Hot Lead and Cold Steel

by Len Levinson

  Longtree was as tense as a guitar string, and he stared at the Japanese soldier's eyes. He knew that the Japanese soldier wanted to get away, and he could see the panic in the Jap's eyes. The Japanese soldier shouted, feinted with the knife in his left hand, then tossed the knife to his right hand and pushed forward to Longtree's stomach.

  Longtree tucked his stomach in and dodged to the side, as graceful as a matador, while slicing down with his knife. His razor-sharp blade caught the Jap on the neck...

  Also by Len Levinson

  The Rat Bastards:

  Hit the Beach

  Death Squad

  River of Blood

  Meat Grinder Hill

  Down and Dirty

  Green Hell

  Too Mean to Die

  Do or Die

  Kill Crazy

  Nightmare Alley

  Go For Broke

  Tough Guys Die Hard

  Suicide River

  Satan’s Cage

  Go Down Fighting

  The Pecos Kid:

  Beginner’s Luck

  The Reckoning

  Apache Moon

  Outlaw Hell

  Devil’s Creek Massacre

  Bad to the Bone

  The Apache Wars Saga:

  Desert Hawks

  War Eagles

  Savage Frontier

  White Apache

  Devil Dance

  Night of the Cougar

  * * *

  Hot Lead and Cold Steel

  * * *

  Book 8 of the Rat Bastards

  by

  Len Levinson

  Excepting basic historical events, places, and personages, this series of books is fictional, and anything that appears otherwise is coincidental and unintentional. The principal characters are imaginary, although they might remind veterans of specific men whom they knew. The Twentythird Infantry Regiment, in which the characters serve, is used fictitiously—it doesn't represent the real historical Twentythird Infantry, which has distinguished itself in so many battles from the Civil War to Vietnam—but it could have been any American line regiment that fought and bled during World War II.

  These novels are dedicated to the men who were there. May their deeds and gallantry never be forgotten.

  HOT LEAD & COLD STEEL

  Copyright © 1984 by Len Levinson. All Rights Reserved.

  EBook © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-849-0

  Library ISBN 978-1-62460-190-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

  whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover photo © TK/iStock.com.

  ONE . . .

  It was the first of August, 1943, and the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment moved west through the jungle of New Georgia, heading for the main military objective on the island, the Japanese airfield on Munda Point.

  It had rained all night, and the leaves of the jungle were coated with water. The ground had become muck and the GIs slogged through it, their rifles in their hands, ready to fire. They knew the Japs would defend their airfield with the same fanaticism with which they defended everything else, and the final showdown would be bloody and grim.

  The recon platoon was on the left flank of the advance, and it had taken heavy casualties since the landing in mid-July. Always in the thick of the fighting, now it was forty percent of strength, and many of its soldiers wore red bandages as they made their way through the steaming, stinking jungle.

  It was morning and the sun was bright and hot, but its rays couldn't pierce the gloom of the thick jungle. The heat radiated through, and the men felt as if they were in a steambath.

  Pfc. Sam Longtree, a full-blooded Apache Indian from a reservation in Arizona, was the point man for the recon platoon, and he slipped through the jungle twenty yards ahead of the platoon's main advance. He was tall and lanky, with weathered skin and sharp eyes. His helmet was festooned with leaves and his shirt was unbuttoned to his waist, with the sleeves rolled up over his sinewy biceps. A bandage was tied around his left thigh and bulged out underneath his fatigue pants. He'd been slashed by a bayonet in the vicious hand-to-hand fighting near Zanana, but the wound wasn't deep and he walked with only a slight limp.

  The jungle was so thick, Longtree could see only a few yards in front of him. An entire battalion of Japs could be within hand-grenade-throwing distance and Longtree wouldn't be able to spot them. But no Jap ever would get close enough to knife him. Longtree was too clever for that. His M 1 rifle had a round in the chamber and a bayonet affixed to its end. If a Jap tried to jump him, the Jap would wind up skewered on the end of an American bayonet.

