Savage Sniper

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Where the hell are we going?” Philly demanded, looking back nervously over his shoulder. “We sure can’t outrun those Nips. Those little bastards must have wings on their feet.”

“Hurry, hurry!” Danilo shouted.

Even while running flat out, Deke mused that Danilo never seemed to know any English until it suited him, and this seemed to be one of those times. Bringing up the rear, Deke paused now and then to take a shot at their pursuers. His heart was pounding from all the running, so it wasn’t his most accurate shooting.

It had become his job to delay the enemy as much as possible to buy some time for the others. The Japanese were closing in on them rapidly, so he hoped that Danilo had something good up his sleeve.

Moments later he burst into the clearing with the old Japanese defenses, where they had sheltered the night of the storm during their journey out. Up ahead of him, men were already pouring into the bunker, taking up defensive positions facing the trail where the enemy would emerge from the forest.

Deke grinned. Danilo had done all right. Using the protection of the thick-walled bunker, even a handful of determined defenders could hold off a much larger force. The bunker was surrounded by a large clearing that offered a good field of fire. Crossing that clearing would be suicide — not that this ever seemed to stop the Japanese. Deke found a certain satisfaction in the irony of the Japanese bunker being used against them.

However, not everyone could fit within the bunker. Many of the Filipino fighters hunkered down in foxholes that had been dug around the bunker itself. These were men who preferred taking their chances out in the open over being confined in a bunker.

A few of the former POWs joined them. Those who had the energy to do so were adding whatever they could to the defenses, from logs to rocks. A few sandbags were dragged into new positions. The result could hardly be called a fortress, but it was better than nothing.

Not wasting any more time, Deke slipped inside the bunker. He took note of the armored door that was being left open for now to communicate with the men in the foxholes. The door was built of heavy boards with reinforcing bands of steel, almost like a medieval castle door. The steel was already rusting badly in the tropical conditions, leaving long streaks like dried blood splashed across the wood. The door wouldn’t have been much use against heavy weapons, but it would be more than adequate to stop bullets.

For now the bunker would be the center of their defense. The bunker was really more of a rectangular “pillbox” in that it was not buried into a hillside but was freestanding. The Japanese must have built it here for an outpost to guard the jungle trail, but the enemy had abandoned this post in the middle of nowhere.

It had been designed with narrow horizontal firing slits set into all four sides. The slits were really intended for machine guns, but they would work well enough for riflemen as well.

“Padre, you and your men take those two sides,” Lieutenant Steele ordered. “My boys will cover the other two sides.”

“As you say,” Father Francisco said. “Unfortunately, we are running low on ammunition.”

“Then better make each shot count.”

“I thought that I might pray.”

“That might not be a bad idea,” Steele agreed.

Although the ceiling was quite low, the bunker was surprisingly spacious even when crowded with so many men. The weakest POWs were immediately put into the two rough bunks. To Deke’s nose once again came the vaguely fishy smell that he always seemed to associate with the Japanese. Although the bunker clearly had not been occupied by the enemy for quite some time, the smell still lingered.

Here in the jungle, concrete had not been used in the bunker’s construction. Instead, the bunker was built of rammed earth, stone, and even logs cut from the forest. Nonetheless, it seemed sturdy enough to keep any attacker except maybe a tank at bay. Although he felt reassured, there was also the nagging thought that while none of the enemy was getting in, none of the defenders would be getting out as long as they were surrounded by the Japanese. They were trapped like rats in a box. Deke pushed that uncomfortable thought from his mind.

He took up a position alongside Philly. Yoshio and Rodeo covered the other firing slit. Father Francisco and the guerrillas had taken charge of the other firing slits.

“How are we doing for ammo?” the lieutenant asked.

“Getting low,” Deke replied. He had used up a surprising number of bullets keeping the enemy at bay on the path.

“Same here,” said Yoshio.

Father Francisco had already warned that the guerrillas’ ammo supply was getting low, which wasn’t reassuring. It didn’t help that the Americans and the Filipinos were largely armed with different weapons — several of the guerrillas still carried Arisaka rifles that had been liberated in one way or another from the Japanese.

The arrangement left the bulk of the former POWs in the foxholes ringing the bunker, nervously awaiting their fate. Faraday and Cooper were armed with pistols, which wouldn’t do much good unless the Japanese came extremely close to the American position.

“We’ve got company,” announced Deke, who was peering out at the clearing. He spotted the Japanese swarming down the path, spreading out and taking positions around the bunker.

