War of the Sun (29 page)

But their lack of armament didn’t matter: his soldiers were not trained to repulse invaders by shooting at them.

“Squad one up!” he yelled, prompting six terrified young troopers to scramble up to him.

He took each man’s meager weapon and checked all knapsacks. Then he pointed down to the soldiers who had just blown through yet another wall of barbed wire, and were now merely fifty feet away and moving quickly up the ever-steepening cliff. Hachomachi barked his order. With only a moment or two of hesitation, the six men of squad one went over the top.

The Mountain Defense soldiers had been instructed to scream at the top of their lungs when attacking, but the half dozen men now running down the mountain at Geraci’s team remained silent, or perhaps they were unable to scream. The first one tripped and fell about twenty feet away from the startled American soldiers, the pack on his back exploding in a ball of flame, smoke, blood, skin, and bone. The second Cult soldier was cut down by the combat engineers’ combined fire about thirty feet away, his knapsack igniting and blowing the man’s headless torso right into the Americans.

The third and fourth Cult soldiers made it to within twenty feet of Geraci’s men before they, too, were shot down. Only one of the soldier’s knapsacks exploded, the resulting conflagration turning his body to bloody cinders. The fifth soldier hurled himself onto the concertina wire itself, inexplicably blowing an even larger hole in it. The sixth man, after seeing his comrades die so quickly, and for no particular purpose, simply skidded to a halt and detonated his own explosive charge, raising his arms in triumph or pain as he was obliterated in a wash of fire.

The 104th were stunned. They were trained for combat, they had the ability to take on an armed enemy and defeat him. But this was not combat. This was mass suicide.

Geraci wisely had his men withdraw to the other side of the wall of concertina wire to protect them from the human bombs. The other teams had moved up to the position by this time, and now all forty-two men of the 104th were hunkered down and protecting themselves, waiting for the next attack.

The deadly beauty of the suicidal tactic was becoming all too obvious. The American commander correctly guessed that the Cult had more soldiers willing to kill themselves to throw at him than he did troopers who were trying to get up to the objective. What was worse, if the Cult
was
able to punch a hole in the barbed wire barrier—ironically, it was now the 104th’s only means of protection—then they’d be able to throw themselves right onto the engineers’ position itself. Surely such a close-in fight between bullets and bombs would result in heavy casualties for the 104th.

Geraci checked his watch. It was now 0710. On top of everything else, they were running way behind schedule. If the 104th didn’t reach their objective in time, it could prove deadly for the rest of the operation.

Geraci quickly discussed the situation with the rest of his officers.

Together, they all decided there was only one thing to do.

Hunter was at 2500 feet when he got the call.

He’d just thrown another Maverick missile into the side cave entrance, the resulting explosion igniting a large section of the camouflage netting which hung out over the cliff above the opening itself. With this section of netting gone he had been able to get a good, unobstructed glimpse inside the cave itself—the Cult service crews were frantically running around inside, trying to clear the damage he’d caused and get the Zeros launching again.

Geraci’s request for assistance had Hunter on station in less than a minute.

The 104th was in the midst of its second full-fledged suicide attack when he arrived. At least a dozen enemy soldiers had already thrown themselves onto the barbed wire barrier in an effort to blow another hole right through it, and they were now about halfway to their goal, with more human bombs on the way. The combat engineers were firing at the Cult soldiers when they could, but the continual human detonations made it all but impossible to hit anything. The situation was quickly becoming desperate. Should the barbed wire wall be breached, the forty plus men of the 104th would be in a very precarious position, unable to stem the flow of human bombs that would surely come.

Hunter knew he didn’t have time to think about it. He was down to the deck in an instant, his nose cannons blazing. Two Cult soldiers ran right into the murderous fire, their explosives-laden knapsacks detonating before they could reach the ever-weakening wire barrier. He pulled up and out to the left, putting the ’XL into a lung-crunching turn and coming back onto the killing field from the east. Two more Cult soldiers had sacrificed themselves on the wire, and three more were on the way.

