The soldier he spotted was moving from foxhole to trench to boulder, keeping his head down as if he might have felt Cole's crosshairs tracking him. His grayish uniform and furtive movements made him resemble nothing more than an overgrown gopher.
At this distance, Cole did not want to attempt a moving shot. He kept his crosshairs on the man, following along with him as he disappeared behind cover and then reappeared, until the enemy soldier finally came to a halt. It was hard to say why he had stopped, and it really didn't matter.
Cole felt the rifle kick against his shoulder. The bullet required nearly one full second to traverse the distance between ridges, during which time the soldier did not move. Consequently, the bullet hit him and flung him around, as if he had been punched in the shoulder. He went down and did not get back up.
A little to the left next time, Cole thought.
"You got him!" the kid exclaimed, watching through the binoculars. He had pushed his glasses up out of the way and had his eyes right against the binoculars. Lowering the binoculars, he pushed the glasses back down and blinked as his vision adjusted. "Wow, that is really far. You know what, I can barely even see that far, especially without my glasses."
"Then you'd better not lose your glasses."
"Where did you learn to shoot like that?" the kid asked.
"Just comes natural, I suppose."
"You know, some people are just good at baseball. Or at football. But they also get plenty of practice."
Cole thought about it. "I practically grew up with a rifle in my hands," he admitted. "I can't even tell you how old I was when I first went into the woods by myself with a rifle."
"My parents would even let me have a BB gun," the kid said. "They were afraid I would shoot songbirds. Mom said it was bad luck to kill a sparrow. She was worried about me killing birds and look at me now, here in Korea."
"It's a hell of a thing, kid," Cole snorted. "Your folks might have let you take to the woods with a rifle if'n they'd been hungry enough and needed you to bring supper home."
"Not unless you could shoot a meatloaf."
Growing up in the mountains had been different, he supposed. There were always chores to do, from hauling water to feeding the hogs to taking a hoe to the garden. Had he ever really been a child? Not in the usual sense of being a carefree little boy. In the mountains, a child was something that you put to work earning his keep as soon as possible. A child was another mouth to feed.
As for taking to the woods with a rifle when he was barely big enough to carry it, his careworn mother didn't have much say in the matter and it was just possible that his old man had been too drunk to care, or off in the hills making moonshine.
Cole turned back to using the scope to scan for his next targets. Nearby, he knew that the kid was doing the same thing with the binoculars.
Something wriggled at the back of Cole's mind, thinking about the shot that he had just taken. The downed man was just another anonymous soldier, and yet he was like every soldier in some way. Cole had just taken away everything that the man ever had or ever would have. He had just deprived him of life.
It was a hard thing to think too much about. But killing is what he did. It's what any soldier did.
Whenever Cole felt himself growing soft, or reluctant to pull the trigger, he only had to remember the soldiers that he and Sergeant Weber had found frozen in their foxholes on the shores of the Chosin Reservoir, eyes iced over, or the screams of the wounded when the Chinese set fire to the trucks and ambulances they captured on the retreat from Chosin. Those memories hardened his heart.
To be sure, the Chinese had been particularly cruel. He supposed part of it was simple revenge. The attacking Chinese forces had been mown down in huge numbers. Although the enemy forces greatly outnumbered the Americans and their UN allies, the advantage in firepower clearly lay on the American side. A single BAR could cut a vast hole in the attacking line.
In fact, not all of the Chinese attackers back then had even carried rifles. The first wave had been armed, of course, mostly with inferior Chinese-made bolt-action rifles that were no match for the semi-automatic M-1 rifles and carbines used by the US troops.
The second wave of Chinese attackers were expected to pick up weapons from their fallen comrades. Their only weapons were stick grenades, strapped into special holsters or simply shoved into their pockets. Cole supposed that was better than nothing, but you had to get close enough to toss a grenade, and many didn't.
There was no going back, however. No retreat for the Chinese troops. The Chinese attacks had included a third wave made up of the political officers. This last group was well-armed with pistols and even submachine guns, but their role was not as assault troops. Instead, their mission was to shoot any soldiers from the first two waves who dared to retreat.
With those Chinese troops caught between a rock and a hard place, it was almost possible to feel sorry for them.
Once the enemy started overtaking the slow-moving US trucks on the single road leading from Chosin, they had turned the tables by slaughtering the wounded inside.
The Germans had been tough customers in the last war, and there had been brutal incidents like the Malmedy massacre at the Battle of the Bulge, but such war crimes were the exception. Even they drew the line at outright murder of POWs and wounded.
Soldiers captured alive by the Chinese or their North Korean allies had a good chance of staying that way because the Chinese wanted to keep them that way as negotiating pawns.
But the Chinese didn't want to be bothered taking care of any wounded. In fairness, they could barely take care of their own. But it was the way that they went about it that was so godawful. First, they fired through the canvas sides, and then they tossed in grenades or ran forward with torches to set the trucks ablaze.
Sons of bitches.
When he thought about those things, the screams of men being burned alive and the terrible smell of it, Cole didn't mind killing so much.
"Off to your right, about a hundred feet from the last one," said the kid, binoculars pressed to his eyes.
Cole glanced away from the scope just long enough to see that the kid was barely showing anything but the top of his helmet above the rim of the trench. He ought to be safe enough; the enemy sniper would need to be eagle-eyed to catch a glimpse of him.
Following the kid's directions, Cole looked through the scope and spotted that man as well. He put the crosshairs on him. He fired again, and again, reaping the enemy as soon as a target presented itself.
The kid was proving himself to be almost as much of a good spotter as Pomeroy had been, which was saying something. Of course, located as they were in the American lines, Cole and the kid could devote their full attention to the targets on the ridge. Nobody was going to be sneaking up behind him, which would have been a concern anywhere else.
"I've got to take a leak," the kid announced.
"Do it right here in the trench," Cole said.
"You sure?"
"Have you gotten a whiff of this hole, kid? You wouldn't be the first to use it as a latrine. Anyhow, you crawl out of this trench, and somebody is sure as hell gonna see you. That other sniper is out there. He knows I'm in the vicinity. No point in giving him something to shoot out."
A few moments later, he heard the kid's stream splashing down to mix into the mud at the bottom of the ditch. The kid kicked some dirt over it and got back on the binoculars.