Tal panicked for a moment at the heft of the gun, forcing himself to firm his grip and remember Bolick’s instructions. He charged the slide to put a round in the chamber. With barracks walls on either side, he whirled, bringing up the .45 with both hands. Tal breathed so hard he could hardly steady the gun or see beyond the short barrel.
Backpedaling, he aimed at the center of the throng of Japanese narrowing to fit between the buildings to get at him, then past him.
He put his finger to the trigger, convinced he had to kill or die. He stopped retreating.
Before Tal could shoot, the pack of Japanese caved in, attacked from the side. Their advance buckled. Tal eased his finger and lowered the Colt.
The two guerrilla guides running behind him had bowled into the onrushing guards, slashing their bolos. A third joined them, long knife whirling. Gusto! In the midst of swinging at the guards, he raised his chin at Tal, keeping his promise to see him again. The unarmed Japanese began to scatter; several were chopped off their feet.
Bolick, slow and great like a juggernaut, waded past the hacking Filipinos, flashing his rifle at the naked, recoiling guards. He jogged into the alley beside Tal. Both caught their breaths.
A hundred yards back, surging out of Boot Creek through the smoldering west gate, Cubby led the rest of the squad. The four recon men and ten guerrillas came at a dead run, determined to get into the fight.
In a window of one of the barracks, a head popped up. An elderly woman, a teacher, stared at Tal bug-eyed.
She turned to someone ducking beside her. “You won t believe it,” she said. “It’s that Tuck boy.”
~ * ~
Chapter Forty-one
B
OLICK SHOT two Japanese, both in the gut. They’d rushed at him together, as if they’d made a pact to die like this, stripped down to leather thongs and empty-handed, shouting “Banzai” This was suicide, a senseless death. Bolick gunned them both down without flinching, before Tuck could raise the big Colt.
One of Gusto’s guerrillas ran over with his bloodstained bolo. The barefoot Filipino spent a few seconds on the downed guards. Bolick turned the Tuck boy away.
He took the Colt from the lanky kid and eased the hammer to disarm it.
“Put it in the holster,” he said. Bolick wanted the boy to get through the raid and not fire the gun once. Killing would be common today. That didn’t mean it would be meaningless tomorrow.
From all quarters of the camp, gunfire sparked. Every few seconds a grenade went off. Machine guns ripped back and forth between the raiders and the few remaining guard towers.
Cubby and his three recon men hustled up to the guards’ quarters. Bolick allowed Cubby a moment to settle.
“You made it.”
The four soldiers straightened their steel helmets after the long tear across the field and between the barracks. Mud from the paddies smirched their fatigues.
Cubby said, “Sorry, Sarge.”
“What happened?”
“Their damn guides took off on ‘em. By the time I rounded everybody up, it was already sunup. We ran the whole friggin’ way.”
“All right. Stay here and guard the Japs barracks.” Bolick clapped a hand on the Tuck boy’s shoulder. “You did good, kiddo. That took stones.”
“I didn’t do anything. I just ran.”
“We’ll argue about that later. For now, I want you to stay here with Cubby’s squad. Can you do that, ‘til things calm down in the camp?”
The boy squirmed under Bolick’s hand. “I’ve got to get to somebody.”
“Whoever it is ain’t goin’ anywhere, trust me. I got to go do my job and I need to be sure you’re safe and out of the way. Keep that hand cannon quiet as long as you can, okay?”
Tal looked crestfallen. Cubby put his own mitt on the kid’s other shoulder and spoke for him. “He’ll be fine, Sarge. We got him.”
Bolick tightened the straps of the radio and headed toward the heaviest fighting, at the main gate. He hurried in a crouch alongside the building next to the guards’ quarters. Peeking in a window, he noted this was not a barracks but an office.
Bolick crept up a set of steps, rifle lowered and ready. He pushed in the door. His weight creaked the bamboo floorboards, making a Japanese dash from behind a filing cabinet. The soldier, skinny with black glasses, maybe a clerk, leaped through an open window. Bolick plugged him with two rounds, once as he took flight, once in midair. Bolick stayed low and swept his rifle across the office to be sure it was empty. He moved to the window on the far side. The Japanese lay in the dirt, writhing. His glasses had come off. Bolick put another round in him, figuring this was a better end than a bolo.
Outside, he took cover behind the front steps of the building. The firing in the camp had stepped up in frenzy, now that the recon teams were inside the wire along with a hundred guerrillas hunting down the Japanese. A few dozen guards were making a stand, dying hard. Maybe half the garrison had already lit out for the jungle. The rest were hiding.
One hard-core group had hunkered around the two dirt bunkers at the main gate. Ten Japanese were taking potshots from behind the pillboxes. The machine guns in the little fortresses protected their backsides. The squad that Kraft had assigned to capture the main gate was stuck in a fire-fight with them. A bullet zinged past Bolick’s helmet; one of the Japanese had seen him and tried his luck. Bolick figured he’d try his own.
With a piercing two-fingered whistle, Bolick caught the attention of a recon corporal. He wigwagged for the squad to stay clear of the gate. The corporal gave him a thumbs-up and spread the word.