  The jungle was silent, its animals and birds made apprehensive by the movement of so many men through their territory. Monkeys sat on branches with their arms around each other, looking down at the strange biped creatures with leaves growing out of their heads. Birds hopped from tree to tree, making low clucking sounds. On the ground, lizards and wild pigs lay in the bushes and tried not to draw attention to themselves. Most of the creatures were shocked and traumatized by the constant shelling and gunfire, and the war had forced many of them to leave their usual haunts.

  It was eight o'clock, and the recon platoon had been on the move since six. It had met no enemy resistance, and Longtree was getting bored. His mind wandered back to the reservation in Arizona, to the pretty girls he had left behind, to the poverty and misery, and sometimes he wondered what he was doing fighting on the same side as the people who had cheated and slaughtered Apaches for more than a hundred years.

  Machine-gun fire erupted behind him, shattering the silence of the jungle. Birds shrieked and flew into the air, flapping their wings hysterically, and Longtree dived toward the ground. He turned in the direction of the fire, trying to home in on it, when suddenly it stopped and the jungle became silent again. He heard shouting behind him as American officers and non-coms issued orders.

  Longtree had been in the Pacific war for nearly a year, long enough to know that the machine gun he'd heard was Japanese, probably the water-cooled Type 92, a heavy machine gun used in fixed fortifications. That meant it was most likely firing from a bunker. It was possible that he'd passed within sight of the bunker, but the Japs didn't fire at him because he was only one man. Their firing discipline was always excellent, and they didn't open up until they had a lot of targets directly in front of them. They stopped firing when the targets took cover, so they wouldn't give their position away.

  Longtree wondered if anybody in the recon platoon had been hit. He decided to circle back and try to find the bunker.

  Master Sergeant John Butsko, the platoon sergeant of the recon platoon, knelt over Private Michael Reiner of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who had stopped a machine-gun bullet with his lower abdomen. Reiner's shirt and pants were soaked with blood and his face was ashen as he lay unconscious on the ground. Private Joe Gundy, the medic, had just jammed an ampule of morphine into Reiner's ass and now was reaching into his haversack for sulfa powder to disinfect the wound.

  “Whataya think?” Butsko asked Gundy.

  “They'll probably have to take out about half his stomach, but he'll live.”

  Butsko grit his teeth and looked around. Private Watson, Pfc. Futterman, and Private Borak had also been hit by those Japanese machine-gun bursts, which had been so sudden that nobody saw where they came from. The other men lay behind trees and underneath bushes, waiting for somebody to tell them what to do.

  Butsko crawled past them, heading toward First Lieutenant Dale Breckenridge, the platoon leader. He
saw Breckenridge crouching in a little glen, a stream two feet wide running past him, and the air was thick with mosquitoes and other flying insects that lived on blood.

  Breckenridge held a walkie-talkie against his face and was listening to it; Butsko surmised he was talking with Captain Uecki, the CO of Company A, to which the recon platoon was temporarily attached. Next to Breckenridge was Private Craig Delane, the rich guy from New York, who was Lieutenant Breckenridge's runner.

  Butsko slithered into the glen, cradling his M 1 rifle in his arms. He was six feet tall, built like a tank, and wore a filthy bandage on his left cheek. Lieutenant Breckenridge was six feet five inches tall, weighed 265 pounds, and his face and neck were pitted with acne. His helmet sat high on his head because a bandage covered a large portion of his scalp.

  “Yes, sir,” he said into the mouthpiece of the walkie-talkie. “Over and out.” He handed the walkie-talkie to Craig Delane, and looked at Butsko. “What's the story?”

  “Watson is dead; Futterman, Borak, and Reiner are wounded.”

  Lieutenant Breckenridge scratched a mosquito bite on his pug nose. “Captain Ilecki wants us to find that machine gun. Anybody see where it was?”

  “No.”