Hunter opened up once again, spraying the enemy soldiers with 20mm fire. There were three simultaneous explosions as the cannon shells found their marks, but the suicide troops had come within fifteen feet of the 104th’s position before Hunter could cut them down. And now six more were running down the hill.

He put the ’XL into an even tighter gut-crushing turn, and opened up on the half dozen human bombs. He got five, but one got through, blowing away yet another section of the 104th’s ever precarious protective barrier. And now, ten more were on their way down the hill.

The dangerous situation was escalating very quickly. The Cult seemed to have an unlimited number of suicide soldiers. Hunter was the only thing between the 104th and certain annihilation, yet he could only cut down the enemy troops for so long until his ammunition ran out. Then what?

He quickly screeched around and strafed the horrible battle zone again, exploding eight human bombs, but missing two. Their explosives detonated no more than ten feet from the 104th’s position. Pulling up, he saw ten more human bombs were on the way.

He put the ’XL into the sharpest turn of its career, an afterburner-assisted eye-popper that pulled his face back into an involuntary grin. While opening up on the latest wave of human bombs, he managed to activate his radio.

“Task Force Command, this is Task Force One,” he gasped, yanking the Super Falcon into yet another rivet-popping turn. “We need your assistance—
quick.”

The 104th got the order to “get low” less than a minute later.

Most of the combat engineers were already taking cover in the many craters on their side of the barrier; for some, getting any lower to the ground would have been impossible.

They heard it coming, of course, the long shrill whistling sound getting closer by the second. The ’XL had just completed its eighth strafing run in no more than a minute and a half when it suddenly pulled up and accelerated out of the area extremely quickly. Geraci had just enough time to yell to his men once more when the whistling became almost deafening.

Three shells from the
New Jersey
’s 16-inch rear turret slammed into the side of Shuri Mountain a second later.

The resulting explosion and concussion was so intense, it gave many of the combat engineers nosebleeds. But they all survived. The enemy soldiers were not so lucky. When the fire and debris cleared, the members of the 104th looked up and saw there was nothing left of the Cult’s positions except an enormous smoking crater.

C
APTAIN JIM COOK AND
the rest of the JAWs team felt the rumbling of the
New Jersey
’s shelling clear around the other side of the mountain.

Though there were hundreds of deafening explosions going on all around them, it was easy to pick an authentic one and the battleship’s fusillade had literally shaken the earth.

“That
sounded interesting,” Cook said to one of his officers, a lieutenant named Sean Higgens.
“Very
lifelike.”

Higgens smiled wryly. The joke was that all the explosions going on around them were
not
lifelike. All of them were, in fact, fake.

They were standing under a cliff the top of which held one of a half dozen or so emergency exits from the interior of Shuri Mountain. The Cult guards had already fled inside—they’d been spooked by the first series of fake explosions—closing and locking the huge, camouflaged door behind them.

The entranceway was one of two main targets for the JAWs team. The other was approximately a half mile away, at the western base of the mountain. The two entranceways had been determined to be those closest to the places inside the mountain factory where the slave laborers were kept. An important part of the overall Okinawa operation plan was the safe release of these unfortunates. It was the mission given the commandos of the JAWs team.

Unlike their comrades from the 104th, the JAWs team was presently operating on a part of the island where the guns of the
New Jersey
could not reach. The heavy jungle in the area on the western edge of Shuri even made air strikes difficult. This is why the JAWs team appreciated Hunter’s efforts to arrange for some psy-ops to assist them.

The “explosions” were merely flashpots igniting, the deafening rumbling nothing more than recordings piped over dozens of speakers set up in the area. The deception was the work of the stranded movie crew, specifically the special effects people. The F/X crew had wired the target zone two nights earlier, placing the fake charges and speakers around the little-used entranceways. When the
New Jersey
’s guns first opened up on the eastern edge of the island, the F/X men began activating their charges, visually and audibly mimicking a heavy cannon barrage.

As soon as the JAWs team made it to their objectives, the F/X men activated the second series of fake explosions, hoping to discourage any Cult reinforcements from coming near the operation zone. So far the plan had worked.

