Savage Sniper

The guerrilla had already gasped his last. The priest crossed himself, then knelt to give the man last rites and absolve him of sin.

“Exaudi nos, Domine sancte,” he mumbled in Latin, using his thumb to trace the sign of the cross on the man’s forehead. “Pater omnipotens, aeterne Deus.” Hear us, holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God. The intonations of the prayer managed to transcend the grisly scenes of combat in the midst of the dark jungle. Caught up in his prayers, the priest took no notice of the bullets cutting the air around him.

The presence of the priest was a comfort to the guerrillas and a motivating factor — the men knew that he would absolve them of sin and ease their way to the afterlife.

No sooner had Father Francisco finished with his duties than an arrow flashed past him, narrowly missing the priest. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the white blur of the arrow’s fletching.

He raised his fist and shouted, “Sons of bitches!”

There were plenty of bullets tearing through the brush, but it seemed to be the arrows that the men feared the most. Such a brutal weapon had worn away some of their resolve. The guerrilla fighters retreated, slowly giving up ground. Step by step, the Japanese were rolling them back, forcing their way closer to the retreating POWs. If they could get past the hard shell of the guerrillas’ rear guard, they could then rip into the soft underbelly of the column.

It was now a running battle along the forest path. For both the pursuers and the pursued, everything was at stake.

* * *

Now that he was armed again, Deke moved toward the rear of the column with Philly in tow. They both knew that their best hope lay in delaying the enemy that was closing in on them.

“It’s a long way from here back to our lines,” Philly noted. “We are definitely on our own. Any ideas?”

“Honcho is on the front porch, so we’ll mind the back door,” Deke said.

He felt eager for some measure of revenge against his captors, however short his “stay” with them had been. He ignored the fact that he was still sore and aching from his brief imprisonment. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would have been like to be in their clutches for weeks or even months. Now that he had his rifle back, he figured that it was time for some good ol’ American whomp-ass.

But the situation he found at the rear of the column quickly disabused him of that notion. He passed a badly wounded Filipino, and then another, both men making their way forward to join the main part of the column. There hadn’t been that many guerrilla fighters to begin with — they were outnumbered by the Japanese garrison that was pursuing them, so that each loss of a fighter was felt keenly. The sound of gunfire seemed to be growing louder.

“I don’t like the looks of this — or the sound of it, for that matter,” Deke said.

“Me neither,” Philly agreed.

They soon ran into Father Francisco, who was helping a wounded man up the trail. The priest appeared more unkempt than usual, with bits of leaves and twigs sticking to his cassock, his dark hair mussed. He even looked a bit wild eyed, like a horse that had caught the scent of a mountain lion.

“Padre, what’s happening?” Deke asked.

“There are too many of them,” he explained simply. “They got into the woods and flanked us. They are even shooting arrows.”

“Arrows?” Deke knew all too well who had been firing those arrows.

The warrior-priest waved at the empty trail behind him to indicate that he was the last defender. “I will regroup my men farther up the trail, and we will hold them off as long as we can.”

“All right, we’ll see if we can buy you some time.”

“Here they come,” Philly said.

The priest hurried away. Deke had been hoping to set up an ambush of his own, but there was no time for that. No more than one hundred feet away, the leaves seemed to be stirring along the edges of the trail, although there wasn’t any wind. Deke looked more closely. To his surprise, the forest itself appeared to be moving toward him. He saw that it was actually a group of Japanese who had camouflaged themselves using branches tied to their arms, tucked into their belts, and sticking from their helmets. They blended almost perfectly into the surrounding jungle, their movement being the only thing that gave them away.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. He was impressed, although he would have preferred to get Mr. Suey in his sights, rather than this traveling forest.

“You’ve got to hand it to those Nips,” Philly said. “If we weren’t expecting them, we’d never have seen them.”

But Deke and Philly had seen them, which was too bad for the Japanese. “I’ve got the one on the right. You take the one on the left.”