Ardennes Sniper: A World War II Thriller (13 page)

"So now you can shoot him."

Cole smirked. A flicker of uncertainty passed across his face. "He's damn good. I'll give him that."

Mulholland dug a bottle of schnapps out of his pack, took a swig, and handed it to Cole. It was a small gesture that made him feel better about his earlier feelings of jealousy. Whatever their differences might be over Jolie, they were still just two young men a long way from home. "Didn't you say you had a relative who was in the Civil War?"

"Sure, my Uncle Lucas. Well, great uncle, I reckon."

"What did he do?"
 

"He was a sharpshooter."

Mulholland didn't have to ask which side Cole's relative had fought on, considering that a Confederate flag decorated Cole’s helmet. Mulholland had asked about that flag before, and learned that it had been painted by a kid who Cole had gone through boot camp with and then landed at Omaha Beach with in the first wave. The kid had lasted about five minutes. Though obscured now with dirt, scarred and faded, it was clear that the flag meant something to Cole.

"My grandfather served on General Grant's staff," Mulholland said. There was a family story about how his grandfather had saved the general from a ruthless Confederate assassin—a sniper, as a matter of fact—probably someone who was a lot like Cole. The incident had been hushed up at the time to prevent any kind of panic, but his grandfather had spoken of it long after the war.

Mulholland took the bottle that Cole handed back, then put the cork in it. He felt the warmth of the schnapps working through him. It would definitely help him sleep. "Listen, Cole. That German doesn't stand a chance against you."

"I'll take the first watch," Cole said, and headed for the hay loft.
 

CHAPTER 14

Cole was not on watch long before Jolie came up the ladder after him.
 

“Il fait chaud,”
she said, setting down beside him. She wore a blanket across her shoulders for warmth and tugged it across Cole as well. This close, he could smell her hair, a touch of lavender perfume, and the faint smell of soap on her skin. He knew what he smelled like—campfires, gunpowder, and sweat-soaked wool.

“Jolie, what in hell are you doing here?”

“I just thought I would keep you company.”

“You know that ain’t what I’m talkin’ about. Why are you in this place?”

“This is where I belong,” she said. “I want to be fighting the Germans. I want to make them pay—not just for me, but for France.”

“Go home, Jolie. I know how you feel, but this is no place for you. As soon as we can, we’ll get you back to our lines. We’ll send the Kid with you. He’s right shellshocked, even if he’s hangin’ in there for now.”

“
Non,
I will not go.”

“Goddamnit, Jolie. You already did your part. You were in the Resistance long before any Americans set foot in France. What you’re talkin’ about is revenge. Ain’t you had your pound of flesh yet?”

“You tell me, Cole. When does one have enough revenge? Satisfying one’s revenge is like drinking from a cup with a bullet hole in it. You can never get your fill.”

It felt like too much to explain to Cole tonight, but she tried. She felt that Cole was one of the few people who could understand her. She told him how the Germans had murdered her lover—another young resistance fighter—early in the war. The winds of war had scattered her family. Once she was released from the hospital, there was no one for her to go back to. These losses left holes in her heart and soul. Hatred had flowed in, filling these fissures in the same way that minerals turn something that was once living into fossil. The thought frightened her.

“What I was before I can be again if I see this war through to the end,” she said. “Do you understand now?”

“I reckon so.”
 

“Besides, I think we make a good team,” she said.

Cole grinned. “And I have to say, you are a lot better looking than Vaccaro.”

They sat for a while just looking out at the darkness through the huge window in the gable end of the loft. This was where the hay was thrown in on summer days that were impossible to imagine now on this winter’s night. There was not much to see—mainly they sat listening for the crunch of feet on the snow or the growl of a diesel engine. So far, all was silent.

A bit of stray firelight from below reflected in Cole’s clear-cut eyes and cast deep shadows under his high cheek bones—he had told her that there was some Cherokee mixed in with his Scotch-Irish blood. The light and shadow made his face feral and wolf-like. If she had not known him, she would have feared him.
 

“I wrote you from the hospital,” she said. “Did you not get my letters?”

In answer, Cole reached inside his coat and pulled out a half dozen envelopes, tied together with a piece of string. He smoothed the packet with his rough hands. “You have real nice handwriting,” he said. “Prettiest I ever seen.”

“Why did you never write back?”

“You know how it is, Jolie. I wanted to write you, but—” Cole’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Nothin’. Jest nothin’. There’s a war on, is all.”

Something about the letters clearly made him uncomfortable. She changed the subject, thinking it was enough that he had kept the letters. “Do you think he is still out here? Das Gespent?”

“Darlin’, I know he is. He killed Rowe. At that range, it wasn’t some lucky shot. And he was at that massacre.” Cole paused. “I can smell him out there.”

Jolie shuddered. “That German has killed so many. He is a monster. A killer. Cole, do not let him get away this time.”

She kissed his cheek, then stood, taking the blanket with her. With hardly a sound, she crossed the hay loft and descended the ladder, leaving Cole alone on watch.

Her scent lingered on the night air, keeping him company. In the privacy of the loft he pulled out the packet of letters again and breathed in their smell, just as he had done many nights before. He was too embarrassed to tell her that he stumbled over the words like a child, trying to puzzle out their meanings. He never had been to school. His classroom had been the woods and mountains. Cole could read tracks in the woods as clearly as other men read headlines in a newspaper, but he struggled to read a single sentence of her letters. Nobody else in the squad knew.

He had finally contented himself with imagining her hand moving across each page, leaving behind neat letters, a touch of perfume, and the smell of cigarettes.
 

