Jungle Sniper

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The sun came out in the morning, instantly transforming the wet air to steam. On the trail, the jungle that had seemed so mysterious and even threatening at night was lit by dappled sunlight that streamed down through the trees and fronds of vegetation. Mist rose up and caught the glow of the morning sun. Droplets of moisture trapped in the myriad of spider webs sparkled like jewels.

Deke found himself thinking that he might not mind returning to this place someday when peace returned. What a different experience it would be to explore the Philippine mountain slopes without the threat of Japanese attack. Seen by the morning light, the jungle held a million wonders.

But their reality was that they were in the heart of war. If he forgot that for an instant, it could be disastrous not just for himself, but for the entire unit he was scouting for.

Besides, there was not much time to contemplate their surroundings. Within minutes of the sun’s appearance, Captain Merrick had them up and moving.

“Frazier, where the hell are you? I want you and your BAR gun up front,” he said. “It’s been too quiet, and I don’t like it. If anything moves on the trail ahead of us, I want you to turn the trees into toothpicks.”

“You got it,” Frazier replied.

Most BAR gunners were big men, considering that they had to haul the heavy BAR weapon along with ammunition, and it turned out that Private Frazier was no exception. Well over six feet tall and broad shouldered, he handled the sixteen-pound weapon with ease. The Browning Automatic Rifle used a twenty-round magazine that added to its weight.

The BAR gunner joined Philly and Yoshio near the front of the column.

“Try not to shoot my buddy in the ass with that thing,” Philly said.

Private Frazier snorted. “Your buddy, the sniper? He looks mean.”

“You have no idea.”

“Listen, if I start shooting, chances are your buddy will have walked into a Japanese ambush. He and that Filipino will already be dead.”

Philly just shook his head because he couldn’t argue with that.

Deke and Danilo once again led the way, with a gap between them and the rest of the column.

“Buenos días,” Danilo said, nodding at Deke after the Filipino had bundled away his hammock and mosquito netting.

That son of a bitch actually looks well rested, Deke thought.

They headed out once more, Deke registering the tiredness of his body that only amplified the weight of the heavy, damp uniform and boots.

Today’s weather was already shaping up to be much different. By midday they had climbed higher, and the jungle thinned out, replaced by tall stands of kunai grass — jungle grass in the soldiers’ parlance. Some of the clumps stood more than six feet high—perfect ambush cover, Deke thought ruefully. He noticed that Danilo moved forward more cautiously.

The trail followed a ridge through the high country. The strange thing was that it didn’t appear to have rained at all at this higher elevation, or if it had, the sun and heat had evaporated any trace of moisture. Grass crackled underfoot. The trees had retreated, leaving no shade other than a few scrubby bushes. It was less humid at these higher elevations — just plain hot as the sun beat down.

The morning trek passed uneventfully. Just before noon, Captain Merrick called a brief halt. Nobody was very hungry, not with the heat, but they welcomed the chance to get off their feet. However, the lack of shade meant that the halt left the men baking in the sun. In the middle of the day, there was little shade offered by the scrub trees. It wasn’t much of a relief. The column moved on after twenty minutes.

Water was becoming a problem. With the rain yesterday, none of the soldiers had thought to refill their canteens. This high up, they didn’t pass any springs or streams. As the sun baked the soldiers, canteens were emptied by the thirsty GIs. Soldiers began to beg water off buddies who still had something in their canteens.

Deke shook his canteen, realizing that he was starting to run dry. He wanted to kick himself, thinking of all the rain that had fallen yesterday during their hike through the thickest portion of the jungle. Why the hell hadn’t he bothered to refill his canteen then?

There was just a swallow or two of warm water left swishing around in the bottom of his canteen. Damn it all. Maybe Philly has got some water. As for Danilo, the man must have been part camel because Deke hadn’t seen him take a drink yet.

Sweat in his eyes, Deke was distracted by thoughts of water, rather than giving the surroundings his full attention. They had reached a high open plateau without a lick of cover on it aside from the kunai grass and scattered boulders. This terrain was as different as could be from the thick forest they had passed through yesterday.

He listened to the sounds around him. The birds and insects were silent, and it was eerily quiet. Never a good sign. Far in front of the column, Deke and Danilo exchanged worried glances.

There was higher ground off to their left, a ridge that overlooked the plateau. The plateau itself dropped away into a series of steep, brush-covered ravines that would provide perfect cover for a sniper. It was just where Deke himself would have been hiding, had the tables been turned.

