It would have been easy enough to pick off a few of the enemy, but that would have been like poking a stick into a hornet’s nest. For now, it was best if the enemy didn’t know they were here.
The lieutenant lowered his binoculars. “That’s about as many Japs as an anthill has ants,” he said. “Rodeo, bring that radio over here.”
Steele made radio contact and described what he had seen. All that they could hear on their end as he wrapped up were a few hasty “Yes, sirs.” When he’d gotten off the radio, the lieutenant looked around at the battered members of Patrol Easy.
“All right, here’s the deal. We’ll have to wait here for a few days until the rest of the division can catch up to us. We can’t take the Japs on ourselves.”
“Wait here? In the jungle?”
“Do you want to go back through all that mess we’ve come through?”
“Hell, no.”
“I didn’t think so. That means we’ve got no choice but to sit tight.”
They made camp, such as it was, rolling out their soggy blankets onto the ground. Despite the heat, a fire would have been nice to dry out their gear, heat up some rations and coffee, and perhaps drive the bugs away, but Lieutenant Steele wouldn’t allow it.
“Don’t forget that those hills have eyes,” he said. From time to time, the lieutenant’s speech sounded slurred, almost as though he were drunk. It seemed to be a side effect of being hit in the head by a Japanese bullet. “The Japs will have all kinds of lookouts. Try not to move around much if you don’t have to, and don’t show any lights. Not so much as a cigarette.”
“You got it, Honcho.”
Steele reeled, reaching out for Deke’s shoulder to steady himself. “Egan, you and Nelly keep alert. That may be our best chance of keeping the Japs off us until the cavalry gets here.”
His orders given, Steele suddenly looked beyond weary. He lowered himself to the ground, rolled himself in his blanket, and promptly fell into a fitful sleep — his shotgun tucked in beside him.
“I don’t like how the lieutenant looks,” Philly confided to Deke in a low voice, out of earshot of the leader of Patrol Easy.
“He’ll be all right,” Deke said, although he had the same misgivings. They would be lost out here without the lieutenant.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Between shifts of sentry duty, the men were left with time on their hands. That evening, before the jungle darkness descended like a curtain, Deke found himself sitting beside Yoshio, who was in a talkative mood.
“You’re so quiet all the time, except when you talk about fighting,” Yoshio said. “You’re always watching things. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that you liked it here.”
“You know what my pa used to say about keeping quiet? Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”
Yoshio just shook his head. “I guess that’s one reason to be a man of few words.”
Maybe it was odd, but Deke never minded being alone. Growing up on the farm, he’d never really had friends or much company, other than his sister, Sadie. It was also a fact that his scars made him feel self-conscious and shy around other people.
For companionship, he had the woods and the farm fields, the mountains with all their lofty peaks and hidden valleys. As a boy, he had learned to keep himself company. With his father’s death and the loss of the farm, then the awful stint in the sawmill, he had withdrawn even deeper into himself. As a soldier in the United States Army, he continued to guard himself, because that was the lesson that life had taught him. You were better off keeping to yourself and not depending on anyone else.
That was one of the reasons that his friendship with Ben Hemphill, starting in boot camp, had surprised him. Like Deke, Ben had been quiet. Unlike Deke, he’d had a need for companionship. Once he felt comfortable, he’d talk at you all day and even share a joke or two — even if they weren’t very good ones.
“Hey, Deke, what do you call a blind German? A not-see. Get it?”
It was a corny joke, but it had made Deke grin all the same.
That had been Ben for you. He hadn’t been cut out to be a soldier — not combat infantry, anyway. He’d been too gentle. He would have been better off typing up reports as a clerk somewhere, but like a lot of young men from the mountains, Ben had lacked any education. As it turned out, he’d made good cannon fodder, and that was about it.
I’ll make them pay for what they done to Ben, Deke swore silently. I’ll kill every last Jap on this island if I have to.
Yoshio interrupted Deke’s reverie. “Kimura was telling me about that Samurai Sniper,” Yoshio said.
“Who in the hell is Kimura?”
“Nozaki Kimura. The prisoner.”
“So he’s got a name now, does he?”
“The way he tells it, he didn’t have much choice about becoming a soldier.”
“Maybe not, but that sure didn’t stop him from shooting at us.”
At Steele’s order, they were keeping the Japanese soldier’s hands tied. That was uncomfortable, and the rough bindings digging into his wrists cut off circulation, so Yoshio loosened them from time to time, although he kept a close eye on the prisoner when he did so.
It would have been a good time for him to try to make a run for it. The patrol members would be reluctant to shoot him because that would give their presence away to the enemy, but the prisoner seemed to sense that he wouldn’t get far before Philly stuck a bayonet in him. The Chamorro also watched the prisoner warily, one hand never straying far from that savage machete he carried. He kept close to Yoshio, not so different from the way that Whoa Nelly hung around Egan.
But even Deke had to admit that the prisoner — Kimura, he reminded himself — didn’t look all that threatening. He’d been banged up and bandaged more than a few times. He was only a couple of inches over five feet tall, and he was too skinny, as though he hadn’t been getting enough to eat. It was also clear that he wasn’t much more than a teenager.
“Yoshio, ask your buddy here how old he is.”
When Kimura answered, Yoshio replied, “He’s nineteen.”
Deke shook his head. Not much younger than he was, but Deke sometimes felt as if he’d been born old. “Next thing you know, the Japs will be sending children and little girls to fight us.”
Deke had picked up the kindness with which Yoshio treated the prisoner. Deke no longer had any doubts about Yoshio’s loyalty — he was American through and through, as far as Deke was concerned. Yoshio’s treatment of the prisoner had less to do with them sharing Japanese heritage and far more to do with common decency — a commodity currently in scarce supply.
He thought about his own vow earlier to kill as many Japs as possible to take revenge for what they had done to Ben. Had he been too hasty in wanting an eye-for-an-eye satisfaction against each and every Japanese soldier? Maybe he had painted all Japanese with brushstrokes that were too broad.
From the point of view of the average US soldier, it didn’t help that they had seen so much of the ugly side of the Japanese that it was hard to see them as human. Yoshio appeared to be an exception.
“Yoshio, you’ve got a good heart,” Deke said. “Just don’t let that get you killed. Now tell me about this Jap sniper.”
“The Samurai Sniper.”
“That’s the one.”
“Kimura says this sniper is an officer and that he comes from an old Japanese samurai family.”
Deke was taken aback. “You mean he really is a samurai?”
“Well, the Japanese don’t actually have samurai anymore,” Yoshio explained. “But they definitely have an upper class. I’d guess you would call them aristocrats. This Okubo is one of them.”