Savage Sniper

The team split up, moving silently through the jungle toward their assigned positions. Deke and Philly circled the huts cautiously, their rifles at the ready. The damp ground enabled them to move silently.

Deke felt that, just maybe, they were going to get lucky for once and get the drop on whoever was in these huts. It would be even luckier, he supposed, if whoever was here had simply fled.

As they moved around to the rear, the rest of the group slowly advanced into the village itself.

The silence was broken when a shot was fired from the hut that had the smoke trailing out of it. Apparently it had been occupied, after all. One of the guerrillas went down.

In that moment Deke realized it was a trap.

“Get down,” he shouted, shoving at Philly’s shoulder.

No sooner had they hit the ground than rifle fire began pouring from the trees beyond the clearing. Bullets ripped the air overhead.

Deke gritted his teeth and took a deep breath, feeling a rush of adrenaline course through his veins. He didn’t feel any fear, but only an eagerness for action. He raised his rifle and started firing at the edge of the forest, where the enemy was hidden.

Philly followed his lead, firing back at the enemy. The firefight was intense, with bullets whizzing past them and clipping the leaves and branches at the edges of the jungle.

Deke could feel the sweat pouring down his face, his heart racing. He knew that his life was on the line, that he was exposed out here in the clearing, but he also knew that he had a job to do. He kept firing, although none of the enemy had shown themselves. He did hear a few of the unseen enemy shouting at one another in voices that were distinctly Japanese.

Fortunately there were no machine guns in the mix, or they would have all been goners, caught as they were in the open. The intense rifle fire was punishing enough. The crackle of rifles on both sides punctuated the air.

The enemy had known they were coming and had been ready for them. Perhaps the Japanese had heard the patrol hacking its way up the trail, or maybe they had even glimpsed the lights and activity in the abandoned bunkers the night before. In any case, the trap had been set, and they had waited for the Americans to blunder right into it.

Desperately, Deke looked around for a target. He couldn’t see any of the enemy, so the best that he could do was fire at the muzzle flashes visible in the shadows. He fired, once, twice, three times, until there were no more shots from that section of the forest. More shots came from the hut, but Rodeo tossed in a grenade, and that was that.

Meanwhile, the Filipinos weren’t about to stay pinned down. They made a dash for the forest, closing the distance to the trees in a mad sprint, bolo knives flashing in their hands. It was clear that the guerrillas planned to finish this fight up close and personal. Deke shuddered at the thought.

Directly to his right, he heard a wet chunk, a scream, and then silence. The guerrillas swarmed among the trees, seeking out and ending the enemy one by one. The fight was over in minutes. As the shooting died out, Deke and the others straightened up and looked around wearily, all of them exhausted as they started coming down from the sudden rush of adrenaline and coated in sweat.

One of the enemy soldiers had managed to stagger back into the clearing before he collapsed and died. Deke was surprised to see that the man was in rough shape. He looked too skinny, and his uniform was practically in tatters. Something about the condition of this soldier, and this remote collection of huts near the abandoned bunkers, just didn’t add up. What were these Japanese doing out here, so far removed from the active fighting on Leyte?

“I’ll bet that these are deserters,” the lieutenant said, seeming to guess Deke’s thoughts. “They were probably out here, waiting out the war. We just happened to stumble across them. I guess maybe not all the Japanese are determined to fight until the end.”

There wasn’t anybody left alive to interrogate.

“Too bad for them,” Philly said.

Nonetheless, the short fight had not been without casualties. The rifle firing from the hut had claimed one of the guerrillas. Deke didn’t know the man’s name, but he was a fellow soldier all the same. As he watched, the priest knelt and gave the man last rites, even though he had already passed.

A quick search of the huts seemed to support Lieutenant Steele’s theory that this was a community of deserters. The Japanese soldiers that they had come across until now seemed to have adequate food and supplies — certainly they had plenty of ammunition. Some were even relatively fresh troops, rushed to the fight from elsewhere in the Japanese war effort. These men, however, had very little. There was even some evidence that they were trying to survive off the forest by hunting and eating small game, although that was a challenging task.