Honcho gave him a sideways look. He knew that what Oatmire was saying wasn’t entirely true, but the colonel seemed to buy it hook, line, and sinker. “All right, I’ll give you a few more hours. Dammit, I’m not happy about it. I won’t have those Nips sneaking away again. If that’s not good enough for MacArthur, then by gum he’ll have to come down here and tell me in person.”
“Thank you, sir,” Oatmire said.
As they walked away, Honcho said, “That went better than I expected. If I didn’t know better, I would have believed you when you brought up that bit about MacArthur.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re not gonna go running to headquarters and tell them any different. Anyhow, believe me when I say that the last thing any career-minded officer wants to do is get on MacArthur’s bad side.”
“It seems to me maybe that’s just what you did, to get sent out here.”
“Come to think of it, you might be on to something.”
They returned to find Patrol Easy and the Filipino snipers waiting for them, plus the boy that had somehow latched on to them. Steele had mixed emotions about dragging the boy into this mess, but they were too deep into the city to send him home. Considering that the place was a war zone, he would never make it home.
The lieutenant looked around at the faces, which were tired and dusty. Hell, when was the last time that any of them had washed, slept, or eaten something that hadn’t come out of a ration can?
Even Deke, who was as lean as a locust fence post and usually took about as much abuse as one of those weathered posts without complaining, looked a bit gray around the edges. They would all have to get some decent sleep tonight, if the enemy let them.
To Honcho’s surprise, he saw that Deke wasn’t constantly scanning the surroundings, as he was wont to do. For a change, he was in a halting conversation with Juana. Then again, the Filipino girl was hardly a talker herself. They both knew just a few words of the other’s language. However, she seemed to understand Deacon Cole well enough.
Realization dawned on the lieutenant. Deke and Juana? He always counted on Deke to be as tightly strung as the short strings at the top of a guitar neck, a crack shot and cold-blooded hillbilly killer with a chip on his shoulder because he was a dirt-poor hillbilly farm boy, and an ugly, scarred one at that. Deke played one note, like constantly plucking that tight guitar string all the time. But maybe there was another side of him, after all. A rare smile crossed the lieutenant’s face. Well, I’ll be damned. To be fair, he should have seen this coming. If you put a red-blooded man and a woman together, something like that was bound to happen, even in the middle of a war.
He found himself facing the dilemma of many officers in that he loved these grimy goddamned men, had even come to respect and appreciate the Filipino fighters, but he had no choice but to order them back into the meat grinder of battle. Their work here was far from done and the clock was ticking. The ruins of Intramuros beckoned, possibly waiting to swallow them whole.
“Now what, Honcho?” Philly wondered.
“Now we go after the bastards and free those hostages, that’s what. Let’s move out.”
The chase began. This old, central heart of the city literally existed within walls entered through several gates interspersed along those walls. The gate that Patrol Easy entered through now was called the Gate of Saint James. Deke thought the gate was a wonder, unlike anything he had seen before, intricately carved in stone, featuring a warlike sculpture that intrigued him.
He couldn’t have known that was an image of Santiago Matamoros, or Saint James the Moor-killer — patron saint of Old Spain. He was depicted crushing Muslims, traditional enemies of the Spanish Catholics, under his horse’s hooves. Above it all presided the royal seal of Spain. There was certainly no ambiguity here. This gate and stone carving were a projection of long-ago colonial power. The weathered carvings seemed so ancient and foreign, however, that any meaning was lost on the average American soldier.
If the soldiers hadn’t been so tired or more given to consider the philosophical nature of things, rather than trying simply to avoid getting shot, they might have reflected on how history simply repeated itself, war and violence being the common denominator. Like Mark Twain once said, history might not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
They weren’t the only ones preparing to enter the city. Ahead of them, a rumbling Sherman tank bulled its way through the rubble. When it couldn’t go around the chunks of rock and scattered timbers, or even a twisted bicycle or two, it stubbornly went right over top of them. The presence of a tank always made foot soldiers feel better, like a big brother backing you up with a baseball bat.
“We’ll let those boys go first,” Steele said, referring to the tank. “If there’s a welcoming party, I’d rather have a tank crash it than us.”
