The Final Storm (42 page)

“We didn’t drive anybody anywhere. They gave us this ridgeline so they can cut us off. Pretty sure of that. There’s caves that probably go straight through this damn hill. They can hit us from anyplace they like. The caves we passed coming up here are still full of ’em, and we could be in a pile of shit up here. We found several narrow caves out to the right, and one of my men thought he’d check it out, and got blown to hell. Our grenades just chased the Japs in deeper. Unless somebody sends up some relief, we’re probably done for. I plan to go down fighting, if I have to kick hell out of every one of those yellow bastards with my boot heels.” He paused, and Adams saw nothing to suggest that Mortensen didn’t mean exactly what he said. Mortensen scanned the position, said, “What’s on our right flank?”

“Two thirties made it up this far, and I sent one down that way, where that brush begins. Looked like good cover. The other’s out to the left, but the rocks are smaller. There’s a passel of Japs right down below us on the far side. Lots of activity on the far hills too.”

Mortensen nodded toward Welty, said, “Good job.”

Welty hesitated, glanced around.

“Uh … Sergeant Ballard was here. Not sure where he went.”

Mortensen didn’t change his expression, said, “Doesn’t matter where
he
went. You seen Porter?”

“He’s dead.”

Mortensen lowered his head.

“Damn. At least four more looeys down to the right got it. Saw the stretcher bearers, and the Japs hammered them too, sons of bitches. The corpsmen ran out of stretchers down that way, and were using ponchos, but then we ran out of corpsmen. One colonel got it too, I heard. You heard from Bennett? You got a radio, anything?”

“Uh, no. Sarge, I’m only a private.”

Mortensen absorbed that, shook his head.

“Even the Corps makes mistakes. Unless somebody tells us different, we spend the night right here. You’re in charge from this point left. I’ll go back to the right. My own squad is mostly gone. Maybe one or two still alive. Never seen anything like this one. No place to hide, nothing to use for cover. The damn mortars …” Mortensen seemed to catch himself, raised up, the sea of faces close by watching the conversation. “All of you … you listen to this man! Until I say different, do what he says!”

The order was as short as it needed to be, no one objecting, except Welty.

“Sarge …”

“You call me that again up here and I’ll break your glasses
and
your teeth. Dark in an hour. Nobody sleeps.”

The sergeant looked at Adams now, studied his shirt, the blood crusted thick on Adams’s sleeve.

“Damn, son, you okay?”

Welty seemed to notice the gory mess all over Adams now, said, “What the hell happened to you? You wounded?”

“Just a knife fight.”

“I bet you won. Good for you. You sure you’re not wounded?”

Adams shook his head, and Welty said, “A few wounded made it up here, but I haven’t seen any medical bags.”

Mortensen glanced around, called out a single word as a question.

“Corpsman?”

Faces looked his way, but no one answered. Close by, Gridley was wiping down his BAR, said, “Saw two get hit. Ain’t seen no more.”

Mortensen shook his head.

“Too damn easy a target for these bastards. Anybody gets hit up here, we’ll have to make our own aid station.” Mortensen stared beyond the trench, toward the crest of the hill. “The top, huh? Well, that’s where they wanted us to be. I guess somebody
back there
will call this a
victory.
”

W
elty led Adams along the ridgeline, the crest of the hill not more than a few yards above them. The Japanese works had simply faded away, the hillside now cut up by deeper holes, some of them made by American artillery. The mud was as it had been all across the hill, thick black pools gathered in the low places, most of those places now occupied by Marines. Welty moved quickly, appraising the position, men looking up at him as though appreciating his authority, even though almost none of them had ever seen him before. They moved past a thicket of brush, more burned stubble, a deep pocket, sharp rocks that opened into a miniature valley that was cut several feet deep into the hillside. In the bottom was a cluster of Marines, a thirty caliber, metal ammo boxes scattered around them. The tripod of the machine gun was broken, one leg supported by a well-placed rock. Welty stopped, the men staring up at them with dull, tired eyes. Welty said, “You’re not the thirty I sent down here. Where’d you boys come from?”

The men looked up at him with puzzled glances toward each other, and one man said, “We come from down the damn hill. Where you come from? Mars?”

The smell of the men reached Adams now, sour, filthy, the wetness around them thick with the same horror that seemed to fill every low place. Adams nudged Welty, said, “They’ve been here awhile.”

“Yeah, we’ve been here awhile. You think we can just go marching up and down this damn place like we own it?”

