It was hard to say what the purpose of the stick was, considering that the amount of explosive would certainly vaporize the soldier delivering the bomb. But if that length of stick gave the soldier some sense of hope that he would somehow survive the attack, so be it.
Through the scope, he could see the Japanese soldier’s open mouth, screaming a battle cry as he charged.
Deke shot him.
Crazy bastard, Deke thought. What was the point of that?
Then a cold stab of realization went through him. Just beyond their foxhole several barrels were stacked. Then more and more barrels. Holy hell. They were sitting right next to the fuel dump for the airfield.
The berserk Japanese soldier hadn’t been trying to break through their lines. He’d been intending to blow up the fuel dump. If he had succeeded, the explosion would have taken out most of the company. As for the airfield, it would be rendered unusable — most likely, at least part of the landing strip would be reduced to a large burned hole in the ground.
All three seemed to figure it out at once. They looked at the stacked piles of highly flammable aviation fuel, at the advancing Japanese paratroopers, and then at one another.
“Dammit!” Philly said. “I don’t want to get blown up.”
Yoshio muttered, “Chikushō.” Oh shit! No translation was required to understand that it was not something that he would have said in front of his mother.
“Yeah,” Deke said. “That last fella was close. Just don’t let them get any closer.”
But the Japanese seemed to have made up their minds that they were going to blow up that fuel stockpile, even if it was the last thing they did. Destroying the airstrip and the fuel dump appeared to be the paratroopers’ primary mission.
Another Japanese soldier broke away from the paratroopers. Like the previous man, he was similarly armed with a stick bomb. He ran at a crouch toward the American position. Incredibly, he seemed to leap over a burst of machine-gun fire lit by tracers and kept right on going.
“It’s another runner, ten o’clock,” Yoshio said.
“I see him,” Philly said.
He fired, but the man did not go down.
“He’s still coming,” Yoshio said.
“Dammit, I’m out!” Philly shouted, fumbling in the dark for another stripper clip. “You’ve got to get him, Deke!”
Deke was already tracking the enemy soldier through his scope. Hitting a moving target was no small feat, even for the best marksman. The challenge was compounded by the flickering, uncertain light of the battlefield. Also, Deke and the others were being shot at. Bullets sang above their helmets, and it took a huge amount of willpower not to duck down out of sheer instinct. There was a very real possibility that Deke would get shot in the head before he could squeeze that trigger.
Deke got his rhythm going, swinging his sights through the man to a point just ahead of him, moving the sight along, matching his speed. With any luck, the target would essentially run right into the path of the bullet.
Easy, easy—
He flinched at the nearby detonation of what sounded like a mortar. Yoshio yelped in pain.
Dammit. Deke got back on target. The Japanese runner was quick. He had already covered too much ground. There was time for just one shot before the runner covered the distance to the fuel depot and detonated that stick bomb.
Deke put everything else out of his head. Time seemed to slow down. He repeated the process of swinging through the man again, matching his pace, holding the crosshairs there. The runner reached the edge of the fuel dump, where a pile of barrels had fallen over and rolled across the airstrip.
The Japanese gave a keening cry, either of terror or victory, nobody could be sure.
Deke squeezed the trigger.
What happened next happened fast. The rifle kicked against his shoulder, the runner tumbled, the stick bomb hit the ground — and exploded.
A blast wave of searing air washed over Deke’s face. Clumps of burning fuel spread across the field and even landed in the jungle, burning like will-o’-the-wisps among the trees.
But nothing else exploded.
As Captain Merrick’s company concentrated their fire, the fight seemed to go out of the enemy paratroopers. Either that or many of them had been killed. Private Frazier opened fire with his Browning Automatic Rifle and swept the jungle’s edge with a long burst. The effect was like a gale force wind scattering the embers of a forest fire. The enemy fire immediately became more sporadic, then died down altogether.
And just like that, the real fight had ended, the desperate one where the outcome had hung by a thread. All that remained now was the mopping up.
It was hard to say how long the battle had gone on. Time had a way of distorting during combat — nothing made sense. There was no real way of measuring it. The movement of hands on a man’s wristwatch was meaningless. What seemed like hours were actually minutes, while the hours themselves ticked by like seconds.
The only proof of the passage of the long night came from the fact that the sky was already growing lighter. Pale streaks on the horizon promised another tropical dawn. However, down here in the closeness of the jungle, it was still plenty dark enough.
“So much for that,” Philly announced. “Now maybe we can all finally get some sleep.”
Normally Deke tended to be the wide-awake one, getting by on less shut-eye and watching the jungle while the others slept. But a sense of exhaustion suddenly hit him, hard as a knockout punch from Joe Louis.
He slumped down into the muddy bottom of the foxhole, closed his eyes, and fell asleep instantly, clutching his rifle to him like the only lover he had known.
CHAPTER FOUR
Exhaustion set in after the nighttime fight against the incursion of Japanese paratroopers, so sleep came quickly, even for men who had only a helmet for a pillow. While Deke slept, a handful of men kept an uneasy watch. An occasional crackle of rifle fire was a reminder that they hadn’t gotten all the paratroopers. But the enemy’s back had been broken, and they had evidently given up on attacking the airfield again.
The soldiers slept as long as they could, but the rising sun and tropical heat soon began to rouse them. Deke had a momentary sense of panic when he didn’t immediately feel his rifle in his hands.
He sat up, frantically looking around. “Where, where—”
His fingertips touched the familiar stock, which had slipped a couple of inches out of his grip while he slept. “There you are.”
His rifle hadn’t gone anywhere. He shook his head, worried that he was overreacting. I’m just tired, is all.
He had managed to snatch a couple hours of sleep. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. He supposed that he was lucky to get even that much shut-eye.
Judging by the faint sounds of snoring nearby, several of the other men were still sleeping, Philly and Yoshio included. Watching the forms of the two sleeping men, Deke felt a surge of affection toward them, what you might call brotherly love. In fact, if he’d had brothers instead of his ornery sister, Sadie, he was sure this was how he would have felt toward them.
Deke was surprised to discover that sense of bonding toward Philly and Yoshio. After all, he had thought that those last few difficult years on the failing farm and then in the bleak boardinghouse in town — not to mention the loss of his ma and pa, good people beaten down by a hard life — had leached out the last of any emotion in him. Whatever was left that the bear hadn’t clawed out of him already.
Deke discovered that he’d been wrong about that. It had taken a war and all that killing and fighting to realize that there was still something human left in him. He still had a little brotherly love left to give someone other than Sadie. Don’t that beat all.