Hunter Sniper

CHAPTER FOUR

Exhaustion set in after the nighttime fight against the incursion of Japanese paratroopers, so sleep came quickly, even for men who had only a helmet for a pillow. While Deke slept, a handful of men kept an uneasy watch. An occasional crackle of rifle fire was a reminder that they hadn’t gotten all the paratroopers. But the enemy’s back had been broken, and they had evidently given up on attacking the airfield again.

The soldiers slept as long as they could, but the rising sun and tropical heat soon began to rouse them. Deke had a momentary sense of panic when he didn’t immediately feel his rifle in his hands.

He sat up, frantically looking around. “Where, where—”

His fingertips touched the familiar stock, which had slipped a couple of inches out of his grip while he slept. “There you are.”

His rifle hadn’t gone anywhere. He shook his head, worried that he was overreacting. I’m just tired, is all.

He had managed to snatch a couple hours of sleep. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. He supposed that he was lucky to get even that much shut-eye.

Judging by the faint sounds of snoring nearby, several of the other men were still sleeping, Philly and Yoshio included. Watching the forms of the two sleeping men, Deke felt a surge of affection toward them, what you might call brotherly love. In fact, if he’d had brothers instead of his ornery sister, Sadie, he was sure this was how he would have felt toward them.

Deke was surprised to discover that sense of bonding toward Philly and Yoshio. After all, he had thought that those last few difficult years on the failing farm and then in the bleak boardinghouse in town — not to mention the loss of his ma and pa, good people beaten down by a hard life — had leached out the last of any emotion in him. Whatever was left that the bear hadn’t clawed out of him already.

Deke discovered that he’d been wrong about that. It had taken a war and all that killing and fighting to realize that there was still something human left in him. He still had a little brotherly love left to give someone other than Sadie. Don’t that beat all.

Deke shrugged, stuffed a cork in the cracked bottle of his emotions for now, and turned to matters at hand.

None of the sergeants came by with orders, which meant that Captain Merrick didn’t appear to be in any hurry to move out, meaning that they would likely sit here guarding the airfield and fuel dump for a while longer, so Deke set to work cleaning his rifle. The gunfire he’d heard earlier had been distant, and there seemed to be a good chance that he could take fifteen minutes to disassemble the rifle for cleaning without needing it to shoot anybody.

Living in these conditions, it was easy to let something like cleaning your rifle slide, but as far as Deke was concerned, his rifle came first. He might need a shave, his face was dirty, his uniform slick with mud and who knew what else, but he’d have a clean rifle.

He tackled that chore even before he’d had anything to eat for breakfast — a well-oiled weapon might mean the difference between life and death.

If Deke had felt some fondness for his foxhole mates this morning, it didn’t compare to what he felt for his sniper rifle.

First of all, the well-made Springfield seemed indestructible. Its origins went back at least a decade before World War I, a conflict that had put the rifle to the test and honed its functionality to perfection as a combat weapon.

Deke’s rifle had been manufactured the year before at the federal armory on the banks of the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. It was a Model 1903A4 Springfield rifle. The Weaver telescopic sight had been made in El Paso, Texas, with a magnification of 2.5, which meant that the details of the surrounding jungle terrain sprang much closer. Japanese and German optics both had a reputation for being more precise and finely made, but the sturdy Weaver scope got the job done.

The Germans and Japanese seemed convinced of their manufacturing superiority when it came to weapons, even if their output could not keep pace with US production, but in this case, American steel, wood, and optics had been combined into a superior rifle.

Finally, the rifle was a reliable workhorse, or maybe even a sturdy mule. The Springfield was highly forgiving compared to the semiautomatic Garand M1, with its more complex moving parts. It hadn’t let Deke down so far. However, there was no sense trusting the rifle’s reliable function to luck.

He set to work, field stripping the rifle and pulling the bolt free. The metal surface was indeed grimy with gunpowder residue and minuscule bits of metallic fouling. There was possibly mud mixed in there, and the ever-present tropical moisture wasn’t helping. Deke set to work, knowing that it was nothing that a rag and gun oil couldn’t handle.

The metal soon gleamed again and smelled of gun oil rather than sulfur. As far as Deke was concerned, nothing smelled better than gun oil. Hell, if they ever put gun oil into an aftershave, he would have bought it.

Finishing up the rifle, once again ready for action, he set it aside. Deke felt tired, wrung out, even more than usual. He wished he had a cup of strong coffee, maybe with some sugar in it, but that wasn’t going to happen. He settled for a long drink of tepid canteen water, the metallic taste sour in his dry mouth.

Most of the men had managed a few hours of sleep after an exhausting night, but it hadn’t been enough. Their sleep banks were long overdrawn.

Next to him, Philly and Yoshio finally began to stir.

