“All right, we’ll see if we can buy you some time.”
“Here they come,” Philly said.
The priest hurried away. Deke had been hoping to set up an ambush of his own, but there was no time for that. No more than one hundred feet away, the leaves seemed to be stirring along the edges of the trail, although there wasn’t any wind. Deke looked more closely. To his surprise, the forest itself appeared to be moving toward him. He saw that it was actually a group of Japanese who had camouflaged themselves using branches tied to their arms, tucked into their belts, and sticking from their helmets. They blended almost perfectly into the surrounding jungle, their movement being the only thing that gave them away.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. He was impressed, although he would have preferred to get Mr. Suey in his sights, rather than this traveling forest.
“You’ve got to hand it to those Nips,” Philly said. “If we weren’t expecting them, we’d never have seen them.”
But Deke and Philly had seen them, which was too bad for the Japanese. “I’ve got the one on the right. You take the one on the left.”
Deke put his rifle to his shoulder and lined up his sights on the nearest approaching enemy soldier. Philly did the same to the soldier sneaking along the left side of the trail. Both men fired within a split second of each other, dropping their targets, which appeared to be nothing more than a pile of twigs and branches once they fell to the floor of the path.
More Japanese returned fire. Bullets chewed up the leaves around Deke and Philly. They were far too exposed. To make matters worse, a burst of machine-gun fire ripped overhead. Both men threw themselves to the ground, knowing that the next burst wouldn’t be so high. They had gotten lucky that time, although it was bad news that the Japanese had brought along a Nambu. The GIs and guerrillas had nothing to match it.
It was all too obvious now why Father Francisco and his guerrillas had been forced to retreat.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” Deke whispered urgently. “We’re in a tight spot.”
“You don’t need to tell me twice!”
They fired a couple more times, just to make the Japanese keep their own heads down, then leaped up and raced back the way they had come. Now and then they paused long enough to take a couple of potshots to hold up the Japanese advance.
All too soon they reached the rest of the group, bunched up now on the trail ahead. Father Francisco and the remainder of his guerrillas nervously scanned the forest, apparently still shaken by the surprise attack involving arrows. Their fellow members of Patrol Easy — Yoshio and Rodeo — looked haggard.
As for the former POWs, they were the very picture of exhaustion. Someone had given Faraday a pistol, and both Venezia and Cooper had bolo knives. A couple of the other men had picked up sticks to use as clubs. Otherwise, the group of former prisoners was not armed — and there were no weapons to give them.
Steele saw the predicament they were in and took charge.
“Deke, I want you and Philly back here. Pick off as many of the bastards as you can. Padre, you and your men will be the next line of defense.”
“They have a machine gun,” Philly pointed out.
“Yeah, I heard it. Look, we don’t have any choice but to keep going. This might just be a running battle all the way back to our lines.”
Deke knew they would never make it that far, not with the shape that the former prisoners were in. There were just too many miles to go. It seemed unfair, he thought grimly, for these men to have made it so far, only to be hunted down, virtually defenseless.
“Here they come again!” Philly warned.
Deke turned to face the Japanese once again. Down the length of the shadowy path, he could sense more than see movement. The enemy was creeping toward them. Deke held his fire, waiting for a good target.
He realized that there seemed to be no other option than the running battle that he dreaded. They could hold back the Japanese for a while, but if the enemy moved into the forest to flank them, the fight might be over all too soon. They simply didn’t have enough men or weapons to adequately defend against an attack from multiple directions. Here on the trail, they were sitting ducks.
It was Danilo who saved them. He had appeared at the front of the column and was conferring with Steele. The lieutenant nodded, and Danilo waved at the GIs to follow him.
“This way!” Steele shouted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Where the hell are we going?” Philly demanded, looking back nervously over his shoulder. “We sure can’t outrun those Nips. Those little bastards must have wings on their feet.”
“Hurry, hurry!” Danilo shouted.
Even while running flat out, Deke mused that Danilo never seemed to know any English until it suited him, and this seemed to be one of those times. Bringing up the rear, Deke paused now and then to take a shot at their pursuers. His heart was pounding from all the running, so it wasn’t his most accurate shooting.
It had become his job to delay the enemy as much as possible to buy some time for the others. The Japanese were closing in on them rapidly, so he hoped that Danilo had something good up his sleeve.
Moments later he burst into the clearing with the old Japanese defenses, where they had sheltered the night of the storm during their journey out. Up ahead of him, men were already pouring into the bunker, taking up defensive positions facing the trail where the enemy would emerge from the forest.
Deke grinned. Danilo had done all right. Using the protection of the thick-walled bunker, even a handful of determined defenders could hold off a much larger force. The bunker was surrounded by a large clearing that offered a good field of fire. Crossing that clearing would be suicide — not that this ever seemed to stop the Japanese. Deke found a certain satisfaction in the irony of the Japanese bunker being used against them.
However, not everyone could fit within the bunker. Many of the Filipino fighters hunkered down in foxholes that had been dug around the bunker itself. These were men who preferred taking their chances out in the open over being confined in a bunker.
A few of the former POWs joined them. Those who had the energy to do so were adding whatever they could to the defenses, from logs to rocks. A few sandbags were dragged into new positions. The result could hardly be called a fortress, but it was better than nothing.
Not wasting any more time, Deke slipped inside the bunker. He took note of the armored door that was being left open for now to communicate with the men in the foxholes. The door was built of heavy boards with reinforcing bands of steel, almost like a medieval castle door. The steel was already rusting badly in the tropical conditions, leaving long streaks like dried blood splashed across the wood. The door wouldn’t have been much use against heavy weapons, but it would be more than adequate to stop bullets.
For now the bunker would be the center of their defense. The bunker was really more of a rectangular “pillbox” in that it was not buried into a hillside but was freestanding. The Japanese must have built it here for an outpost to guard the jungle trail, but the enemy had abandoned this post in the middle of nowhere.
It had been designed with narrow horizontal firing slits set into all four sides. The slits were really intended for machine guns, but they would work well enough for riflemen as well.
“Padre, you and your men take those two sides,” Lieutenant Steele ordered. “My boys will cover the other two sides.”
“As you say,” Father Francisco said. “Unfortunately, we are running low on ammunition.”