Pacific Sniper

Chapter Twenty-Two

Breathless, they reached the top of the ravine and sprawled in the grass, weapons at the ready. The only one who didn’t seem winded was the Chamorro guide. He crouched on one knee, eyeing the hillside. There was no sign of the Japs, who seemed to have melted away.

“Where did they go?”

“They’re probably setting up another ambush, waiting to hit us somewhere down the line.”

“That’s fine by me. I can wait.”

Quickly, they took stock. The ambush in the ravine had left them shaken and battered.

They had put Steele down, and Deke scrambled across to check on the lieutenant. He rolled him over, looking for a bullet wound, dreading what he would find.

Steele gasped and opened his good eye. He had been knocked out cold. Deke spotted the dent in Steele’s helmet, the metal bright where the paint had been scraped away. He couldn’t believe the lieutenant’s good luck. The bullet had hit him right in the head, but only a glancing blow. Lucky that the Japs used a lighter bullet. A round from Deke’s Springfield would have punched straight through the helmet as though it were a tin can.

“What the hell?” Steele asked groggily.

“Let’s get you moving, Honcho,” Deke said. “No sense being sitting ducks if those Japs come back.”

He helped get Steele up, and together they began to continue unsteadily up the path. After a few steps, he gently shook off Deke’s help. “I appreciate it, son. Really, I do. But I think I’ve got this. Besides, you can’t help me the whole way.”

Despite his insistence that he was all right, it was obvious that Steele had been hit harder than he let on. He had a few dizzy spells. At one point, he bent over and vomited.

“Sure sign of a concussion,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Still, I’ll take that any day over a hole in the head.”

The lieutenant looked around. “Where’s Ingram?”

“Dead, sir.”

Lieutenant Steele nodded, not bothering to correct the “sir.” It was doubtful that there were any Nips around to overhear that slip.

“I suppose I must have known that, but things are a little fuzzy. Damn shame about Ingram. He was a good man. What about his body?”

“We had to leave him behind, sir.”

Steele nodded without commenting. Ingram wouldn’t be the first American whose body had been left behind on Guam, and he wouldn’t be the last.

“Someone will come back to get him someday.”

Deke was starting to feel gloomy, thinking that he had let them all down. He had taken out those two Jap snipers in the ravine, but he hadn’t spotted the other soldiers hidden there — not to mention the marksmen hidden on the hill. Deke felt as if he had led Patrol Easy right into a trap.

As a result, the lieutenant had almost been killed. Ingram had been shot, and there was nothing that Deke had been able to do for him. He had avoided the same fate only by the skin of his teeth.

The lieutenant was the closest thing that he’d had to a father, and Deke had let him down and almost gotten him killed.

Up ahead, the Chamorro guide kept moving relentlessly. He appeared more than a little impatient with the slower pace, which was necessary for Lieutenant Steele to keep up. They were exposed out here in the rolling grasslands — every last one of them felt it. They were just lucky that the Japanese patrol had moved off.

The breeze carried the faint sound of an engine to their ears.

“Anybody hear that?”

“Just keep going,” Steele said.

It soon became clear that Tony Cruz had a destination in mind. He waved toward a line of trees in the distance, urging the men on. More jungle. The trees would provide cover, but no one was eager to begin another jungle trek. The last one had been grueling.

“Maybe I could use a little help, after all,” Lieutenant Steele admitted. Deke moved to offer him his shoulder, but the lieutenant waved him back. “You stay on point and keep your eyes open, Deke. Philly, let me hang on to your shoulder for a while.”

Philly made a show of mock offense. “What, you don’t want me to be the one keeping my rifle handy?”

“We all have our talents.”

With Philly helping to prop up the lieutenant, they made better time.

It wasn’t a minute too soon. Off in the distance, they heard the clatter of tank tracks and the roar of an engine. The faint sound of the engine that they had heard earlier had just gotten a lot closer, going from a distant purr to a deep growl. Due to the rolling topography, they were not able to see the tank yet.

“Dammit, I hear a tank!” Philly said.

“One of ours?” Yoshio asked hopefully.

“Doesn’t sound like it. Our boys are bigger and louder. Besides, there’s no way our tanks have made it this far yet.”

Deke agreed that it had to be a Japanese tank. The small, light tanks might not be a match for the heavier Sherman tanks, but if they were caught out here in the open by a Jap tank, Patrol Easy would be cut to pieces. Frantically, he looked around, half expecting to see a Jap patrol preceding the tank. Like the American tanks, the Jap tanks usually worked in coordination with infantry, which meant they were about to have company. The sound was getting closer.

Tony Cruz was pointing and whispering urgently, almost growling at them. They couldn’t understand the exact words that he was saying, but they needed no translation.

“Hurry it up,” the lieutenant said. “The tank won’t be able to follow us into those trees.”

Ten minutes later, they were entering the edges of the jungle. At the fringes, they passed what looked like hundreds of huge spiderwebs strung through the trees, the webs sparkled with dew; at the center of each web hung a large, shiny, blue-green spider. Each one looked big enough to eat a bird. The sight was so strange that, despite himself, Deke shuddered as he ducked under the massive webs.

Once again, Deke was surprised by the way that the jungle created its own climate. It was like a heavy curtain falling across a stage. The breeze dropped off and the sunshine faded away. He wrinkled his nose at the fecund smell of rotting vegetation. He missed the fresh smell of the mountain woods back home.