Bolick checked his map. With the radio between his knees, he raised B Company, the drop team on the ground and assembling east of the camp. Bolick pinpointed for his counterpart the location of the bunkers on their shared map, warning him also that civilians and fellow paratroopers were close by.
One minute later, a mortar round whistled almost straight down, fired from a few hundred yards away. The 60-mm shell missed the right-hand bunker, short by twenty feet. The Japanese behind it, with dirt clogs raining on them, increased their firing, screaming at the Americans. Bolick corrected the mortar’s range. The next round landed squarely between the two bunkers. Bolick said into the handset, “Fire at will.” Five more rounds dropped one after another. When the haze and flying earth cleared, the pillboxes were gouged, blackened, and quiet. The ten guards around them were all dead, cast backward, smoking as if their spirits were leaving them. Two recon boys dashed past the bodies to toss grenades into the bunkers firing slits. With a pair of muted wallops, the main gates defenses were silenced.
Again, Bolick strapped the radio to his back. Ducking behind cover when he could, he moved among the barracks to help chase internees back inside. Hundreds had not moved from their roll-call positions, they’d just lain down. Bolick was unprepared for the awful condition of the prisoners in the camp. Tal and Bascom were stick thin, and he’d assumed that was typical of the internees. Most of the ones Bolick rousted off the ground were grossly malnourished, some children had swollen bellies, many elderly had dark sockets and legs stained the color of gentian violet. Bolick told them to get in their rooms and crawl under a mattress because their straw walls were not going to stop bullets. Most did what he ordered, some wanted to thank him first, lay a hand on him, ask why he was orange. One young lady asked him his unit.
“Eleventh Airborne, ma’am.”
She kissed him full on the lips before running away. An older gent hurrying past identified the woman as a nun.
Bolick moved carefully along the perimeter of the camp, alert for ambushing guards or those trying to flee. Behind the chapel, four guerrillas had chased a Japanese into a drainage pipe. The Filipinos rolled grenades in at him from both sides. The resulting boom sounded like an artillery piece. At the south gate, Bolick came across one intrepid old American gal with wire cutters snipping the chain to let in a late-arriving recon team.
Small-arms fire burst from the trees e
ast of the creek. The first paratroopers from B Company jogged in from the drop zone. The firing inside the camp swelled, then quickly subsided.
Paratroopers and guerrillas together began to track down the stragglers of the Japanese garrison hiding in the ravines and surrounding brush. Fewer enemy bodies than Bolick expected lay inside the wire. The majority of guards had been caught by surprise at their exercises; without weapons to stage a fight, most hotfooted it, barefoot, into the jungle. The ones who stayed behind to fight stood no chance against the firepower of the recon platoon and the anger of the guerrillas. The pillboxes, gun towers, and gates had all been neutralized in the raid’s first minutes. With B Company’s hundred and twenty troopers pouring into the camp, Los Baños had fallen.
The next step: hold it long enough to get everyone out.
Bolick checked his watch. 0715. Two hours was the predicted safety margin. After that, the Japanese Tiger Division to the south would get wind of the rescue. If they chose to come this way, every soldier and civilian in the camp would be doomed before the day was done.
Bolick tuned his ears west, keen for Shorty Soule’s artillery attacking across the San Juan River down Highway 1. The detonations would signal that the trucks to haul the two thousand internees and six hundred soldiers to safety were on their way.
Bolick heard a different clamor.
Clacking, snorting, and spitting fumes, the first amtrac smashed through the barbed-wire fence, knocked it down, and roared into the camp.
~ * ~
Chapter Forty-two
T
HE SQUAD in Remy’s amtrac wished him luck, then offloaded on San Antonio beach. With the rest of their platoon, a pair of 75-mm cannons, and the thirty guerrillas who’d greeted them ashore, the paratroopers dug in to defend the landing zone. Green marker smoke swirling around them, the amtracs put the water to their backs and powered out of the sand.
Remy rode alone with the driver in the second amtrac. The rest of 1st Battalion, three hundred soldiers, filled the column of amtracs behind him. In the transport out front, setting the snail’s pace at 15 miles per hour, rode Major Willcox.
The camp lay two and a half miles south. The road wound past scattered bamboo huts, beneath leaning palms and clustered banyans. Filipinos lined the pavement, clutching babies, children by the hand, and goats on tethers. Few cheered outright the sight and fury of a mile-long column of American armored vehicles, roaring out of the bay to take back their own from the Japanese. The area remained occupied territory, and makipili informants had yet to be reckoned with.
The long column charged past rice paddies and the lanes of plantations where nights before Remy had walked with Tal. The land appeared quiet and unwary in the morning cool. No reports had come in from the camp’s raiders; no one in the convoy had any idea how the assault was progressing. If the camp’s guards were fighting back, or killing the internees in desperation, the natives and the countryside showed no evidence.
Five minutes into the convoy, still a mile from camp, Willcox’s lead amtrac approached a shanty close to the road. The little house stood on its own at the edge of a small orchard. With the column bearing down, the front door swung open. A Japanese spurted out, bare-chested, pulling up his trousers and gripping a samurai saber. One of Willcox’s team manned the .30-caliber and cut the running soldier down before he could disappear into the fruit trees. Remy’s driver shouted over his shoulder, “For that fella not to hear us comin’, he musta’ been busy!”
