Savage Sniper

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

At the rear of the column, Father Francisco and his Filipino fighters already had their hands full holding off the pursuers.

The dense vegetation worked in their favor, forcing the enemy to stay on the path. As a result, the enemy couldn’t spread out to bring their full firepower to bear. The dense forest typically made flanking the guerrillas difficult — but as it turned out, not impossible. Meanwhile, the guerrillas’ tactics brought the pursuit to a halt in the way that a cork stoppered a bottle.

The guerrillas were familiar with fighting in this way and had staggered themselves so that each man had a clear line of fire, some standing, some kneeling, enabling them to send a lot more lead in the direction of the enemy than they were receiving.

However, it was a mistake to underestimate the Japanese, who were experts in their own way at jungle warfare. While the main body of pursuers engaged the guerrillas on the trail, a handful led by Colonel Yamagata slipped into the forest.

The going was difficult, every step requiring them to force their way through the underbrush. Yamagata used his bow to push aside the brush, but it became tangled in some vines. He managed to pull it free. All around him, his men were having similar difficulties with their rifles. The problem was compounded by the fact that they were trying to move quietly and without being seen from the trail. Fortunately for them, the forest created such a thick screen he could hardly see the man to his right or left, though they were no more than ten feet away.

They managed to position themselves parallel to the trail, close enough to see the guerrillas pouring fire at his own men. Yamagata smiled. The Filipinos were about to get an unpleasant surprise.

He picked out a tunnel in the greenery that he could fire an arrow through. On the other end of the tunnel were a couple of Filipino fighters. They were totally unsuspecting targets. Even under the circumstances, Yamagata felt a little thrill go through him.

He nocked an arrow and released. The enemy fighter went down, his eyes wide with shock, an arrow jutting from the base of his neck.

Yamagata nocked another arrow. He reminded himself not to rush. Instead, he drew the arrow back and held it, feeling the full, coiled strength of the bow shivering like a straining muscle in his hand. Oblivious, the fighter pivoted to reload his rifle, presenting himself square on to Yamagata.

He released, and the arrow flashed through the tunnel of greenery.

The fighter that he had been aiming at remained standing. Yamagata grunted in disappointment, thinking at first that he had missed. Then he saw the fighter stare down at the copious amounts of blood now running through a hole in his torso. Yamagata realized that the arrow had struck with such force that it had gone right through the Filipino. He watched as the man coughed up blood and then sank to his knees.

Yamagata had no more clear targets through the undergrowth. He did not want to waste arrows that would be deflected by the twigs, leaves, and branches. He put down his bow and drew his pistol from the holster on his hip.

To his men hiding in the brush nearby, he gave the order to fire.

Their first volley was devastating, cutting down several of the Filipinos, who were taken by total surprise. His men worked their bolt-action rifles and fired again.

The element of surprise did not last long. After all, the guerrillas were experienced jungle fighters. They managed to hold back the Japanese advancing up the path while also dealing with the fact that they had been flanked.

Bullets tore through the greenery where the Japanese hid. Yamagata threw himself flat. Nearby he heard one or two of his men cry out as they were hit.

From the direction of the trail, he heard a shout as several of the guerrillas launched themselves into the forest, their long bolo knives flashing. It was more than evident how they planned to deal with any Japanese they caught.

Yamagata crawled away, figuring that his men would have to fend for themselves. In the thick brush, he didn’t even know where they were — until he heard the scream of a soldier being dealt with by a razor-edged bolo knife.

Out of nowhere, an enemy fighter appeared a few feet away. Yamagata was practically on his belly, so he thought that the man might pass him by. But then the Filipino looked down and caught sight of him. Giving a grunt of surprise, the guerrilla lifted his arm to slash at Yamagata, but the colonel fired his pistol at nearly point-blank range. The bolo knife fell from the enemy fighter’s grasp, and his body slumped into the undergrowth.

Yamagata kept crawling until the sounds of the struggle faded and he was confident that he was alone. Slowly, he got back to his feet. He had dragged his bow along with him. He took a moment to reload his pistol, just in case he still had to deal with any more of the guerrilla fighters.

