He didn’t even bother to use the scope, but just pointed the Springfield and pulled the trigger. The sniper fell back. Deke worked the bolt and fired again, taking his time and aiming carefully at the sniper’s head. He fired and the sniper didn’t move again.
“Dammit, I hate these sneaky bastards,” Lieutenant Steele said. The sniper had killed two GIs and wounded a third, whom the medic was now working over. It didn’t look promising. “Son of a bitch. That’s three of our guys. Still, that was good shooting, Deke.”
“You got it, Honcho. I just wish I’d gotten him before he’d gotten us.”
“Then you’d better grow some eyes in the back of your head.” He looked around at the squad. “Maybe we’d all better do that.”
“Don’t you mean eye, Honcho?” Philly asked.
“Keep it up, Philly. I’m sure they could use some help stacking boxes on the beach.”
“Right now, that sounds pretty good.”
“What’s that?”
“Uh, nothing—” Philly managed to stop just short of adding sir, which would have been a death warrant if there were any Japanese within listening range. Given the terrain, that was entirely possible.
They had eliminated the Japanese sniper, but the Japanese weren’t done.
Up ahead, they heard a burst of fire from a concrete pillbox. But this was no solitary sniper with a rifle. This was definitely a machine-gun emplacement. The Japanese Nambu machine guns always had the telltale sound of a woodpecker, albeit a deadly one.
“Everybody down!” Lieutenant Steele shouted.
Bullets tore up the ground all around them. Yoshio seemed frozen in place, not sure what he should do. Deke grabbed Yoshio by the shoulder and dragged the interpreter down beside him.
It was soon clear what Yoshio’s fate would have been. Caught in the open, one soldier was unfortunate enough to take a round through the head and died instantly.
“Anybody see him?” Philly asked. “Hey, Yoshio. Why don’t you go on up there and ask him to surrender?”
“Is he serious?” Yoshio started to push himself up from the ground.
“Stay put,” Deke growled.
A fresh burst of fire snapped overhead, proving what a bad idea it would be to approach the pillbox.
Deke squinted at the structure. All that he could see was a narrow, dark slit into the interior of the pillbox. But the view wasn’t clear. Broken trees and brush obscured much of the pillbox. He put his rifle on the slit, hoping that a muzzle flash might give him a target. Meanwhile, the Nambu kept hammering away, chewing them to pieces. The entire squad was pinned down until this pillbox could be eliminated. Deke wasn’t looking forward to the task.
But this time, it was going to be somebody else’s job. As the soldiers scattered ahead of it, the tank came rolling forward. Deke had almost forgotten all about it.
Bullets ricocheted off the tank, raising sparks. The tank commander swore and dropped down inside the hatch. The tank rolled to a stop, brought its big gun to bear, and fired an earsplitting round directly at the pillbox.
Smoke and dust roiled across the ground and chunks of concrete rained down. It was hard to say whether or not the tank round had hit the slit in the pillbox directly, but it had been close enough. The concrete face of the pillbox looked charred and blackened. The Nambu had fallen silent.
“Show’s over!” a sergeant shouted. “Let’s move out!”
“I don’t know about you guys, but I sure do like having a tank around,” Philly said.
Chapter Fifteen
General Takashina could see that his attack had failed. His troops had no choice now but to retreat into the jungle itself, where defenses had been prepared to hold off the enemy as long as possible.
“We will wear down the enemy’s resolve until they are forced to withdraw,” he announced to his staff. He would not call it a retreat. “They will wish that they had never set foot on this island!”
“We will fight to the end!” Colonel Iwasaki, Takashina’s second-in-command, agreed enthusiastically.
What both Iwasaki and Takashina knew, but would not say, was that the cream of their troops had been lost in the desperate banzai attacks against the American beachhead. If it had not been for the appearance of the US tanks, perhaps the tide of battle would have turned in their favor. As it stood, thousands of their best troops now lay dead.
But the Japanese Army was far from defeated. In the months leading up to the attack, fallback defenses had been built in the more mountainous areas of the island. Takashina’s claim that they would wear down the Americans was not an idle boast. The Americans had now firmly established their beachhead and even captured the airfield, but the fight for Guam was far from over.
Reluctantly, Takashina gave the order for his troops to withdraw. He climbed into one vehicle, with Colonel Iwasaki following in another. The convoy set off down the unpaved jungle road, headed deeper into the mountains.
But their convoy did not go unnoticed. From the air, the pilot spotted them and went into a dive, strafing the road with the plane’s powerful machine guns. Considering the speed at which the plane moved, the attack seemed to be over in an instant, and yet it had been enough.
Riding behind the general’s vehicle, Colonel Iwasaki watched in horror as the plane’s machine guns riddled General Takashina’s vehicle, which then went out of control and plunged off the road and into a deep ravine. The vehicle flipped several times before coming to rest upside down.
Somehow, Colonel Iwasaki had come through unscathed. “Get down there!” he shouted at his driver, hoping that by some miracle the general had survived.
But looking down at the wreckage, he knew the truth in his heart. General Takashina must be dead, meaning that Colonel Iwasaki was now in command of the forces that must somehow push the Americans back into the sea.
When the tank charge began, taking Okubo by surprise, he had felt a sense of elation. As impossible as it seemed, the battle might now be won. The first volley of firing from the tanks had created pandemonium, so Okubo had crawled out of his sniper’s nest and crawled over to the wreckage of the tank to see if Kimura was still alive.
He had taken a grave chance in revealing himself to the American sniper. Perhaps he had been foolish in doing so. However, he had wanted to show the enemy that he did not fear him. That was the Bushido way, and Okubo was nothing if not a Bushido warrior.
To his surprise, the enemy sniper had also stood up and revealed himself. He had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat rather than a helmet. Through the binoculars, Okubo had seen that the man’s face was badly scarred. If Okubo ever saw him again, he would surely recognize the soldier.
Going to the wreckage of the tank, he peered inside but could see nothing moving in the darkness. He could, however, smell the decomposing bodies of the tank crew.
“Private Kimura?” he said sharply. “Are you alive?”
Something moved in the darkness. “Sir!”
“Come out of there.”
Kimura emerged from the wreckage. Okubo stepped back to give him room. Kimura was bleeding from a slight wound in his arm but was otherwise unscathed.
Private Kimura began to try to explain himself. It was clear enough that after being wounded, he had kept himself hidden away inside the tank. “Sir, I—”
“Never mind that,” Okubo said. He might deliver some punishment later, but for now he thought that there was nothing that he could do or say to Kimura that was as bad as cowering in the confines of the tank with the dead men.