Pacific Sniper

Chapter Twenty-Six

For two days, the soldiers waited while the ships and planes softened up the Japanese defenses. A few probes against the enemy were met with a series of hidden defenses, including sniper attacks. One of the worst of these was a road through an open field that swiftly earned the nickname “Sniper Alley.”

Tension made the time pass slowly. Conditions grew more miserable daily due to the poor food and rations, the insects, and occasional Japanese incursions.

Waiting was the worst part, so they all felt a sense of relief when, just past dawn, the orders finally came to move out.

“Drop anything you don’t need here,” Sergeant Hawley said. “Fill your canteens. Take all the ammo you can carry. Be ready in fifteen.”

Despite his crisp orders, Hawley sounded nervous, as well he should be. His glance kept flicking toward the mountain that they were supposed to take today. Now that the bombs and shells had stopped falling, it was eerily quiet. A chorus of insects and birds worked to fill the void. Had the bombardment wiped out the Japanese, or were they up there, waiting?

Soon enough, the squad was going to find out.

Deke had already been awake since before first light, cleaning his rifle once more as Philly snored nearby in the foxhole. Yoshio tossed and turned, sleeping fitfully.

The morning mist carried the smell of cordite mixed with a salty tang. As the heat quickly grew, Deke could also smell the fetid jungle, the mud, even the unwashed soldiers around him. Wistfully, he thought of long-ago mornings when the smell of coffee and bacon, along with fresh-baked biscuits, had filled the old farmhouse kitchen. There had been some good times and enough to eat before the Depression hit and his father died.

Deke’s belly rumbled, and he ate some of his rations, surprised that he was hungry at all. Other men scrambled to gather their gear or hurried off to relieve themselves.

Minutes later, the squad moved out in silence. Even Philly kept his mouth shut for a change.

They could see their objective up ahead. The mountain.

Their route took them through a rugged area of stunted trees and heavy underbrush. The sun rose higher, and the heat grew quickly, along with the swarms of insects.

“Glad somebody’s getting a hot breakfast,” Philly grumped, slapping at the mosquitoes.

They paused at the edge of a large field dotted with clumps of kunai grass between what looked like overgrown vegetable patches. The Chamorros must have been farming this land before being forced into labor camps by the Japanese. A few huts were scattered around the field, but they had an abandoned air.

Out on the dirt road that crossed the field, they could see the body of a dead man. It was hard to say if he was American, Japanese, or an unlucky Chamorro who had gotten caught in the cross fire.

“Sniper Alley,” Philly said, gazing out at the field. “We get to cross it, lucky bastards that we are.”

Deke scanned the field and frowned. There were too many hiding places, from the clumps of grass to the huts and clumps of trees.

Any number of enemy snipers could be hidden out there, but all it took was one.

“Make sure you ain’t the first one to leave cover,” Deke said quietly to Philly and Yoshio.

Lieutenant Thibault called a halt. Once the soldiers were in that field, they would be fully exposed. It was the perfect place for an ambush. But he didn’t have any choice. Skirting the field would have taken too much time. The only choice was straight across the open field.

“Sergeant, what do you think?”

Hawley didn’t have any insights. “I don’t see any Nips, sir.”

Still, the lieutenant hesitated. He turned to Conlon, who waited nearby with his rifle. “Conlon, what do you see?”

The sniper eyeballed the field with his riflescope. “I don’t see anything, sir.”

Nobody had asked Deke his opinion — except for Philly. He said quietly, “What do you say, Deke?”

“I say we’re gonna get our asses shot off.” He couldn’t have said how he knew. It was just a feeling.

“Great.”

“You’re the one who asked.” Deke turned to the interpreter. “Hey, Yoshio. When the shooting starts, keep your head down and do whatever Philly and me tell you.”

“What shooting?”

“You’ll see.”

Up ahead, the lieutenant gave the order to move out.

It was hot out in the open, and the sun beat down mercilessly, early though it was. Nobody talked, and not so much as a breeze stirred the humid air.

They were halfway across when the first sniper shot took out a GI named Horton. The bullet punched through his helmet, and he was dead before he hit the ground.

Everyone threw themselves down, but there wasn’t a lot of cover. The sniper didn’t fire again until after Sergeant Hawley stood up and told everyone to get moving.

