But the church had not been without enemies. Pirates raided the coastal towns and villages established by the Spanish, killing the priests and enslaving the Christian converts. Spanish forces had finally put an end to the pirates.
The church had taken another blow centuries later when United States forces had won the Spanish-American War. The Philippines became a US possession, and all Spanish citizens had been required to leave — including the priests who had been educated in Spain and were thus considered to harbor a colonial mindset and foreign loyalties. In their place, a new generation of priests ran the churches and tended to the flock. These priests had been born in the Philippines and were thus closer to the people.
Father Francisco was part of this new generation that had grown and flourished during the decades of American administration. Of course, the US promoted freedom of religion as well as a healthy separation of church and state.
Then came the arrival of the Japanese in 1941. Since then, the church had suffered greatly at the cruel hands of the Japanese, who targeted any organization that they thought might undermine their authority.
Bat nodded as he inspected the neatly wrapped bandage, and the priest moved off to talk with some of the Filipinos. “It’s all well and good to have a priest and God on your side, but what I’d really like tomorrow morning is a company of marines to go up that hill with us,” he said.
“This is all we’ve got,” Ball pointed out.
“Then I guess it’s gonna have to do.”
The soldiers had spread out in the space between the low-growing molave trees. In reality, there wasn’t much of a camp to make. They had been traveling as light as they could. Aside from weapons and explosives and ammunition, they didn’t even have a blanket between them, but it didn’t matter.
This was the tropics — the temperature never fell below seventy-five degrees, even at night. They settled for tugging their jackets more tightly around themselves as best as they could and fell asleep almost instantly. They’d been awake for most of the previous night, and so they were exhausted, to say the least.
After the long tropical twilight, night came on, and the soldiers around Deke slept fitfully. There was a lot riding on what would happen in the morning — not only were their own lives at stake, but they couldn’t help but think of the hundreds or thousands who might die if they couldn’t knock out that battery.
Deke cleaned his rifle using the small bottle of gun oil and patches that he’d brought along for that purpose. It was too dark to really see if he was doing a good job, but it didn’t matter. The feel of the metal under his fingertips was reassuring, and he worked the oil into the action until the steel was almost silky to the touch.
He felt a hand squeeze his shoulder. It was the lieutenant, who had taken the first watch.
“Better get some sleep, son,” he said. The lieutenant was old enough that Deke almost felt like an actual son at times. Not for the first time, he realized how much he missed his own father. He just hoped that if his pa was looking down on him from somewhere above, that Deke would make him proud. “I know for a fact that you and that rifle won’t let us down.”
Deke said, “I just want to finish up here.”
The lieutenant nodded and moved off.
Deke reassembled the rifle, finally sliding the bolt back into place.
He recalled the Japanese sniper that he’d seen earlier that day. He wasn’t afraid of the enemy sniper — not exactly. After all, he had managed to survive the Samurai Sniper that he’d run into on Guam, a marksman who had been every bit his equal. The Samurai Sniper had escaped with the small number of Japanese troops who had managed to flee Guam as the American noose tightened. Deke wasn’t in any hurry to meet him again.
If the sniper that he’d crossed paths with today was half as good, reaching those guns at the top of the hill wouldn’t be easy. He reassembled the rifle carefully, knowing that tomorrow might put him and the Springfield to the test.
Not for the first time, Deke wondered just what he had gotten himself into. He sure was a long way from the mountains. Back home, the mountains would be well into fall, with crisp mornings, cool nights where the stars shone clear over the peaks, maybe a fox barking in the distance, and the leaves turning orange and red so that it almost looked as if the hills were on fire.
The warm, humid jungle was a long way from that. The only sounds came from singing insects and the distant drone of an aircraft — most likely a Jap plane on patrol. To be sure, they were deep in enemy territory. At the moment, it seemed almost impossible that they would ever wrest this island — not to mention the entire Philippines — from Japanese control.
Still, Deke couldn’t think of a place where he’d rather be — among these good men, helping these people, fighting the Japanese. He sometimes wondered if that meant there was something wrong with him.
The others would do their duty, but for Deke, this was something else altogether. This was what he was meant to do, the same way that a wolf was meant to hunt.
The only other member of Patrol Easy who seemed to feel the same way was Lieutenant Steele. In his own way, the lieutenant seemed just as content as Deke to be here.
Steele was still awake, pulling the wrapper off a chocolate tropical bar and munching it slowly. The look on his face indicated that his thoughts were elsewhere — probably on their next move. He kept his shotgun upright between his knees. Deke also kept awake and stared into the jungle, his ears straining for the slightest sound. But all he could hear were a few birds and the ever-present insects gossiping in the treetops.
Deke closed his eyes and fell asleep almost instantly. It was like when he’d been a boy on the farm and had barely been able to get into bed before falling asleep.
Before he drifted off, Deke took some satisfaction in the fact that they’d been on the run from the Japanese troops most of the day, hiding out, but in the morning, it would be time to bring the fight back to the enemy.
The surprise attack on their hilltop fortress had put the Japanese on high alert. No enemy ships had been spotted, and yet a small enemy force had launched an attack. This brought on a flurry of doubt and questions that struck at the confidence of the Japanese. Where had the enemy come from? What was their mission? The appearance of the enemy soldiers had created uncertainty — and anger.
One of those angry soldiers was Ikeda, who was holding his sniper rifle with a white-knuckled grip. Truth be told, Ikeda felt thoroughly red-faced in the wake of the surprise attack. After all, he had seen the signs that raiders had landed on the beach. If only he had been a little faster, he might have cut them off or given Noguchi more of a warning so that they could have been prepared.
In part, he thought that the attack on the hill was his fault. Somehow, it felt as if he had allowed or enabled the attack. Over and over again, he reviewed his actions, wondering where he had failed.
Ikeda knew that he had held off making any warning shots because he had hoped to overtake the raiders and didn’t want to give himself away. Some part of him had wanted to play the hero, and he realized that had been a costly mistake.
Given his personal failures, his only thought now was to go after the raiders. He had shot at least one of them with his sniper rifle, even if he evidently hadn’t killed the enemy soldier outright, and he would be more than happy to finish the job.
“Sir, I will organize a squad to pursue the enemy,” he said to Noguchi. He had found the officer outside the bunker to the massive battery, busy directing new machine-gun emplacements.
Noguchi put his hands on his hips and blew out a big breath of air. “No,” he said.