“Look at that, I slept on a rock and didn’t even notice,” Philly remarked groggily. He touched the small of his back and winced. “Must have been tired. I’ll feel it today, that’s for damn sure.”

“You sure you didn’t sleep on that rock with your face?”

“Very funny, country boy. Aren’t you just a ray of sunshine?” Philly yawned. “Damn, when we finally get back home, the second thing I’m going to do is sleep for a week.”

“What’s the first thing you are going to do?” Yoshio asked, unable to resist.

“I’ll tell you what, Yoshio. Since you asked. The first thing I’m going to do is look up Nancy Holland and see if she will give a war hero like me a warm welcome home. With any luck, I’ll spend the week sleeping in her bed. When she lets me sleep, that is.”

Deke snorted. “Good luck with that. When I get home, the first thing I’m gonna do is get something decent to eat. Maybe a big breakfast with sausage and gravy. Hell, I’d settle for a hamburger.”

“Ice cream,” Yoshio muttered dreamily. “Fresh strawberries with cream. Orange juice.”

“You dopes can go home and eat hamburgers and banana splits if you want to,” Philly said. “I’m gonna go home and eat some pussy. Maybe put a pickle on it.”

Deke couldn’t help but laugh at Philly’s crude humor. The conversation of most young soldiers usually focused on the things they had to do without in the jungle — food, booze, and women — with the usual amount of bragging, boasting, and wistfulness mixed in. Philly was just saltier than most, and a bigger liar.

Now that the sun had risen above the hills to the point that the sunlight finally managed to flood across the small airfield, Deke looked above the rim of the foxhole at the morning view. His good mood evaporated at the sight before him.

Daylight revealed the full carnage from the previous night’s battle. Several dead Japanese lay scattered across the airfield. Some were balled up into fetal positions they had assumed during their agonized dying throes, while others sprawled exactly where they had fallen, killed instantly, perhaps by one of Deke’s bullets. He didn’t feel any remorse, however. The Japanese would gladly have done the same to him.

These had been crack Japanese troops fighting a desperate battle, and they had sold their lives dearly. Maybe a few had slunk back into the jungle, but it looked to Deke as if most of the paratroopers had been killed here last night.

Deke looked around and saw where he had shot that Japanese bomber before he could reach the fuel dump. Seeing the number of avgas barrels now visible in daylight, Deke realized it would’ve made quite a bang. Most of the company would have been incinerated. Although Deke’s bullet had brought him down, the dead Japanese soldier’s body was in several pieces thanks to the bomb he’d been carrying. He spotted what looked like a leg, and a few feet away, a hand still gripped the remnants of the stick bomb.

Ordinarily such a scene would have been nauseating, but Deke now took it in stride. What were they all becoming?

If he needed any reassurance about the carnage, all he had to do was look at the spot where a few dead GIs had been gathered at one end of the company’s position. The four bodies had been laid out in a neat row, their faces covered with coats or blankets, giving them some measure of dignity in death. A detail trooped past with entrenching tools to dig graves. Between the heat and the inadequacy of the digging tools, it was doubtful that the graves would be very deep. It was too far to carry the bodies, so a shallow jungle grave would have to do.

No such effort was made for the dead Japanese — they would rot where they had fallen. There was little doubt that the vultures and other scavengers would pick at their bones, because little went to waste in the jungle. Again, Deke felt a kind of numbness at the thought. After all, these bastards had been trying to kill them just last night.

With some bad luck, or if the night had been darker and they hadn’t spotted the parachutes coming down, it might have been all of them lying out there. Deke still didn’t feel like he hated the enemy, but more and more, he was starting to wonder.

“Damn these Japs,” he muttered to no one in particular. The words simply vented like steam from a cast-iron radiator.

“What?” Philly asked.

“Nothin’.” Deke shook his head. No point in trying to explain himself.

A sergeant came around, looking for Yoshio. That in itself was a little unusual. Having been attached to the company as scout-snipers, the three of them — along with Danilo when he was around — were officially part of the company, yet somehow were not.

Captain Merrick had seemed to realize that they knew their business and left them to it. Most of the time, their job was to lead the column down the jungle trail, on the lookout for any threats of ambush. When there was trouble, they were the first to deal with it.

“You’re that guy who speaks Japanese?” the sergeant asked.

“Hai,” said Yoshio, who was not without his own sense of humor.

The sergeant stared at him a long beat, not without a little malice. Yoshio looked Japanese, and he sounded Japanese — some GIs just couldn’t get used to the idea that he wasn’t the enemy, even if he was as American as they were.

“Yeah, well,” the sergeant finally said, “Captain Merrick’s got a prisoner. He wants you to question him.”

Yoshio grabbed his rifle and helmet, which he’d taken off hoping for respite from the morning heat, and scrambled out of the foxhole.

Deke and Philly looked at each other, then grabbed their own gear and followed Yoshio out of the hole.

