“Gonna find out.”
Soon, it was time for Yoshio and the band of Filipinos to go their own way. They were going to strike out directly across the face of the hill, while Deke and Philly moved still higher.
“Good luck, Yoshio,” Deke said. “I’ll see you at the rendezvous.”
“Kōun o,” Yoshio replied, then trotted away with the guerrillas who were going to impersonate Japanese troops. Pinstripe brought up the rear, watching for any stray Japanese who might give them away.
“I wish people would talk English around here. What do you think Yoshio just said?” Philly asked.
“I’m pretty sure it was Japanese for, ‘Stop asking so many damn questions.’ You’re making everybody nervous.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
They reached the front part of the steep hillside that had been transformed into the Japanese defenses. Most of the trees and vegetation had been cleared, leaving the hillside open. Of course, the ground was veined with trenches and pockmarked with pillboxes and firing pits. Some were clearly marked by the baskets of earth and even concrete that had been used to fortify them, while others were cleverly hidden.
Deke hoped that he never had to attack and capture this hill — it would be a nightmare. What they planned on doing was going to be hard enough. To take this hill would require boots on the ground because bombing alone from ships or from the air would never be enough to completely wipe out these defenses.
He looked toward the summit. The top of Hill 522 was basically divided into two ridges that branched out from the main spine of the hill to create a kind of Y shape, one branch of the Y being slightly higher than the other. Near the peak of the topmost branch of the Y, Deke could see the cave-like entrance of the bunker that protected the powerful Japanese battery. From up there, the Japanese gunners would have a commanding view of the approaches from the sea and beach. With any luck, the rest of Patrol Easy would be hitting that bunker soon.
Deke would leave them to it. His plan was to climb to the lower branch of the Y that formed the summit. Up there, he would make himself at home in one of the Japanese rifle pits. He and his Springfield would give the Japs plenty to think about.
But first, they had to get there, which was easier said than done. Having entered the cleared portion of the hill, they had lost their cover and now had to rely on the series of Japanese trenches to traverse the face of the slope. The trenches would have been fine if it hadn’t been for all the damn Japanese.
Sprinting up a trench, they went around a switchback and came face-to-face with a soldier holding a shovel. Apparently, the Japanese still weren’t finished with their fortification efforts.
The Jap shouted something that sounded like, “Hey!”
Deke was so startled that he froze. Lucky for him, the Jap did too. They stood for a split second, staring at each other.
Deke didn’t want to fire a shot or risk damaging the rifle and its delicate telescopic sight by swatting the soldier with it. Still shaken by the incident this morning, he was reluctant to use his knife again.
The Jap started to open his mouth and might have shouted more to sound the alarm, if Philly hadn’t surged past Deke and hit the soldier in the forehead with the butt of his rifle. Whunk. The Jap went down instantly and didn’t move.
“Thanks,” Deke muttered.
“Aren’t you glad you brought me along? That probably messed up my rifle, though. I hope it can still shoot straight.”
“Is he dead?”
“If he isn’t, then he’s going to have one hell of a headache when he wakes up. Either way, who the hell cares? Let’s keep moving.”
They kept going, this time with Philly in the lead. He kept his rifle ready, butt first; however, they didn’t encounter any other enemy troops. Apparently it was still too early for the work crews to be out in full force.
After another minute of hard climbing, they reached the secondary ridge, from which they could look down and see the rest of the hill sweeping away. Slightly above them was the topmost ridge with the brooding presence of the bunker. All in all, Deke had a good view in all directions.
That was when Deke spotted what he was looking for. It was a Japanese version of a foxhole, encircled by roughly woven baskets filled with soil and partially covered with a tarp that must have been intended to hide the hole from above. He slid into the hole, with Philly right behind him. The hole smelled of dirt, of course, but something else — dirty canvas on account of the tarp, and urine, like maybe some Jap had taken a leak in the hole.
Never mind that. This was prime real estate, a good shooting spot, even if it smelled bad. He was sure the location was exactly why the Japanese had put a sniper nest here. This morning, he would be using it against them.
“This is where I set up shop,” Deke said. He pointed to a similar foxhole nearby, close enough that the two men could communicate easily. “You take that one. If the Japs drop a mortar on my head, no sense in both of us gettin’ killed. If they get me, you keep shooting. Remember, every Jap we kill is one less to shoot at Yoshio or the rest of our boys up on that hill.”
“I’ll be damned. It’s gonna be like a shooting gallery!” Philly exclaimed. There was no doubt this was a good position, offering a clear field of fire down the slope, which was why the defenders had put a foxhole here in the first place.
“It will be a turkey shoot, all right, at least until they figure out we’re here.” In the back of Deke’s mind, it nagged at him that anyone shooting down at them from the ridge with the bunker would have a distinct advantage. He hoped to hell that the Jap sniper that he’d run into yesterday didn’t figure that out, or it was going to be a pretty lousy morning dodging bullets.
Besides that, the Japs had all sorts of nasty surprises up their sleeve, from their grenades that looked like cans of beans, to so-called knee mortars for close combat, to the Nambu machine guns that could plow up a field quicker than Farmer Brown’s prize mule.
“Listen up, your job is to watch my back. Shoot any of those Nip bastards who come sneaking around up here.”
“You got it.”
They’d been hurrying all morning, but now was the time to take it slow. In his deliberate way, Deke got organized. Haste makes waste, Pa used to say. He took off the small haversack that he had carried up the hill on his back and set it on the edge of the hole, then laid his rifle across it to make a passable benchrest for his rifle. He scooped dirt over the haversack and the rifle barrel where it protruded from the hole to help disguise them. He kept the muzzle clear, of course.
It helped that he had already wrapped strips of dirty fabric across the rifle and the telescopic sight itself to break up the outline of the weapon. He worried about the glint of glass from the telescopic sight, but that couldn’t be helped. If the Japs figured out where he was hunkered down, they would be sure to rain hellfire upon his head — and on Philly’s head as well.
He backed himself deeper into the hole, then pulled the tarp across. Once he started shooting, enemy eyes would be hard-pressed to spot him unless they did happen to pick up on that reflection off his riflescope. He reached for his canteen and took a long drink of water, which might be his last for a while.
In stark contrast to the jungle growth, the hill spread out below him was barren of any vegetation, a vast network of trenches, pillboxes, and dugouts. The scene before him looked like one of those pictures of the trenches in an old photograph from World War I, but all built on a slope. Jap soldiers moved about, carrying shovels or bossing around the crews of Filipino workers, oblivious to the US sniper who had them in his sights.