Sudden Threat (46 page)

Matt. Where could Matt be? Is he alive? Bastards!
The thought shot through Zachary’s mind like the boomerang from hell. In and out, back and forth, ricocheting from side to side, angling to the nether regions of his mind, then soaring to the frontal lobe, striking pain and fear and hate and vengeance into his heart, kick-starting an emotional, instinctive reaction to kill every last Japanese invader. He knew by then that the Japanese were behind the whole fiasco.
Yes, kill them all.

The radio crackled with a whispering voice making a net call. Zachary acknowledged. He nodded when he heard McAllister’s distinctive Boston accent, comforted by his friend’s confident cadence. One night over a few beers at the Schofield Barracks O-Club, he and McAllister had waxed philosophical, something most infantry officers avoided. But out of deep respect for one another, they tried to reach out in a manly way. Each wanted the other to know he trusted the other with his life. “If we ever get on the two-way rifle range, old boy,” McAllister had said, eyes glassy from alcohol, “I hope to hear your voice come crackling over the radio.”

Zachary had looked at McAllister, wanting to say the same thing, sorry he had not used the line first. “Same here, bud. I want you on my flank.” The two warriors had stared at each other in a moment of martial kinship, an intangible combat multiplier understood by few.

And there it was. McAllister would not let him down. He knew that much if he knew nothing else. It was a good feeling.

“Cardinal, over.”

Cardinal was the code word for commencing the attack. Zachary was to initiate the fires with the Javelin antitank weapons, then lay down a base of small-arms fire to mask the battalion’s movement across an essentially open field. Zachary had recommended against going across the airfield, but Buck believed it to be the best route.

As Zachary was about to signal his unit, he heard the unique sound of an M4 weapon falling to the ground. It rattled loudly off the lava rock with the distinctive sounds of plastic and metal crunching. It was a foolish mistake. One of the small, uncon-trollable things that happen when there are 115 young men gathered together. Everybody makes mistakes.

Zachary felt his stomach tighten as he saw a Japanese soldier guarding the fence only a hundred meters to his front look up and ready his weapon. Too late, Zachary said to himself, radioing his platoons to commence firing. The word spread quickly to the Javelin antitank gunners, who squeezed the triggers of their command launch units, sending twenty-nine bright flashes arching through the night toward their preplanned targets. Zachary had identified ten tanks for each platoon to destroy to avoid overkill.

The platoon leaders had then divided the tanks by squad for the same reason. The squad leaders had done likewise.

Zachary had grabbed his M4 and leveled it at the Japanese guard who had reacted to the falling weapon. Looking through his goggles and following the infrared aiming light onto the man’s chest, he squeezed the trigger three times and watched him kick backward with each impact. It made him feel good, but he wanted more.

Seconds later, many of the tanks exploded into bright fireballs, some with turrets tipping loose. In the confusion, it was difficult to determine how many they had destroyed, but they suddenly found themselves under fire from somewhere. Large-caliber bullets were impacting all around them.

The sound of helicopter blades in the distance sent a chill up Zachary’s spine. Japanese attack helicopters were engaging them at night. The very technology that the United States had developed and employed in their state-of-the-art equipment had been cloned to the Japanese, who were at the moment using it to kill American soldiers.

That was no Abu Sayyaf unit with rented small arms.

“Net call, get your men down, engage all heli-copters if you can acquire,” Zachary said into the company radio net. Then he switched to the battalion net.

“Knight six, this is Bravo six,” he said loudly into the radio handset. Bullets were raining down on his position with heightened ferocity, streaming from behind the white huts with precision.

“This is Knight six,” Buck’s nervous voice came back over the radio.

“Roger. We have destroyed over twenty enemy vehicles, but are receiving helicopter small-arms fire from the barracks vicinity, over.”

“Roger, good job, over.”

Dirt kicked into Zachary’s eyes as a 30mm chain-gun round impacted less than two feet away.

Zachary, crouching low in a ravine, looked at his microphone and rolled his eyes. He was not looking for praise, but wanted to warn the battalion commander that they needed to wait until he could engage the helicopters and the rest of the tanks before he moved the battalion.