  “Have the men fan out squad by squad and look for it. Has Longtree reported anything?”

  “No.”

  “Get him back here. Maybe he saw something.”

  Butsko cupped his hands around his mouth. “Longtree!”

  There was no answer.

  “Longtree, get the fuck back here!”

  Still no answer.

  Lieutenant Breckenridge wrinkled his brow. “Maybe something happened to him.”

  “Maybe,” Butsko replied, “but I don't think so.”

  Longtree had heard Butsko calling for him, but he didn't want to reply because he didn't know how close he was to the Jap machine gun. He was crawling through the thick underbrush in the direction of the fire that he'd heard, and it might be only a few yards away.

  He stopped to reorient himself, glancing around, talcing note of terrain details, not wanting to get lost in the jungle. The wind shifted and brought him a faint whiff of something awful, the unmistakable odor of a latrine.

  Longtree knew the Americans hadn't been in the area long enough to build a latrine, so it had to belong to the Japs. Maybe it was the latrine used by the Japs in that bunker. He sniffed the air and determined the direction of the wind, then shifted direction and crawled toward the stink.

  He was as silent as a snake and nearly as fast as he moved over the muck and gunk that was the jungle floor. The bandage on his leg rubbed against the ground, but Longtree had been trained since early childhood to disregard pain. The smell of the latrine became stronger and Longtree smiled. The Japs wouldn't dig the latrine too far from their bunker. They'd want to get back in a hurry in case of trouble. But it would be far enough away so that the latrine wouldn't stink up the bunker.

  Longtree heard a footstep in front of him, perhaps ten or twenty yards away. He knew he might be mistaken; it might be an animal rustling in the leaves or a dead branch falling to the ground, but it sounded like a footstep to him. He paused and listened closely, hearing the same sound again. Somebody was walking out there, and Longtree wondered whose side he was on.

  The footsteps stopped. The jungle became silent again. Longtree wondered what the person out there was doing, when suddenly he heard the comical sound of a big burbling fart. Longtree grinned and crept silently toward the sound. He made his way around a tree and underneath a network of vines, then stopped. Parting the leaves in front of him, he saw the back of a Japanese soldier with his pants down, squatting over a hole in the ground. The stench was horrible in the heat of the jungle, and swarms of flies buzzed loudly around the hole and the Jap's bottom.

  The Jap was a sitting duck, motionless except for a big turd being squeezed out of his rear end. Longtree gripped his rifle tightly, took a deep breath, and leaped up, running toward the Jap, aiming his bayonet at the Jap's back.

  The Jap heard him coming and turned his head around, but Longtree was already on top of him. Longtree rammed his rifle forward and his bayonet went into the Jap's right kidney up to the hilt. The Jap opened his mouth and shrieked for a second, but the Longtree's big hand covered the Jap's mouth. The odor from the latrine nearly knocked Longtree out, and the mud at the rim of the hole was still slippery from the previous night's rain.

  Longtree nearly lost his footing and fell in the shit. He let go of the Jap and lurched back, yanking his bayonet out of the Jap's kidney. The Jap had gone into shock, and blood spurted out of the hole in his back. He toppled backward and fell headfirst into the pool of shit and piss in the hole. Longtree watched in fascination as the Jap sank down to his waist, his legs bent over as if he were sitting upside down. The flies, disturbed by the sudden action, returned with a vengeance, covering the Jap's legs and bottom and the surface of the shit.

  They also swarmed around Longtree's face, trying to fly into his nose and mouth, brushing their wings and legs against his eyeballs. Longtree waved them away and retreated into the jungle, crouching behind a bush. The flies left him and returned to the latrine.

  Longtree wondered if the Japs in the bunker had heard the death cry of their comrade and, if they did, what would they do about it. Would they venture out of the bunker to investigate, when they knew American soldiers were moving into the area? Longtree decided they probably wouldn't. They'd want to stay at their posts and contend with the real danger in front of them.

