“Spread out, spread out!” Lieutenant Steele managed to shout, right before the deep boom of his 12-gauge shotgun echoed between the buildings.
The Japanese returned fire, bullets whining and ricocheting off the rocks and rubble. Up ahead, the main force of the Japanese kept moving. Tanigawa seemed to have a destination in mind.
Deke crouched behind a stone block — not a moment too soon, it turned out, as a bullet struck the stone and sent chips flying. The enemy’s smaller-caliber Arisaka rifles had a sharper, higher-pitched report, making the shots from their side sound like a crackling fire.
Briefly, he looked around to check the position of the others. Honcho was not far behind, in the process of shoving the boy’s head down. The stupid kid had apparently been curious to see what all the shooting was about.
Philly crouched right behind him, sharing the stone block for cover. But where was Juana? He didn’t see her right away and felt a momentary pang of concern, right up until he glimpsed her taking cover behind a tangled pile of corrugated metal sheets. He checked himself, wondering why he cared so damn much. But now wasn’t the time to ponder that.
“Ready?” he asked Philly. “I’ll shoot right, you shoot left.”
“Yeah.”
“One, two, three!”
Both men popped up, shooting at the Japanese. They got off two rounds each, working the bolt in between. Lucky for them, the enemy troops also had bolt-action rifles. Deke squeezed off a third shot at a Japanese who was turning his rifle in their direction.
“Got one,” Philly said. “You?”
“One, maybe two.”
But they hadn’t gotten all the Japanese, who were soon returning fire. More bullets hit the stone that they were sheltering behind. Lucky for them, it would have taken an artillery shell to get through that block. Off to one side, Honcho’s shotgun boomed again.
“They’re falling back,” Honcho shouted. “Let’s go!”
They had taken out some of the rear guard, but more peeled away to replace their fallen comrades, and in greater numbers. The sniper squad was at a disadvantage because they relied on precision rather than firepower. Undeterred, the Americans pressed forward as best as they could, firing, advancing a few feet, taking cover, then doing it all over again. Deke shot a Japanese, whose arms flung wide as dramatically as a dead man in a movie. Two more took his place.
Clearly Major Tanigawa was prepared to fight a battle of attrition and didn’t care about the losses of his own men if he could slow down his pursuers.
What transpired was a running battle through the ruined city streets. The Americans continued to advance, but it was slow going.
“Look out!” Yoshio warned.
He had spotted something to one side of their route through this no-man’s-land. One of the Japanese soldiers they had shot wasn’t quite dead. He lay wedged between two chunks of concrete, grasping a grenade to his chest.
Yoshio shouted something in Japanese at the soldier, probably encouraging him to give up. But by now Yoshio should have known that surrender was not the Japanese way.
I guess he’s got to try, Deke thought. Even though Yoshio was clearly wasting his breath.
It wasn’t clear whether the wounded enemy soldier intended to blow himself up or throw the grenade at the nearest American. Deke didn’t give him a chance to make up his mind. He squeezed the trigger and put another bullet in him. The body twisted with death throes and then the grenade went off, the noise ringing in Deke’s ears. Some wet gore spattered on the rocks and on his trousers.
Philly swore and wiped at his face, which had a splash of blood across it.
“You all right?” Deke asked him.
“Not mine,” he said, wiping his lips with the back of a grimy hand. He spat. “Dammit, I’ve got some of that Jap’s blood in my mouth. I hope to hell he wasn’t diseased.”
They moved on, stepping around the dead soldier’s mangled body. Deke didn’t give a second thought to shooting him — it had been them or the Jap.
“Keep after them,” Honcho shouted, then ran ahead, outpacing even Danilo, who seemed to have a kind of death wish, evidently determined to be the first to reach the Japanese column. He had found a wounded Japanese soldier among the rubble and had finished him with a quick swipe of his wickedly sharp bolo knife.
It was becoming clear that the Japanese were making for a large building across the square. It looked like something official, like one of the government buildings that Deke had seen on his visit to Washington, DC, before shipping out. Neoclassical was not in Deke’s vocabulary, but that was the architectural style that they were looking at. There were elements of Rome in there, and Greece, with some Spanish colonial mixed in. The solid stone building was a brooding presence over the rubble-strewn square.