The column surged down the forest road where Remy and others had chopped firewood until they ate the carabao that hauled the wagon. Through the trees, the concrete pillars of the camp appeared, the wire invisible from this distance. No smoke rose above the buildings, and if there was gunfire it could not have been heard above the din of the vehicles. No one inside the fence ran for cover. Was the fighting over already? Was Tal there, was he safe? What had he done? In another minute, Remy would find out.
The amtracs bypassed the main road into the camp, to swing around and enter at the smaller, less protected north gate. A hundred yards from the perimeter, near the overgrown baseball fields of the college, a pair of guerrillas stepped out of the scrub. They flagged down the column. Willcox’s amtrac halted and the major climbed down.
Both Filipinos carried ancient Lee-Enfield rifles, holdovers from the Great War. They pointed at the north gate and its twin guard towers. They were warning Willcox about the Japanese defending the gate.
Willcox trained his binoculars on the tower. He nodded to the guerrillas and climbed into his amtrac. His driver hit the gas before the Filipinos could get out of the road.
Willcox’s boys manned the two machine guns. His driver showed no hesitation barreling for the closed gate. Remy’s amtrac bellowed to keep pace; behind him the whole column spun tracks and rolled.
Thirty yards from the gate, Willcox’s .50-caliber loosed a burst into the tower. The wooden structure disintegrated into pinwheeling splinters. A body tumbled out; another corpse stayed behind in the shattered remains. Willcox’s gunner backed off the trigger. The guerrillas were mistaken; the guards in the tower were already dead.
Remy recognized the riddled Japanese on the ground: the scarred veteran Ito, who wanted Remy to remember him when the war was over.
Willcox’s amtrac rammed the gate, snapping the barbed wire, crunching the frame into shards. Bits of post and concrete were dragged into the camp by the vehicle’s nose.
The column slowed. Remy, returning after four days gone, rode on the high steel back of the amtrac, searching for signs of the worst. His heart climbed his ribs for the first moments inside the wire. Internees bustled among the many barracks, gathering their belongings, soldiers walked with rifles shouldered, children skipped at the knees of the big paratroopers, who gave them candy and rations. Remy let go his held breath. There had been no massacre.
Willcox rode past the infirmary. He halted the convoy with only a half dozen amtracs inside the fence, then dismounted. The battalion followed suit, flooding the camp with soldiers. Remy patted his driver on the back and climbed down. Willcox’s three hundred troops formed up quickly before heading to the camps south gate. Their mission was to intercept the leading elements of the Tiger Division if they came to stop the rescue.
Internees approached Remy, a hundred or more. Since slipping under the wire, he’d gobbled three meals a day. He’d seen no one but bronze American soldiers, well-cared-for warriors. The people milling about him looked so badly worn. Their sudden liberation did not fatten or heal them, and did not raise the dead. Remy rebuked himself for those moments over the past few days when he’d failed to remember he was one of them. He swore he would never again forget the barbed wire, bamboo coffins, white rice, Mac, the guard Ito, and how awful Los Baños had been.
“It’s Remy,” the crowd said.
“He brought the cavalry.”
Remy stepped into their midst. He took down his fedora, with nothing else he could do to honor them in greeting. They touched him and shouted to be recognized. Remy scanned faces, wading into their number.
Over and over, he asked, “Anyone seen my boy?”
~ * ~
Chapter Forty-three
S
HE WAS not in her window.
Tal wondered where she might be, but without concern. So long as Carmen was safe somewhere nearby, they’d find each other.
Did she know he was back in the camp? Did she see him run? Tal was eager to hold her, but he didn’t want Carmen or Yumi inside the wire until the fighting had stopped. The raid was twenty minutes old, and paratroopers and guerrillas kept ferreting Japanese out of hiding places around the camp, in the nearby jungle. None of the guards were taken prisoner, every one who didn’t hightail it was killed on sight. A squadron of twin-tailed P-38s circled the treetops, scanning for more enemies.
Carmen could wait a little longer. Bolick handed Tal a smoke grenade.
“Go to that barracks across from the infirmary,” th
e big radioman told him. “See if you can get ‘em moving. If they won’t, use this.”
Tal jogged off with the smoke canister. The weighty Colt and black harness at his shoulder labeled him as one of the fighters come to free the camp.
Everywhere, internees packed their belongings, those meager and precious bits that had kept them alive. A setting of china plates, a Sunday blouse, books, secret diaries, a preserved pair of Keds, these went into battered suitcases and muslin sacks. The internees could not conceive of a world outside the wire where these items would not be needed. The American soldiers ordered and pleaded with them to hurry, but the people of Los Baños were insistent about packing or eating their last cans of Spam.
The paratroopers handed out rations, crackers, cheese packets, and Hershey bars to every internee who approached. The soldiers took kisses from women young and old. They carried stretchers out of the hospital. One soldier lifted his shirt to show his own ribs so an older fellow would not feel embarrassed by his emaciated state.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 35