For this strip of concrete in the vast Pacific, thousands of men would die.
Okubo pushed these thoughts of strategy from his mind and focused on the task at hand. He would do his part to help make the attack a success.
He froze. Kimura walked right into him, and Okubo heard him open his mouth to utter an apology, but he reached out to grip his arm and silence him.
Not more than one hundred feet away, he had seen a momentary flash of muted light. Someone had lit a match or flicked a lighter, and then like a firefly, the light was gone.
They had reached the American defenses.
Moving parallel to where he thought the line of foxholes was located, Okubo barely dared to breathe. Each step might give them away.
In fact, they were much closer than was prudent. If he hadn’t spotted that light, they very well might have walked right into the American lines.
The jungle had mostly given way, and the ground was more broken by coral boulders and even fallen trees. All that he needed to do was find the right spot.
He required a good position where he could set up his sniper’s nest. The easiest course of action would have been to climb a tree. From above, he could have picked off anyone in the foxholes. However, once daylight arrived, he might be an easy target.
Some snipers did not care about that. They had been taught that their lives were expendable. But Okubo considered himself to be a samurai. He believed in the Bushido code of honor. A samurai did not throw his life away but lived to fight again.
Finally, he nearly bumped into the wreckage of a Japanese tank. Though fierce fighters and extremely damaging to infantry, the light Japanese tanks were no match for the more heavily armed Sherman tanks or threats from the air. This tank and crew had paid the price. Okubo could smell burned metal, spilled fuel, and the stink of putrefying flesh in the tropical heat. Perhaps the crew had been trapped inside and were rotting like a tin of bad sardines.
“Private Kimura, you will take your rifle and fire on the Americans when I give the order.”
“From where, sir?”
“From inside the tank.”
Kimura wrinkled his nose. “There are dead men in there, sir.”
“They will not ask any questions.”
“Hai,” Kimura said without much enthusiasm.
Leaving Kimura at the tank, Okubo walked a short distance away to a pile of coral boulders. He worked his way down among them, squirming in like a badger.
When dawn came, he would have a clear field of fire. If the enemy noticed the sniper fire, then the wrecked tank would be an obvious target. Private Kimura would certainly draw their attention with his inept shooting. Meanwhile, Okubo would continue to slay the Americans, unseen.
With everything in place, Okubo settled down to wait. He must be patient. General Takashina’s attack would come soon enough.
He was the samurai sniper, and they were nothing more than the gaijin that he would slay.
Chapter Eleven
No sooner had Deke and the rest of the squad dug in as best as they could in the hard volcanic soil than the rain that had been threatening on the horizon arrived.
Rain in the tropics wasn’t quite like anywhere else. The rain clouds seemed to build up momentum while crossing the vast expanses of the Pacific, soaking up moisture like a sponge. Once over land, those clouds seemed determined to wring themselves out. Torrents of rain fell, washing the dust of battle from the fronds of the coconut and palm trees overhead. The hard-packed ground couldn’t drain fast enough, and deep puddles formed. Thunder rumbled as darkness fell and lightning flashed. Deke had experienced his share of mountain storms back home, but for some reason, being on an island made the experience feel more like being on a ship at sea.
Deke hunkered down. The foxhole that he and Philly had dug soon began to fill with rainwater. Their boots and uniforms were soaked through. The rain had brought chill air, and their teeth chattered from the cold.
“It would be a hell of a thing to freeze to death on Guam,” Philly complained.
“Yeah, your chances of getting a Jap bayonet in the gut are a lot better.”
“Now that’s a thought to warm anybody up,” Philly said. “Thanks for that.”
Neither of them could resist turning a nervous eye toward Private Shimizu, who had been put into the foxhole by them. Quietly, he had done his part digging. He now sat with the brim of his helmet dipped low over his eyes, a cascade of water flowing off it, looking as miserable as they felt.
Deke’s wide-brimmed hat provided some measure of protection against the downpour, keeping the rain from running down the back of his neck. He unsnapped the other side to provide more protection. The hat was a useful item in the tropics, all right.
As another tropical night approached, they all settled in, digging foxholes as deep as they could in the island soil. Remembering what they had gone through the previous night with constant Japanese attacks, no one argued about laboring to dig his foxhole. The deeper the hole, the better one’s chances of survival.
“You know, it’s funny,” Philly said.
“What is?” Deke asked.
“I would have thought that being a good soldier meant being good with a rifle. In reality, it means you’re good with a shovel.”
“Just shut up and dig.”
The only one who seemed to have trouble digging his foxhole was Private Shimizu. After a half hour of steady toil, it seemed as if he had barely scratched much more than a shallow hole into the tough, coral soil.
Philly wasn’t shy about pointing out that the hole wasn’t sufficient.
“Better dig deeper,” Philly warned him. “You might look like those Japs, but they’re going to shoot you all the same.”
Shimizu went back to shoveling. After a while, he straightened up and looked over at Deke. Philly had gone to bum cigarettes off the next squad over.
“Do you think that this is deep enough?” Shimizu asked.
Deke just shrugged.
“You don’t like me much, do you? I can tell.”
“Listen, kid, I just don’t care about you, one way or the other. The last buddy I looked out for got himself killed, and there wasn’t a damn thing that I could do about it. You’re better off on your own.”
“What about Philly?”
“Philly can handle himself. It’s you I’m not so sure about. We’ll see if you even last the night.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean you’ll probably get killed, that’s what.”
Shimizu shook his head and went back to digging, probably wishing that he was back at HQ on the beach, interrogating enemy prisoners — although those tended to be few and far between. The enemy hadn’t shown himself to be much in favor of surrender.
The sound of distant gunfire was punctuated only by the dig and scrape of shovels nearby. Finally, the sun began to dip toward the horizon and another night of hell.
Little did the men know that the attacks of the previous night had been no more than harassment. Hidden in the lengthening shadows of the jungle, emerging from their hiding places and the tunnels where they had concealed themselves, more than six thousand Japanese soldiers were preparing to attack the thin American lines at dawn.
Despite the threat of attack, the soldiers managed to sleep fitfully during the night. They came fully awake only when one of the guard dogs attached to an adjacent company began barking madly.