Deke made the mistake of ignoring his own advice and looking back at the Japanese pursuing them. He could see several soldiers not more than a couple hundred feet away, led by an officer waving a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other. There seemed to be no shortage of fanatical officers.
Beyond a doubt, he knew now what those Japs did with their swords. He could almost feel his neck itching. He shouldn’t have looked back.
They entered the cover of the forest and raced pell-mell through the trees, dodging the trunks like downhill skiers, propelled by fear and gravity. Bullets still followed them, but the shots went high, punching holes in the fronds of the big palm leaves overhead and raining green confetti on their heads.
Before entering the forest, Deke had gotten a glimpse of the landmark rosewood tree and held its position in his mind. He didn’t like their chances if they missed the rendezvous point. The jungle stretched beyond, so in its own way, it was a bit like trying to reach an island in the vastness of the Pacific.
He felt relieved that the sounds of the Japanese had faded somewhat. It was no wonder — he and Philly were running like madmen. At any moment, he was sure that one of them was going to fall and break his fool neck. But Deke sure as hell didn’t slow down.
Back when he’d been a boy on the farm, play and games had been rare. His ma and pa had seen play as a waste of time and energy. Why run around when you could haul water to the stock and split firewood? Still, that hadn’t stopped him and Sadie from playing fox and hound on occasion. It was a simple game in which he or his sister got a head start through the woods, while the other one gave chase. Sadie could track him as well as any boy — or grown man, for that matter. It wasn’t just about who could run the fastest and catch the other one, because they constantly came up with ways to give the other one the slip by disguising their tracks or leaving a false trail. She could also run like the wind, and there had been times when Deke was hard-pressed to catch her. That game always had been thrilling, but it was nothing compared to the game taking place now.
The sight and sound of all those Japs had given wings to Philly’s feet, Deke decided. For all his smoking, and despite his shorter legs, Philly managed to pull ahead — and sure enough, that city boy started to run in the wrong direction.
“This way!” Deke shouted, when Philly got off course at a ravine.
“You sure?” Philly didn’t look convinced. Wild eyed, he was about to run off in the wrong direction.
“Sure I’m sure.” Deke still had the picture of that big tree held in his head.
“All right, I’ll trust your redneck instincts out here in the boonies. But if you ever need to find a trolley station, let me know.”
After a few minutes of hard running, they burst into the clearing. The big tree stood just a few feet away. Deke hoped that they had somehow lost the Japanese.
But maybe he was wrong about that. No sooner had they quit running and stood bent over in the clearing, hands on knees, gasping for breath, than they heard someone crashing through the forest, coming right at them. Both men swung their rifles in that direction.
To their relief, it was Yoshio who came bursting from the jungle undergrowth.
“I’ll be damned, but you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Deke said.
“You’re lucky I didn’t plug you,” said Philly, finally lowering his rifle. “I thought you might be a Jap coming after us.”
Yoshio looked around. “Where are the others? Where’s Honcho?”
Deke shook his head. “No sign of ’em yet.”
“Do you think they made it?”
“Let’s give them some time. They were farther away than we were.”
“None of my Filipinos made it,” Yoshio said in disbelief. “Some were captured. They cut off their heads!”
“Yeah, we saw what happened to them.” Deke shook his head in disgust. “Damn Japs!”
From the forest, they heard the sounds of more men crashing through the trees, headed in their direction.
All three men swung their weapons toward the sounds, not sure if they were about to see friendly faces — or Japanese soldiers.
It hadn’t been easy taking out the gun battery. In fact, it had been a near thing. Just as Lieutenant Steele and the others had feared, the Japanese had been expecting them and were well prepared. A couple of machine guns had been set up to cover the approach to the cave that had been carved into the hillside, inside of which was the three-gun battery waiting to blast anything that moved out of Leyte Gulf — or out of the air, for that matter. In addition to the machine guns, there were at least two dozen soldiers spread out in rifle pits as well.
While those were ordinary riflemen, they couldn’t have known that one of the Jap’s best snipers, Sergeant Akio Ikeda, was positioned here as well, with his rifle covering the slope leading up to the cave mouth. Ikeda and his spotter were well hidden in a rifle pit, out of sight. Some of the men scattered throughout the trenches were his sniper trainees.
Something else that the Japanese probably hadn’t intended for them to see were the land mines directly in front of the bunker. If any attackers made it that far, the mines created one final line of defense. The Japanese probably thought that those mines would be a big surprise for any raiders. And they would have been, if Bat’s practiced eyes hadn’t picked out the tiny flags the Japanese had left to mark the mines for their own troops.
“You’ve got to hand it to the Japs. They thought of almost everything,” Lieutenant Steele said, looking over the defenses as he crouched in a nearby trench with the rest of Patrol Easy, the priest, and a handful of Filipino guerrillas. Most of the Filipinos had gone with Yoshio to join the diversion attack. “Then again, they didn’t think of absolutely everything.”
Father Francisco smiled. “The back door.”
“Exactly. You might say our prayers are answered, Padre.”
The very fact that they had reached this point undetected spoke to the reality that the Japanese were expecting any assault on the bunker to come front and center, up the hillside itself. It was just the direction that their attack yesterday had taken. What the enemy wasn’t expecting was an incursion from one side of the bunker — slightly behind it, in fact, where the supply trail emptied out near the summit of the hill. They definitely had Father Francisco to thank for letting them know about that route.
If the Japanese did have any worries about the supply trail, they probably figured that their sentries had it covered. The only problem was that Deke had taken out the sentry at the bottom of the hill, and a similar fate had befallen another sentry at the hands of one of the Filipino guerrillas.
Even so, it wouldn’t have taken much for the defenders to shift their machine guns and their rifles to meet an attack from another direction.
That was where the diversion led by Yoshio had come in. Deke and Philly would also play a role, with Deke picking off as many Japs as he could and sowing confusion. One thing for sure, Honcho had been glad that he wouldn’t be the one in Deacon Cole’s rifle sights. That farm boy could shoot.
“Sit tight, everybody,” Honcho whispered. “Let’s wait for the show to begin down there.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” Bat asked. The marine looked pale — it was clear that his wounded shoulder had been causing him some pain.