Then the anxious silence was shattered by the crack of an enemy sniper’s rifle. From the trail behind him, Deke heard the pained cry of a wounded soldier.

“Japs!” somebody shouted, and the soldiers scrambled for cover.

One of the soldiers was on his knees, both hands grasping his bloody belly as if trying to hold in his guts. The Japanese sniper had shot him through his stomach. Gut shot. It was just where you would shoot a man if you wanted him to die slowly and painfully. Deke believed that it went against some kind of code to shoot a man on purpose that way, enemy or not. The enemy had deliberately left the soldier with a lingering, painful wound.

Deke felt sick. He looked away and tried to block out the sounds of the dying soldier’s cries. Along with a sense of horror, Deke felt himself getting angry. Damn those Japs.

Another bullet whip-cracked past Deke’s head, and he hit the dirt. To his surprise, Danilo was already there. Damn but the Filipino was quick. Another bullet cut the air where Deke had been standing an instant before.

Other soldiers weren’t so quick or so lucky. Several men fell as the quick pop, pop, pop of the smaller-caliber Japanese rifles came from the ridge above and from the cover of the ravines below. They were being shot at from all directions. The fortunate casualties dropped in their tracks, killed instantly by well-placed shots. The less-fortunate ones fell wounded, their bright blood staining the brown, tinder-dry kunai grass with sprays and droplets of crimson.

“Medic!” someone shouted. “Doc!”

The medics ran to do their job, but they were targeted by the enemy snipers. As Deke watched, one medic spun around like a top, struck in the shoulder by a sniper.

The small-caliber Japanese rifles did not always kill instantaneously, requiring more precise aim because they didn’t pack the wallop of a US .30–06 round. Then again, Deke was convinced that the Japanese weren’t always shooting to kill — the man wounded in the belly being a case in point.

One of the more pernicious strategies he had witnessed was for the Japanese to wound a man out in the open. It went against every fiber of a soldier’s being to leave his buddy like that. However, when he left cover to help the wounded man, a Japanese sniper would pick him off.

“Stay under cover!” Merrick shouted. “Don’t let the Japs lure you out.”

Soldiers cursed as they abandoned trying to retrieve their wounded buddies. The ones who disobeyed and tried to help were soon lifeless corpses sprawled in the jungle grass, hit by bullets coming at them from several directions at once.

More orders were given to dig in. Some soldiers returned fire, while others wielded shovels, trying to scratch out foxholes in the rocky soil of the plateau.

Deke looked around for Danilo and finally spotted him behind a boulder, rifle to his shoulder. The Filipino had the right idea. It was time to pick off some Japs.

From the cover of a cluster of boulders, Deke looked up to see the ridge from which the Japanese snipers were firing. Bad as it was, he realized that it could have been worse. The ridge lay between them and the Japanese roadblock. If the Japanese had placed mortars up there, the GIs would’ve been dead meat. As it was, they’d already taken a few casualties, and now they were pinned down here.

Like the others, Deke found himself trapped by the enemy fire. They were all sitting ducks up here on the ridge. His only option was to move down into the ravine and try to work his way back up the mountain to the right, where the Japanese had to be coming from. He rolled over to get a better look at the landscape surrounding them.

The terrain set the perfect stage for an ambush, which was so cleverly disguised that they never saw any sign of the Japanese. They had walked right into the Japanese trap. The ground was so good for an ambush that Deke found himself envious. If the tables had been turned, he realized that it was just the ground that he himself would have chosen to stage a sniper attack.

All through yesterday’s trek, then today, they had seen no sign of the enemy except for occasional footprints. Now it was apparent that the Japanese had pushed deep into the heart of the peninsula to make their stand against the Americans.

It was hard to say just how many Japanese there were, but he didn’t think that Merrick’s company was outnumbered. They were just being outsmarted and outgunned.

Deke’s mind worked furiously as he tried to figure a way out of the trap. The options were few. He decided that Captain Merrick’s best bet for saving his company was to get off the ridge and into the cover provided by the ravines. But with most of the company pinned down, that wasn’t an option.

Philly came running through the kunai grass, Yoshio on his heels. A bullet kicked up dirt at Philly’s feet.

“Get down, you dang fool,” Deke said, reaching up and pulling Philly down into the long grass. Yoshio dove into the grass headfirst as bullets snapped the air around him.