Too late.

Through his goggles, the green landscape showed hundreds of small black dots moving rapidly on foot across the airfield.

The suppressive fires lessened on Zachary’s position, and to his disgust, he saw orange tracers, enemy orange tracers, raking the airfield, causing the black dots to fall to the ground.

“Engage all helicopters!” Zachary screamed into the microphone, reissuing his earlier order.

On that order, he saw no less than fifteen missiles soar through the air, resulting in a fireball at the end of each smoke-filled path. The trails of spent gunpowder etched white lines in the darkness of the night, crisscrossing and merging like some crazy traffic pattern.

Then Zachary heard helicopters behind him.

They’re everywhere!

He turned and saw four to his right flank and noticed his antitank gunners whipping around to engage them.

He could make out two hellfire missile racks on either side and the two Hydra 70 rocket pods balancing the stubbed wings. Beneath the belly of the ship was the 30mm chain gun, hanging low. He watched as a hellfire let loose from its rack and scorched a hot path into an enemy tank that had turned on his position. The two turbines rode high in the back near the tail rotor, making the craft look like a hovering wasp.

They’re friendlies!

Too late.

He watched in horror as a young private first class gunner followed his commander’s orders to “engage all helicopters.”

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Zachary yelled into the radio to no avail.

The Javelin missile screamed upward in a flash and impacted with a silent thud into the Apache helicopter, jarring it from its aerial fighting position. The helicopter shuddered once, then began to lose altitude rapidly. He heard the engines quit and watched as the pilot turned his head frantically to see what had hit him.

Fortunately, the gunner that had fired was within the sixty-five-meter arming zone for the missile. Outside of sixty-five meters, and the missile would have armed and exploded into the helicopter, vaporizing the two-man crew.

The pilot auto-rotated the main blade and achieved what his aviator buddies called a “hard landing.” The tail boom split in two, sending the tail rotor whipping through the Japanese positions like a circular saw blade. Eventually the fuselage of the helicopter stopped spinning and Zachary sent a squad from Kurtz’s platoon—SSG Quinones, who had acted so brilliantly during the defense of the pier—to gather up the copter crew, if they survived, and reel them back to safety.

“Bravo six, this is Alpha six, over!” came McAllister’s voice.

“This is Bravo six, go, over,” Zachary replied.

“The old man’s gone to yellow brick. I’m in charge of the maneuver element now until I can talk to his second-in-command.”

Buck’s dead? This can’t be happening!

Zachary had no great affection for Buck, but he was a nice guy. The man had a wife and four sons
.
Now what?

“This is Knight five, copied last message, moving into position now.”

Knight five was the battalion executive officer, who was second-in-command during the maneuver phase. The battalion operations officer was positioned with Zachary’s unit and was responsible for controlling the supporting fires. With Buck dead, Major Kooseman stepped into the saddle to gather in the reins of a horse that could quickly get out of control. 

Zachary watched through his goggles as the remainder of the battalion performed fire and maneuver across the airfield, through the high brush and into the Quonset hut area, where his company had defended only days earlier. He thought he could see McAllister with three radio operators hovering around him and wanted to tell him to be careful, that someone might come surging from the water with a pistol in hand trying to kill him. He rubbed the clotted scar above his left ear as he gave the order for his men to lift their fires.

The bulk of the Japanese helicopter force had reacted to the Marine landings on either side of Manila Bay, allowing Buck’s battalion to seize the critical airfield at Subic Bay. They needed to secure the area quickly, call the C-17s circling in the sky, and prepare to defend against a heavy counterattack.

As quick as it had begun, the battalion’s first battle had tapered off. Casualties had been heavy on the airfield, as Japanese AH-X 30mm chain guns had formed a curtain of steel, killing Buck and at least thirty others. The light infantrymen had to contend with the forty wounded first, though.

