Hunter Sniper

CHAPTER THREE

As Deke ran toward the sound of the fight, the game trail through the jungle narrowed and disappeared, the forest closing in on them like a cattle chute, but Deke kept running pell-mell, shoving aside branches, crashing through the greenery, a one-man bush hog.

It wasn’t how he normally liked to move through the forest, but a kind of battle madness had come over him. He became aware of a constant snarl rumbling at the back of his throat. He wasn’t even himself anymore, he realized, but just an elemental force racing through the trees toward the fight.

They were making as much noise as a herd of buffalo, but considering all the shooting going on up ahead, he doubted anyone would notice. At some point a big spiderweb draped across his face like a net. He clawed it away and kept going. He could hear Philly and Yoshio right behind him.

Their sheer momentum turned out to be a saving grace. If they had been moving slowly, the outcome might have been different.

A figure popped up ahead of Deke. He could see the silhouette, crouched, caught off guard. From the man’s short stature, Deke knew at once that it was a Japanese soldier. One of the paratroopers, probably carried off course, trying to catch up with the rest of his unit.

Philly had seen him too.

“Jap!” he whispered hoarsely.

“Yeah, I see him.”

The paratrooper looked like he was about to launch himself at them, but Yoshio said something in Japanese, “Anata no yunitto wa dokodesu ka?”

Yoshio was asking him, Where is your unit? Yoshio’s words seemed to confuse the enemy paratrooper into thinking that he had run into more of his comrades, but the ruse did not last for long. The soldier scowled, then said, “Anatahadare?”

“He wants to know who the hell I am,” Yoshio whispered, then replied in Japanese: “Watashi wa tomodachidesu.”

Yoshio had told the soldier, I am a friend. Apparently it was the wrong thing to say, or perhaps Yoshio’s accent had given him away. Sure, he spoke Japanese, but he didn’t sound like he’d just come from Tokyo.

Something bright flashed in the paratrooper’s hand. Either a knife or a bayonet. These paratroopers were essentially commandos and had plenty of training with bladed weapons.

No matter how much training he had, not using his rifle turned out to be a mistake.

The hand went up, ready to slash down, the blade once again catching a ray of moonlight, the razor-sharp edge glinting. As the blade started to come down, Deke twisted his lean body out of the way like a mongoose dodging a striking snake. The blade hissed past, cutting only air.

Deke didn’t have time to aim his rifle but fired from the hip at point-blank range, so close that the muzzle blast stabbed out and scorched the paratrooper’s uniform.

The sheer amount of muzzle energy generated by the Springfield packed quite a punch. He hit the enemy paratrooper square in the chest, the force of the impact lifting the smaller man off his feet. The paratrooper tumbled back into the jungle, bladed weapon spinning out of his hand.

Deke didn’t stop to make sure the man was dead, although he had no doubt of it. His momentum carried him right past the crumpled body, and he kept going. Behind him, Philly and Yoshio didn’t stop either.

They didn’t encounter any additional threats, Japanese or otherwise, as they rushed to rejoin Captain Merrick’s company on the airfield perimeter. Up ahead, he saw the trees thinning out and the clearing that indicated they had reached the airfield.

“Coming through!” Deke shouted for the benefit of the soldiers who might be apt to turn their guns on the sounds approaching from the jungle.

He needn’t have worried. Captain Merrick himself stood nearby, standing tall even as Japanese bullets cut the air.

“Hold your fire!” Merrick shouted at the men ready to shoot at the trio that had burst from the jungle growth. To Deke he said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Chasing Japs.” Deke refrained from calling the officer “sir” on the battlefield — it was a surefire way to attract even more attention from any Japanese within earshot.

“There’s plenty right here. Get busy.”

Merrick’s company had quite a fight on their hands. The night blossomed with explosions, stabs of flame, and brilliant streams of machine-gun tracers. It was like the Fourth of July and Hades all wrapped up together.