But underlying the smell of rot was a fresher scent of clean, running water. He also heard a vague roar. Was that the ocean? Inland, it was easy to forget that they were on an island, never all that far from the Pacific.

From behind them, they could hear another roar. But this was nothing natural. It was the high-pitched revving of a tank engine.

The tank fired, sending a round over their heads to explode deeper in the jungle beyond. Despite the intensity of the explosion, the heavy jungle seemed to muffle the blast.

“Move it!” Steele shouted. “Everybody into the trees!”

Letting the others run ahead, Deke stopped and turned to face the tank in the distance, glad to see that the tank was already having trouble getting across the rough ground leading to the jungle. Hillocks of grass, tree roots, and the steeply eroded trail were more than the tank tracks could handle. The tank halted, and its engine seemed to growl in frustration. Another round cracked from its main gun, exploding among the trees. The tank could shoot at them all day, but it couldn’t pursue them.

The troops accompanying the tank were a different story. A squad of enemy soldiers fanned out around the tank and continued to advance.

Deke knew that he had to buy Patrol Easy some time. A tank was one thing, but he could handle soldiers. He lifted his rifle, lined up the sights on a soldier, and dropped him. He ran the bolt and fired again. Another soldier fell.

He wasn’t going to be able to stop a whole squad — but maybe he could send them on a wild-goose chase.

He jumped to the top of a grassy hillock, exposing himself to the pursuing Japs. A few bullets snapped the air around him. It was a foolish thing to do, but Deke had a method to his madness. Making sure that the Japanese had seen him, he turned and ran in a direction away from the one that the patrol had taken.

He heard an excited shout and looked back.

Sure enough, the Japanese squad started after him. More bullets flicked through the air like angry bees. The country here was getting rougher, and he descended another steep hillside. He splashed into a small creek, stopping to get his bearings, and was instantly besieged by swarms of mosquitoes that attacked his neck and face, but he didn’t dare slap at them for fear that it would give him away — the enemy was that close. He could hear their feet pounding down the red dirt path behind him.

Keeping low, Deke crept out of the creek bed, then dropped out of sight behind another hillock. He was breathing hard, but he held his breath a moment to make sure that the Japs were following him. He could hear them talking to one another. Satisfied, he crept away, back in the direction that Patrol Easy had taken. With any luck, the Jap soldiers would continue in the wrong direction.

He now found himself on another steep hillside leading down into a valley. This time, there was no trail, but a weird landscape that resembled an egg carton. The soil had eroded badly, except where the jungle trees stood on humps of earth that had been held in place by their roots.

Deke paused, listening, every sense on high alert. He even sniffed the air. Anyone seeing him now would have been reminded of a hunting wolf. He could vaguely hear the Japs somewhere off to his left, still excited about the prospect of hunting an American soldier. But where had Patrol Easy gone? The only answer was down the hill. Keeping his rifle ready for any surprises, Deke headed in that direction.

The slope took a final plunge that sent him slipping and sliding. He caught himself just in time to keep from going over the edge of a cliff. Thirty feet below, he spotted a pool of still water and the source of the roar that he’d heard earlier. A waterfall plunged over an even higher cliff above and cascaded down into one end of the pool. Dappled with sunlight, the surface of the pool glittered with shades of blue and green. Mist from the waterfall caught the light so that a rainbow hovered above the water. A shallow cave had been carved into the base of the cliff, near the base of the waterfall. The entrance was wreathed in massive pink flowers.

Deke was a little awed despite the peril that he was in. He had stumbled across a tropical paradise. He was so captivated by the scene that it took a shout from below to get his attention.

“Deke, quit pussyfooting around and get down here!” He looked down to see the familiar figures of the guys from Patrol Easy emerge on a ledge at the edge of the pool. Philly was waving at him.

He raised a hand in acknowledgment, a little embarrassed that he hadn’t seen them sooner, then picked his way down the slope to join them.

“What happened to you? You’re the last person I figured to get lost,” Philly said.

“He didn’t get lost,” Steele said. The lieutenant looked as haggard as ever. He was swaying on his feet, like a tree in the wind, but not so much as a breeze stirred the air in the waterfall valley. “He hung back to deal with the Jap squad traveling with that tank.”

Yoshio was staring at Deke in awe. “What did you do, shoot them all?”

“No, but I reckon I picked off a couple, then sent them hunting for us in the wrong direction.”

“Nice work, Deke. That was stupid to do on your own — but you saved our bacon.”

Deke was still thinking about the disastrous ambush. He wasn’t sure that he could ever make up for that.

“Listen up,” Lieutenant Steele began. “Keep your voices down and no shooting — no sense making it any easier for the Japs to find us.”

“Let’s get into that cave and out of sight. We can rest there until we get our bearings.”

Nobody argued with that plan, except for Philly.

“Just great. Another cave.”

“You want to stay out here and take your chances with that Jap patrol that’s looking for us?”

“All right, all right. At least there won’t be any Japs inside. What the hell, I’ll even go first.”

Outside the mouth of the cave, Whoa Nelly had begun barking furiously. Egan was working to hold her back. “Easy, girl.”

“What’s she going on about?”

“She smells something in that cave.”

“Hell, I smell something out here. Philly ain’t had a bath in at least a week.”

“Very funny.”

“Toss in a grenade.”

“And let every Jap around know where we are? Besides, Nelly’s probably barking at some critter in there.”

“Only one way to find out.”