“Listen up, everybody,” Steele announced. “We are getting low on ammo. We need to make each shot count.”

“How the hell are we getting out of here, Honcho?” Philly wanted to know. “The Japanese are going to have us surrounded.”

“We would’ve been sitting ducks on that trail,” the lieutenant responded. “Now we’ve got them right where we want them. We can whittle away at them while these men rest, and then once it’s dark, we can slip away.”

“Sounds good to me, Honcho,” Philly said.

“Dammit, Philly, I wasn’t asking your opinion. Now act like a sniper and shoot anybody that the enemy sends against us.”

Deke decided that the lieutenant was being optimistic for the benefit of those listening. The look in his one good eye told a different story — Lieutenant Steele knew damn well that they were in a tight spot.

The Japanese attack began not with a fusillade of bullets, but with a single arrow. The arrow flashed through the air and arced down into one of the foxholes. A man screamed as the arrow pierced him.

Only then did the shooting begin.

Deke didn’t fire blindly. He was waiting for one target in particular — well, make that two. He wanted to put a bullet through Mr. Suey and then through that bastard of a commandant. It was almost like a physical ache, an itch that needed to be scratched. Say what you wanted about war, but sometimes it did get personal.

“If anybody sees that son of a bitch with a bow and arrow, let me know,” Deke said, turning and shouting to the others before giving his attention back to the firing slit in front of him.

Deke had to admit that he was impressed all over again by the commandant’s archery skills. The bow had a longer range than Deke might have expected. Yamagata had managed to shoot one of the guerrillas without exposing himself. He was beginning to wonder if maybe he had underestimated the Japanese archer. On the face of it, a bow and arrow seemed to be a useless weapon against rifles and bullets, but there was just something so terrifying about it. Deke couldn’t help but wonder if this was how his ancestors had felt, fighting the Indians while holed up in a wooden stockade with a long rifle.

As if to punctuate his thoughts, an arrow came right through one of the firing slits and buried itself in Rodeo’s upper arm, the one that the butt of his rifle had been tucked into. Deke rushed over to Rodeo and pushed him to one side, hoping for a glimpse of Yamagata.

He spotted the archer at the far end of the clearing, where he had stepped away from the cover of the forest to fire his arrow. By the time that Deke acquired that spot in his rifle scope, Yamagata had vanished back into the trees.

Deke fired anyhow, hoping that he might get lucky and his bullet would find Yamagata in his jungle hiding place.

“What the hell, Deke?” Rodeo demanded indignantly. He clutched at his arm, clearly in pain.

“Sorry,” Deke muttered. “I wanted a shot at that son of a bitch. The commandant of that Japanese camp likes to play with bows and arrows.”

“Did you get him?”

“No,” Deke said bitterly.

“I’d say the commandant does more than play with bows and arrows,” Yoshio pointed out. He had come over to help Rodeo and was wrapping a rag around the base of the arrow. The tip had entered the fleshy part of Rodeo’s biceps, but hadn’t gone all the way through, leaving the full length of the arrow still jutting out. When Yoshio grasped the arrow, testing how firmly it was embedded, Rodeo yelped in pain.

“Hey, that’s not a goddamn stick shift!”

“You can’t fight with that arrow the way it is, and we cannot leave it buried in you. It will get infected,” Yoshio said. “It must be removed.”

“How the hell are you gonna do that?” Rodeo demanded.

“I have an idea.”

Without any warning, he used the now bloody rag to get a good grip on the shaft of the arrow and shoved until the point came out the other side of Rodeo’s biceps.

Rodeo screamed and made a fist, drawing back his good arm as if about to slug Yoshio. “You son of a bitch!”

Deke grabbed Rodeo’s fist before he could punch Yoshio. “Hold on, Yoshio is right. It’s got to come out.”

Yoshio made the rest of his treatment plan clear by digging in his pack for the wire cutters they had used to get through the perimeter fence. He snipped off the tip of the arrow, then pulled the shaft backward, freeing it from Rodeo’s arm. Once again, Rodeo howled.

Yoshio sprinkled some sulpha powder on the entry and exit wounds, then bound it tightly with the rag. Yoshio was the nearest thing they had to a medic, and once again he had demonstrated his medical skills. “There,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “Good as new.”

“Good as new my ass,” Rodeo replied. “I can tell you one thing. It’s gonna hurt like hell to shoot this rifle. At least I’ll get a Purple Heart out of it.”

