Deke frowned. He found it disturbing that the Japanese seemed to have an endless supply of men with which to feed their war machine. The brass wanted them all to think that the Japanese were just about licked, but that didn’t seem so obvious on the ground.
He reached down and spent a moment examining the dead enemy soldier’s rifle, noting that it was yet another Arisaka, but well oiled. You had to admit that the Japanese made a darn good rifle, even if the M1 had made the bolt-action weapons increasingly obsolete. So what if it had a slower rate of fire? No matter — it would kill you all the same.
Judging by the quiet behind them, it was also evident that Captain Merrick had not opted to lead the rest of his company into the forest in pursuit of the Japanese. Deke, Philly, and Yoshio were on their own.
Deke thought about how many parachutes he had seen drifting down. There had been a lot. An awful lot. He had been more than a little hotheaded in dashing into the jungle, but there was no telling how many Japanese might also be moving through the forest. It was likely that the Japanese paratroopers had a rendezvous point, and it wouldn’t be all that smart for the three of them to stumble across it without any support.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Deke whispered, more than aware that there might be other ears out here, listening. “We need to find the rest of the company.”
Yoshio seemed to have the same thought. Still, he took a moment to go through the dead paratrooper’s pockets. He struck pay dirt when he found a map. Using the red lens of his flashlight so as not to spoil his night vision, Yoshio looked it over.
“What does it say?” Deke asked. The Japanese writing looked like chicken scratch to him, but he knew that Yoshio understood it well enough.
“I think it indicates targets they intend to hit,” Yoshio said. “Captain Merrick may have a better idea. Anyhow, I don’t think this is the place to spread out the map and read it.”
“Agreed,” Philly said. “Listen, Merrick held the rest of the company back at that clearing. Hopefully our guys won’t think we’re the Japanese coming back to get them and shoot us on the way out.”
Deke couldn’t argue with that. Slowly he turned and followed Philly and Yoshio back the way they had come, never taking his eyes off the dark jungle surrounding them, expecting at any moment to see an enemy soldier appear.
As they advanced through the jungle, it soon became clear that they were not alone. But it was not the Japanese they encountered. There were other threats in the night, ones oblivious to the war and indifferent to the struggles of the Japanese or the GIs.
Rounding a bend in the game trail, with Deke leading the way, they found two large green eyes staring at them. Deke froze, staring back without flinching. In the moonlight, the rest of the creature began to coalesce. They could see a powerful feline body, poised to launch itself at them.
They had come face-to-face with a large predator that was also stalking the night. It was a leopard cat, one of the few large predators in the Philippine jungles. Like as not, the leopard cat or its kin had been responsible for some of the death cries they had heard from the darkness tonight.
“What’s that?” Philly asked, sounding startled by the strange sight of glowing eyes staring at them out of the darkness.
Behind Philly, Yoshio muttered something in Japanese. It might have been either a curse or a prayer.
“Don’t move,” Deke whispered.
“Shoot it!” Philly urged.
They were moving single file on the narrow trail, and Philly couldn’t get a shot off without hitting Deke in the back.
“No shooting, goddammit. We’ll have every Japanese paratrooper in the neighborhood down on our heads if you pull that trigger,” Deke replied quietly. “Just keep still. Let’s see what he does.”
It was true that a gunshot would have alerted the Japanese, who were surely lurking somewhere in the forest. What Deke didn’t say to Philly was that it was doubtful that he could have lifted and aimed his rifle before the jungle cat covered the distance between them.
He trusted that his reflexes were quicker, or at least as quick, as any Japanese soldier they might have encountered on the trail. But Deke doubted that he was as quick as a jungle cat.
Maybe it was his imagination, but the old scars on the left side of his face, even the deep ones that raked across his body, flared up, tingling and burning on their own, throbbing with each beat of Deke’s heart. Those scars were evidence of the mauling that had almost killed him as a boy. They had also left one side of his face and most of his torso disfigured and ugly.
These were the scars that the bear that had come down from the mountain had left on him all those years ago. Deke hadn’t been quick enough then to stop the charging bear, and he doubted that he would be quick enough now if the leopard cat sprang at him.
The seconds ticked by.
Ever so slowly the leopard cat seemed to make up its mind that the soldiers either weren’t a threat, or weren’t worth the fight. It wasn’t like they could ask it. The animal gave one last good stare with its green eyes, flicked its tail, and melted off the trail and into the jungle.
Deke realized that he had been holding his breath. He let himself breathe again.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I’ve got to say, I’d rather fight the Japs any day than fight that thing.”
When Philly didn’t reply right away, he turned around and found that Philly and Yoshio had retreated by several paces. Only Deke had held his ground.
“Uh, yeah,” Philly said, sounding sheepish.
Deke snorted. “Some help you two were.”
“It looked to me like you had things under control.”
“Come on,” Deke said. “This war ain’t gonna fight itself.”
As they approached the small airfield, they could hear a gun battle taking place. You had to give these Japanese paratroopers credit, Deke thought. They had dropped out of the sky into a hostile landing zone and still managed to regroup quickly and launch an attack. The Japanese attack also appeared to be highly organized, because they had even managed to post a handful of troops to guard their flanks.
They found that out because they ran right into those guards.
Stabs of flame from muzzle flashes punctuated the dark forest ahead. If there was any question about whether those shots were intended for them, that question was answered when they heard the sound of bullets zinging through the night air around them.
“Come on!” Deke shouted, then surged ahead.
“Dammit, Deke!” Philly protested. “Let’s wait for the others to come up.”
It sounded as if the fight at the airfield was not only hot but going badly for their own boys. The sharp crack of the Japanese weapons sounded slightly different from the American rifles, and their bursts outnumbered the smattering of return fire.
Where the hell was the rest of Captain Merrick’s company? Deke wasn’t going to cool his heels while Merrick’s men caught up. Ain’t no time for that. If nothing else, the three of them might be able to take the Japanese attackers by surprise and do some good there. So far, Deke, Philly, and Yoshio were the only cavalry those boys at the airfield were going to get.
Deke wasn’t waiting for anybody else, not if they hoped to have any chance of turning the tide of the fight ahead. He ran toward the sound of the firing, shouting, “Follow me!”
CHAPTER THREE
As Deke ran toward the sound of the fight, the game trail through the jungle narrowed and disappeared, the forest closing in on them like a cattle chute, but Deke kept running pell-mell, shoving aside branches, crashing through the greenery, a one-man bush hog.