But Yamagata did not circle back and return to his own troops. Instead, he pressed deeper into the forest, following what he hoped was a parallel course to the jungle trail that the American raiders were using as their line of retreat. He knew that his men were in capable hands with Sergeant Matsueda, and even, he reluctantly had to admit, with Lieutenant Osako. Those two would press the pursuit for now.

What Yamagata planned to do was get close enough to the trail to use his bow and arrow to pick off the raiders. He felt empowered by his success just now with the bow, which had been silent and deadly.

Colonel Yamagata was on the hunt, just as he had once done as a boy. Back then, he had pursued deer and wild boar, but the game he hunted now was far more enticing.

On the trail, Father Francisco was busy directing his fighters with one breath and cursing the enemy with the next. He had long since stopped being conflicted about his ire toward the enemy. Of course he was careful not to use the Lord’s name in vain, but he stuck with some of the American slang he had picked up. “Sons of bitches!” he shouted toward the jungle. The sight of the priest, dressed in his homespun brown robes, shaking his fist at the enemy and cursing, was equal parts comical and terrifying as he poured the wrath of God upon them.

Some of his men raced into the trees to deal with the soldiers that had flanked them, and he turned his attention to the dead and dying men on the trail.

“Madre de Dios!” Father Francisco cried out, taking in the horrifying sight of a man with an arrow jutting from his neck. It was bad enough to see a man die from a bullet, but seeing a man shot with an arrow was a new experience — one that the priest wished that he could have avoided.

The guerrilla had already gasped his last. The priest crossed himself, then knelt to give the man last rites and absolve him of sin.

“Exaudi nos, Domine sancte,” he mumbled in Latin, using his thumb to trace the sign of the cross on the man’s forehead. “Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus.” Hear us, holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God. The intonations of the prayer managed to transcend the grisly scenes of combat in the midst of the dark jungle. Caught up in his prayers, the priest took no notice of the bullets cutting the air around him.

The presence of the priest was a comfort to the guerrillas and a motivating factor — the men knew that he would absolve them of sin and ease their way to the afterlife.

No sooner had Father Francisco finished with his duties than an arrow flashed past him, narrowly missing the priest. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the white blur of the arrow’s fletching.

He raised his fist and shouted, “Sons of bitches!”

There were plenty of bullets tearing through the brush, but it seemed to be the arrows that the men feared the most. Such a brutal weapon had worn away some of their resolve. The guerrilla fighters retreated, slowly giving up ground. Step by step, the Japanese were rolling them back, forcing their way closer to the retreating POWs. If they could get past the hard shell of the guerrillas’ rear guard, they could then rip into the soft underbelly of the column.

It was now a running battle along the forest path. For both the pursuers and the pursued, everything was at stake.

Now that he was armed again, Deke moved toward the rear of the column with Philly in tow. They both knew that their best hope lay in delaying the enemy that was closing in on them.

“It’s a long way from here back to our lines,” Philly noted. “We are definitely on our own. Any ideas?”

“Honcho is on the front porch, so we’ll mind the back door,” Deke said.

He felt eager for some measure of revenge against his captors, however short his “stay” with them had been. He ignored the fact that he was still sore and aching from his brief imprisonment. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like to be in their clutches for weeks or even months. Now that he had his rifle back, he figured that it was time for some good ol’ American whomp-ass.

But the situation he found at the rear of the column quickly disabused him of that notion. He passed a badly wounded Filipino, and then another, both men making their way forward to join the main part of the column. There hadn’t been that many guerrilla fighters to begin with — they were outnumbered by the Japanese garrison that was pursuing them, so that each loss of a fighter was felt keenly. The sound of gunfire seemed to be growing louder.

“I don’t like the looks of this — or the sound of it, for that matter,” Deke said.

“Me neither,” Philly agreed.

They soon ran into Father Francisco, who was helping a wounded man up the trail. The priest appeared more unkempt than usual, with bits of leaves and twigs sticking to his cassock, his dark hair mussed. He even looked a bit wild eyed, like a horse that had caught the scent of a mountain lion.

