire erupted not that far ahead of them. Bursts of fire, followed by solitary rifle shots. It sounded like a lopsided fight. But if there was a sniper involved, those solitary rifle shots might be devastating.
A few minutes later, a soldier came trotting up the road.
"Hey!" he shouted when he caught sight of Cole. He ran up to them, nearly breathless. He took a good look at Cole's rifle. "Is that a sniper rifle?"
Cole could see that the soldier had been running, and he looked a little scared, so he gave him the benefit of the doubt. "Well, it ain't a banjo."
"Good." The soldier was too rattled to be anything but serious. "The lieutenant back there sent me to find you. He said to look for somebody named Cole." He waved his arm in the general direction of the road behind him. "Is that you?"
"That'd be me."
Vaccaro spoke up. "He asked for you by name? What the hell?"
"Shut up, Vaccaro." Cole looked at the runner. "I reckon I'm Cole. So what's the situation?" He pronounced it, sitch-ee-ay-shun.
"A sniper has us pinned down. And if that's not bad enough, the sniper has got a kid tied up in the field. He’s using him as goddamn bait. A couple of our guys got greased trying to rescue him." He gulped. "It's awful."
"Let me take my banjo here, and go have a look."
They set off down the road at a trot. Cole moved with a graceful lope that was hard for the others to keep up with.
Still, Vaccaro managed to pant a question at the soldier who had found them on the road. "Are you sure the lieutenant didn't mention me? Vaccaro?"
"I'm pretty sure he didn't."
Cole looked back over his shoulder. "Hey, quit jabberin' and keep up."
He picked up the pace. They could tell that they were getting close by the louder sound of gunfire.
The soldier stopped running near a gap in the hedge. The sound of firing was very close now. "This I where I cut through."
Cole didn't know what he was walking into, but he knew it wouldn't be good. If this soldier was right, and the German sniper had tied some kid up in the field as bait, it meant that the German had set a trap and that he had every advantage.
What kind of German sniper would do that? Cole suspected that it might very well be the one who had ambushed him yesterday.
Cole hesitated before plunging down the path. He didn't like this set up one bit. Like the soldiers in the squad that was now pinned down, he would just be walking into the sniper's trap.
It didn't help that he was ringed in on every side by trees, hedges, and flat fields. His ears were telling him more than his eyes. But he couldn't shoot with his ears. What he needed to do was get up high and get the lay of the land.
He thought about the church they had seen in the distance. It wasn't exactly a cathedral, but the steeple was at least a couple of stories tall, and the church itself had been built on high ground. It was likely that the church was far beyond rifle range from this field, but at least he could see what was going on, and then make his move from there.
He turned back the way they had come and started running.
"Cole?" Vaccaro shouted after him. "What the hell?"
"Come on," Cole called, and without further explanation, he ran back toward where he had seen that church steeple.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The church was of modest dimensions, no more than thirty-five feet long and maybe twenty-five feet across. More of a chapel, in actuality, than a church, and the building definitely was not going to be confused with a cathedral. A plaque identified it as Église St. Dominic. It was built of huge stone block, hauled from God knows where, with each massive block weighing hundreds of pounds. One thing about these French, Cole thought, was that they built to last. If only they had taken the same care to defend the very existence of their country.