They headed inside the cave, with Philly leading the way. To show his bravado, he had simply walked right through the cave entrance. The others followed.
“Anybody got a light?”
Lieutenant Steele obliged by clicking on a flashlight.
Instantly, two Japanese soldiers appeared in the glare of the flashlight. They all froze.
The two groups stared at each other, not sure what to do.
Then with something like a snarl, one of the Japanese started to raise his rifle. The last thing they needed was a gunshot to attract the other Japs in the area — not to mention getting shot.
But they needn’t have worried. Their Chamorro guide stepped forward and grabbed the muzzle of the rifle, wrenching it from the grasp of the weakened and wounded Japanese. An instant later, his machete slashed down into the soldier’s neck, and the Jap slumped to the floor of the cave.
The second Japanese soldier, wide-eyed, had not moved. He did not appear to be armed. Tony Cruz raised his machete.
The Japanese soldier closed his eyes and lowered his head, ready to accept the killing blow.
But Lieutenant Steele put out a hand to stop the guide. “Wait,” he said. “We’re supposed to capture some Japanese, but so far we haven’t had much luck. Yoshio, why don’t you see if you can figure out what this man knows.”
When the machete didn’t slice down at him, the Japanese soldier looked up at them, clearly puzzled. He did not relax but eyed them fearfully.
“What should I ask him?”
“For starters, see if he can tell us where the rest of his buddies are hidden.”
Yoshio stepped forward but didn’t start his line of questioning right away. Instead, he pointed to the enemy soldier’s bandages and asked him something in Japanese.
The soldier responded, and Yoshio nodded.
“He says he was up on the hill during the ambush.” Yoshio jerked his chin at Deke. “He says that you shot him.”
Deke realized that this must have been the soldier who popped up out of the grass like a decoy. The real sniper had gotten away.
“I reckon I didn’t do such a good job shooting him.”
“Now’s your chance to shoot him again,” Philly said. “It’s gonna be hard to miss this time.”
“Egan, take a look at him,” the lieutenant ordered.
“He’s a Jap!” Philly said. “What are we going to do, fix him up so he can shoot at us again?”
“Shut up, Philly,” Steele said, glaring. “He’s out of the fight for good.”
Philly seemed to realize that he was pushing his luck. “Whatever you say, sir,” he grumbled.
Egan handed Nelly’s leash to the lieutenant and inspected the wound. To do so, he had to take off the soldier’s shirt, revealing how emaciated the Japanese looked. His rib cage and shoulder blades were prominent.
Deke had not felt bad about shooting the Jap, who had been shooting at him, after all. But seeing how thin the soldier was, he experienced a twinge of sympathy. Deke knew a thing or two about going hungry.
“Looks to me like he’s missed a few meals.”
“All that these Japs eat is rice and fish. How fat do you think he could get?”
Also, with his shirt off, the soldier looked not only thin, but quite young, given his small stature and youthful face, which didn’t seem to feature so much as a whisker.
The Japanese soldier winced as Egan sprinkled on sulfa powder, added a fresh bandage, and then wrapped up the wound. “The bullet went all the way through,” he said. “He’ll live if we get him some help and there’s no infection — though I wouldn’t say that a cave in the jungle is the best place to avoid that.”
Once the Japanese soldier had been patched up, Yoshio began his interrogation, such as it was. He spoke gently, and although they couldn’t decipher the words, the tone was easy enough to understand. From time to time, Yoshio paused to give the Japanese soldier a drink of water from his canteen or a little food.
“Remind me not to drink out of Yoshio’s canteen,” Philly muttered. “Now it’s got filthy Jap germs on it. Not that Yoshio would care, considering that he’s one of them.”
“Philly, go keep an eye out,” the lieutenant said. “Take Tony here with you.”
With Philly gone and the Chamorro no longer glaring at him with machete in hand, the prisoner seemed to relax a little. He had been stingy with his answers at first, but now a flood of words poured out as Yoshio asked his questions. The prisoner had seemed to accept that, for him, the war was over.
Yoshio relayed to the lieutenant what he had found out. It seemed that the bulk of the remaining Japanese defenders were dug in not far from here, at a place called Mount Santa Rosa.
“All right,” Steele said. “I want to get eyes on these Japs. Once we have an exact location and an estimate of their numbers, we can report back. That’s why we’re out here.”
The others in the cave exchanged nervous looks. After the fight today, and having captured a prisoner, it seemed as if they had found out all that they needed to. “Whatever you say, Honcho.”
