Ardennes Sniper: A World War II Thriller (2 page)

Klein had no way of knowing it, but the dead soldier was the first casualty in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hidden on the other side of the mountains, nearly two thousand German tanks and two hundred thousand men waited for the order to attack.
 

The lone wolf on this lonely road would soon be joined by the pack. It was to be the winter of the wolves all over again.

CHAPTER 2

If snow was money, every GI in the Ardennes Forest would have been filthy rich by now. All it did was snow. Then freeze. Then snow some more. It was hard to tell where the dull leaden sky ended and the whitened fields and woods began. A group of soldiers trudged along a road through this gray landscape, shoulders hunched, resigned to the cold.
 

There were six of them, all carrying rifles with telescopic sights. Snipers. They wore dirty white ponchos made from bedsheets in an effort at camouflage, and the snow that dusted their shoulders helped them blend into the backdrop of forest. Some of the trees hung over the road so that in patches the frozen mud was nearly bare. Most of the men kept their heads down, trying to keep the snow out of their faces.

Only one man, who walked last in the line, further back from the others, scanned the surrounding trees constantly. Cole was unofficially the deadliest sniper in the United States Army. Unofficially, because the Army didn’t track such things, not like they kept track of the number of planes a pilot shot down, for example. But word had gotten around. Just hours ago, he and Vaccaro had taken out a squad of Germans that strayed too close to the American lines.

Cole had pale eyes with so little color that they resembled ice. He was taller than average and lean like a fence post. Though covered in grime, a Confederate flag was just visible painted on his helmet. In a nod to their Southern heritage it had been painted by Jimmy Turner, another country boy whom Cole had tried to keep alive at D-Day—and failed.

Vaccaro looked back. He was an Italian-American of average height and build from Brooklyn. In his own mind, he thought he looked like Rudolph Valentino and somehow managed to wear his helmet at a jaunty angle. "Cole, what's eating you?"

"Too quiet," the other sniper said.
 

"Quiet is fine by me," Vaccaro said. "But I would give my left nut for some sunshine and warm weather." He stuttered the words because he was shivering in the cold.
 
"Hell, I'd give both nuts to be at Coney Island on a July day rubbing coconut oil into some girl's shoulders. Mmmm."

"Vaccaro, if you give away your nuts that's all you’re gonna be able to do to her," Cole said. "Unless you plan to talk her to death, which wouldn’t be no surprise."

"Cold as my Johnson is right now, I'm not sure it's ever gonna thaw out, anyhow."

A moment of silence passed as the men mentally checked the status of their own Johnsons. It was definitely cold enough for concern. For weeks now they had been battling the cold and its consequences—everything from frozen gear to frostbite to shivering all night in their blankets. And it was only mid-December, with the heart of winter still ahead.
 

These men had been at D-Day and fought their way across France and into the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Germany was nearly on the horizon. They could almost taste the end of the war. It was warm and sweet in their mouths like the mulled wine the locals drank at Christmas, or maybe the lips of that girl Vaccaro dreamed about, with a little tongue slipped in. These snipers had been through hell and back. But now they were in a quiet backwater of the war that even offered a few opportunities for some R&R. Some soldiers had even seen Marlene Dietrich performing nearby with a USO tour. The snipers would settle for spending Christmas someplace indoors, sleeping and eating. Real turkey dinners, if they were lucky.

Lieutenant Mulholland signaled for a stop. The weary men flopped down in the snow, except for Cole, whose eyes continued to scour the woods, looking for any sign of movement.
 

"Cole, you need to relax," said Vaccaro. "There ain't a German around for miles."

Cole ignored him and searched the trees with his rifle scope until he was satisfied that they were alone, then joined the others in munching chocolate bars and smoking cigarettes. In the cold, the brittle Hershey bars tasted like wax. He sat a little apart and kept his rifle across his knees. In the Ardennes Forest in December 1944, staying alert was just part of staying alive.

