Jungle Sniper

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

He crouched alone in the darkness, all coiled energy and sinew, like some jungle beast. He held himself perfectly still and quiet. Noises from the jungle filled the night — the cry of a night bird, the singing of insects, wind strumming the branches, and the growing rumble of thunder as the storm approached.

Slowly the Japanese began to reveal their positions — a cough here, a muttered word there. He couldn’t see the enemy soldiers, of course, but he had a sense of where they were spread out around the ravine. They had a strong position against any sort of attack that came along the spine of the ridge, but they would not be expecting an attack on the ravine.

Grasping the solid rifle in his hand, feeling the heft of wood and iron, Deke felt a kind of power flow into him. It was the power of the predator, the hunter. At this moment, the Japanese were nothing more than prey.

Some part of the bear that had almost killed Deke as a boy seemed to live on inside him. The bear had left him scarred for life, but something of the bear’s power resided in him. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Sadie had told him that once, and he had taken her words to heart.

It wasn’t something he could ever admit to anyone, but he enjoyed this sense of power. There was no greater thrill than seeing an enemy soldier in his crosshairs, pressing the trigger, and sending a bullet to bury itself into the man with that satisfying thunk of lead hitting home. The fight on the ridge, Dickie Shelby being shot down after fetching the canteens, and most of all his inability to get the Japanese sniper Ikeda in his crosshairs had leached away that feeling and left him feeling beaten. Then again, Dickie had been right when he had pointed out that there was nobody better at this than Deke.

The tide had turned. He was a hunter again. There was nothing on God’s green earth that gave a man power like a rifle did.

And yet Deke wasn’t foolhardy. He was just one man, and the Japanese were many. They had trained to fight at night. Even now they might be planning an attack on Captain Merrick’s men sheltering on the jungle trail.

He touched the hilt of his bowie knife. If it came to it, he might have to rely on the blade if he encountered any Japanese before the rest of the company was in position. A single rifle shot would give him away.

What he needed was a trick, a ruse.

The wind was picking up. A few drops of rain touched his face under the brim of his jungle hat. The approaching storm might work in his favor, providing cover for his movements.

In the flicker from the lightning, a gnarled shrub took on the shape of a man. It gave Deke a start, but it also gave him an idea.

Growing up on the farm, they’d often had to contend with all sorts of critters intent on raiding their garden or crops. Birds, mostly. You couldn’t be there to shoo them away all the time, so they relied on a scarecrow to do the job for them. Sadie had been especially good at making the scarecrows, using a stuffed grain sack for a face and tattered old pants and shirts filled with straw. In the Cole family, the last stop for worn-out clothes was a scarecrow in the garden. Deke had to admit that there were times when a scarecrow dressed in his old rags had looked downright lifelike and spooky, like a doppelgänger.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was you standin’ around the garden,” Sadie had remarked. She had grinned. “I’ve got to say, one of you is bad enough.”

It was just what he needed now. Two versions of himself. One to distract the Japanese — and one to kill them.

Scrounging on the ground, he found just what he was looking for. A longer branch that he could post upright, and a shorter crosspiece. Using his boot laces, he quickly lashed the shorter branch crosswise to the upright post to form a cross-like shape.

He didn’t have any spare tattered clothes, but he did have his uniform. He slipped off his trousers and shirt, then hung them on the scarecrow frame. Like many GIs in the jungle, he had long since given up on underwear and gone commando. Dressing the scarecrow meant that he had completely undressed himself.

He used his bowie knife to cut a few leafy branches to fill out his clothing. He tied one final stick to the arms, as though the scarecrow were grasping a rifle. Maybe it wasn’t as good as one of Sadie’s scarecrows, but it would get the job done.

Now it was beginning to rain in earnest as the storm blew in. Deke worked his way through the ravine, climbing the ridge, moving awkwardly on account of dragging along the scarecrow. He had slung the rifle and kept the big knife in one hand, hoping and praying that he didn’t run into any Japanese.

Slowly he climbed the ridge. This same ground had been hot and dry during the daylight. Now his feet slipped as the thunderstorm poured buckets of rain on his head. The task was made doubly hard by the fact that his boots flopped on his feet, the laces having been used for the makeshift scarecrow.