Cook checked his watch. It was 0725. Time to get moving.

He gathered his officers around him. Along with Higgens were Warren Maas, Clancy Miller, and Mark Snyder, all veterans of the JAWs previous campaigns, including the capturing of the Fourth Reich’s American headquarters in Football City. This plan called for Snyder and Miller to take twenty men around to the second entranceway while Higgens, Clancy, Cook, and the remaining JAWs troopers concentrated on the one above them.

The problem was that the slave laborers had no idea the rescue attempt was about to be made. There had been absolutely no contact with them, if indeed any were still alive inside the beleaguered mountain. Even their nationalities were, for the most part, unknown.

Snyder and Miller counted off their detachment and departed. Cook, Higgens, and Clancy waited for another five minutes and then began to move up toward the large bolted set of doors.

One minute and a charge of
SEMTEX
later, the doors were open. There were no Cult troops anywhere near the opening. In fact, all the JAWs men saw was a long, very dark tunnel which curved down away from them and smelled heavily of cordite.

Leaving a guard at the door, Cook, Clancy, Higgens, and a dozen commandos entered the tunnel, their only light in the pitch black from Cook’s field flashlight set on dim. The deeper they went into the tunnel, the thicker the smell of smoke filling the air. Explosions deep underground could be heard, and also the whine of propeller engines, even though they were nearly on the opposite side of Shuri from the entrance to the hidden airstrip.

They moved quickly and quietly for about ten minutes before they saw a light at the far end of the tunnel, about 200 feet away. They could hear shouting and even screaming as they moved toward the light, guns raised. The scream of prop engines was even louder.

About twenty-five feet from the opening, the group stopped and only Cook and Clancy went forward. They crept up to the edge of the tunnel to find they were looking out on a vast brightly-lit cavern. Below them were several hundred people who had to be Cult slaves. All were women and girls, all were kneeling in long rows, barely clothed, many of them visibly trembling. At the far end of the cavern was a squad of black-uniformed Cult soldiers, many of them displaying long, shiny swords. An officer was standing ramrod straight in front of these soldiers, hastily reading something in Japanese from a document.

Cook and Clancy didn’t need a translation to figure out what was about to happen. It was clear the soldiers were being given orders to slaughter the women.

The Cult soldiers turned as one and with the click of their boot heels raised their phalanx of swords above their heads. Many of the women in the first row of prostrate slaves began whimpering. Death was just seconds away.

In an instant, Cook and Clancy had their M-16s up and firing, not at the Cult soldiers, but at the rows of lights on the ceiling of the vast hall. Their combined fusillade KO’d most of the lights, and short-circuited the others. Within two seconds, the entire cavern was plunged into darkness.

The men of the JAWs team quickly flowed into the cavern, down the metal stairs to the floor of the hall below. They were yelling at the women to stay down, that they were being rescued, but many of the slaves were too frightened to move in the first place.

The JAWs men found themselves crawling over the frightened, screaming half-naked women, their NightScope-equipped guns picking off the Cult blackshirts one at a time. Some of the Cult soldiers chose to skewer themselves rather than face a bullet, but others fought ferociously. Hand-to-hand combat broke out all over, the JAWs troopers battling sword-wielding Cultists with rifle butts and small arms.

The fighting was sharp and bloody, but it was over in a matter of a minute—temporarily, at least. As the last of the surviving Cult blackshirts fled the chamber, the JAWs team rounded up the women and began hurrying them up the stairway toward the exit. Shots were now being fired at them from deeper inside the mountain, a sure sign that more Cult troops were on the way.

Two of the JAWs troopers ran ahead to the opening, making sure it was still secure. They made radio contact with the other JAWs team who had run into a similar execution ceremony, but with a much larger group of slaves, possibly as many as three thousand. They were now streaming out of their exit and fleeing into the jungle. There were also reports that other exits had been opened by the slaves themselves, further emptying the Cult’s subterranean chamber of innocents.