• • •

Sometime after midnight on December 15, the highly decorated German sniper Hauptmann Kurt Von Stenger sat in the back seat of a staff car roaring through the night. He was wedged between a nervous Wehrmacht general named Rothenbach and SS Obersturmbannführer Aldric Friel, who was so relaxed that he seemed to have fallen asleep. Handsome as a Nazi poster boy come to life, Friel was a firebrand who had made quite a name for himself, first as an adjutant to Heinrich Himmler and then as a ruthless tank commander in Russia. Even asleep, Friel seemed to radiate energy.

Von Stenger stared out into the trees that loomed in the headlights. No one knew where the winding road would take them. He had been on leave from the fighting in France and Belgium when the summons came in the form of an SS driver appearing at his door. So much for a Christmas holiday.

No one knew why they had been summoned to this mysterious meeting in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, piled into staff cars driven by grim young SS soldiers. Clearly, the general thought they were being taken out to the woods to be shot.
 

It was not out of the question.
 

"Relax, Herr General. Here, have a cigarette," Von Stenger said. He offered the man one of his trademark gold-tipped Sobranie cigarettes. "Why drive us all the way out here to shoot us? It seems like a waste of petrol."

The general's hands shook when he tried to light the cigarette. Maybe it was just the bumpy road. Von Stenger lit it for him with a Zippo lighter taken from a dead American. As the general leaned in, Von Stenger caught a whiff of alcohol and garlicky sausages.

On the other side of him, Obersturmbannführer Friel gave a low laugh. So, the SS
Wunderkind
had awakened. "You always had a sense of humor, Kurt. Still reading your Goethe?"

"Of course. I appreciate a man who tries to make sense of the world but admits when he can't. We could use more of that these days."

Von Stenger felt the Wehrmacht general beside him stiffen in alarm. It was getting dangerous to make any criticism of the beleaguered Führer, implied or otherwise. There were rumors that the wrong words could get you strung up on a meat hook in some dark Gestapo dungeon.
 

Or driven out to the woods in the middle of the night.
 

To be shot.

Clearly the general did not think it prudent to criticize Hitler in the presence of an SS officer, even one who, like them, might already be condemned. This seemed unlikely, however, considering that Friel was known as one of Hitler's favorite young officers.

"May I have a cigarette?" Friel asked.
 

"Of course." Von Stenger offered him the pack. "So, do you know where we are going?"

"We are going to see a man who makes sense of the world, my friend."
 

"Ah."
 

The flame as Friel lit the cigarette illuminated the twin silver lightning bolts on the collar of his tailored uniform. Beside the lightning bolts were four silver squares known as
pips
that indicated his rank. The flicker of flame revealed Friel’s craggy, blonde good looks. He could have played an SS officer in a movie. He was not yet thirty. Certainly, he was young to be an Obersturmbannführer.
 

He and Von Stenger came from similar backgrounds and had traveled in the same social circles in the heady early days of the war, though Von Stenger was a few years older. Both men became soldiers. But that was where the similarity ended. Friel was a capable commander while Von Stenger preferred being a lone wolf. But the most important distinction of all was that Friel was a disciple of the Nazi cause.

Now here Von Stenger was, taking a car ride with a frightened general and an SS Obersturmbannführer in the middle of the night. What had he gotten mixed up in?

• • •

After they had eaten, the sniper team started moving again. They had not gone far when Lieutenant Mulholland stopped. "What the hell?" he muttered.

A lump lay in the middle of the road. All the soldiers had seen enough carnage to know it was a dead body. Somehow, a body always looked smaller than an actual person. The snow had not quite covered the dead soldier. He wore an American uniform, of course, because they were far from the German lines or any fighting.

"Poor bastard probably froze to death," Vaccaro muttered from between blue lips.

"Maybe he did, but what's he doing out here in the middle of nowhere?" the lieutenant wondered aloud. "Huh. There's a crossroads village down that way. Maybe he got drunk and was hit by a truck."