“What about the prisoner, Honcho?”
“We either have to shoot him or bring him with us,” the lieutenant said. “Considering that he’s going to show us where to find the rest of these Japs, it’s his lucky day.”
Deke knew the lieutenant was correct that their mission was to reconnoiter and gather intelligence about the enemy position, so that was exactly what they were going to do.
Going by what the captured soldier had said, they left the cave and prepared to move out.
“Do you think we can trust that Nip?” Philly asked, glancing back at the wounded Japanese soldier. “He might be leading us right into a trap.”
“Philly, this whole island is a trap. Besides, I reckon he knows that he’s one wrong turn away from gettin’ a bullet in the back.”
Cautiously, they climbed out of the valley that contained the waterfall. It had been like a beautiful, hidden oasis from the war raging around them. Deke had to wonder how many places there were like this on Guam, where a man could hide himself away and not be found. He thought that if the Japanese wanted to, they could drag this war out for years if small groups hid themselves in the jungle.
From time to time, an American fighter plane zipped overhead. They tried to keep out of sight of the planes, for fear that from the air they might be mistaken for a Japanese patrol. After all, American forces had not pushed into this sector yet. The pilots would see anything that moved on the ground as fair game.
Once they were back on high ground, they spotted the smoke and flames of something burning on the opposite rim of the valley that they had just climbed out of. The lieutenant paused to look through the binoculars.
“Looks like the flyboys caught up with that Jap tank we ran into earlier,” Steele said. “Good riddance.”
The red dirt trail became more pronounced as they approached the area where the prisoner indicated the Japanese were dug in. It made sense that the paths would be more heavily used if this was an active area frequented by Japanese troops. The minerals in the soil gave the steep sides of the path a kind of rainbow pattern that reminded Deke of shale cliffs back home.
They began to move more cautiously, worried about running into the enemy.
Egan brought the dog up, letting her nose lead the way. “She’ll give us a warning, boys,” Egan said, obviously proud of the dog. “She hasn’t let us down yet. Go get ’em, Nelly.”
Reluctantly, Tony Cruz stepped aside and let Whoa Nelly lead the way down the path. She seemed to be straining at her leash, eager to get at the Japs. Still licking their wounds from the earlier fight, Patrol Easy wasn’t nearly as eager to run into the enemy again.
Even with the dog leading the way, Deke didn’t let his guard down. His eyes roamed constantly. On the upside, he supposed that the Japs weren’t expecting them yet, considering that the bulk of US forces remained on the opposite side of the island.
Given the size of the island, the distance back to the beachhead wasn’t far as the crow flies, but they weren’t crows. Reaching this point would require the rest of the division to bushwhack its way through the jungle. It would have been great if they’d been able to simply land men and supplies by boat, but this side of the island had only steep cliffs that sloped down to the ocean.
The only choice was to come by land, although bringing up supplies and tanks would be a nightmare. There were no paved roads, but only dirt trails. Churned up by the passing troops and saturated by frequent downpours, the red, sticky soil of Guam quickly turned to mud that sucked down boots and gripped tires and tank tracks.
As they walked, sweat dripped into Deke’s eyes. The heat and humidity were worse than it got in August back home.
Deke slapped at a biting fly that had been pestering him for several minutes, and his hand came away bloody. He wiped his palm on his muddy trousers. “Got him. You think the bugs are on the same side as the Japs?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Philly said. “I’ve lost about a pint of blood to these suckers since yesterday.”
“That’s ’cuz you taste so sweet.”
Philly snorted. “We need to get the Seabees in here to spray this whole island with DDT.”
Since the beachhead had been secured, teams had been working to spray the jungle perimeter with a mixture of diesel oil and DDT to keep down the flies and mosquitoes. Deke had no idea whether it worked, but the stink of diesel oil filled the air near the beach.
Fortunately, the Seabees hadn’t gotten this far with their noxious spray. Despite the heat and insects, Deke had to admit that he found something alluring in the landscape of this place. The gentle mountains, meandering creeks, high-country meadows, and deciduous woods of the Appalachians would always be his first love. But the lush green jungle — by turns mysterious, dark, and quiet — also had its appeal, as did this grassy rolling country.
Earlier, he’d made the mistake of saying as much to Philly. “You know what? I reckon I wouldn’t mind coming back here and exploring someday when the place wasn’t crawling with Japs.”
“Are you nuts?” Philly had scoffed. “I don’t want to see so much as a palm tree ever again.”