With Buck dead, a young major fresh out of the Army Command and General Staff College was commanding the battalion. He spoke to the attack helicopter battalion commander, asking him to expand the security zone to the south so that the circling C-17s could land and discharge the combat troops waiting at the back ramps, rifles in hand, faces painted, adrenaline pumping, ready to go at it and kill the bastards that had once again forced them to fight and try to steady the tumbling play blocks of world power.

The C-17s came screaming in from above, landing almost atop one another. They received some small-arms fire from isolated pockets of Japanese soldiers not yet quelled. The Apaches fired Hydra rockets and let loose with 30mm chain guns on the enemy, driving them from Subic Bay Naval Base.

Two U.S. F-117 stealth bombers flew low across the water, like bats hunting insects, and dropped precision-guided munitions into each of the cargo ships that had off-loaded the Japanese weapons. Black smoke billowed high into the night, black on black, dimming the Manila City lights from Zachary’s vantage point.

His troops watched the display of combined arms warfare in awe. Naval gunfire began to pound the remaining Japanese vehicles positioned along the pier where the ammunition had been stacked—and from where Ayala had attacked.

“I guess this is what they meant when they said we were the main effort, huh, sir?” asked Slick, who had listened in on the battalion operations order earlier that afternoon.

Zachary didn’t answer. He watched as he saw an F-16 explode in the sky with a bright fury that momentarily lit the entire engagement area to include the ever-resilient white Quonset huts. Like a star cluster, pieces of the jet sprinkled down, seeming lighter and less dangerous than they really were, and fizzled in the water just off the pier.

Was it theirs or ours?

Who knew? Only the pilots fighting in the skies and the AWACS airplane reading squawk signals and directing traffic.

Curiously, it occurred to Zachary that it was his company that had made all of this possible. Without his guys, America’s course would have been much different. Then of course, there was Chuck Ramsey and his team to think about. And his brother, Matt.

Must get them both. Matt, where can you be? Are you safe? Chuck, has the Black Hawk found you?

CHAPTER 83

Zachary watched as Major Kooseman briefed the operations order. Kooseman had done well for being thrust into command during a raging battle. The tall major spoke nonchalantly about their next mission, a sharp contrast to the befuddlement of Colonel Buck, Zachary thought, then realized Buck was dead and squelched the thought.

“Right now, guys,” Kooseman said, “we’ve got two Ranger battalions hiding in the jungle, pinned down by an armored division. Over two hundred tanks.”

The group of captains, the commanders, collectively rolled their eyes and tightened their sphincters, waiting for the word that they were going to join the fray. The previous night’s battle had given most of the soldiers in the battalion their first taste of war. Many were already battle-stress casualties, having watched Japanese helicopters fire 30mm chain guns, mowing down their buddies, killing them. Only B Company’s precision fire had saved them by destroying many of the deadly attack helicopters.

The battle still raged on the perimeter. Naval gunfire popped in the offing, M1 tanks fired as if they were making headway, jets screamed overhead, helicopters came and went continuously, and, of course, the supply planes landed through it all.

They sat on the crusty, dried lava from Mount Pinatubo, amidst all the noise, just to the north of the white Quonset huts. The battalion was arrayed in the center as the brigade reserve, with the other two battalions securing the main avenues of approach into the naval base. Planes were landing every five minutes with support troops and supplies, trying to develop sufficient combat power to sustain extended operations.

Water was an issue, and it came rolling off the C-17s by the truckload. The heat had soared to over 115 degrees. The intelligence officer, Chip McCranum, had briefed that the heat was here to stay, with no relief in sight. As Zachary listened, he was reminded of George Carlin’s “Hippy-Dippy Weatherman”: ”During the night, dark, very dark. But when the sun comes up, light, very light.”

Tell me something I don’t know for a change.

Kooseman stood again, rising from the white dust and brushing his army combat uniform. Wisps of white dirt exploded off his pants. He squinted as the sun tried to reach inside his eyelids and fry his pupils.

“Tomorrow morning at 0400, we attack to seize the prison at Cabanatuan.” He made circling motions with his hands on the map that was positioned on an easel. “Our actions will be in concert with the Rangers, who will move from the jungles in the east as a feint to make contact with the enemy, draw their fire, allowing us to attack from the west.”