If Cole stuck his nose above the floor level, he was fairly certain he would get shot. So he stuck the .45 up instead and sprayed shots in several directions. The noise was deafening. He surged up the steps and into the belfry, both hands on the gun, ready to fire.
Nobody there.
He was soon followed by Mulholland, Vaccaro and Jolie. "He really is the Ghost Sniper," Jolie said.
"He was here, all right," Cole said. He had noticed a gold-trimmed cigarette butt on the stone floor. With his boot, he toed at an empty shell casing. The Cyrillic markings were just visible. "Our sniper shoots a Russian rifle. It was him."
"He didn't just vanish," the lieutenant said. "He could be hiding."
They made a quick inspection of the tower room. The windows were too narrow to crawl out. There was no attic to hid in. Down below, the oak doors had been barred shut from inside — which meant the sniper hadn't slipped out at the last instant just ahead of them.
"Huh," Cole said.
Vaccaro, still panting from the climb, looked around the empty room. "Reb, I know you're a man of few words, so let me say them for you: Where the hell did he go?"
Cole lingered at one of the slit windows long enough to see the advancing German column. There were an awful lot of Germans heading for Bienville. However, they were forced to stay on the road because of the flooded fields surrounding the town and roadside.
If he could have stayed up in the tower, there was no telling how many he could pick off. Then the Tiger tank fired and a shell whistled close by the tower. If their aim got better, the tower would not be standing much longer.
He started back down the stairs.
"Cole, where are you going?" Mulholland demanded.
"Well, sir, he ain't up here."
They descended quickly, not worrying about an ambush on the stairs this time. But the room below was as empty as ever, with a bare stone floor. The only furnishing was a tattered rug on the floor.
"Did you expect to find that Jerry down here making coffee or something?" Vaccaro asked.
Cole looked at the rug more closely, saw that one corner was flipped up. He reached down and tugged at the rug, revealing the trap door set into the stone floor.
"I'll be damned."
The trap door was awfully heavy, and it helped to have two men to swing it all the way open. A shaft led down into a dark tunnel that smelled of dank, musty earth. Over Cole's shoulder, Vaccaro lit a wooden match and dropped it down the shaft. The sputtering flame revealed the ladder and tunnel below, but no sign of the enemy sniper.
"I'm going after him," Cole said.
"Huh," Vaccaro said.
Nobody had a flashlight, so Vaccaro gave Cole his Zippo lighter.
“Hey, I want that back, so don’t get shot.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that.”
Cole went down the ladder and then stood on the floor of the shaft. He could see the others looking down at him, including Jolie — she had not done very well in following the lieutenant's orders to stay out of harm's way.
"I will meet you at the other end," she said.
"Where's that?" Cole asked.
"It must come out in the marsh," she said. "The priests would have wanted a way to reach the river without being seen."
"I wish we had known about this goddamn tunnel before now," Cole said.
Jolie shrugged. "France is full of secrets."
"Cole, you are one crazy mountain man," Vaccaro said, peering down from above.
Lieutenant Mulholland spoke up. "I won't order you to go after that German," the lieutenant said. "But I won't tell you not to."
"In that case I reckon I'm going to nail that son of a bitch's hide to a barn door," Cole replied.
He had to get down on his hands and knees to enter the tunnel. He flicked the Zippo to get his bearings. The roof and sides of the tunnel were shored up with damp bricks and ancient boards that looked punky with rot. It smelled like an old root cellar. He peered into the darkness that pressed up against the dim light from the flame. The tunnel seemed to go on and on. How long was it and where did it lead? The flickering lighter flame did not reveal much beyond a few feet ahead.
It was awkward trying to crawl forward on his hands and knees while juggling the rifle and a burning lighter. He snapped the lighter shut and was immediately enveloped in darkness. He kept one hand wrapped around the rifle, keeping it more or less pointed ahead of him and ready to fire. He pushed on into the tunnel, less worried about where he was going than by the thought that the Ghost Sniper might be somewhere just ahead, waiting to ambush him.
Cole was totally helpless in the tunnel — there was no way that the German could miss if he suddenly opened fire. Briefly, Cole considered firing a few shots into the darkness ahead in case the German was up there, but decided against it. If the German didn't know he was being followed, Cole would only be tipping his own hand.
Don't give nothin' away. Whoever had the element of surprise held all the cards.
He crept deeper into the tunnel. The dim light from the trap door faded until it was like crawling through a blacksnake's belly.
While the floor of the tunnel felt damp to the touch, the crumbling ceiling was powder dry, so that when his head accidentally brushed the bricks overhead, bits of dirt and mortar rained down. Judging by the debris in his path, someone had recently been this way. He moved ahead blindly, feeling the tunnel seem to press in around him.
Then came a rumbling sound and Cole was enveloped in choking dust. He crawled faster, knowing without seeing it that part of the roof was coming down. Faster, faster. Bricks bounced off his shoulders, but he managed to outpace the crumbling ceiling. The sound he heard was much like a shovelful of dirt hitting the bottom of a hole — that whump sound — only a whole lot louder.
He stopped panting, and half turned in the cramped tunnel to light the Zippo.
"Christ on a cross," he muttered.
It didn't look good. The lighter flame was tiny, but in the depths of the tunnel the flickering light was bright as an explosion, revealing the fact that a good portion of the tunnel had collapsed behind him.
No turning back now. There was only one way out, and that was forward. He felt that his chances of running into the German were slim now, so he took his knife and cut a strip of cloth from the tail of his uniform shirt and wrapped it around the Mauser’s muzzle to keep the mud out. Then Cole kept going.
His hand touched water, and soon he was making his way across a wet, slippery floor. The water grew deeper as he moved ahead, rising around his wrists, his knees, his shoulders. He slung his rifle across his back.
For the first time since entering the tunnel, he stopped.
Water. Why did it have to be water?
His thoughts went back to the day he had almost drowned in Gashey’s Creek while trapping beaver. He had been under a long time, all tangled up in rope and the submerged branches of drowned trees. By all rights he should have died. Feeling the water all around him now and the same blackness, Cole fought back a momentary panic as the darkness seemed to take on weight and viscosity like some tangible thing — oil or a heavy wet blanket. He felt it close in around him and the cold water felt like it was squeezing his chest. He found it difficult to breathe and his heart raced. Even now, the water seemed to be rising. Every fiber of his being screamed get out, get out, get out.
The German sniper had come this way. Cole was sure of it, and he was going after him no matter what.
But where the hell had the German gone? There. Up ahead, barely visible in the distance, Cole could see that the tunnel brightened. He understood now that he was looking at the only way out.