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

only supposed to be a squad of Krauts in the village. That’s a whole hell of a lot more than a squad. Look at ‘em all.”

Cole managed to get his rifle to his shoulder. He could see lots of Germans, though most were behind cover. “I think we just kicked the hornet’s nest,” he said. “Where the hell is Mulholland, anyhow?”

“He’s pinned down in that ditch over there.”

“All right, let’s whittle these Krauts down to size.”

Cole tried to aim, but he had to admit, his eyes felt like someone had taken sandpaper to them. He felt too weak to hold the rifle steady. He fired and missed. Missed again.

Vaccaro gave him a target. “Hey, there’s a sniper in that church steeple!”

Just as Vaccaro spoke, a bullet that seemed more precise than all the others pecked at the stone near his head. They both ducked.

Cole searched the church steeple, but couldn’t detect any sign of the enemy sniper. Although Cole couldn’t see him, there was no doubt that he was there, all right. Another bullet came in and hit the new greenbean soldier firing from the tunnel entrance. Private Tawes fell dead, hit square in the head, a neat round bullet hole in the front of his helmet.

Vaccaro swore. “Dammit, I knew I shouldn’t have bothered to learn his name. These new guys never last a week.”

His comments sounded unfeeling, but hardening your heart was sometimes the only way to get through this madness.

The sniper was taking a terrible toll, but Cole was too feverish to be able to focus enough to take him out. He could barely hold the rifle steady. He lowered the Springfield rifle and slumped against the tunnel wall.

Vaccaro looked at him with concern. “You hit?”

“I feel like a truck hit me, if that counts.”

“That dead greenbean looks livelier than you do, Hillbilly. Don’t make me carry you back.”

The squad would have withdrawn, but they couldn’t—not with Lieutenant Mulholland and Private Bigelow still pinned down in the ditch. Between the machine gun and the sniper, trying to make a break for it would have meant certain death.

“We can’t leave Mulholland out there,” Cole said.

“There might not be much choice,” Vaccaro said. “Whoever thought there was just a handful of Germans in the village was wrong—dead wrong.”

“There are a few of them,” Cole agreed.

“We had better pull back. If they put a round from one of those mortars into this tunnel, we’re all goners.”

Behind them, they heard the clank and rumble of approaching tanks. From the engine noise, they knew that these were Shermans. That much was good news.

“Those look like ours!” Vaccaro said. “I never thought that I’d be so glad to see tanks.”

So far, they hadn’t seen any sign of German armor, which would have spelled trouble for any Sherman tank, which was equipped with a gun that was no match for the more heavily armed Panzers prowling these mountains.

The tunnel under the train tracks was just wide enough for the Shermans to pass through, once the dead greenbean’s body was dragged out of the way.

“Poor bastard,” Vaccaro muttered, helping to lift the body onto the back of a tank. “He’d barely been in the field long enough for his socks to get wet. Speaking of socks, that reminds me.”

Vaccaro went through the dead soldier’s pockets and liberated a chocolate bar and a pair of dry socks. The way that Vaccaro saw it, he could put those to good use, but the socks and chocolate wouldn’t do the soldier much good considering where he was headed—the local graves registration unit.

Quickly, the tankers hatched a plan to free Lieutenant Mulholland from the ditch. The lead Sherman would pull out of the tunnel entrance and head down the road just past where the lieutenant lay. The armored behemoth would create cover for Mulholland and Bigelow, giving them a screen. After all, the Germans could fire all the machine guns they wanted at the Sherman, but the bullets wouldn’t so much as dent the metal.

Once Mulholland was out of the ditch, the tank would reverse back toward the tunnel entrance, giving the infantrymen cover all the way. The second tank would hang back in reserve and provide any covering fire.

“You ought to let those Krauts have it,” Vaccaro said. “Jam a couple of shells down their throat.”

“I’d like nothing better,” the tank commander said. “But there might be people in the village. I don’t want to kill any civilians. We’ll have to rely on our thirty for suppressing fire.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Vaccaro said. He shouted down the road, hoping that Mullholland could hear him. “Lieutenant, we’re coming for you!”

It soon became apparent that the plan was going to be complicated by the fact that the Germans had started to advance toward the tunnel, clearly intending to push the Americans back.

“If we’re gonna do this, we need to do it soon,” Vaccaro pointed out. “Those Jerries mean business.”

“No time like the present,” the tank commander said. He pulled the tank hatch shut, sealing the crew within.

The tank started down the road toward the village. At the last second, Vaccaro fell in behind it.

Cole couldn’t believe it. Vaccaro wasn’t one to stick his neck out. Like Cole, he had seen all too often how that usually turned out.

“Where are you going, City Boy?”

“You sit tight, Hillbilly. We’ll be back with the lieutenant in a jiffy.”

From the village, the Germans redoubled their rate of fire. Machine-gun bursts and bullets hammered against the armored skin of the tank. Although the bullets couldn’t pierce the armor, it must have been more than a little nerve-wracking to hear them pelting the metal. Cole had grown up in a shack with a tin roof, so he could well imagine that the inside of the tank must have sounded like the sleeping loft in the shack during a summer hailstorm.

If the tank commander had dared to leave the hatch open, the German sniper in the church steeple might have tried to pick him