"Yeah, but where are the tire tracks?"

Three of the snipers stood over the body. Cole slowly circled them, prowling the edges of the road. He stopped in a place where the snow had only dusted the frozen mud.
 

The lieutenant bent down and took the corpse by the shoulder, rolling him over. The body wasn't quite frozen. Moving the body revealed a puddle of blood beneath it.

"Jesus, what happened to him?"

The lieutenant had seen plenty of gunshot wounds, but this wasn't one of them. "It looks like he's been stabbed."

"There's no m-m-muggers in the middle of the goddamn woods," Vaccaro stammered. "M-m-must be Germans."

Cole spoke up. His voice had a Southern, hillbilly twang to it. "It weren't no German," he said. "These here are fresh boot prints. Bigger than what he's got on. But the boots belonged to an American."

"How can you tell?"

"Vaccaro, I been starin' at your footsteps for the last six months. I reckon I know what a boot print looks like."

"Huh," Vaccaro said.

The lieutenant gave orders to move the body to the side of the road. "No sense letting the poor bastard get run over. Once we get to HQ we'll send somebody back to pick him up."
 

Then the snipers moved down the road. Dusk was coming on, and the snowy woods that moments ago had seemed peaceful as a scene on a Christmas card now looked dark and sinister.
 

CHAPTER 3

The car carrying Von Stenger plunged on through the forest. No one said much. After he finished his cigarette, Obersturmbannführer Friel managed to fall asleep again. The general emitted several deep sighs of resignation. Von Stenger cracked the window, lit another cigarette, and spent some time thinking about the long years that had led up to this moment.

Von Stenger had seen more than his share of action, starting in Spain back in 1938 when Hitler had sent military "observers" to help the cause of dictator Ferdinand Franco. Von Stenger was already an accomplished marksman, and his role was to perfect the art of sniper warfare. He proved quite adept—gifted, in fact. He was not only a good shot from years of boyhood hunting trips, but also quite clever in his tactics.
 

After Spain, he had seen action in Poland and Russia. God, what a mess the Eastern Front had been. Only the fact that he had been wounded in a sniper duel at Stalingrad and then evacuated to Berlin had saved his life—not so much from the bullet wound as from the onslaught of Russians.
 

It was in Stalingrad that Von Stenger had earned his nickname,
Das Gespent
—The Ghost—for his ability to slip unseen among the city ruins and reap Russian after Russian. The effort had earned him the Knight's Cross he wore at his throat, making him Germany's most decorated sniper. Although he had been made an officer almost out of hand because of his family and connections, Von Stenger had resisted being in charge of anything or anyone other than himself.

However, it was only natural that while recovering from his wound that he had served as an instructor at the Wehrmacht's sniper school. He found that he enjoyed teaching snipers. He was good at it. He was older than the trainees, many of whom were hardly more than teenagers, and his reputation preceded him so that his trainees respected him.

While teaching, he thought of ways to be even better as a sniper. He read everything he could on sniper warfare and survival techniques. It was interesting that the British had compiled the most information about sniper tactics, going back to the Napoleonic wars. The German military, too, had a rich tradition of employing
Jäger
—lone hunters and military scouts equipped with rifles for long-range shooting. He passed the best of what he learned on to his students.
 

Von Stenger saw teaching as a way station, however. He never doubted that he would return to the field when the time came, and put his knowledge into practice.

It was training and superior equipment that gave the German snipers an advantage—the Americans had no such special training for snipers other than the basic marksmanship taught to all soldiers.
 

In Russia, more than a few Germans and Russians had been forged into expert snipers. Between the cold and the constant fighting, the Eastern Front had been hell. Now the Russians were pressing at the borders like the Barbarians at the Gates of Rome. Von Stenger shuddered to think of what might happen if Germany's last defenses fell. The Reich that had been destined to last a thousand years now had its back against the wall.