As the storm struck, the surrounding brush and jungle beyond was transformed into a confusing patchwork of blowing leaves and shifting shadows. Deke reckoned that any Japanese soldier with good sense was keeping his head down — certainly not looking for the strange sight of a buck-naked GI carrying a scarecrow up the hill. Most of the Japanese would probably have turned tail and run at such a spectacle. Deke smiled at the thought.

He managed to reach the top of the ridge, slipping one last time and gashing his knee on a rock. He cursed, but it didn’t do much good, considering that he had to be so quiet about it.

Still no Japs in sight. The jungle squall was making him muddy, wet, and miserable, but at least it was keeping the Japanese hunkered down.

He planted the scarecrow at the far end of the ridge, out in the open, near where the trail entered the jungle on the other side. It would be the last direction that the Japanese would expect an attack to come from — if they expected any attack at all from the American troops.

As a final touch, Deke stuck his broad-brimmed jungle hat on top of the stick. Then he ran at a crouch through the downpour, tropical rain warm on his bare shoulders, and slithered behind a big rock maybe twenty yards away.

He set his rifle across the rock and stretched out in a pool of jungle goop behind it, getting mud and decomposing leaves into places he didn’t want to think about. Didn’t matter. He pushed any thoughts of discomfort from his mind.

He put his eye to the scope and cupped the butt of the rifle to his shoulder. Once again he felt the power of the rifle flowing through him. The storm and his own physical discomfort melted away as his world shrank to the size of what he could see through the telescopic sight.

The scarecrow stood out on the ridge like some crazed sentinel, the dancing lightning appearing to give it motion. Even down here among the trees, the sharp crack of thunder was enough to give one pause. It would be one hell of a thing to get killed by a lightning bolt while on the verge of attacking the Japanese. Deke settled down to wait, but he didn’t have to wait for long.

Shouts rang out through the noise of the storm as the Japanese spotted the scarecrow. Somebody opened fire, and Deke picked off the silhouette illuminated by the muzzle flash. His own rifle shot was drowned out by the confusion of the storm and the Japanese gunfire. He fired again. Worked the bolt. Fired again. And again.

But the Japanese weren’t fooled for long. He couldn’t understand the words, but he heard the tone of command that seemed to say, Cease fire.

On the ridge before Deke, a figure stepped forward. Deke thought that he recognized the set of the shoulders, but more than that, he spotted the telltale noncommissioned officer’s hat with its long fabric havelock that came down and covered the man’s neck. Lightning forked the sky, and in the blinding flash Deke saw the Arisaka rifle with its telescope sight in the man’s hands. Ikeda.

He put his rifle sights right between Ikeda’s shoulder blades.

Deke reckoned that it would have been more sporting to give the man a shout. Give him a chance to turn around and defend himself, or at least to know that he was about to die.

To hell with that.

Deke squeezed the trigger.

At the first growls of the storm on the horizon, Ikeda had welcomed the opportunity to launch a raid against the Americans he knew were cowering in the jungle, probably along the path that led to the ridge.

The Americans had been beaten back from the ridge during daylight, and he was sure that they would try again at dawn. He and the other Japanese did not intend for them to sleep well, he thought with a rueful smile.

The storm arrived even faster than he had expected, wind gusting through the trees and forks of lightning in the sky. Some of his fellow soldiers cowered among the rocks, which he found amusing. Considering all that they had faced, a storm seemed to be the least of their worries.

Cutting through the growing noise of wind and thunder, he heard excited shouts and then gunshots from the other side of the ridge. What was going on? Were they under attack? It would have been a bold move by the Americans. Rifle at the ready, Ikeda hurried in that direction to investigate.

In a pulse of lightning, he saw a lone figure standing on the ridge. The figure wore an American uniform and stood defiantly, not moving even as the Japanese troops began firing at him.

What caught Ikeda’s attention more than anything else was the hat that the lone soldier wore. It was a broad-brimmed bush hat with one side pinned up — exactly what the American sniper wore. He had faced this same sniper on the ridge today, and even during the Americans’ raid on Guinhangdan Hill, when they had managed to knock out the massive battery guarding Leyte Gulf.

