Deke slung his rifle over his shoulder, then began to ascend the hill, hand over hand, using bits of stump, vines, and even rocks for handholds. Glumly he realized that the Japs could roll rocks down on the GIs, and it might be enough to stop the advance.
Apparently Philly had the same thought. He caught up to Deke, who had been slowed by the steep slope. “I don’t like this, Deke. We’re sitting ducks if they so much as roll rocks down at us.”
“Yeah,” Deke admitted. “How about if you go up there and ask them real nice not to do that?”
Philly just snorted and kept climbing.
Deke slipped, and his boot came down hard, going out from under him so that his ankle crunched on a sharp rock. He winced, first at the noise and then at the pain, looking down to see if he’d cut himself, but he didn’t find any blood.
He wasn’t the only one struggling up the hill. Off to his right, Yoshio’s boots slipped on the slick dirt, and he fell heavily with a grunt.
Somebody muttered, “Quiet, goddammit!”
Yoshio glanced in Deke’s direction, looking stricken. Deke shrugged. They all knew that they’d be better off if the Japs didn’t hear them coming up the hill, but it was easier said than done.
Deke held on to a tree root and stopped climbing, listening for any clue that the Japanese had heard them. They could hear small-arms fire in the distance and even the crump, crump sound of artillery, but nothing from the hill itself.
Quiet, Deke thought. Maybe too quiet.
They had no choice but to continue. Deke started climbing again.
After a few minutes of hard going, he reached the top of the sharp incline, to the point where the hill began a gentler slope across open ground. Oddly, there was still no sign of the Japs. Where the hell were they?
There was no firing, yelling, or movement of any kind. He’d had some idea of what to expect, but this wasn’t it. Deke gestured to Philly to stay down, keeping to the brush that clung to the forest’s edge.
Once at the top, Deke found that he could go no farther without exposing himself. He had reached the open part of the hillside, where all the trees had been cleared away to give the defenders open fields of fire. From their raid, Deke and the others knew that the hillside was laced with trenches, some of them cleverly interconnected. Other than the batteries near the summit, still raining shells on the beaches and even reaching out to the ships offshore, there didn’t appear to be any Japanese activity.
Philly crept closer and knelt beside him, both of them taking advantage of the natural cover. “See what I mean?” Philly asked. “I’m telling you that the Japs pulled out.”
“I don’t think so.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Just trust me for once.”
Deke studied the empty ground, which didn’t look right. He knew that the Japs must be out there, unseen. Unless they were deaf, dumb, and blind, they would have had plenty of warning that the Americans were on their way up here.
He remembered once, as a boy, there had been a mean old bull that ruled over Old Man McGlothlin’s pasture. The pasture had been a shortcut to the one-room schoolhouse that Deke sometimes attended when farm chores permitted. When he and Sadie crossed that field, the bull snorted and pawed the ground, but he didn’t charge.
Some part of Deke had been disappointed. Running from the bull would have helped to liven up the otherwise routine walk to something as boring as school.
“For all that noise, that bull don’t amount to no more than a fart in the wind,” Deke had said.
“That’s probably just what that bull thinks about you,” Sadie had said. “He reckons that such a skinny beanpole ain’t worth chasin’. Now if you wanted to stir that bull up, what you’d have to do is wave a red flag at him.”
“Go on now,” Deke had said. “That ain’t true.”
“Try it and see. Wave something red at that bull just once and you’d better run.”
Deke hadn’t had anything red that day, but the next time they’d crossed that pasture on the way to school, he’d surprised Sadie by pulling out a red bandanna. “You know what you said the other day about that bull?”
“Deke, don’t you dare!”
But Deke hadn’t been able to resist. There was the bull, snorting and pawing the ground as always from halfway across the pasture. Deke had waved the red handkerchief at it.
At first nothing had happened. But then the old bull had begun to trot toward them, huge slabs of meat and muscle vibrating powerfully down his sides. Deke had begun to have second thoughts about the wisdom of his actions, but it had been too late for that. The bull had lowered his horns, bellowed with rage, and charged.
“Run, Sadie!”
“Run, Deke!”
Barefoot, they’d flown across the pasture, the bull snorting and bellowing right behind them. It had been a near thing, but they’d gotten across that field and over the fence ahead of the bull, who’d pulled up short at the fence and stood snorting in frustration. Deke and Sadie had jumped off the fence and tumbled into the deep grass on the other side, laughing their fool heads off.
He reckoned that now the Japanese were the bull, and Deke was the handkerchief.
“Here we go, boys,” he muttered. “I sure hope you’re ready.”
Light as smoke, Deke stepped out of the underbrush and into the clearing.
At first nothing happened. Deke held his breath, imagining that some Japanese was using the time to line up his sights on him.
Then again, that was the whole idea. He gave the hidden Japs what was known back home as a “hillbilly wave,” the big arm swing of a mountain howdy. In the old days, it had been meant to show that you had only one hand on your rifle and weren’t planning on shooting anyone.
The enemy wasn’t so welcoming. Almost immediately, the firing began.
The Japanese were there, all right, but they’d just been waiting for that red flag. Deke had sprung the Japanese trap.
As he looked up the hill, a muzzle flashed from within a hidden pit. The bullet whizzed past him, and he ducked behind a rock. He was so close that he heard the click of the Japanese soldier working his rifle bolt, giving Deke a target for his own rifle. He fired without thinking, acting out of pure instinct and adrenaline, then looked to see that he’d hit the Japanese soldier. The man was slumped over the barrel of his rifle, a look of surprise frozen on his face.
If only all the Japs would die that easily. Back home there seemed to be this idea that the Japs were all near-sighted, buck-toothed, terrible shots, and no match for a real American. That was all propaganda to reassure Americans that there was no doubt they could win the war. By now Deke knew there was nothing further from the truth about this terrible enemy.
“Get into those trenches!” Steele shouted. “I want fire on those positions on the hill.”
Deke bent low and ran forward into the storm of lead as he might run into a hurricane wind. A couple of men went down. The only reason there weren’t more casualties was because the Japanese were shooting downhill, resulting in a natural tendency to shoot high.
It worked both ways. Firing up the hill, many of the GIs were shooting too low.
“Aim lower!” Steele shouted.
While the nearest trenches did offer cover, the trouble was that they were still occupied by Japanese. Deke tumbled into a trench, finding himself face-to-face with two enemy soldiers. They were screaming at him in Japanese. He wasn’t sure what they were yelling other than that it probably wasn’t, “How do you do?”