Amid the overwhelming noise of weaponry, they heard shouted orders — some in English, some in Japanese — the enemy was that close. The air smelled of cordite mingled with the fecund odor of the jungle at night.

Following orders, the sniper team took up position in a foxhole occupied by a dead man. Deke shoved the body aside without thinking, then slid his rifle to his shoulder and his eye to the scope. The flashes and bursts sprang closer, but the telescopic sight severely limited his field of view. This was exactly why he had Yoshio as a spotter.

“On your left!” Yoshio shouted.

Deke swung the rifle that way. Through the scope, he spotted the movement just where Yoshio had said it would be. A shadow separated itself from the larger shadow of a tree trunk. The Japanese soldier had been creeping up on their position. Before the enemy could fire, Deke squeezed the trigger and dropped him.

Off to Deke’s right, Philly was also firing at a target using his own rifle with its telescopic sight. Yoshio was trying to spot for them both, but the action was too fast and fluid. He gave up and turned his full attention to giving direction to Deke — who was the better shot, anyhow. Philly would just have to satisfy himself blasting away at the enemy muzzle flashes.

There were a lot of those. The Japanese paratroopers had converged on the airfield to make their attack, and they seemed to be everywhere at once.

What we could really use is a machine gun, Deke thought.

He would just have to do what he could to help defeat the attack and defend this jungle airfield, one bullet at a time. Though highly accurate, especially in the hands of a skilled marksman like Deke, his Springfield rifle had a slower rate of fire due to it being a bolt-action weapon.

The US Army lacked any official sniper warfare training, unlike the Japanese or the Germans. It was a little ironic, considering the Americans’ reputations as hunters and crack shots. Weren’t they all supposed to be like Daniel Boone and maybe Wyatt Earp? The truth was far from that. However, a little training went a long way, which was why a few renegades like Lieutenant Steele had made the effort to train snipers and put real sniper rifles into the hands of men like Deke and Philly, with devastating effect.

For the most part, the US military doctrine saw itself as a blunt instrument, a hammer blow. Sometimes what you needed was an ice pick, which was exactly the purpose that a sniper served.

The real advantage of a sniper came at the fringes of a battle, or not even during a battle at all. A good sniper learned to pick off the enemy during moments when he least expected it: having a smoke, drinking from his canteen, a careless moment when he stood up to admire the view or joke with a friend. That was when a sniper delivered death, a fatal metallic pill to swallow.

A sniper remained unseen and unheard until that moment when a bullet came out of nowhere. A good sniper would fire one shot and then vanish like smoke before the enemy could pinpoint him. He left death and fear in his mysterious wake.

More than anything, Deke had come to realize, sniping was a head game to strike fear into the enemy in quieter moments. That wasn’t going to happen during a full-fledged firefight.

“Ten o’clock!” Yoshio shouted.

Deke swung the rifle that way and saw a Japanese soldier running right at them. In the flickering light of the battle zone, Deke saw that the enemy wasn’t carrying a rifle but was armed with a stick bomb. These were long poles with a high-explosive charge attached to one end. The Japanese called them Shitotsubakurai. The explosive charge would detonate on impact, essentially being a primitive pressure-sensitive bomb.

It was hard to say what the purpose of the stick was, considering that the amount of explosive would certainly vaporize the soldier delivering the bomb. But if that length of stick gave the soldier some sense of hope that he would somehow survive the attack, so be it.

Through the scope, he could see the Japanese soldier’s open mouth, screaming a battle cry as he charged.

Deke shot him.

Crazy bastard, Deke thought. What was the point of that?

Then a cold stab of realization went through him. Just beyond their foxhole several barrels were stacked. Then more and more barrels. Holy hell. They were sitting right next to the fuel dump for the airfield.

The berserk Japanese soldier hadn’t been trying to break through their lines. He’d been intending to blow up the fuel dump. If he had succeeded, the explosion would have taken out most of the company. As for the airfield, it would be rendered unusable — most likely, at least part of the landing strip would be reduced to a large burned hole in the ground.