Honcho had overheard that last part. “Purple Heart? Hell, no. I hate to tell you this, Rodeo, but nobody would believe me if I put you in for a medal because you got shot with an arrow.”

“Well, dammit all, then.” Rodeo appeared genuinely disappointed. “That’s not fair.”

Yoshio grinned. “Maybe you will get shot next with an actual bullet and get yourself a medal after all.”

“You’re a regular barrel of laughs.”

Another arrow came soaring in, picking off another one of the Filipino guerrillas in the foxholes. Deke noted that you could possibly get out of the way of an arrow — if you saw it was coming.

“Dammit, where the hell is he?” he muttered to himself once again. Through the scope, he was watching the spot where he had last seen Yamagata, but there was no sign of him. The arrow had come from an entirely different direction. Just liked a skilled sniper, Yamagata knew to move around.

Deke hurried to the firing slit on that side and scanned the edge of the forest, but there was no sign of the archer. Reluctantly, he had to admit that maybe the man was more talented than he had been willing to give him credit for. Neither had he seen any sign of Mr. Suey. Already the fight was not going the way that Deke had expected or hoped.

After all, a few arrows were terrifying weapons, but they were not the worst of it. The garrison troops had encircled the bunker and foxholes, pouring fire at them. The simple fact was that the Americans and Filipino fighters were outnumbered two or three to one. Their only advantage was the bunker, but even that wasn’t completely impregnable. Bullets pinged constantly around the edges of the firing slits. Occasionally the Japanese bullets found their way inside.

From the interior of the bunker, one of the prisoners screamed as he was hit. The man had been little more than a bag of bones, and he collapsed and writhed on the dirt floor. Faraday bent over him, asking him where he was hit, but there was nothing that he could do. The man was beyond any kind of medical care. After a few awful moments, he finally lay still.

“Son-of-a-bitch Japs!” Faraday cursed.

In a rage, Faraday dashed to one of the firing slits and blasted away with the pistol that he’d been given earlier.

“You’re wasting ammo,” Deke pointed out.

“Maybe, but it sure as hell made me feel better.”

Deke just nodded. He couldn’t argue with that.

Out in the foxholes that made up the defensive perimeter, the Filipino fighters weren’t faring much better.

Father Francisco did not possess a weapon because his religious vows would not allow it. However, he not only directed his defenders, but brought them water and spare ammo taken from the dead and dying after he had said his prayers over them. He was also tending to the wounded as best as he could.

From the bunker Deke could see the priest from time to time, dashing between foxholes at huge personal risk. Bullets kicked up the dirt all around him whenever he appeared in the open. Once or twice Deke could have sworn that he saw bullets pluck at the priest’s robes. But the man himself remained unscathed.

Maybe God was protecting the man in some way, after all, Deke thought. Father Francisco had expressed earlier in the mission that he had begun to doubt his faith because of all the loss and suffering he had seen in the war. It was just possible that God had not lost faith in the priest.

Meanwhile, all that any of them could do was fight, hoping that they could pick off enough of the Japanese to even the odds.

“I wish to hell they would come at us in a banzai charge,” Philly said.

“No such luck,” Deke said.

It was a common misconception that the Japanese were all eager to throw away their lives in pointless banzai charges, but that was not the case. Those charges usually took place when the situation was so desperate that such tactics were a hopeless gamble. This was not the current situation. The Japanese could be stealthy adversaries. They were keeping to cover for the most part, wearing down the defenders. Deke had to hand it to Yamagata in that the man knew his business.

Another arrow whipped through the air, this time smacking against the rim of the firing slit and dropping harmlessly to the ground. Yamagata had missed, but what about the next time? That arrow had come awfully close.

Deke scanned the forest fringes for some sign of the archer, but he was too canny to show himself.

But from the woods, a new threat presented itself. There was a sudden tap, tap, tap. Almost instantaneously, a burst of slugs hit the side of the bunker all around the open firing pit in front of Deke and Philly. They instinctively ducked down.

The Japanese had a machine gun.

It had been bad enough to be pinned down by superior rifle fire and an arrow or two. This new development made things much worse.

“Well, don’t that beat all,” Deke said. “That machine gun changes things.”

Philly gave him a look from below the rim of the firing slit, where they had both sheltered when the first volley from the Nambu had chewed up the wall of the pillbox. He said, “Corn Pone, that is probably the understatement of the year.”