The other soldiers couldn’t seem to hit the man, but Ikeda had no doubts about his own marksmanship. He put the rifle to his shoulder and looked through the telescopic sight. At this range he couldn’t miss.

But the lightning faded and plunged the ridge into darkness. Ikeda cursed silently and waited, still as a statue himself.

Another bolt of lightning revealed the American sniper still standing there. Ikeda felt himself both surprised and outraged by the way the American seemed to scoff at them, as if sure that the Japanese were such poor shots.

Ikeda knew that he would not miss. As the flash of lightning lingered, he put his sights on the defiant figure and fired.

He worked the bolt of his Arisaka rifle, stamped with the chrysanthemum emblem of Emperor Hirohito. He had to wait a few moments for the next flash of lightning. To his amazement, the figure still stood on the ridge. Now a machine gun opened fire, hurling tracers at the figure, which still didn’t move.

What? How?

Ikeda realized that the figure was a trick. It was nothing more than a kakashi. A scarecrow. Enraged, he started to run toward it to tear the thing down, then thought better of it with so many soldiers firing wildly at the ragged scarecrow.

The enemy must have erected the kakashi as a diversion. Where would the enemy sniper be? Behind them, that was where. Ikeda started to turn.

Too late.

He felt a hammer blow between his shoulder blades. He toppled forward into the mud and rainwater, unable to move, dimly aware that he had been shot, unable to breathe. As his vision faded, the last thing he saw was the scarecrow with the broad-brimmed hat looming over him.

Then Ikeda died.

Deke hunkered down as the Japanese fired wildly, expending a lot of ammunition to shoot up the dark trees and clumps of kunai grass. Little did they know that there wasn’t anybody out here but him.

But not for long. He was suddenly aware of movement behind him and swung his rifle in that direction, worried that the Japanese had somehow gotten behind him. A clump of grass parted to reveal Danilo’s grinning face.

“Hola,” he whispered.

Philly appeared, then Yoshio.

“I can’t believe I’m actually happy to see you fellas,” Deke said.

“We couldn’t let you take on the whole Japanese army by yourself,” Philly said. He looked Deke up and down as more lightning illuminated the ridge. “Holy hell, did the Japs steal your clothes? You’re bare-ass naked.”

“Still got my boots on,” Deke pointed out.

There wasn’t time to explain. Behind them came Captain Merrick’s company, pushing up the ridge to attack the Japanese, who were in complete disarray on account of Deke’s diversion. The storm added to their confusion.

The BAR added its own lightning to the night, the muzzle flashes reaching nearly two feet from the barrel. It was the Japanese who were now exposed on the ridge, and the Americans used the lightning flashes to target any Japanese that they could see. Those enemy soldiers who didn’t die right away scattered into the night.

Once the shooting died down, Deke walked over to the scarecrow with Philly and Yoshio and retrieved his uniform. He held up his shirt and trousers, which were shot full of holes. “I reckon those Japs can shoot, after all.”

“Look at it this way,” Philly said. “You won’t need to unbutton anything to take a leak.”

Somehow his hat had come through unscathed. Some guys had a lucky rabbit’s foot or a Saint Christopher medal to keep them safe, but Deke was starting to think that maybe the hat was his lucky charm.

They found the Japanese sniper facedown in the mud left by the downpour. There was a coin-size bullet hole right between his shoulder blades.

The Arisaka sniper rifle lay nearby. Deke picked it up and presented it to Danilo. The Filipino guide looked through the telescopic sight, then nodded with satisfaction.

The ridge never had been Captain Merrick’s real objective but only an obstacle to a clear route forward. As the thunder and lightning faded away, they dug in. Their accommodations were soggy, muddy, and buggy, but with the Japanese dispersed and less of a threat, each man got a few hours of sleep when he wasn’t on watch.

The company was up and moving at first light, with Deke and Danilo leading the way. Out in the open, sunlight appeared quickly and dried their wet uniforms and gear. The morning sun added warmth and a touch of optimism. But all too soon they were back in the shaded depths of the jungle itself.

Even so, Deke felt relieved that there didn’t seem to be any sign of the Japanese. They were surely still out there, licking their wounds, but they were apparently too disorganized to be a threat at the moment.

The jungle path was now open before them.