Sniper's Justice (Caje Cole Book 9) by David Healey (best classic books txt) 📗

which to die, given the promise of a new day. They did their utmost to make sure that it would be Americans who died, rather than Germans.

To their surprise, the defenders did not open fire. In the darkness and the snow, the Americans didn’t want to shoot their own men, some of whom were still straggling in from the debacle on the hilltop.

However, the German attackers had no such qualms. They opened fire at any defenders who dared to shoot at them, overwhelming them with rifle fire and machine-gun fire. They had tried to bring down some of the self-propelled 75 mm guns right into the streets of town, but a lone Sherman tank had managed to knock out those guns before being destroyed itself.

The fight for Wingen sur Moder seemed to be over almost before it had started. As the daylight grew and the last of the flakes from the departing snowstorm drifted down, the village found itself firmly in German hands.

Before the attack, around three dozen soldiers in the service company had bedded down in the cellar of a house near the Catholic church. The upstairs of the spacious house had mostly been taken over as office space and sleeping quarters for some of the officers.

Joey Reed slept soundly, despite the crowded space. He didn’t mind too much because the body heat kept the stone basement warm.

Before daylight, the sound of gunfire woke Joey up.

This shooting wasn’t taking place in the hills. This was right outside. In the village streets.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“We’re under attack, that’s what,” Serra said. “It sounds as if the goddamn Krauts are right outside the window!”

Both men reached for their weapons, but they weren’t exactly eager to join the fight. Neither man had fired his weapon since training back in the States.

“Hey, you’ve got to put bullets in it, dummy!” Serra shouted, pulling Joey back from the window and shoving an ammunition clip into his palm.

Joey had to think for a second about how to load the carbine. On top of that, the weapon’s action was caked with mud from when he had dropped it a couple of weeks ago and never bothered to clean it. In a headquarters unit, combat readiness was not emphasized as much as the importance of filing paperwork correctly.

He finally figured out the carbine, got it loaded, and joined Serra at the window. Beside them was another soldier, Private Paul Sampson, hunched over his own weapon. Quite unlike the mighty Biblical Sampson, this soldier was skinny and wore thick glasses with heavy black frames that dwarfed his bony face, but had somehow managed to enlist.

“Should we start shooting, or what?” Sampson wondered.

“No, we might hit our guys. Let’s wait for orders,” Serra said.

Joey stared out through the cellar window. Although it was dark, in the flashes of light from the shooting going on, he caught glimpses of men running here and there. He had assumed they were other soldiers from the 179th, mounting a defense of the town. Some must have been fighting back. But then he also saw troops wearing white smocks and the distinctive, square-shaped Stahlhelm of German troops. His blood ran cold.

“Holy cow, those are Krauts out there!” Joey said.

“You catch on fast,” said Serra. “How good a shot are you with that carbine?”

“Not very good.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. And you’re not the only one. We’re all a bunch of clerks, for chrissakes. If I were those Krauts, I wouldn’t exactly be shaking in my shoes.”

As dawn gave way to the gloomy morning, the scene in the street only worsened. White-clad Germans went past with Schmeissers hanging from leather slings, herding groups of American POWs with their hands in the air. A few prisoners were in their underwear, despite the cold—the fact was that they had been surprised in their beds.

It seemed almost inexplicable that the Americans hadn’t been more prepared, but the average GI couldn’t be blamed. The capture of Wingen sur Moder reflected some serious shortcomings on the part of the unit’s commanding officer.

Some of the Germans passed so close that the men hiding in the cellar could hear them conversing. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted in. The Krauts were smoking cigarettes that they had captured from the Americans.

They could see German machine-gun teams setting up at key positions down the street, unleashing overwhelming fire whenever someone shot at them from one of the houses in the village.

“Holy cow,” Joey muttered over and over again. He felt a growing sense of desperation. What were they supposed to do?

The only real holdout against the Germans seemed to be a rifleman in the church steeple next door, who kept the Krauts scrambling for cover whenever one of them entered his line of sight.

It all felt surreal to Joey, like he was watching a real-life pageant or something. So far, nobody had noticed the clerks hiding in the cellar—possibly because they were all being quiet as church mice.

“Anybody got any ideas?” Serra whispered.

“The Krauts haven’t spotted us. We’ve got that much on our side, at least,” a sergeant said. Although he held the highest rank of anyone in the cellar, he didn’t seem eager to take charge.

“Any ideas?”

“What we ought to do is sit tight until dark. We can try to slip out of here then and the Krauts won’t see us.”

“Dark? That’s a long time to wait. You think we can hide out that long?”

The sergeant shrugged. “You got any better ideas? Maybe you want to go out there and take on the Krauts with that rusty rifle of yours. Nah, we can wait. It’s winter. It gets dark early.”

However, waiting was much harder than any of the men expected. Each minute dragged out for an eternity. They all seemed to hold their breath countless times as the enemy came within spitting distance of their hiding place. How was it possible that they had not been detected? Each cough threatened to give them away. They had no food or