Ardennes Sniper: A World War II Thriller by David Healey Read Free Book Online Page A

German standing over him, about to put a bullet in his brain.
    Ten. Still alive. He started counting again. Just ten seconds more, God. That’s all I ask. Just ten seconds.
    He got to eight again when he heard laughter and the sound of an engine starting. Having finished delivering the coup de grace to the wounded Americans, the SS soldiers drove away.
    Still, Hank did not move. He did not open his eyes. What if it was a trick? The cold crept up from the frozen ground. He imagined he could hear the heat leaving the bodies all around him, in the same way that a truck motor ticks as it cools.
    The Germans were gone. All around him lay a sea of silent bodies.
    Finally, Hank forced himself to his knees. He glanced at Ralph’s dead body. Then he retched again and again, the contents of his stomach spilling across the snow. His vision blurred. And then everything went black.

CHAPTER 7

    Hundreds of miles away at Allied headquarters in Paris, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower tossed the latest communiqué from the front down on his desk and lit another cigarette.  
    “It’s just a feint,” Ike said. “The Germans are stirring the pot, but it’s nothing serious. It can’t be. They don’t have enough men to staff a Rotary carnival, let alone an offensive.”
    Eisenhower inhaled the smoke deeply. He was up to four packs a day. Not to mention the endless cups of coffee and terrible diet. He was too busy to eat properly. Yet for a man in his mid-fifties he looked quite fit—if one overlooked the fact that he was balding and carried a small potbelly—but it did not take much to imagine him as the West Point football player that he had once been.  
    “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, sir,” said Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, his chief of staff. His nickname was Beetle, although by nature he was much closer to a Doberman—woe to anyone who interfered with Ike’s schedule or tried to waste the general’s time.
    “When’s Kay getting back? We’re supposed to see a movie tonight.”
    “I don’t know, sir.”
    Ike’s pretty Irish driver, Kay Sommersby, was out doing some Christmas shopping on Ike’s behalf. It was a poorly kept secret that she was the general’s mistress. Yet neither Ike nor Sommersby found anything odd in having her pick out something nice for the general’s wife, Mamie, safely out of the way stateside.
    Ike smoked and thought. All day long reports of German activity in the Ardennes had been coming in. None of it made sense. “Listen, Beetle. You know as well as I do that the Germans are finished. It’s just a matter of time. They don’t have the resources for a counteroffensive. Why they don’t just do us all a favor and give up is anybody’s guess.”
    “Because it’s Adolf Hitler, sir. That’s why.”
    Ike was a man who operated on percentages and forecasts and compromise. He admired brilliant military strategists, particularly General Robert E. Lee, but Eisenhower’s great talent was as a politician and administrator. He was the glue that held together sometimes prickly Allied forces. He relied on Omar Bradley and George Patton to lead troops on the field. They were Ike’s equivalent of James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, both of whom had been Lee’s top generals during the Civil War.
    Intellectually, Ike understood that Hitler was a fanatic, and yet the concept of ignoring the percentages was hard for him to grasp. Why go on fighting a war you couldn’t win?  
    Hitler had missed his chance. If the Germans had bid for peace six months before, in the weeks leading up to D-Day when Ike had lost sleep over the dismal casualty projections, the terms of a peace agreement would have been quite favorable for the Germans. But there was no need to negotiate terms with the losing side.
    An aide entered with another report. Ike read it, his eyes going wide.
    “The Germans have broken through our lines. Damn it, Beetle! Reports are coming in of hundreds of tanks,