“What are you thinking?” Vaccaro asked.
“We’ll have to get closer.”
“That’s just what I was thinking. But how do we do that without getting our asses shot off?”
“Let me think about it a minute.”
The two men began to strategize quietly, using gestures as much as words. They had done this together before. Vaccaro would point out a path toward the steeple or a landscape feature. Cole would either grunt in reluctant agreement or shake his head in disapproval. It wasn’t all that different from how a pair of cavemen would have planned their hunt.
Once again Vaccaro handed him the binoculars, and Cole studied the scene, taking in every detail. The church steeple loomed against the gray sky, its stony features brooding and somehow menacing. Above them in that steeple, the sniper would be hidden in the freezing shade, still as the stone around him, his rifle at the ready, waiting for a clear shot.
Cole thought about the differences between German and US snipers. First, he knew that he and other Americans had a lot to learn from their German counterparts. The US Army did not have a sniper training program beyond the basic marksmanship training that all soldiers received — or were supposed to. In the early months of the war, thousands of troops had been rushed through basic training without more than a cursory introduction to their rifles. The approach could be termed on-the-job training.
To be fair, not all these men were intended to be combat troops, and the army had desperately needed every warm body it could get its hands on for jobs from clerks to cooks to truck drivers. US snipers were men like Cole who had been found to be crack shots and kept their cool under fire. They were given rifles with telescopic sights and told to get to work.
It wasn’t that easy. The enemy snipers they faced had often gone through specific training in the subtle art of targeting the enemy. He’d heard that to pass sniper training, the Krauts had to undergo a test in which they remained undetected by their instructors. They learned to camouflage themselves. They learned patience. They learned tricks to fool their prey. They learned to sleep and eat and relieve themselves in a hole in the ground. If they failed these tests, they did not earn their Scharfschütze badge.
German snipers were not just marksmen, they were trained killers.
Americans liked to see themselves as great hunters and crack shots, and there was some truth to the fact that compared to most Europeans, many Americans had grown up with rifles and firearms. Wasn’t every American supposed to be a cowboy at heart, or maybe Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett all rolled up into one?
For every Cole who had grown up hunting, it seemed like there were just as many men like Vaccaro who had only known pavement under their feet.
However, the Germans and the Russians also had a great tradition of hunting and a culture around firearms. German snipers tended to have been hunters in their youth. Most had grown up in the countryside. Their skill with a rifle had been honed by training. Some of the sharpshooters had experienced battle against the Soviet Union, and that included taking on the highly skilled Russian snipers.
You either learned quickly, or you died.
Cole and Vaccaro had learned their trade the hard way — by trial and error. It helped that Cole also had a natural cunning.
Looking at that church steeple, Cole knew that he would need all his skills to nab the German hiding up there.
“Let’s go have us a look,” he said.
Cole started off through the space between them and the church steeple, moving cautiously across the yard and even small barnyards. He constantly kept something between him and the sniper’s position, whether it was a stone wall or the corner of a building.
They moved carefully and quietly through the maze of narrow alleys that crisscrossed the town. The frozen ground was hard and uneven, dotted with rocks and clumps of torn earth from the shelling. These threatened to trip up Cole’s feet, but even in the ruts he managed to move lightly. Vaccaro clumped along behind him, making enough noise for them both.
Cole exhaled a cloud of breath in the cold air, his stomach tight with anticipation. Battle-worn after these months of war, he had experienced more than a few moments like this, those moments where life and death hung in the balance. It wasn’t fear but the thrill of the hunt.
As they inched closer, they passed through a dense thicket of rosebushes encircling a house, the branches bare and twisted, grasping with thorns, like the gnarled hands of ancient whispering souls. The scent of damp earth and decaying leaves filled Cole’s nostrils, a reminder of the funk from which all men sprang and to which they would return.
Not that Cole was in any hurry for that. So he took his time working closer to the church steeple.