“Padre, what’s happening?” Deke asked.

“There are too many of them,” he explained simply. “They got into the woods and flanked us. They are even shooting arrows.”

“Arrows?” Deke knew all too well who had been firing those arrows.

The warrior-priest waved at the empty trail behind him to indicate that he was the last defender. “I will regroup my men farther up the trail, and we will hold them off as long as we can.”

“All right, we’ll see if we can buy you some time.”

“Here they come,” Philly said.

The priest hurried away. Deke had been hoping to set up an ambush of his own, but there was no time for that. No more than one hundred feet away, the leaves seemed to be stirring along the edges of the trail, although there wasn’t any wind. Deke looked more closely. To his surprise, the forest itself appeared to be moving toward him. He saw that it was actually a group of Japanese who had camouflaged themselves using branches tied to their arms, tucked into their belts, and sticking from their helmets. They blended almost perfectly into the surrounding jungle, their movement being the only thing that gave them away.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. He was impressed, although he would have preferred to get Mr. Suey in his sights, rather than this traveling forest.

“You’ve got to hand it to those Nips,” Philly said. “If we weren’t expecting them, we’d never have seen them.”

But Deke and Philly had seen them, which was too bad for the Japanese. “I’ve got the one on the right. You take the one on the left.”

Deke put his rifle to his shoulder and lined up his sights on the nearest approaching enemy soldier. Philly did the same to the soldier sneaking along the left side of the trail. Both men fired within a split second of each other, dropping their targets, which appeared to be nothing more than a pile of twigs and branches once they fell to the floor of the path.

More Japanese returned fire. Bullets chewed up the leaves around Deke and Philly. They were far too exposed. To make matters worse, a burst of machine-gun fire ripped overhead. Both men threw themselves to the ground, knowing that the next burst wouldn’t be so high. They had gotten lucky that time, although it was bad news that the Japanese had brought along a Nambu. The GIs and guerrillas had nothing to match it.

It was all too obvious now why Father Francisco and his guerrillas had been forced to retreat.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” Deke whispered urgently. “We’re in a tight spot.”

“You don’t need to tell me twice!”

They fired a couple more times, just to make the Japanese keep their own heads down, then leaped up and raced back the way they had come. Now and then they paused long enough to take a couple of potshots to hold up the Japanese advance.

All too soon they reached the rest of the group, bunched up now on the trail ahead. Father Francisco and the remainder of his guerrillas nervously scanned the forest, apparently still shaken by the surprise attack involving arrows. Their fellow members of Patrol Easy — Yoshio and Rodeo — looked haggard.

As for the former POWs, they were the very picture of exhaustion. Someone had given Faraday a pistol, and both Venezia and Cooper had bolo knives. A couple of the other men had picked up sticks to use as clubs. Otherwise, the group of former prisoners was not armed — and there were no weapons to give them.

Steele saw the predicament they were in and took charge.

“Deke, I want you and Philly back here. Pick off as many of the bastards as you can. Padre, you and your men will be the next line of defense.”

“They have a machine gun,” Philly pointed out.

“Yeah, I heard it. Look, we don’t have any choice but to keep going. This might just be a running battle all the way back to our lines.”

Deke knew they would never make it that far, not with the shape that the former prisoners were in. There were just too many miles to go. It seemed unfair, he thought grimly, for these men to have made it so far, only to be hunted down, virtually defenseless.

“Here they come again!” Philly warned.

Deke turned to face the Japanese once again. Down the length of the shadowy path, he could sense more than see movement. The enemy was creeping toward them. Deke held his fire, waiting for a good target.

He realized that there seemed to be no other option than the running battle that he dreaded. They could hold back the Japanese for a while, but if the enemy moved into the forest to flank them, the fight might be over all too soon. They simply didn’t have enough men or weapons to adequately defend against an attack from multiple directions. Here on the trail, they were sitting ducks.

It was Danilo who saved them. He had appeared at the front of the column and was conferring with Steele. The lieutenant nodded, and Danilo waved at the GIs to follow him.

“This way!” Steele shouted.