He tucked the letters away. The cold soon crept through him again. He ignored it. Long, hungry hours in the woods as a boy had long since trained him to shut out most things he couldn’t do anything about: cold, fear, hunger.

But tonight after Jolie went down the ladder he experienced a new sensation that nagged at him. He tried to push it from his mind, but failing that, he attempted to put a finger on this troubling emotion.

The realization came to him as suddenly as a cork being pulled from a jug. It was like something in his mind went
pop
.

He felt lonely.

It was an emotion he had rarely felt before, and Jolie Molyneaux was to blame.

• • •

Cole always had been a loner. It seemed to him that it was the best way to be a survivor, something that he had been doing all his life. On a winter's day in 1936, a fourteen-year-old Micajah Cole had learned a valuable lesson in the difference between life and death, and that lesson had stayed with him on the battlefields of Europe.

In the days following Christmas that year a cold snap settled over the mountains back home. There was none of this gray and snow, but bright blue skies and wind sharp as a Cherokee flint knife. At night the cold seeped into the ancient rock, freezing the ground iron hard and turning the mountain creeks into ribbons of ice. It was only in the really deep, fast-moving water like Gashey’s Creek that Cole could still set his traps.

A beaver pelt brought a dollar and a really good muskrat pelt was worth 50 cents—not nearly what prices had been just a few years before, when the Cole family had experienced a brief spell of such prosperity that they bought canned goods and even new boots for pa. Then the Depression hit, and the demand for fur had dried up like everything else. Just about anyone with good sense had given up trapping, but for a mountain boy it meant a little money coming in for the family and maybe some muskrat for the stew pot.
 

Cole's pa was what the mountain people called a "woodsy" in that he mostly lived off the land—hunting and trapping, no matter the season or the game laws. Hard cash was tough to come by in the mountains so the old man would sometimes trade firewood he had split by hand or a jug of moonshine from the still he kept way up in the hills. When he was sober, he taught Cole everything he knew—how to read tracks like a road sign or the way to aim so that a bullet would travel true in the mountain air. Sober, Cole's daddy was a hard man of few words. Drunk on moonshine, he was mean and quick with a beating. It was best to stay out in the woods.

Locked in a deep freeze, the winter woods were silent to most ears, but not so quiet if you knew what to listen for. Cole could make out the chirp of a cardinal, the chatter of a squirrel, the gurgle of creek water so cold it was like liquid ice.

He went down to the edge of Gashey’s Creek, to a hole where the water was at least ten feet deep and still flowing. The current reminded Cole of the quiet, smooth movement of a muscle under the skin.
 

A mud path on the steep bank showed where the beaver ventured out to gnaw the bark from the willows growing near the water's edge. He set down the bag of traps he carried. A beaver could weigh nearly 50 pounds, and so a beaver trap weighed about 10 pounds. It was a lot of weight for a boy to carry, but already Cole had muscles hard as knotted cordwood.

Working carefully, he set the trap. A steel trap has a system of dual springs that require all the weight of a lean fourteen-year-old boy to set them—and then some. With one boot on each spring, Cole got the jaws open, then set the pan that held them in place. It was not an easy task with bare fingers on cold steel in the frigid air. The slightest touch would trigger the jaws to snap shut. From one spring ran a length of chain, at the end of which was a loop of steel through which was threaded a length of wire that ran down into the water.

When the jaws snapped shut on a beaver, the weight of the trap dragged the animal down into the deep water and drowned it.

Cole knew to be careful around the traps, but the cold made him hurry and take a shortcut. Instead of setting the trap from beneath—a safety precaution in case the jaws snapped shut, although it required extra effort—he set the pan from above. The trigger caught and held, and he started to take his hand away. But the movement caused his feet to shift on the ice and the jaws clamped around his wrist, catching him in his own trap.

The jolt of pain caused him to slip on the icy bank and he encountered an even bigger shock when he plunged into the creek.

The extra winter clothes and layers of wool intended to keep him warm instantly soaked through, weighing him down like a granite shroud. With a 10-pound trap around one hand, he could not swim. Bubbles escaped toward the surface, but he was trapped beneath the water.
 

How long could he hold his breath? This wasn't some summertime swim. One minute in the icy creek, maybe two, and it would all be over.
 

Not much time. He had to think of something.
 

Cole let himself sink to the bottom. There was some current but the wire that ran through the ring at the end of the trap's chain tethered him in place. The only way back to the surface was to get the trap off his hand. But it would take both his feet to do it.

The icy water was very clear; he could look all the way back up to the surface. Like he was the fly in the bottom of a Mason jar of moonshine.

The creek bed was soft and muddy, but he kicked around, ignoring the pain in his hand, until he found a good, flat rock. He put the trap on the rock, then stood on the springs. There was some give, but the buoyancy of the water meant his full weight wasn't on the springs. He raised both feet at once and did a kind of jump. Nothing. His lungs screamed for air.
Try again.
He bobbed up and came down again on the springs. The added force was just enough to make the jaws loosen their grip and he wrenched his hand free, leaving a good bit of skin behind.
 

He then kicked his way to the surface and swam the short distance to the creek bank. Once there, he lay half in and half out of the water, taking big gulps of air like it was money some rich man was giving away. Then he crawled the rest of the way up the creek bank.

Though he had not drowned, the frigid air would kill him almost as quick in this cold. It was only about five degrees above zero at midday, which meant ice immediately formed on his wet clothes. His hair froze. He was three miles from home.

Move, he told himself.

He took the time to pick up the sack of spare traps. Pa would whip him if he left those behind.

Then Cole started running, trying to outrace the cold. He trotted through the snowy woods, leaving spots of blood in the snow. His heart hammered with the effort, but he did not stop.