The Jap prisoner said something, and Lieutenant Steele called a halt. The Jap was pointing at a mountain that loomed out of the jungle ahead. Lieutenant Steele had his map out, getting their bearings.
“That looks like Mount Santa Rosa,” he announced, folding the map away. “Over that way is Yigo. And a little beyond them both is the ocean. If that’s where the Japs are, it looks to me like they have their backs against the sea. There’s nowhere else for them to run.”
“Just like the Alamo, only with Davy Crockett fighting on the wrong side.”
Lieutenant Steele looked over at Yoshio. “Ask our prisoner where we can find his buddies.”
Once Yoshio had asked the question, the prisoner talked at length. Deke tried to wrap his head around some of the words, but Japanese made as much sense to him as chickens clucking, and he gave up after a while. Yoshio would let them know if the prisoner had anything important to say.
The prisoner seemed to have relaxed somewhat around his American captors, who were not the monsters that his superiors had convinced him that they would be. In fact, they treated him better than Okubo had. His wounds had pained him, but the food and water had given him enough energy to keep up with the patrol.
For obvious reasons, the young prisoner had attached himself to Yoshio, who was about the same age. After all, Yoshio was the only one he could communicate with in the patrol. Yoshio treated the prisoner kindly enough. At one point, they had even shared a laugh.
That didn’t go over well with Philly. “Don’t get too friendly with that Jap,” he warned Yoshio. “We might still have to shoot him.”
Yoshio glanced at Lieutenant Steele, who didn’t comment one way or the other but took out his map again as if to occupy himself. He seemed reluctant to say that the prisoner’s life still hung in the balance. They could hardly march around for days burdened with a prisoner.
Now the Japanese prisoner eagerly pointed out what Yoshio explained were artillery positions, dug into the steep sides of the mountain.
“He says there are thousands of soldiers there,” Yoshio explained. “They have dug caves and tunnels to turn that mountain into a fortress.”
“I suppose that I ought to take his word for it,” Steele said. “But I want to see for myself. I want some visual confirmation before I invite the whole division to join us here.”
“Invite, huh? That’s one hell of a way to put it, Honcho.”
With more than a little trepidation, the patrol continued forward. The fortified mountain grew closer. Steele took out his binoculars and studied the slopes. Deke did the same through the riflescope, which was not as powerful but revealed Japanese soldiers milling around the tunnel entrances. Other soldiers stood in the bastions as if awaiting the appearance of the enemy. Deke was sure that they would not be disappointed before too long.
It would have been easy enough to pick off a few of the enemy, but that would have been like poking a stick into a hornet’s nest. For now, it was best if the enemy didn’t know they were here.
The lieutenant lowered his binoculars. “That’s about as many Japs as an anthill has ants,” he said. “Rodeo, bring that radio over here.”
Steele made radio contact and described what he had seen. All that they could hear on their end as he wrapped up were a few hasty “Yes, sirs.” When he’d gotten off the radio, the lieutenant looked around at the battered members of Patrol Easy.
“All right, here’s the deal. We’ll have to wait here for a few days until the rest of the division can catch up to us. We can’t take the Japs on ourselves.”
“Wait here? In the jungle?”
“Do you want to go back through all that mess we’ve come through?”
“Hell, no.”
“I didn’t think so. That means we’ve got no choice but to sit tight.”
They made camp, such as it was, rolling out their soggy blankets onto the ground. Despite the heat, a fire would have been nice to dry out their gear, heat up some rations and coffee, and perhaps drive the bugs away, but Lieutenant Steele wouldn’t allow it.
“Don’t forget that those hills have eyes,” he said. From time to time, the lieutenant’s speech sounded slurred, almost as though he were drunk. It seemed to be a side effect of being hit in the head by a Japanese bullet. “The Japs will have all kinds of lookouts. Try not to move around much if you don’t have to, and don’t show any lights. Not so much as a cigarette.”
“You got it, Honcho.”
Steele reeled, reaching out for Deke’s shoulder to steady himself. “Egan, you and Nelly keep alert. That may be our best chance of keeping the Japs off us until the cavalry gets here.”
His orders given, Steele suddenly looked beyond weary. He lowered himself to the ground, rolled himself in his blanket, and promptly fell into a fitful sleep — his shotgun tucked in beside him.
“I don’t like how the lieutenant looks,” Philly confided to Deke in a low voice, out of earshot of the leader of Patrol Easy.
“He’ll be all right,” Deke said, although he had the same misgivings. They would be lost out here without the lieutenant.