Hunter Sniper

CHAPTER TWO

In the skies overhead, the artillery and antiaircraft guns had also done their work. The burst of flak resembled small black clouds in the moonlit sky. Having surprised the American forces on the ground, the Japanese planes had flown over nearly unscathed. Nearly.

As they watched, one of the Japanese planes was hit, began to trail smoke, and then burst into flame. Ponderously, the plane began to turn, parachutes spilling from it like seeds from a milkweed pod. The burning plane turned toward the distant sea and slowly disappeared from sight, leaving a trail of glowing sky in its wake. The spectacle was mesmerizing, but the action at hand forced the men to turn their gaze away.

If the soldiers had known what they faced, they might not have run headlong toward where they had seen Japanese troops come down. The paratroopers were crack troops that had seen a great deal of action in China. It hadn’t received much attention, because America was busy fighting its own war, but the Chinese had put up a tough fight against the Japanese invaders. Unfortunately, they had been outgunned and poorly supplied, but they certainly had a fighting spirit in defense of their homeland. The Japanese paratroopers had found that out the hard way, and now they faced American troops.

Just beyond the closest trees, the Americans heard rifle shots and submachine-gun fire.

“Doesn’t sound like one of ours,” Philly panted, struggling to keep up with Deke, whose lanky farm boy’s legs ate up the ground.

“Everybody be careful,” Deke called, not sounding nearly as winded as Philly. “Those Japs came down thicker than jam on a buttered biscuit.”

“Whatever that means,” Philly managed, then put his head down and, with a burst of speed, managed to catch up to Deke.

They burst into the clearing, Yoshio on their heels. Deke saw a paratrooper still struggling out of his harness and shot him.

Immediately stitches of muzzle flashes came from their right. Deke dropped to one knee to make himself less of a target and fired at one of the flashes. The enemy soldier went down.

More GIs spilled out of the trees right behind them. Deke heard a grunt of pain and saw one of the GIs fall. After all that they had been through the last few days on their journey through the jungle, the last thing any of them had expected was for Japanese reinforcements to literally drop out of the sky. Deke cursed when he saw another soldier fall.

Deke picked out another target and squeezed the trigger. Next to him, he heard Philly’s rifle fire almost at the same time. That was two down.

The Japanese probably hadn’t planned on making a fight in this spot, which was nothing more than a random clearing in the surrounding trees, but they were doing a good enough job of it.

The Japanese who were left decided not to stick around. Still firing, they retreated into the trees and lost themselves among the brush and undergrowth.

Deke wasn’t about to let them go so easily. His blood was up. After the tension of the last few days, it was as if something inside him had snapped. With a snarl, he ran after the enemy.

“Deke, where the hell do you think you’re going?” Philly called. There was a curse, and he heard Philly coming after him, muttering, “That stupid redneck is gonna get us all killed. Come on, Yoshio.”

That was the last Deke heard before he crashed into the jungle underbrush. Green and lush as it looked, there was nothing soft or forgiving about the forest. Sharp-edged kunai grass at the edge of the clearing cut his hands as he pushed it out of the way. The spiky leaves of the smaller trees jabbed at his face and eyes.

Deke didn’t care. He just wanted to go after the enemy.

Up ahead, in the darkness, he could make out the brush swaying this way and that as someone forced his way through. Deke put his rifle to his shoulder and pressed his eye to the scope. He caught a glimpse of helmet and fired. There was a grunt of pain. Almost immediately one of the paratroopers fired at Deke, the bullet passing so near that he heard it clip the stem of a palm frond as neatly as a pair of garden shears. Damn, that was close. Deke dropped, hoping the next shot would miss him by more of a gap, then fired at the enemy’s muzzle flash. It was hard to say if he hit anything. All he could see now were the ghostly flashes that had played havoc on his night vision.

He stopped running, hearing noises behind him as Philly and Yoshio caught up.

“What the hell was that all about?” Philly wanted to know.

“Hush now, these woods are crawling with Japanese,” Deke replied, then cautiously moved forward, his earlier battle madness having dissipated. He had gone about fifty feet when he came across the body of the Japanese paratrooper he had shot. The man had been solid and well fed; even his uniform looked new. Many of the Japanese they had faced on Leyte so far had shown the signs of meager rations and a struggling supply chain, although it had little impact on their fighting spirit. This man, on the other hand, did not seem to want for anything.

Deke frowned. He found it disturbing that the Japanese seemed to have an endless supply of men with which to feed their war machine. The brass wanted them all to think that the Japanese were just about licked, but that didn’t seem so obvious on the ground.

He reached down and spent a moment examining the dead enemy soldier’s rifle, noting that it was yet another Arisaka, but well oiled. You had to admit that the Japanese made a darn good rifle, even if the M1 had made the bolt-action weapons increasingly obsolete. So what if it had a slower rate of fire? No matter — it would kill you all the same.

Judging by the quiet behind them, it was also evident that Captain Merrick had not opted to lead the rest of his company into the forest in pursuit of the Japanese. Deke, Philly, and Yoshio were on their own.

Deke thought about how many parachutes he had seen drifting down. There had been a lot. An awful lot. He had been more than a little hotheaded in dashing into the jungle, but there was no telling how many Japanese might also be moving through the forest. It was likely that the Japanese paratroopers had a rendezvous point, and it wouldn’t be all that smart for the three of them to stumble across it without any support.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Deke whispered, more than aware that there might be other ears out here, listening. “We need to find the rest of the company.”