“Honcho, I like how you think,” Philly replied. “Maybe those boys can track down those Japs for us?”
“Don’t push it, Philly.”
Ahead of them, the sturdy Sherman tank squeezed through the gate in the walled city, its steel flanks nearly scraping the stone. Not so much as a single rifle shot greeted its arrival.
The question was, Where had the Japanese gone? They had last seen Major Tanigawa and his men slipping away through the city before being forced to temporarily retreat. Deke was reminded of rats scurrying to hide when the door of a corncrib back home was flung open. Unfortunately, the rats in this case were herding prisoners. Both the Japanese and their hostages had simply melted into the landscape.
The tank and the GIs parted company, with the tank having to keep to the more open areas of the streets so that it could navigate between the piles of rubble. Patrol Easy struck out in the direction where they had last seen Tanigawa’s contingent. There was no sign of them anywhere. How could they have disappeared so quickly?
It was Danilo who spotted it, just when they were feeling lost. A Red Cross nurse’s cap hung from the branch of a shattered street tree. This was the best kind of breadcrumb that they could have hoped for. In fact, Deke guessed that one of those brave nurses had done this on purpose, leaving them a sign to follow.
“Aqui!” Danilo shouted.
The Filipino guide raced ahead, Deke and Philly trotting after him like hunting dogs with a whiff of the quarry in their noses. Danilo was as tough as monkey meat left to dry in the sun. However, Danilo was such a creature of the mountains and jungle that he looked out of place in the ruined city. But he was adapting, as they all were. Manila was just a stone and concrete jungle, after all.
They were reminded of this fact as they picked their way cautiously through the ruins. The shelling that had already taken place had left the city a mess. Deke moved down what must have once been a street, with the tall stone facade of a building to his right. Each block of stone must have weighed hundreds of pounds, all of it joined together with thick layers of mortar. No wonder the building still stood when the shelling had ripped its surroundings asunder.
If the street had once been paved, it was hard to tell because the surface of asphalt and cobblestones now resembled a freshly plowed field. Deke was reminded of the fact that he sure as hell didn’t want to be here when the big guns resumed firing.
The sun was still up, casting long shadows across the rubble. Although the artillery barrage had been suspended for now, much of this inner city had already been severely damaged by shelling and aerial bombardment.
He walked under an overhang of corrugated metal with holes punched through it by shrapnel. Deke had a passing thought that he hoped the flyboys had also gotten the message to hold off — the last thing they needed were bombs falling around their ears.
It was shadowy under there, but the shrapnel holes let daylight filter in. To his left, where the plowed street was located, more tangles of sheet metal clogged the area. The big, corrugated sheets lay every which way, resembling metallic leaves blown into piles by storm winds. The whole mess smelled of burned metal, charred wood, cordite, and unpleasant whiffs of hidden corpses rotting in the warmth.
Deke kept his eyes peeled because there were so many potential hiding places for the enemy. It was the perfect environment for an ambush if Tanigawa’s men intended to slow them down — or wipe them out. He had the unsettling thought that one hidden Jap with a machine gun or a grenade could have cut them all down, especially if he was willing to die himself in the process. That never seemed to be an issue with the Japanese.
“Easy, easy,” he called to Danilo. He struggled to summon a word from his limited Spanish vocabulary. “Cuidado.”
But the tough guerrilla guide was too intent on pursuit to listen. Deke cursed under his breath and hurried after him.
Leaving the tunnel of corrugated sheets behind, they emerged into an open area that appeared to be a city square. That’s when they caught their first glimpse of Tanigawa’s group.
Danilo whooped and fired a shot, which set the events that followed in motion.
Although they were strung out, the problem was that Tanigawa had nearly one hundred men with him, each determined to die like the good little samurai they imagined themselves to be. Several still herded the prisoners along with bayonets. As soon as Danilo fired, a handful of Japanese soldiers turned to fight a rear-guard action, meeting their pursuers with gunfire. Deke realized that they’d been foolhardy and had badly overreached. They were so outnumbered that if the Japanese had decided to fight in force, they might easily have wiped out their pursuers. To make matters worse, Patrol Easy was basically moving in a straight line because they had all been so eager to follow Danilo.