“Aw, shut the hell up,” Deke said, and shot him.
The impact of the bullet knocked Mr. Suey backward. He tumbled back out through the door, and the grenade went off. The blast knocked away a few more boards so that the broken door hung in its frame like a lopsided, gap-toothed smile.
A momentary quiet settled over the bunker and clearing as both sides tried to figure out what to do next.
Once again, the quiet did not last long. One of the former prisoners decided that he’d had enough. He’d had enough of being hungry and thirsty. He’d had enough of fearing death at the hands of the enemy. After so many long months of cruel captivity, who could blame him? Freedom had seemed so close, only to be denied again at the hands of the enemy. Unable to take any more of it, the man simply snapped. The open door left by the grenade attack beckoned.
The man leaped up with a burst of energy that would have seemed impossible only minutes ago. After all, he was little more than skin and bones, what remained of his ragged uniform flapping around his skinny arms and legs.
Deke recognized him as one of the quieter captives who had kept his head down, seemingly intent on survival. The man’s name was Truslow.
“I’ve had it!” Truslow shouted. “I’m getting out of here!”
To his credit, Faraday tried to stop him. He jumped up and tried to get between the man and the door. “Hold it, Truslow! Just hold it! Where the hell do you think you’re going? We’re surrounded!”
“I can’t take it anymore!” Truslow shouted, then managed to dodge around Faraday and head for the door. Looking on, Deke and the others were too stunned to act.
A split second later, the man was out the doorway. He jumped over the heads of the startled Filipino fighters in the foxholes and began running for all he was worth across the open clearing.
The man’s sudden appearance in the open seemed to have taken the enemy by surprise, because they held their fire.
Where Truslow hoped to escape to was hard to say, because the clearing really was ringed by Japanese troops hidden within the cover offered by the encroaching forest. His escape attempt was somewhat helped by the fact that it was starting to get dark, and the dusk was growing thicker. With any luck, his momentum might carry him clear through the enemy perimeter.
Alas, it was not to be. A lone figure stepped from the forest into the clearing. The figure was instantly recognizable as Colonel Yamagata because of the bow he brandished. He already had an arrow nocked. In the time it took to take a breath, Yamagata’s powerful arm drew back the string and released an arrow.
The arrow’s fletching made it visible like a white flash in the dusk as it sailed straight and true, burying itself in Truslow’s chest cavity. Truslow threw his arms wide like a man beseeching the heavens, then tumbled to the ground, ending his run for freedom a few feet short of the edge of the clearing.
Yamagata. Deke had his rifle up once he had recovered his wits, but by then the archer had faded back among the trees.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” Faraday was muttering, staring out through one of the firing slits at Truslow’s lifeless figure in the distance. An enemy rifle cracked, and he was forced to duck down.
“That’s it,” Lieutenant Steele announced. He had positioned himself in front of the bunker door to block the exit, just in case anyone else got the idea to make a run for it. “One way or another, we are getting out of here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Trapped. It was how they all felt, Deke included, as they peered out through the firing slits at the ring of forest surrounding the bunker.
One hell of a place to make a last stand, Deke thought. Lieutenant Steele might not want to call it that, but that was what it was shaping up to be.
Our very own Alamo, he thought, right here in the jungle.
A weary quiet settled over the men in the bunker. Truslow’s desperate bid for freedom had left them all shaken. His attempt had been doomed from the start, but they could all understand why he had at least tried. The truth was that they all felt the same way. Truslow simply hadn’t been able to take it anymore.
Meanwhile, they were all just waiting for the next shoe to drop. It felt as if the Japanese held all the cards.
“How well did you know Truslow?” Deke asked Faraday, once an uneasy calm had returned.
Faraday shrugged. “You know, it’s funny. I lived right alongside the man for months but didn’t know that much about him. Hell, you could probably say the same about any of us.”
“Sometimes it’s best not to get to know the other fella too well.”
“Honestly, we were all mostly too tired and worn out to chew the fat. I do know that he’d been a sailor who went in the drink when his ship went down. All I really knew about him aside from that was that he was married. He had a little girl back home somewhere in New Mexico. She’d been born while he was away, and he’d never even seen her. Imagine that? He said the Japanese took away the only picture he had of her and his wife when he was captured. Bastards.”
“A sailor from New Mexico? Don’t that beat all,” Deke replied.
“Dammit, I should have been a little faster,” Faraday said. “Maybe I could have stopped him. He wasn’t in the right frame of mind.”
“He went loco,” Deke said, more to the point. “Can’t blame him — and you sure as hell can’t blame yourself. If anybody is to blame, it’s me.”
Faraday gave him a look, his eyes bright and almost feverish in what remained of the daylight. They had all been without enough food and water, and the effects were starting to show. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He and Deke were off to one side of the bunker, talking quietly. Although the former flyboy was an officer, that line between them had disappeared, if it had ever existed at all. What they had been through together in this short time had made them equals. It was true that they were very different, Deke with his country ways and Faraday with his officer’s polish, but Deke had come to trust the man every bit as much as any member of Patrol Easy.
Steele had already announced that they would try to break through the enemy encirclement, so they just needed it to get darker. Then again, it came down to a coin toss whether the Japanese would launch another attack first.
“I feel responsible for each and every one of these men,” Deke said. “I put them all at risk with this escape attempt. Hell, I promised them freedom, but maybe it’s just not something that I can deliver.”
“Don’t say that,” Faraday replied.
“I went in there thinking we were gonna kick some Japanese ass and take names later. Cut through them like a hot knife through butter. That was the plan, anyhow. I could tell that some of your boys weren’t keen on it, and maybe they knew better. Who knows, in another few weeks, they might have been freed anyhow when the advance reached them.”
Faraday shook his head. “I doubt it. You said yourself that maybe the enemy was looking to erase any evidence of the camps. That meant erasing their POWs. No, it’s likely that we were on borrowed time.”
“Look where it got us,” Deke said. He wasn’t one to give up easily, but he suddenly felt down and out. “Now we’re trapped.”
“So we’ll die fighting. You saw what it was like in that camp. It was only a matter of time before those bastards worked us all to death — or worse.”
“What are you planning on fighting the Japanese with?” Deke asked. After all, the former prisoners were unarmed.
Faraday looked away. He didn’t have a good answer for that.
Deke had to admit that he hadn’t felt so down in a long time. It was seeing Yamagata fire that arrow into Truslow so triumphantly that had set him on edge. He had hoped to get Yamagata in his sights by now, but the colonel had proved too elusive. Fortunately, the same couldn’t be said of Mr. Suey. What was left of him now lay beyond the bunker door, attracting flies and ants.