Then he settled himself behind the rifle, butt pressed into the cup of his shoulder, cheek to stock, eye to the scope, finger on the trigger. He breathed in, breathed out.
It nagged at him that if some Jap sneaked up behind him, he’d be a goner. He’d have to trust that Philly was watching his back. Now he’d just have to wait for the show to begin, and that depended on Yoshio and his band of Filipino guerrillas.
Right on cue, he heard shouting down the slope. Through the scope, he saw a small group of what appeared to be Japanese soldiers running up the hillside. The man in front was waving his arms and hollering something in Japanese. Deke couldn’t understand the words, but they sounded urgent.
He grinned, realizing that this was Yoshio and his band of guerrillas in disguise. Yoshio was doing a damn fine job of sounding like a Jap officer. From a distance, Yoshio and the guerrillas looked convincingly like enemy soldiers.
The Japs seemed to think so too. Heads popped up from hidey-holes around the slope, sentries that Deke hadn’t seen before. Good thing he and Philly had taken the back door onto the hill, or they wouldn’t have gotten far before stumbling right into a nest of Japs.
An officer stood up from a trench, hand on the hilt of a sword, and shouted something at Yoshio, who shouted back and pointed down the hill.
Yoshio’s ruse was very convincing in that the last thing this seemed like was an attack. It looked for all the world like Yoshio and his men were fleeing from American soldiers who must be on their heels, still hidden in the greenery below. All eyes were now looking down the hill, away from the summit where, Deke hoped, Lieutenant Steele and the rest of the gang were trying to blow up the bunker.
But the ruse couldn’t last forever. Yoshio spoke the language, but he and his group of Filipino guerrillas were only passable as Japanese soldiers from a distance. Their uniforms were piecemeal, and Deke could even see the collar of Pinstripe’s shirt sticking out from the Japanese tunic. Up close, he felt sure that the officers could tell the difference between a Jap and a Filipino.
Already, two or three officers were moving to intercept Yoshio — probably trying to determine what the hell was going on.
Maybe they were wondering if the Americans had landed. That seemed unlikely, considering that the sea was visible from these heights, and Leyte Gulf remained blue and empty of ships.
Deke tracked the lead officer in his scope, finger on the trigger. Not yet.
He could hear Philly muttering from his own foxhole, as if urging Deke to shoot. “Come on, come on.”
Deke ignored him. Soon enough, there was going to be all kinds of shooting.
Below, the officer had reached Yoshio and stood a few feet away, shouting at him in Japanese. Realization seemed to dawn on the Japanese officer. He stopped shouting. He stared at Yoshio, momentarily speechless, then reached for the pistol on his belt.
Deke squeezed the trigger and shot the officer in the back, leaving a coin-size wound visible through the scope. The officer crumpled as if somebody had cut his puppet strings.
Deke squeezed off another shot, managing to take out a soldier who had been standing at the officer’s elbow.
That was when all hell broke loose on Hill 522.
That morning, the Filipinos had been given orders to pick targets as they came up the hill. Now they opened fire. A guerrilla who had been passing a machine-gun nest quickly shot all three soldiers before they knew what was happening. He and another guerrilla slid into the hole, swung the Nambu machine gun around, and opened up on the Japanese. The satisfying rhythm of the machine gun firing at enemy soldiers soon filled the air.
Elsewhere, a guerrilla had gotten hold of a grenade. He tossed it into a trench, taking out the Japanese squad waiting there. The work crews of Filipino men ran for cover.
Yoshio was shooting in all directions like a wild man, but he was too exposed, making himself a target for every Jap on that hill.
“Get down, you dang fool,” Deke muttered. He fired at a soldier who was charging in Yoshio’s direction with a fixed bayonet, dropping him.
But Deke’s mission wasn’t to protect Yoshio. He tore his eyes away from his squad mate and scanned the slope for Japanese officers. Truth be told, they were the brains of the operation. The Japanese didn’t trust their enlisted men to think for themselves and relied on officers far more than did the Americans.
If you wanted to create chaos, you had to shoot the officers.
Deke took his time picking out his targets, swinging the crosshairs through and past any enlisted men.
His sights settled on an officer waving a sword, and Deke shot him through the chest.
Looking around for another target, he spotted an officer trying to organize a charge to sweep the guerrillas off the hillside.
Deke dropped him.
From above, he had a clear view of the hillside below and its defenses. Some of the machine gunners were dug too far into the hill for him to get a good shot at them. One by one, their nests came into play as they figured out what was happening on the hill. The Japanese had set up fields of fire to cover the open ground, and he saw two guerrillas mowed down in a single burst of machine-gun fire.
He spotted a stab of flame coming from a dugout hiding one of the deadly Nambu guns and fired at the flashes. It took three shots before the machine gun fell silent.
He fired again and again.
He was in the process of reloading when the first bullet plucked at the tarp. He heard the round ricochet and go winging off into the distance with an unpleasant metallic whine that made his spine tighten.
“Philly!” he shouted. There was no point in being quiet anymore, not with all the shooting going on.
He heard Philly shout back, “Hey, Deke, somebody is shooting at you.”
“You don’t say. Where’s it coming from?”
“To hell if I know.”
“See if you can find out.”
Another bullet whistled in, apparently not aimed at Deke’s hidey-hole this time, but at Philly. “Dammit!”
“Keep your head down.”
A Jap sniper had found them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Deke had hoped for more time to pick off targets without attracting attention. But he’d been overdue for someone to notice him, considering the number of shots that he had taken from the same location.
The truth was that Deke was still relatively inexperienced at sniper warfare, but one basic rule had come through loud and clear, which was that a sniper had to keep moving if he wanted to stay alive. Either that, or he had to be extremely well hidden — invisible was best. It was a rule that the Japanese snipers who tied themselves into trees tended to ignore, which was why they didn’t last long. They did their fair share of damage nonetheless.
Deke had violated that rule this morning, and somebody had noticed him, all right. That somebody had to be another sniper. He figured it took one to know one.
Deke was still busy picking off targets below, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he had time to hope that it wasn’t the same Jap sniper that he’d run into yesterday.
On the hillside below, the attack was faltering. Several of the Filipinos were down. Deke reckoned that the dead guerrillas would be the lucky ones. If the Japanese captured any of the Filipino guerrillas, wounded or not, he didn’t like their chances. The Japanese wouldn’t like having been duped, and they might consider any captured Filipinos to be spies, considering that they had been dressed as Japanese soldiers. The punishment for spies was swift and merciless.
For the Filipino soldiers, the stakes were high. This was one of those situations where if it came down to being captured or killed, then they were truly better off dead than alive.
What about Yoshio? Deke spotted him working his way back down the hill. Given the odds arrayed against him as more and more Japanese poured into the fight, overwhelming the small guerrilla force, Yoshio was doing the sensible thing and retreating — but it looked like he might be too late.