Yoshio seemed to have the same thought. Still, he took a moment to go through the dead paratrooper’s pockets. He struck pay dirt when he found a map. Using the red lens of his flashlight so as not to spoil his night vision, Yoshio looked it over.

“What does it say?” Deke asked. The Japanese writing looked like chicken scratch to him, but he knew that Yoshio understood it well enough.

“I think it indicates targets they intend to hit,” Yoshio said. “Captain Merrick may have a better idea. Anyhow, I don’t think this is the place to spread out the map and read it.”

“Agreed,” Philly said. “Listen, Merrick held the rest of the company back at that clearing. Hopefully our guys won’t think we’re the Japanese coming back to get them and shoot us on the way out.”

Deke couldn’t argue with that. Slowly he turned and followed Philly and Yoshio back the way they had come, never taking his eyes off the dark jungle surrounding them, expecting at any moment to see an enemy soldier appear.

As they advanced through the jungle, it soon became clear that they were not alone. But it was not the Japanese they encountered. There were other threats in the night, ones oblivious to the war and indifferent to the struggles of the Japanese or the GIs.

Rounding a bend in the game trail, with Deke leading the way, they found two large green eyes staring at them. Deke froze, staring back without flinching. In the moonlight, the rest of the creature began to coalesce. They could see a powerful feline body, poised to launch itself at them.

They had come face-to-face with a large predator that was also stalking the night. It was a leopard cat, one of the few large predators in the Philippine jungles. Like as not, the leopard cat or its kin had been responsible for some of the death cries they had heard from the darkness tonight.

“What’s that?” Philly asked, sounding startled by the strange sight of glowing eyes staring at them out of the darkness.

Behind Philly, Yoshio muttered something in Japanese. It might have been either a curse or a prayer.

“Don’t move,” Deke whispered.

“Shoot it!” Philly urged.

They were moving single file on the narrow trail, and Philly couldn’t get a shot off without hitting Deke in the back.

“No shooting, goddammit. We’ll have every Japanese paratrooper in the neighborhood down on our heads if you pull that trigger,” Deke replied quietly. “Just keep still. Let’s see what he does.”

It was true that a gunshot would have alerted the Japanese, who were surely lurking somewhere in the forest. What Deke didn’t say to Philly was that it was doubtful that he could have lifted and aimed his rifle before the jungle cat covered the distance between them.

He trusted that his reflexes were quicker, or at least as quick, as any Japanese soldier they might have encountered on the trail. But Deke doubted that he was as quick as a jungle cat.

Maybe it was his imagination, but the old scars on the left side of his face, even the deep ones that raked across his body, flared up, tingling and burning on their own, throbbing with each beat of Deke’s heart. Those scars were evidence of the mauling that had almost killed him as a boy. They had also left one side of his face and most of his torso disfigured and ugly.

These were the scars that the bear that had come down from the mountain had left on him all those years ago. Deke hadn’t been quick enough then to stop the charging bear, and he doubted that he would be quick enough now if the leopard cat sprang at him.

The seconds ticked by.

Ever so slowly the leopard cat seemed to make up its mind that the soldiers either weren’t a threat, or weren’t worth the fight. It wasn’t like they could ask it. The animal gave one last good stare with its green eyes, flicked its tail, and melted off the trail and into the jungle.

Deke realized that he had been holding his breath. He let himself breathe again.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’ve got to say, I’d rather fight the Japs any day than fight that thing.”

When Philly didn’t reply right away, he turned around and found that Philly and Yoshio had retreated by several paces. Only Deke had held his ground.

“Uh, yeah,” Philly said, sounding sheepish.

Deke snorted. “Some help you two were.”

“It looked to me like you had things under control.”

“Come on,” Deke said. “This war ain’t gonna fight itself.”

As they approached the small airfield, they could hear a gun battle taking place. You had to give these Japanese paratroopers credit, Deke thought. They had dropped out of the sky into a hostile landing zone and still managed to regroup quickly and launch an attack. The Japanese attack also appeared to be highly organized, because they had even managed to post a handful of troops to guard their flanks.

They found that out because they ran right into those guards.

Stabs of flame from muzzle flashes punctuated the dark forest ahead. If there was any question about whether those shots were intended for them, that question was answered when they heard the sound of bullets zinging through the night air around them.

“Come on!” Deke shouted, then surged ahead.

“Dammit, Deke!” Philly protested. “Let’s wait for the others to come up.”

It sounded as if the fight at the airfield was not only hot but going badly for their own boys. The sharp crack of the Japanese weapons sounded slightly different from the American rifles, and their bursts outnumbered the smattering of return fire.

Where the hell was the rest of Captain Merrick’s company? Deke wasn’t going to cool his heels while Merrick’s men caught up. Ain’t no time for that. If nothing else, the three of them might be able to take the Japanese attackers by surprise and do some good there. So far, Deke, Philly, and Yoshio were the only cavalry those boys at the airfield were going to get.

Deke wasn’t waiting for anybody else, not if they hoped to have any chance of turning the tide of the fight ahead. He ran toward the sound of the firing, shouting, “Follow me!”