Captain Merrick had made his HQ in a foxhole near the center of the line of holes that delineated the company’s position at the perimeter of the airfield. The only concession to it being the HQ seemed to be that the hole was somewhat bigger, was also occupied by a radioman and the company’s last remaining medic, and, stretched across the top, had battered camouflage netting that struggled to block the harshest rays of the sun.

Crouching in the hole was Captain Merrick, leaning over a wounded Japanese soldier. The man was propped up against the sides of the foxhole. His arms hung limply at his sides, and it was evident that he wouldn’t have had the strength to sit up on his own. The soldier who had been a terrifying enemy a few short hours ago was nothing but a pathetic dying figure now.

Merrick was crouched over the wounded man and leaning forward as if to hear what the captured Japanese had to say. The man was speaking softly, but in his own language, leaving Merrick looking frustrated. At least the man was talking. If they wanted to find out what the enemy soldier had to say, they didn’t have much time.

The Japanese soldier groaned when Merrick touched him, but refused even a drink of water with a weak shake of his head. Deke always expected the enemy to be older somehow, battle-hardened warriors, but this Japanese looked like he might be nineteen or twenty, younger than Deke.

Deke could see a large open gash in the man’s thigh, almost to the bone. Thick, dark blood had collected in puddles around the wound, despite an effort to apply bandages. The smells lingering in the bottom of the foxhole were not good ones — sweaty bodies, mud wet from the dying man’s blood, a whiff of intestines.

Captain Merrick sat back on his haunches when he saw Yoshio slide into the foxhole.

“Sir,” said Yoshio. “You wanted to see me?”

Merrick nodded at the wounded prisoner. “This one is singing like a canary, but I’ll be damned if I can understand a word of that gibberish. You’re supposed to be an interpreter, right? Maybe you can make out what he’s saying. Headquarters has been on us to gather some intelligence. Something, anything, that they can use to give us an idea of how many Japs are still out here and what sort of supplies they have. See what you can find out.”

Yoshio changed places with the captain, leaning over the prisoner. The man’s eyes were shut — for all they knew, he might already be dead.

Although it was true that Yoshio was an interpreter, there had been precious few opportunities for him to use his language skills. Not many Japanese surrendered. The ones who were captured tended to be badly wounded, like this man, too weak to take their own lives or beyond caring.

Yoshio spoke a few words to the dying man, whose eyes flicked open in surprise at the sound of his native tongue.

He responded with a few halting words spoken quietly. To Deke’s ears, Japanese was a surprisingly harsh and guttural language. It seemed to roll around in the chest and the back of the throat before the words erupted like short, angry barks.

“What’s he saying?” Captain Merrick demanded.

“He says that he grew up on a farm outside the village of Shirakawa,” Yoshio answered. “As a boy, it was his job to tend the chickens and cattle. He had hoped to return there after the war and marry the daughter of a merchant in the village.”

“I doubt that HQ wants to know any of that, Private,” Merrick said. “Ask him how many more paratroopers there are. Where is their base? Where do they intend to drop next?”

Yoshio translated the captain’s questions into Japanese, but the wounded enemy paratrooper just shook his head and uttered a few guttural words in reply.

“Well?” Merrick demanded, having appeared to hang on every word. He seemed desperate to provide HQ with something that they could use.

“Sir, he says to look around the airfield. Do you not see the bodies fallen like flower petals? There are no more paratroopers coming.”

“All right, I suppose that’s something. Ask him how many planes left their base.”

Yoshio leaned close to do as Merrick ordered. The paratrooper’s words had been faint, and his chest barely rose up and down. Yoshio said something in Japanese, but there was no response. “That is it, sir. He is gone.”

“Dammit! HQ will be glad to know that there shouldn’t be any additional drops — if we can believe this Nip.”

“For what it is worth, I believe that he was telling the truth, sir.”

Merrick snorted. “You believe him, huh? What was he, a cousin of yours or something?”

“I interviewed my share of prisoners on Guam and now on Leyte, sir. Dying men tend to tell the truth.”

“If you say so, Private. From one Jap to another, right?”

“Sir—”

“That will be all. You are dismissed, Private. The rest of you, we’ll be moving out in an hour.”

The three of them exited the makeshift company HQ and headed back to their own foxhole.

“Got to say, Merrick was kind of an asshole back there,” Philly muttered once they were out of earshot of the captain.

Deke nodded in the direction of the burial detail. “I reckon you might be, too, if you were the one who had to write all those letters home.”

“Aw, Merrick can go screw himself,” Philly said. “We all know we can trust you, Yoshio.”

Yoshio gazed out over the field of Japanese dead beginning to bloat in the heat and didn’t say anything at all.

An hour later, as promised, the order came to move out, and they left the airfield and the stinking bodies behind.