Hunter Sniper

And just like that, the real fight had ended, the desperate one where the outcome had hung by a thread. All that remained now was the mopping up.

It was hard to say how long the battle had gone on. Time had a way of distorting during combat — nothing made sense. There was no real way of measuring it. The movement of hands on a man’s wristwatch was meaningless. What seemed like hours were actually minutes, while the hours themselves ticked by like seconds.

The only proof of the passage of the long night came from the fact that the sky was already growing lighter. Pale streaks on the horizon promised another tropical dawn. However, down here in the closeness of the jungle, it was still plenty dark enough.

“So much for that,” Philly announced. “Now maybe we can all finally get some sleep.”

Normally Deke tended to be the wide-awake one, getting by on less shut-eye and watching the jungle while the others slept. But a sense of exhaustion suddenly hit him, hard as a knockout punch from Joe Louis.

He slumped down into the muddy bottom of the foxhole, closed his eyes, and fell asleep instantly, clutching his rifle to him like the only lover he had known.

CHAPTER FOUR

Exhaustion set in after the nighttime fight against the incursion of Japanese paratroopers, so sleep came quickly, even for men who had only a helmet for a pillow. While Deke slept, a handful of men kept an uneasy watch. An occasional crackle of rifle fire was a reminder that they hadn’t gotten all the paratroopers. But the enemy’s back had been broken, and they had evidently given up on attacking the airfield again.

The soldiers slept as long as they could, but the rising sun and tropical heat soon began to rouse them. Deke had a momentary sense of panic when he didn’t immediately feel his rifle in his hands.

He sat up, frantically looking around. “Where, where—”

His fingertips touched the familiar stock, which had slipped a couple of inches out of his grip while he slept. “There you are.”

His rifle hadn’t gone anywhere. He shook his head, worried that he was overreacting. I’m just tired, is all.

He had managed to snatch a couple hours of sleep. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. He supposed that he was lucky to get even that much shut-eye.

Judging by the faint sounds of snoring nearby, several of the other men were still sleeping, Philly and Yoshio included. Watching the forms of the two sleeping men, Deke felt a surge of affection toward them, what you might call brotherly love. In fact, if he’d had brothers instead of his ornery sister, Sadie, he was sure this was how he would have felt toward them.

Deke was surprised to discover that sense of bonding toward Philly and Yoshio. After all, he had thought that those last few difficult years on the failing farm and then in the bleak boardinghouse in town — not to mention the loss of his ma and pa, good people beaten down by a hard life — had leached out the last of any emotion in him. Whatever was left that the bear hadn’t clawed out of him already.

Deke discovered that he’d been wrong about that. It had taken a war and all that killing and fighting to realize that there was still something human left in him. He still had a little brotherly love left to give someone other than Sadie. Don’t that beat all.

Deke shrugged, stuffed a cork in the cracked bottle of his emotions for now, and turned to matters at hand.

None of the sergeants came by with orders, which meant that Captain Merrick didn’t appear to be in any hurry to move out, meaning that they would likely sit here guarding the airfield and fuel dump for a while longer, so Deke set to work cleaning his rifle. The gunfire he’d heard earlier had been distant, and there seemed to be a good chance that he could take fifteen minutes to disassemble the rifle for cleaning without needing it to shoot anybody.

Living in these conditions, it was easy to let something like cleaning your rifle slide, but as far as Deke was concerned, his rifle came first. He might need a shave, his face was dirty, his uniform slick with mud and who knew what else, but he’d have a clean rifle.

He tackled that chore even before he’d had anything to eat for breakfast — a well-oiled weapon might mean the difference between life and death.

If Deke had felt some fondness for his foxhole mates this morning, it didn’t compare to what he felt for his sniper rifle.

First of all, the well-made Springfield seemed indestructible. Its origins went back at least a decade before World War I, a conflict that had put the rifle to the test and honed its functionality to perfection as a combat weapon.