The formidable building would make a good fortress. The Japanese were making a beeline right for it.
“That’s the legislative building,” Honcho explained. Despite the quick pace, he hardly sounded winded. “The heart of the Filipino government — at least until the Japanese came along.”
The Japanese reached the broad stone steps and surged between the tall pillars. Deke caught a glimpse of the red-haired American, who was looking back, as if still hopeful of rescue. Then he was gone, forced within the shadowed entrance with the other prisoners.
It turned out that Tanigawa’s men were not the first ones there. Rather, they were joining Japanese forces already in position. Emphasizing this fact, a Nambu machine gun opened fire from the rooftop, tracer rounds suddenly burning even brighter than the scorching sun.
“Down, dammit, everybody down!” Honcho shouted.
More fire poured at them, every window seemingly occupied by a Japanese soldier with a rifle. It was becoming clear that the Japanese had let them approach this close so that they would enter the killing field.
Honcho fired his shotgun, but it was only adding to the noise, the 12-gauge useless at this range. More machine-gun fire swept around the Americans and Filipinos. Entire hunks of stone went flying, and the whine of ricocheting bullets filled the air. Improbably, an alley cat had been mousing in that no-man’s-land and streaked away, leaving the humans to their fate.
Patrol Easy got down low in the rubble, dodging the enemy bullets by some miracle. Their luck wasn’t going to last long, however. The Japanese machine gun was giving them the worst of it.
“Deke!” Honcho shouted.
Deke knew just what to do. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, resting his arms over a chunk of what had once been a building. A bullet struck the stone, but he ignored it. He could just see the tops of the machine gunners’ helmets above the parapet of the legislative building.
That Nambu was spitting bullets and tracer rounds like a fire-breathing dragon. But all that Deke needed was one bullet. Well, maybe two.
He put his crosshairs on one of those helmets and fired, feeling the satisfying punch of the powerful rifle against his shoulder. The .30–06 round split the top of the Jap’s head like an ax blade pops apart a chunk of firewood. He slumped over the gun, blood sizzling on the hot barrel. The second machine gunner did his duty, pushing aside his dead comrade and getting behind the Nambu. Deke lined up the sights again, and the Jap thought his last thought before the top of his head was likewise blown off.
Now that the machine gun had blessedly fallen silent, the GIs and Filipinos ran for better cover than that offered by the rubble. Japanese bullets nagged at them, but the soldiers weaved as they ran, managing to dodge the gunfire.
They reached the shelter of a stone building overlooking the square.
Panting, Philly looked back at the heavily defended legislative building and said, “That’s gonna be a tough nut to crack.”
Deke spat out a mouthful of dust. “That ain’t no nut, city boy. That’s a damn cannonball. Good luck cracking that.”
Nearby Honcho was looking around with concern. “Anybody see where that boy got to?”
“Last time I saw him, he was hightailing it over here with the rest of us,” Rodeo said.
“Well, I sure as hell don’t see him,” Honcho said. He raised his voice and called, “Roddy, where the hell are you?”
They all looked back toward the no-man’s-land of the city square that they had just navigated, but the boy was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Running for his life, Roddy made a fateful last-minute decision not to stick with the Americans. They seemed intent on getting away from the Japanese, running for cover, which seemed to Roddy to be completely the wrong direction. They should have been running toward where the prisoners were being held. Thanks to the immortal perspective of youth, he didn’t think that any of the bullets were meant for him. His only thought was I’ve got to get my father back. He hadn’t figured out how he was going to do that but had acted on impulse. He now felt as if the whole weight of rescuing his father had fallen on his thin, young shoulders.
He veered left, hooking back toward the hulking legislative building. The storm of bullets followed the soldiers but left Roddy alone, as if he had just managed to swim out of a riptide.
He was small enough that the Japanese didn’t see him making his way through the rubble. That was what saved him in the end. He paused, hiding, and studied the landscape around him to pick out a path to take. Even his young mind recognized that a frontal attack on the huge building wasn’t going to work. Instead, there had to be a back way, or a side way. It didn’t really take a military genius to understand the situation. After all, young boys knew about such things from their own games of chase and war. You outsmarted your enemy by finding their weak point, which was just what he set out to do.