  He raised himself on his toes and moved through the jungle again, circling around the latrine, looking for the path that led from the latrine to the bunker.

  Meanwhile the recon platoon was combing the jungle, searching for the Japanese bunker. Sergeant Charles Bannon from Pecos, Texas, the leader of the First Squad, had his men spread ten feet apart and moved them cautiously through the thick foliage.

  “Keep your heads down,” he said, “and keep your eyes open!”

  Bannon was tall and lean, with blond hair and blue-green eyes. Before the war he'd been a cowboy, and he'd enlisted on the day after Pearl Harbor on a patriotic impulse that he'd since regretted many times.

  His eyes roved back and forth through the jungle, searching for the bunker, hoping to spot it before the Japs inside saw him and his men. It was scary business, because the bunker would be well camouflaged. The Japs excelled in the art and science of camouflage. Bannon wouldn't see the bunker until he was right on top of it, and then it might be too late.

  He kept himself loose, ready to drop to the ground at the least sign of danger. His body was covered with sweat, which soaked his uniform and plastered it against his skin. He smelled like a pig wallowing in shit and he itched all over from rashes and mosquito bites. He wished he could be anyplace except in the hothouse jungle of New Georgia.

  The Japanese machine gun opened fire, and Bannon hit the dirt, rolling to the side once so that he'd make a difficult target. The machine gun sounded like it was to the right of his squad. It stopped firing and Bannon heard Sergeant Cameron of the Third Squad asking if anybody was hurt. The thick jungle made it difficult for Bannon to hear distinctly, but it was his impression that at least one man was wounded. How many people are we going to lose before we find that bunker? he wondered.

  “All right, swing to the right!” he shouted. “Watch your step because we're getting close!”

  He and his men arose and moved, hunched over, in the direction of the machine-gun fire that they'd heard. Bannon hoped they'd run into the bunker on its flank, instead of walking into the mouth of the machine gun. “Fucking Japs,” he said to himself. “Fucking bastards.”

  The First Squad stepped cautiously through the jungle as the sun rose in the sky and the day grew hotter. Bannon had a stomach ache and his feet alternately itched and ached from the trench foot that had been afflicting him ever since he had landed on New Georgia. His eyes stung from peering intently through the leaves ahead. Reac
hing into his shirt pocket, he took out a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes and poked one into his mouth. He lit it with his Zippo and dropped the Zippo into his pant pocket. The smoke in his lungs made him slightly dizzy for a moment, but it was better than what he'd been feeling. I really ought to stop smoking, he thought. It cuts my wind.

  To the left of Bannon was Private Frankie La Barbara from New York City, husky and swarthy, with wavy jet black hair and handsome Mediterranean features. Frankie chewed gum frantically and was as tense as a guitar string because he'd dreamed the previous night that he'd be shot by a Jap today, and he was superstitious enough to believe that dreams could predict the future.

  He was afraid that the Jap machine gunners would see him first and shoot him down, so he tried to lag behind the skirmish line, hoping the Japs would shoot somebody else.

  “Move it up, Frankie!” shouted Bannon. “Get the lead out!”

  Shit, Frankie thought, he saw me. Pinching his lips together, he moved forward and lined himself up with the others. Sweat poured down his face and he'd been constipated for three days; His stomach was bloated and he felt awful. I can't take this war anymore, he thought. I'm gonna go nuts if I have to keep this up.

  Suddenly a figure rose out of the bushes three feet in front of Frankie, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. His eyes bulged, his tongue stuck out, and he raised his rifle to shoot the man down.

  “Relax,” said Longtree. “It's me.”

  Frankie wheezed. “You scared the shit out of me!”

  Longtree stepped forward. “Where's Bannon?”

  “I'm over here,” Bannon replied. “Where the fuck you been?”

  Longtree trudged toward Bannon and pointed west. “Back there.”

  “Didn't you hear Butsko calling you?”

  “Yeah, I heard him. Where is he? I found the Jap bunker.”