“Hey, Deke!” Philly shouted in his ear, even though he wasn’t more than a foot away. “You got any ideas?”

“Yeah, go to the beach and bring back some mortars to blow these bastards to hell. If we had a flamethrower, or those mortars, we could maybe root them out of there.”

“OK, if I do that, it will take me a couple of days to get there and back. How about a better idea?”

“Start shooting Japs,” Deke said. “How does that sound?”

“I would if I could, but I can’t see any Nips. They’ve got good cover.”

“Yep, there is that,” Deke agreed, even as he began using the scope to scan for targets. “Good thing for us that they don’t have any mortars, or we wouldn’t even be here. As it stands now, they’re gonna have to kill us slowly.”

He hadn’t seen any sign of mortars. Maybe the Japs were saving them as a surprise, letting the GIs get their hopes up. In an effort to travel light and fast, the Americans hadn’t brought any mortars with them into the jungle. Those would have been useful. Maybe the Japs had found it just as difficult to carry supplies using the jungle trail. Good thing — the ambush could have been much worse.

What the Japanese did have was a Nambu machine gun set up on the high ground. The steady and rapid peck, peck, peck of the machine gun targeted any movement on the plateau.

Captain Merrick had decided that he’d had enough of that. Off to his right, Deke heard Merrick shouting for the BAR gunner. “Frazier, get your ass in gear and hose down that Japanese machine gun!”

Private Frazier didn’t need to be told twice. Against all odds, he wasn’t shot down when he leaped up to get better control of the BAR, making himself a target in the process. Aiming the BAR in the direction of the hilltop that the Japanese were firing down from, he unleashed a long burst. Clods of dirt and bits of shrubs whirled up as he walked the burst along the enemy position. The shooting from that sector fell quiet. Frazier dropped back under cover behind a boulder before the Japanese could take him out. He slammed in another magazine.

“I’ll be damned,” Philly said. “That was impressive.”

“Waste of ammo,” Deke grumped. “I’ll bet he didn’t even hit anything.”

The team of snipers went to work, fighting back the only way they could. Yoshio was using binoculars to glass the ravines, calling out targets as he did so.

“Two o’clock, behind that big bush,” Yoshio said.

Deke put his sights there and fired. The grunt of satisfaction that came from Yoshio indicated that Deke had hit his target.

Deke worked the bolt. “Next,” he said.

“Do you see that ravine on our right? Halfway up, I saw a glint. Something caught the sunlight. Might be a rifle scope.”

Deke peered through the scope but didn’t see any targets. “You sure?”

He heard Yoshio suck in a breath. At first he feared that Yoshio had been hit. But then Yoshio said, “I don’t believe it.”

“What?”

“You know that sniper from Hill 522? Ikeda. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that’s him.”

Deke swung the rifle in that direction and was rewarded with a glimpse of a Japanese soldier wearing a field cap with a havelock, or “sun cape.” He seemed to be issuing orders to other soldiers, who were unseen. Something about the determined set of the shoulders looked familiar. Otherwise the man was unremarkable, just another Japanese soldier. But in his gut Deke knew it was the same man.

That was when he saw the rifle in the enemy soldier’s hands. It was an Arisaka with a telescopic sight.

Instantly Deke put his crosshairs on the Japanese sniper. But it was as if the man had read his mind. No sooner had he begun to pull the trigger than the man took cover, disappearing from sight. The man knew better than to stay out in the open too long. Deke’s brain had already set his finger into motion, and the rifle fired into empty space.

“Yeah, that’s him all right,” he said.

“Where did he go?” Yoshio asked. “I don’t see him.”

As it turned out, Deke’s attempt to shoot Ikeda hadn’t gone unnoticed. A bullet struck the rock behind which Deke was hiding. Then another, glancing right off the top of the rock. Too damn close.

“He figured out where we’re at,” Deke said. “Keep your head down.”

Peering through the scope, Deke had a good idea of where Ikeda was hidden. There were a couple of big rocks up on the ridge. The cleft between them created a perfect shooting spot. That’s just where I’d be, Deke thought.

He put his crosshairs on the rock, fired, and raised a puff of dust.

In return, a bullet smacked into his own rock. That’s him, all right.

The enemy sniper shouted something. Deke was too far away to hear it clearly amid the shooting, but he was fairly certain that it was a taunt. “Hey, Charlie!”

I am sick and tired of these Japs. He worked the bolt and took aim through the scope, waiting for his chance.