Welty glanced toward the ridge above them, stepped down into the depression, and Adams followed, the smells growing, could see how the hole could hold these men in good protection. The machine gun was tilted to one side, the rock not quite level for the tripod, and Adams could see a carpet of spent shells, spread all past the muddy bog the men seemed anchored
to. Close beside him, Adams flinched, saw two corpses, men wrapped in ponchos, boots sticking out toward him. Marines. Welty said, “What’s your unit?”

“You got the password, Captain Four-Eyes?”

“Hell no. Ain’t had one for a couple days. How about ‘Lala palooza’?”

“Close enough. Zeke here’s been waiting to stick somebody who can’t get the
l
’s right. Ran out of grenades last night. You got some you can spare?”

Welty fumbled through the baggy pockets on his jacket, Adams doing the same, each man pulling out a pair.

“Here. Take these. We got a few more. There’s a few dozen of us up to the right, a Jap trench, or something like it.”

The closest man took the grenades from Welty’s hand, passed them to the others, spoke for the first time, a low, hard whisper.

“These won’t last long. Full dark, the rain will come. After that, they’ll come for us. Not much we can do.”

The man’s voice was different, and even through the whisper, Adams could hear his words distinctly, clear, the telltale sound of an education. Welty focused on that man as well, said again, “What unit?”

“Doesn’t matter now. We’re Marines.”

Welty glanced back at Adams, then said, “Twenty-ninth? You been up here for …”

“Three days.”

Adams stared at the well-spoken man, saw age, a glimmer of seriousness he had seen before. He moved closer, squatted, said in a whisper, “You’re an officer.”

The man stared at him, shook his head slowly.

“Nope. Not anymore. Lost my whole damn company. My bars went with ’em. They followed me up here, and I got every man killed. Some of ’em got hauled off somewhere, an aid station maybe, but pretty sure they didn’t make it. Mortars caught most of us. Too much blood, too many heads half blown off. I didn’t get a scratch. I assumed somebody’s trying to tell me something. So, I thought I’d better listen. I lead men, they die. So no more of that. I’m stuck up here with these two boys, and I assume somebody put me here for one reason, to fight. No more fancy uniforms.” He looked at Welty, and Adams saw the dead calm in the man’s eyes, a deep hint of madness. “So, how about you?”

Welty shook his head, said only, “Private.”

“Well, Private, welcome to our corner of the war. I’m guessing somebody sent you down here to check on us. Fine by me. You’re in command. We heard your boys coming up on those rocks out there. Can’t say it’s a very good place to be, once the rain starts. There’s a few more of us down farther, deep ground, like this. Caves everywhere, Japs inside, waiting for dark. I hope you’ve got a hell of a lot more grenades than what you gave us. The rain oughta start any time now.”

Adams was baffled, glanced skyward, the darkness sifting over them, but the air was clear, no rain at all. He heard a sound, far up on the crest, a low voice, scuffing on the rocks. He put a hand against Welty’s arm, the redhead looking that way as well. The three men didn’t look up at all, slid back farther into their muddy grotto, pulling the thirty with them. The man they called Zeke said, “Half a box. All we got left.”

The officer shrugged, said to Welty, “We’ll hold out here as best we can. We can keep the infiltrators away for a little while. But once the rain starts, we’re probably finished. You will be too, unless you get the hell out of here. The entire Japanese army knows we’re here.”

The sounds above them were increasing, low voices, and Adams heard the dull thump, familiar, a grenade jammed on a helmet. There was another, more thumps on the rocks. Welty grabbed his arm, yanked him hard through the stinking mud, pulling him back into the deepest part of the hidden hole. The grenades came down now, tumbling, bouncing, one landing close to the corpses. They ignited in a scattering of blasts, and Adams pulled his knees up tight, the M-1 against his gut, the blasts blowing mud and dust into him, the ringing of shrapnel on the rocks around him. Above the position, the Japanese could be heard clearly, shouting out, single taunting words, names.

“John! Joe! Hey Doc!”

Another wave of grenades tumbled down, some farther away, the hillside erupting in bursts of fire, more mud and shrapnel, one of the gunners close to him grunting, a hard groan. Adams wanted to move, to help the man, but the grenades did not stop, continued to bounce and thump on the rocks out past the entrance to the odd hiding place. Adams held his knees as tightly as he could, his helmet tilted down toward the worst of the blasts, heard the sudden eruption from the thirty, the gunner firing a brief burst into nothing, a streak of red reaching far out into the dim light, the gun silent now.