All three seemed to figure it out at once. They looked at the stacked piles of highly flammable aviation fuel, at the advancing Japanese paratroopers, and then at one another.

“Dammit!” Philly said. “I don’t want to get blown up.”

Yoshio muttered, “Chikushō.” Oh shit! No translation was required to understand that it was not something that he would have said in front of his mother.

“Yeah,” Deke said. “That last fella was close. Just don’t let them get any closer.”

But the Japanese seemed to have made up their minds that they were going to blow up that fuel stockpile, even if it was the last thing they did. Destroying the airstrip and the fuel dump appeared to be the paratroopers’ primary mission.

Another Japanese soldier broke away from the paratroopers. Like the previous man, he was similarly armed with a stick bomb. He ran at a crouch toward the American position. Incredibly, he seemed to leap over a burst of machine-gun fire lit by tracers and kept right on going.

“It’s another runner, ten o’clock,” Yoshio said.

“I see him,” Philly said.

He fired, but the man did not go down.

“He’s still coming,” Yoshio said.

“Dammit, I’m out!” Philly shouted, fumbling in the dark for another stripper clip. “You’ve got to get him, Deke!”

Deke was already tracking the enemy soldier through his scope. Hitting a moving target was no small feat, even for the best marksman. The challenge was compounded by the flickering, uncertain light of the battlefield. Also, Deke and the others were being shot at. Bullets sang above their helmets, and it took a huge amount of willpower not to duck down out of sheer instinct. There was a very real possibility that Deke would get shot in the head before he could squeeze that trigger.

Deke got his rhythm going, swinging his sights through the man to a point just ahead of him, moving the sight along, matching his speed. With any luck, the target would essentially run right into the path of the bullet.

Easy, easy—

He flinched at the nearby detonation of what sounded like a mortar. Yoshio yelped in pain.

Dammit. Deke got back on target. The Japanese runner was quick. He had already covered too much ground. There was time for just one shot before the runner covered the distance to the fuel depot and detonated that stick bomb.

Deke put everything else out of his head. Time seemed to slow down. He repeated the process of swinging through the man again, matching his pace, holding the crosshairs there. The runner reached the edge of the fuel dump, where a pile of barrels had fallen over and rolled across the airstrip.

The Japanese gave a keening cry, either of terror or victory, nobody could be sure.

Deke squeezed the trigger.

What happened next happened fast. The rifle kicked against his shoulder, the runner tumbled, the stick bomb hit the ground — and exploded.

A blast wave of searing air washed over Deke’s face. Clumps of burning fuel spread across the field and even landed in the jungle, burning like will-o’-the-wisps among the trees.

But nothing else exploded.

As Captain Merrick’s company concentrated their fire, the fight seemed to go out of the enemy paratroopers. Either that or many of them had been killed. Private Frazier opened fire with his Browning Automatic Rifle and swept the jungle’s edge with a long burst. The effect was like a gale force wind scattering the embers of a forest fire. The enemy fire immediately became more sporadic, then died down altogether.

And just like that, the real fight had ended, the desperate one where the outcome had hung by a thread. All that remained now was the mopping up.

It was hard to say how long the battle had gone on. Time had a way of distorting during combat — nothing made sense. There was no real way of measuring it. The movement of hands on a man’s wristwatch was meaningless. What seemed like hours were actually minutes, while the hours themselves ticked by like seconds.

The only proof of the passage of the long night came from the fact that the sky was already growing lighter. Pale streaks on the horizon promised another tropical dawn. However, down here in the closeness of the jungle, it was still plenty dark enough.

“So much for that,” Philly announced. “Now maybe we can all finally get some sleep.”

Normally Deke tended to be the wide-awake one, getting by on less shut-eye and watching the jungle while the others slept. But a sense of exhaustion suddenly hit him, hard as a knockout punch from Joe Louis.

He slumped down into the muddy bottom of the foxhole, closed his eyes, and fell asleep instantly, clutching his rifle to him like the only lover he had known.