Another shot. A soldier Deke had known since basic fell dead.

They kept going, but it was a big field. Each man seemed to be able to feel the crosshairs on him. It made their skin crawl.

They reached a clump of abandoned huts, which provided some cover, although the grass walls wouldn’t stop a bullet.

The sniper fired again. A soldier who had been crouching behind one of the huts fell to his knees, then slumped over, dead.

“Where’s that sniper at?” Thibault demanded. “Conlon, make yourself useful, goddamn it.”

Conlon ran up beside Thibault, swinging his rifle in all directions.

Deke had gotten down low, scanning the field through his telescopic sight. His attention was focused on another clump of huts about two hundred feet away. It was a pretty good bet that the Jap sniper would have set up there, where he had some cover and shelter from the sun.

There. Sure enough, Deke was rewarded with a brief glint in the doorway of one of the huts. Just as quickly, it was gone, but he knew what he had seen — a reflection off the glass of the enemy sniper’s scope.

Conlon saw it too. Maybe he wasn’t as hopeless as Deke thought.

“He’s in those huts over there,” Conlon said excitedly.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Take him out.”

Conlon fired, worked the bolt, fired again.

He didn’t get a chance for a third shot. A bullet came in and killed him, his body dropping at Thibault’s feet.

“Dammit!” Thibault looked around desperately. “Deke, take out that sniper or so help me God, I’ll shove that riflescope up your ass.”

Deke looked the lieutenant up and down.

“What are you waiting for? Dammit, that’s an order!”

“Yes, sir!” Deke barked out, and saluted him.

Thibault stared, then grew angry. “You picked one hell of a time to decide to act like a soldier. What a smart-ass. I’ve a mind to—”

Deke never did know what the lieutenant had in mind, because a bullet entered Thibault’s brain at that instant.

He stared at the hut in the distance. Damn good shot.

The sergeant ran over and crouched over Thibault’s body, crying in dismay, “Lieutenant! Lieutenant!”

Hawley could shout all he wanted, but the lieutenant wasn’t gonna hear nobody no more.

Maybe he ought to have bought that Jap a drink for that one. But Thibault wasn’t the only soldier in the squad. He had Philly to worry about, and Yoshio. They might be next if Deke didn’t do something. The sniper had them all pinned down.

Deke stretched out on the red dirt, locking his elbows into the ground and spreading his legs behind him so that he had the whole steadiness of the island beneath him. He put the sights on the doorway where he had seen that glint of movement. The scope wasn’t powerful enough to reveal anything but a dark entrance.

Still, he put his finger on the trigger, took a deep breath, and ever so slowly began to squeeze.

Where are you, you damn Nip?

From inside the hut, he saw the flash of a muzzle. He was amazed that the sniper’s rifle made barely a sound.

A bullet clipped the shack where Yoshio was hiding, inches from his head.

“Deke!” Philly said desperately. “Any day now!”

But Deke was hardly listening, all his attention focused on that target in his mind’s eye. His finger took up the last bit of tension on the trigger, and the rifle jolted against his shoulder.

He ran the bolt and waited.

“Did you get him?”

“Hell if I know. He’s in that shack on the right. What are you all waitin’ for?”

Philly took the hint and opened fire, followed by Yoshio.

Bullets ripped through the shack, sending bits of grass and debris flying. The walls of the hut made a good hiding place, but they didn’t stop bullets.

The Jap sniper seemed to agree. Seconds later, a figure ran from the shack and disappeared into the deep grass.

In that moment, Deke had glimpsed two things. The first was that the Japanese carried a rifle. The second was that the enemy sniper wore a white headband.

Deke’s blood ran cold in the tropical heat. This wasn’t just any sniper. This was the same sniper who had challenged him during the tank battle and then masterminded the ambush that had left Ingram dead and Lieutenant Steele wounded.

An instant later, Deke was on his feet and running after him.

He heard pounding feet behind him and realized that Philly, Yoshio, and Egan had joined the chase. Whoa Nelly strained at her leash, barking madly. She knew an enemy soldier when she saw one, all right.

They entered the clutch of huts and started running through. Deke would have thought that nobody could have survived the fire that they had poured at these shacks, but as they passed one of the grass structures, a Japanese soldier burst from a doorway. He was screaming bloody murder and jabbing a rifle with a bayonet directly at the closest man, which happened to be Egan.