“Come on down, you yellow bastards!”

“Time for me to go, boys.”

The words came from the officer, and in the last glimpse of daylight Adams saw the man crawling forward with his carbine, wanted to shout at the man to keep back. The grenades came down farther away again, a carpet of blasts to the right, one sharp scream, a man crying out. The officer seemed oblivious, moved out beside the mangled corpses, leaned down, pulled the ripped ponchos over one man’s body, straightening the legs. He stood now, climbed up from the low hole, stepped out onto the rocks. Adams stared in horror, no one saying anything, the officer a clear shadow, silhouetted by the blasts of fire down below. He aimed the carbine high, fired a burst, made a strange sound, calling out, not words, just a cheer, a mad
hurrah
. The grenades came now, a half dozen, bouncing around the man. Adams watched as he caught one in his hand, threw it hard back up the hill, the sound of a brief laugh, but the grenades were too many, and before the man could fire the carbine again, the ground around him erupted into a burst of fire. Adams ducked low, felt impacts against his legs, his helmet, heavy wet slop. All along the hill the grenades kept falling and the Marines answered by tossing up their own, up and over the hill, the two sides only yards apart, spread along opposite sides of the muddy ridgeline. There was almost no rifle fire, no targets for the M-1s, the enemies too close for mortars, too close for artillery. Some of the fights erupted face-to-face, knives and bayonets, but when the two sides kept their distance, there was no effective weapon except the handheld bombs. Throughout the long night, men on both sides surged up and out of their hiding places, seeking any glimpse of their enemy, but few were adventurous enough to leave the fragile safety of their own side of the hill. While the supply of grenades held out, they flew back and forth over the hilltop, coming down on their unseen targets like rain.

T
he trench had been no trench at all, not in the way any Marine had hoped. Welty kept them in place, but less than an hour after full darkness, the mortar shells had come. They were carefully aimed, unusual, but the Japanese clearly had the range on this particular part of the hill. The mortars came down on both sides of the snaking trench, and then, dead center, men shredded and cut apart, Welty immediately pulling the survivors back down the hill. From the right flank Mortensen had sent word that the Japanese had come up from behind, a hidden tunnel the
Marines still couldn’t locate. Adams had heard the thirty caliber offer bursts of fire for long seconds at a time, and then silence, only the pops of the rifles, the dull eruptions from grenades from both sides. The thirty caliber machine gun Welty had sent to the left had never been heard from again, and there was no time to investigate that, no hope of finding anyone in the dark. It had to be bad, no one optimistic that any gunner who suddenly stopped firing had done so by his own choice. The chaos was absolute, any Marine who could was waging his own war, seeking targets from bursts of fire, or emptying magazines and tossing grenades in a desperate hope that the enemy was there. The wounded were many and loud, the voices drawing more fire, grenades mostly, from Japanese troops who had slipped in among the American positions. With Welty forced to bring the men down, Mortensen did the same, and in the muddy defiles and ragged rocky heights, men began to slide and tumble and scamper back down through the places they had climbed the day before. Some did not stop until they made the bottom of the hill, and even then, the fire from Japanese guns on the far hills took aim at landmarks already established in daylight. As the Americans pulled down and off Sugar Loaf yet again, the vicious fire from what remained of the enemy’s artillery spread flashes of light over the mud and wreckage of the bare landscape, and showed the retreat for what it was, a desperate escape for the Marines.

On the hill, men still hunkered low, lost, digging into softer dirt, wallowing in the filthy mud, the smells of the corpses not nearly as pungent as the smells from the explosives and the smoke that surrounded them. Some of those men tended wounded, would not leave them behind, strangers offering whatever help they could give, help that more often was a ripped shirt or a syrette of morphine. The dead offered one last gift, ammunition, men forced to tear through the horrifying remains, stiff or bloody corpses that might still be holding ammo belts and grenades. Throughout the night the fight continued, the Marines who remained on the hill engulfed in a blind war with an enemy who seemed to lust for death, as long as that death took Americans along for the ride. The Japanese made no secret of their tactics, loud shouts, often in English, taunting the Marines with name-calling and threats, the Japanese seeming to know they had the Marines exactly where they wanted them. As more grenades rolled down into shallow cover, the casualty count continued to grow. From distant officers word filtered up the hill that a general withdrawal had been ordered, but most of the men who sat terrified in their holes had no way of hearing
that, and most of those had no will to do anything but sit in one place and wait for the dawn.