Hunter Sniper

He stood there on the beach, well aware that he was a six-foot-tall target but knowing that if he threw himself down on the sand, the men would stall.

“Move out!” he shouted. “We’re not staying on this beach.”

Sergeant Bosco got the men moving, shouting, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

Bosco had to drag some of them to their feet and shove them in the lieutenant’s wake. It wasn’t that the men were afraid, just confused and already worn out.

Egan and Thor were among the men advancing toward the tree line, the dog panting but not barking despite all the excitement. Good dog, Steele thought. The war dogs had been trained not to bark except when the Japanese were around.

He saw that Rodeo and Alphabet had shucked the plastic off their rifles and were using the telescopic sights to scan the tree line for targets, just as they had been trained to do.

Alphabet fired, and one of the machine guns that had been pecking at the men on the beach fell silent.

“Good shot!” Steele shouted, not sure whether Alphabet had heard him or not, then ran on. Once again, he was well aware of being a target as he raced ahead of the soldiers.

He looked back once and saw the men following him, spread out in a line. It went against every fiber of a man’s being to run toward gunfire, and yet they were doing it, every last one of them.

He felt a surge of pride even though he barely knew the soldiers of the platoon that he had been assigned to command. At the moment that didn’t matter. Damn, these were good men. Every last one of them.

Turning his attention to the terrain ahead, he ran toward the line of vegetation where the jungle met the beach, shotgun at the ready. With the exception of his two snipers, most of the men were equipped with the M1 rifle, a fine weapon. But for close-quarters fighting in the dense vegetation ahead, it was hard to beat a twelve gauge.

Once again, he half expected a flurry of shots to tear through his guts, but there was mostly silence. A few enemy rifles cracked, snipers hiding in the trees or in spider holes carved into the sand, a kind of hors d’oeuvre for the fighting that would surely follow.

Reaching the tree line, he passed the base of a tree where, incredibly, a Japanese sniper had tied himself into the upper branches. The man had no hope of escape but was still resolutely firing at the hundreds of soldiers coming ashore, working his bolt-action Arisaka rifle between shots.

The sniper had clearly intended to die at his post, so the lieutenant decided to give him what he wanted.

Steele raised the shotgun and gave him a blast of buckshot. The enemy sniper slumped down, dead, but remained in the tree thanks to the ropes he had used to tie himself there. Back on Guadalcanal, Steele remembered how some of the dead Japanese snipers had been left in their trees until they had turned into skeletons picked clean by the magpies and scoured bare by the sun and wind. That didn’t take long in the tropics.

A grenade exploded nearby, a muffled blast that was the result of being tossed into a spider hole. The explosion indicated that another lone enemy sniper had been dealt with, the narrow hole becoming his grave.

Other than a handful of snipers clinging to the beach area, there was little resistance. They had seen this before. The Japanese were here, all right, but knew that they couldn’t hold the shoreline, not when the naval bombardment would have hollowed out any defenses and blasted them to pieces.

No, the enemy would be farther inland, well dug in, waiting for them.

Now that they were entering the jungle itself, Steele continued to take the lead, and he took it upon himself to find a path forward for his platoon. He didn’t want to hand the job off to Sergeant Bosco, who had plenty of bravado and kept the men in line, but who lacked the finesse that being on point called for.

There might be trip wires, mines, or spider holes waiting for them, and one wrong step could spell disaster. Not for the first time, he wished that he had Deke with him. That hillbilly seemed to have a sixth sense for traps and trouble.

But Deke was somewhere in the interior, fighting his own battles. Steele would just have to manage on his own — one eye or not.

Satisfied that they didn’t seem to be walking right into a trap or ambush, he looked back at the men of the platoon and waved them on. He could sense their uneasiness, as they seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. The soldiers moved ahead cautiously.

He couldn’t blame them. They had good reason to be nervous, Steele thought. When it came to taking a beach and the island territory beyond, there was nothing easy about it.

Aside from the sniper up in the tree, they had seen precious few of the enemy.

The question remained, Just where the hell were the Japanese?

Steele had a sneaking suspicion that they would soon find out.

CHAPTER EIGHT