Hunter Sniper

Along with Danilo, the rest of Patrol Easy was doing the same thing, watching any likely sniper positions. There were so many possible ones, and yet no one was shooting at them yet.

The peace and quiet didn’t last for long.

A shot rang out. The men behind Deke scrambled for cover, but not before a soldier had fallen. The sniper’s aim had proved deadly. The GI lay sprawled in the dirt street, a pool of crimson spreading around him.

Nobody ran to drag the dead man out of the street, because that would have been suicide, making them an easy target for the Japanese sniper.

“See him?” Philly whispered, his eyes on the rooftops.

“Not yet,” Deke whispered in reply.

The way that the rifle crack had echoed along the street made it hard to tell where the shot had been fired from.

Deke crouched in the shadows, waiting.

Captain Merrick called a halt, and the wait lengthened.

Now and then shots were exchanged, the two sides pecking at one another.

Truth be told, Deke was glad for a chance to rest. They had been in almost constant motion since leaving Bloody Ridge.

The only bad part of taking a rest was that it gave his malaria or whatever bug he had to rear its ugly head. Advancing into Ormoc, maybe he’d just been too busy to be sick.

But he could feel his fever gradually returning — if not at a full boil, then definitely a simmer. Between the fever and sheer exhaustion, all of a sudden he could barely think straight.

Deke knew that he wasn’t the only one who was half-asleep on his feet. Nobody had managed to get much sleep in the days leading up to the beach landing or during the long initial night after that landing, which they had spent fighting off Japanese infiltrators. Half the men were walking around like zombies, even if they weren’t sick like Deke.

He caught himself swaying as a shiver ran through him, despite the high air temperature. It was an awful thing to have fever chills at the same time that you were sweating in the tropical heat.

Speaking of which, from time to time he got a good whiff of himself, the stink of his dirty uniform mixing with feverish sweat. Whenever he moved, his stiff and grimy shirt stuck to his skin, as if it had taken on a mind of its own. The smell was somewhere between a dead woodchuck on the side of the road and the sickly-sweet odor of hay that had been rained on and left to rot. He wrinkled his nose. It was a good thing that everybody else smelled just as bad.

Meanwhile, the tropical heat was nearly overwhelming, and the humidity clung to him like the grasping hands of a thousand greasy beggars. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes but felt it run down his chest and pool in his navel.

He was finding it hard to concentrate, because what he really wanted to do was lie down and take a nap, preferably a nap that would last for a week. The lack of sleep from the last several nights was taking its toll. Unfortunately, the war was not being fought on his schedule, and nobody was going to call a time-out.

Behind him, Captain Merrick’s company had been held up, but not for long. The advance could not be halted because of a single sniper.

“Let’s go!” Honcho shouted.

More soldiers ran across the street, presenting themselves as targets.

Sure enough, the sniper fired again.

Another man went down.

Feverish as he was becoming once again, Dekes seemed to be having a harder time focusing on the windows and rooftops. But like a sudden glimpse of an enemy ship through the fog at sea, he spotted movement in the window of a house across the street. He could just see the sun outlining the shape of a Japanese helmet, neatly framed by the window.

There. He put the rifle sights on the other sniper’s head and ever so slowly squeezed the trigger.

The rifle bucked against his shoulder, jolting his already aching bones.

Had he hit the target?

When he looked through the scope again, the window frame was empty.

“You got him,” Philly whispered. It was hard to say if his tone indicated grudging admiration or disbelief at the skill involved. “Hey, you all right? You don’t look so good. Did your fever come back?”

“Like a freight train.”

“You know what? You picked one hell of a time to get sick again. We’re in the middle of another battle.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

It soon became clear that the elimination of one enemy sniper was just a drop in the bucket. The Japanese snipers were scattered throughout the city, taking shots at any US soldiers who appeared in their sights. It was a highly effective strategy for pinning down the advance through the city streets.

And those were only the snipers. Far more daunting were the well-placed bunkers, covering the streets with machine-gun fire. Men scrambled for cover, pinned down one moment, running for their lives the next. They had known this wasn’t going to be an easy job, but it looked as if breaking the enemy stranglehold on Ormoc was going to be even more bloody and costly than expected.

Fortunately, the Americans had at least some aces up their sleeves.