The broken and bleeding nails of his hands were really beginning to ache, but he made one more attempt at finding the edge of a loose board in hopes of working his way free. After a few minutes, he gave up once again — not quite defeated, but certainly frustrated. He was trapped like a rat in a cage.
That was when he heard a sound outside. He listened more closely and made out shuffling footsteps approaching, then the sound of the latch being lifted off the door.
Deke rose, ready to leap for the opening. Bayonets or not, he knew that getting past the guard was his only hope of getting out of the hot box. He would either break free or die trying.
The door opened wider, and Deke crouched, tense as a coiled spring. In the darkness, he could see only a silhouette framed by the open doorway.
“Are you ready to get out of here?” asked a familiar voice in English.
Relief flooding through him, Deke realized it was Faraday. It looked as if he wouldn’t have to throw himself against a bayonet after all.
“I’ll be damned,” Deke said. “You came for me.”
“Lucky for us there aren’t any guards posted on the hot box. You didn’t really expect us to leave you behind, did you?”
“Then let’s get the others and get the hell out of this place.”
“That’s the spirit.” Faraday wrinkled his nose. “I almost forgot how much it stinks in here.”
“Smells worse than a skunk’s asshole,” Deke agreed.
Deke exited the hot box. Although the night air was damp and humid, it was still considerably more comfortable than the confines of the hot box, and less stale.
“Where are the others?” Deke asked.
“Follow me.”
Faraday hurried along, hunched over and moving quietly. Deke did his best to keep up, although he felt stiff from the beatings and the cramped quarters that he’d been held in. From time to time, he cast a nervous eye in the direction of the guard tower. So far they hadn’t been seen or spotted.
Up ahead, Faraday slipped around the corner of the barracks and into the deeper shadows behind it.
The prisoner named Cooper was there, recognizable for his size, and Deke could see the white teeth of his feral smile in the gloom. “Here we go,” he said.
Helping him was Venezia, the other POW who helped Faraday run the show. Like magic, first one board and then another were removed, creating a gap in the back wall of the barracks. It was just what Deke had hoped to do in the hot box, but to no avail. Clearly the barracks hadn’t been built with the same scrutiny.
One by one, the POWs began to emerge through the gap. As they came out, the men gathered in the shadows. Although they remained utterly silent, there was a palpable air of both fear and excitement hovering around the group.
“What about your snitches?” Deke wondered. He knew that one warning cry would bring the Japanese guards running.
“Cooper had a quiet word with them. There are only a couple of weak links. He made it clear that it would be in their best interest to remember which side they were on. In other words, he promised to break their necks if they made a peep. He can be quite convincing when he wants to be.”
Having seen the size of the POW and his Cheshire-cat grin, Deke was sure that Cooper wouldn’t hesitate to make good on his threats. “I’ll bet.”
Soon the barracks were empty, and Faraday darted inside to make sure that no one was being left behind. “That’s everybody,” he said.
Some of the prisoners were so weak that they had to be supported by the other men, or even practically carried. Deke was surprised when Venezia, despite his short stature, hoisted a man onto his back and hauled him away in a fireman’s carry. Deke knew that these weakened men would slow them down, but the idea of leaving them behind was unthinkable.
“Does anybody have a watch?” he asked. “What time is it?”
Faraday searched the crowd. One man had managed to keep his watch hidden from their captors. “Simpson?” he asked.
“Half past midnight,” the man whispered back.
“Dammit, we’re late,” Deke said. “Let’s go. Faraday, you know this ground better than I do, so you’d better lead the way.”
Faraday nodded and headed out, but not before warning the group, “Try to stay in single file. Whatever you do, keep quiet, or the Japs will kill us all.”
It was less than a couple hundred feet from the barracks to the fence line, but it felt like miles. Deke winced each time a man stumbled in the dark. Someone coughed, and Deke heard the laughter and conversation abruptly end in the guard tower. Dammit all, he thought.
There was nothing to do but move forward blindly into the dark, following Faraday.
Seconds later, he heard one of the sweetest sounds to grace his ears in days. It was the sound of someone whispering his name in the darkness ahead.
“Deke?”
He surged past Faraday and almost crashed right into Lieutenant Steele.
“It’s about time,” Honcho said.
“I ran into some trouble.”
“Never mind, let’s get everybody the hell out of here before the Japanese get wise to us.”
This wasn’t the time for introductions, so Faraday and Steele simply nodded at one another before Faraday slipped through the gap in the fence.
It was a precarious operation, considering that the sudden quiet from the guard tower seemed to indicate that the Japanese were on alert. Deke realized he was holding his breath.
One by one the POWs slipped through the gap in the wire toward freedom. Of course, this desperate gamble for freedom only increased the immediate peril that the prisoners were in.
There was no doubt that the escape attempt was putting all the POWs in incredible danger. The rules of war would clearly have put the Japanese in the wrong if they had harmed cooperative prisoners — not that those rules seemed to concern them all that much. However, the escape attempt changed the equation entirely. It was perfectly acceptable to shoot prisoners who were trying to escape.
It was hard to know what fate would have awaited the POWs as their Japanese captors became more desperate. One thing was for sure as they went through the fence — to be caught now would be a death sentence for each and every man.
There were only a handful of men waiting to make it through the gap when the inevitable happened. One of the weakened prisoners lost his balance and fell, landing in the tangled thorns and barbed wire with an audible crash. The man couldn’t help but cry out in pain as the rusty barbs tore his flesh.
From the guard tower, a soldier shouted something unintelligible in Japanese.
“Hurry!” Deke whispered. He was still inside the fence line, waiting with Faraday for the last man to make it through. Frustrated, Deke grabbed the last man by the back of his trousers and practically hurled him through the fence.
That was when the machine gun finally opened up. The tracers from the Nambu lit up the night. The machine gunner did not have a clear line of fire because of the barracks, which blocked his view of the hole in the fence, but that didn’t stop him from stitching the forest all around with bursts from the machine gun.
They could have used a few more minutes for the POWs and liberators to make their getaway into the forest. But they had run out of time. The jig was up. All hell had broken loose.
From their position a hundred feet from the gap in the fence, concealed in the forest beyond the perimeter, Philly and Yoshio opened fire. They would be able to get off only a shot or two before they were targeted by the Nambu.
Either they had gotten lucky, or one or the other of the men had finally displayed some real skill as a sniper, because the machine gun momentarily fell silent. The lull in the fire gave the Americans and Filipinos precious seconds to hide themselves deeper in the forest. With the last POW finally through the gap, Deke and Faraday slipped through themselves and ran like hell after the others.