That was where Vaccaro came in. Cole had set up his spotter in the lee of the stone wall, no more than twenty feet from the gap that Cole hoped the sniper would come through. Vaccaro had his own rifle and a .45, but the only thing he’d be pointing at the enemy was his flashlight.
“When you hear that racket start, you light him up,” Cole explained. “I’ll do the rest.”
“Dammit, hillbilly. That Kraut will start shooting as soon as he sees my flashlight.”
“Ain’t likely,” Cole replied.
“Why the hell not?”
“’Cuz he’ll be dead by then.”
“What if he’s not?”
“Then turn off your flashlight and shoot back.”
“There’s got to be an easier way to do this.”
“Listen here, city boy. They say that son of a bitch has shot at least a dozen of our boys. Shot them smoking cigarettes, shot them walking down the street. Hell, he even shot them taking a leak.”
“Yeah.” Vaccaro had heard the stories.
“When that flashlight hits him, he’ll know for a split second that I’m about to punch his card. That’s why we’re going to do it this way.”
“All right then. Let’s do it.”
They waited in the foggy, frozen night, shivering. Despite the cold, Cole could feel some of the snow melting beneath him and starting to soak through his clothes, adding to his discomfort. He wished that he’d thought to bring a blanket. He doubted that Vaccaro was faring any better. It was going to be a long, cold wait for them both.
Deep down, Cole knew that his approach smacked of revenge rather than soldiering. He grinned at the thought. Sometimes you needed a little vengeance.
What they were doing, simply put, was setting a trap to catch the sniper — a fatal and deadly trap.
If the sniper had a split second in which to realize that he was a dead man, even better.
The thought warmed him so much he forgot the cold.
Cole had always loved traps and trapping. As a boy he’d spent long days working his trapline. He collected the animals he caught, then reset the traps or moved them to a different location. He was no John Colter, trapping beaver in the far reaches of the frontier, but deep in the mountains he could go all day without seeing another human being. He had liked that just fine.
Cole was not one to sit and watch the birds and clouds. Restless by nature, he had kept on the move, working his way along the mountain streams and across remote ridges. The steep landscape and the toil of carrying the traps had turned his lean body hard and wiry. Wind, cold, rain, heat — the weather was just something to be acknowledged, something to push through to the next ridge, the next bend in the creek.
He had learned to move without a sound, sometimes walking right up to an unsuspecting fox or deer, so silently had he passed through the woods, like a forest creature himself. If he could take a shot at any game, he took it. Often he had just one or two bullets, and they were not to be wasted. Those skills had served him well in this war.
The Coles always had lived off the land. While the rest of the country suffered through the Great Depression, the hard times never changed for the Cole family.
The animals that he collected in his traps varied. There were a few beaver in the more remote mountain creeks, but he also caught fox, possum, muskrat, and raccoon. The pelts weren’t worth as much with the demand for fur being low on account of the Great Depression, but he would at least bring in enough to buy another handful of bullets and maybe some canned goods. Anything else, and the Cole family pretty much made their own or made do.
His trapping trips weren’t only about making money. In the end, he just liked being alone in the deep mountain woods. Once he got to be a teenager, he would sometimes disappear into those woods for two or three days at a time. At night, he would roll himself in a blanket and sleep by his campfire, cooking whatever he had caught over the flames. The mountains, his rifle, a fire, a blanket, fresh water from a mountain stream, something to eat that he had hunted or trapped — Cole realized it was all a man needed in this world.
Some might say that he had been born a century too late, but the old ways still existed if you sought them out.
Now, on the outskirts of Bastogne, waiting for his trap to be sprung, Cole let the time pass over him like currents over stones in a mountain creek. He stayed alert even as one part of his mind drifted. Occasionally he heard Vaccaro fidget. That city boy was noisy as a herd of buffalo.
But his ears stayed sharp for other sounds. From the town held by the Americans came the grind of gears and sleepy curses. From the distant woods came the occasional guttural words of German, carried far on the chill, foggy air.
Then he heard the crunch of footsteps approaching across the frozen snow. The footsteps were coming from the direction of the German lines. He put his eye to the scope and his finger to the trigger.
He had no doubt that this was the enemy sniper.