Caught off guard, Egan froze as the bayonet plunged toward him.

Nelly leaped, pulling the leash out of Egan’s grasp and crashing into the attacking soldier. She snarled, and the Japanese cried out in shock and pain, but not before he managed to pull the trigger. Man and dog went down in a tangled heap.

“Nelly!” Egan cried.

The dog moved weakly, the fight gone out of her. Shouting what sounded like curses, the Japanese managed to shove the dog off, for all the good it did him. He barely had time to blink before Deke shot him dead.

Egan knelt by Nelly’s side, taking her in his arms. “No! No!” he cried.

Nelly whimpered, licked his hand, then went still.

“She died saving my life,” he muttered. An aching sob escaped his throat.

None of them knew what to say. Maybe it was just a dog, but it sure felt like more than that to Deke. Whoa Nelly had been like part of the squad.

“You all stay here with Egan,” he finally said. “I’m going after that Jap sniper.”

Deke fed another shell into the chamber as he ran. He soon found that the field was crisscrossed by a network of paths. Most led to the huts or cultivated patches, but one or two led off toward the jungle itself.

He had to be careful — that sniper could be anywhere. He had also shown himself to be of a live-to-fight-another-day mindset. That got Deke to thinking that the sniper might try to put as much distance as possible between himself and the squad. To do that, he could crawl around through the grass, or he could find himself a path like this one that led toward the jungle and escape. If Deke had been the Jap sniper, that was the path he would have taken.

He left the field and entered the forest. A shot rang out, and something caromed off a tree trunk inches from Deke’s head. The sound made his spine quiver.

Deke shot back, not sure what he was aiming at — but the Jap wouldn’t know that.

He followed the path that seemed to grow narrower. Up ahead, he could see open sky through the trees, which puzzled him until he reached the edge of a steep cliff that sloped down toward the sea.

Had Okubo gone this way, or was this another one of his tricks?

Where did you go?

That was when Deke saw the smashed rifle lying in the weeds. Okubo must have abandoned it, but not before busting it against a rock to make it useless.

Deke picked it up. Despite the damage, he saw that the scope itself bore the scars of a bullet. He guessed that his shot back at the hut had come close.

Deke was about to dash down the path in pursuit, but what he saw next stopped him in his tracks. He stared down at the sight before him.

There was a reason the US forces had not staged a landing here but had chosen the Orote Peninsula despite the challenges of the coral reefs. On this side of the island, steep cliffs ran down to the sea, and there was only a narrow band of rocky beach. The steep landscape and the narrow beach would have been so easy to defend that the Japanese could have thrown coconuts at them.

That narrow beach was now crowded with Japanese soldiers. They were all trying to get onto a handful of vessels, bobbing in the heavy ocean waves. Some of the vessels appeared to be small Japanese naval craft, while the rest looked like commandeered Chamorro fishing boats. The seaworthiness of these last boats looked questionable, but that wasn’t stopping the soldiers from swimming out to them through the breaking surf.

He even saw three or four floatplanes whose wings bore the rising sun symbol of Japan. They must have been hidden away somewhere on the shoreline, ready for this very moment. The makeshift fleet was clearly too insignificant to have attracted the attention of the US Navy.

The ocean was dotted with swimming men, fighting their way through the waves. The beach quickly emptied. In the end, there weren’t more than a few dozen Japanese soldiers, taking a desperate chance. Perhaps they had some small hope of survival in the vast Pacific. Many thousands more would rest upon the island for all eternity.

It was impossible to say which one of these men must be Okubo. Deke swept the riflescope over the surf, but finding the sniper was impossible.

As it turned out, Deke himself hadn’t gone unnoticed. One of the small Japanese Navy vessels unleashed a burst of machine-gun fire, the rounds shredding vegetation along the rim of the cliff. Deke hit the ground. Though defeated, these Japanese still had teeth.

Keeping low, Deke watched as the overloaded floatplanes labored to take off. Finally, they lurched into the sky. The boats changed their heading and pointed their bows to the sea. Deke gazed out at the boats growing smaller and smaller in the vast Pacific.

The beach below was now empty, save for scattered gear and weapons that had been abandoned at the last instant.

The Japanese had fled, but he was sure that he hadn’t seen the last of them.