Pacific Sniper

They entered the clutch of huts and started running through. Deke would have thought that nobody could have survived the fire that they had poured at these shacks, but as they passed one of the grass structures, a Japanese soldier burst from a doorway. He was screaming bloody murder and jabbing a rifle with a bayonet directly at the closest man, which happened to be Egan.

Caught off guard, Egan froze as the bayonet plunged toward him.

Nelly leaped, pulling the leash out of Egan’s grasp and crashing into the attacking soldier. She snarled, and the Japanese cried out in shock and pain, but not before he managed to pull the trigger. Man and dog went down in a tangled heap.

“Nelly!” Egan cried.

The dog moved weakly, the fight gone out of her. Shouting what sounded like curses, the Japanese managed to shove the dog off, for all the good it did him. He barely had time to blink before Deke shot him dead.

Egan knelt by Nelly’s side, taking her in his arms. “No! No!” he cried.

Nelly whimpered, licked his hand, then went still.

“She died saving my life,” he muttered. An aching sob escaped his throat.

None of them knew what to say. Maybe it was just a dog, but it sure felt like more than that to Deke. Whoa Nelly had been like part of the squad.

“You all stay here with Egan,” he finally said. “I’m going after that Jap sniper.”

Deke fed another shell into the chamber as he ran. He soon found that the field was crisscrossed by a network of paths. Most led to the huts or cultivated patches, but one or two led off toward the jungle itself.

He had to be careful—that sniper could be anywhere. He had also shown himself to be of a live-to-fight-another-day mindset. That got Deke to thinking that the sniper might try to put as much distance as possible between himself and the squad. To do that, he could crawl around through the grass, or he could find himself a path like this one that led toward the jungle and escape. If Deke had been the Jap sniper, that was the path he would have taken.

He left the field and entered the forest. A shot rang out, and something caromed off a tree trunk inches from Deke’s head. The sound made his spine quiver.

Deke shot back, not sure what he was aiming at—but the Jap wouldn’t know that.

He followed the path that seemed to grow narrower. Up ahead, he could see open sky through the trees, which puzzled him until he reached the edge of a steep cliff that sloped down toward the sea.

Had Okubo gone this way, or was this another one of his tricks?

Where did you go?

That was when Deke saw the smashed rifle lying in the weeds. Okubo must have abandoned it, but not before busting it against a rock to make it useless.

Deke picked it up. Despite the damage, he saw that the scope itself bore the scars of a bullet. He guessed that his shot back at the hut had come close.

Deke was about to dash down the path in pursuit, but what he saw next stopped him in his tracks. He stared down at the sight before him.

There was a reason the US forces had not staged a landing here but had chosen the Orote Peninsula despite the challenges of the coral reefs. On this side of the island, steep cliffs ran down to the sea, and there was only a narrow band of rocky beach. The steep landscape and the narrow beach would have been so easy to defend that the Japanese could have thrown coconuts at them.

That narrow beach was now crowded with Japanese soldiers. They were all trying to get onto a handful of vessels, bobbing in the heavy ocean waves. Some of the vessels appeared to be small Japanese naval craft, while the rest looked like commandeered Chamorro fishing boats. The seaworthiness of these last boats looked questionable, but that wasn’t stopping the soldiers from swimming out to them through the breaking surf.

He even saw three or four floatplanes whose wings bore the rising sun symbol of Japan. They must have been hidden away somewhere on the shoreline, ready for this very moment. The makeshift fleet was clearly too insignificant to have attracted the attention of the US Navy.

The ocean was dotted with swimming men, fighting their way through the waves. The beach quickly emptied. In the end, there weren’t more than a few dozen Japanese soldiers, taking a desperate chance. Perhaps they had some small hope of survival in the vast Pacific. Many thousands more would rest upon the island for all eternity.

It was impossible to say which one of these men must be Okubo. Deke swept the riflescope over the surf, but finding the sniper was impossible.

As it turned out, Deke himself hadn’t gone unnoticed. One of the small Japanese Navy vessels unleashed a burst of machine-gun fire, the rounds shredding vegetation along the rim of the cliff. Deke hit the ground. Though defeated, these Japanese still had teeth.