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  Frankie looked down at Captain Kashiwagi out cold on the floor. He walked around the desk to the front of the tent. Opening the flap an inch, he was dismayed to see three guards with their backs to him. Could he shoot three guards before one of them shot him? It was the only chance he had. Spreading his legs apart, he held the Nambu in both hands and clicked off the safety. He poked the barrel outside and took aim at the guard on the left. He licked his lips, squinted, and squeezed the trigger...

  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

  Hot Lead and Cold Steel

  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

  * * *

  Do or Die

  * * *

  Book 10 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.

  DO OR DIE

  Copyright © 1984 by Len Levinson. All Rights Reserved.

  EBook © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-850-6

  Library ISBN 978-1-62460-191-0

  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.

  * * *

  Do or Die

  * * *

  ONE . . .

  It was January 6, 1943, and a lone Japanese aircraft droned high in the sky over a northern expanse of the Solomon Sea. Seated in the cockpit was Sergeant Kaneatsu Noruma, searching for American shipping activity below.

  His plane was a Mitsubishi A6M Zero-Sen fighter, the famed Zero, and he leaned to the side, looking down at the whitecaps on the blue water, and the reflected rays of the sun twinkling and dancing. He saw no American ships or planes, and so far his reconnaissance had been routine.

  He looked around to see if American planes were sneaking up on him, but the sky was clear. He was headed in a northeasterly direction toward the island of Bougainville, which he was supposed to fly over, making note of American troop dispositions, seeing as much as he could before the Americans spotted him and sent up planes to chase him away.

  The Americans had invaded Bougainville on the first of November, wading ashore at Cape Torokina on Empress Augusta Bay. The Japanese believed the landing was a feint, with the main blow coming somewhere else. Sergeant Noru ma's mission was to determine whether the main blow was in fact in progress.

  The Zero's 940-horsepower Nakajima Sakae engine snarled across the sky. Sergeant Noruma was jittery, because he knew Bougainville was straight ahead, maybe twenty miles away. Americans also sent forth reconnaissance flights, and he didn't want to bump into a patrol of American Mustang fighters by mistake. If they saw him first, they'd kick his ass all over the sky.

  He narrowed his eyes and searched around him, but saw nothing. Directing his gaze downward, he thought he saw specks on the ocean toward the northeast. He blinked, because the specks might only be his eyes playing tricks on him, but when he opened his eyes again they still were there. He angled his stick to the side and headed toward them, leveling off and easing back the accelerator so that his engine would make less noise.

  He flew closer to the specks until they became more discernible on the surface of the ocean. It was an American convoy headed toward Empress Augusta Bay! Excitedly he wrote down the number and position of the ships on the paper attached to the clipboard on his lap, glancing around every few seconds to make sure no American fighter planes were stalking him. Finishing his notes, he thought he'd dive down to see what kinds of ships were there. It would be risky, because a lower altitude would make him more visible to observers on those ships, but he thought he could get down and out before American planes could be launched to pursue him.

  Adjusting his flight goggles and turning up the collar of his flight jacket, he angled his stick to the right and pulled back the accelerator lever. The Zero turned to the side and its wings became perpendicular to the surface of the ocean. The Zero dropped sideways toward the American convoy, wind whistling past Sergeant Noruma's goggles and flight hat. As the American ships came up at him he perceived four troop transports.

  The Americans are reinforcing Cape Torokina, he thought. General Imamura will be glad to know that. He saw an aircraft carrier on the eastern flank of the convoy, with figures like insects running around on deck. Sergeant Noruma clicked the entire scene into his memory like a photograph, then eased Ms stick back to climb away, because the activity on the aircraft carrier indicated that the Americans might have seen him.

  The Zero leveled off and climbed into the morning sky, angling toward Rabaul. Below him, American fighter pilots scrambled toward their planes as the sirens and horns sounded general quarters.

  Corporal Charles Bannon from Pecos, Texas, was sitting on the deck of the General John Pershing, smoking a cigarette and resting with his back against the steel bulkhead, when the siren went off. He jumped to his feet and threw the cigarette over the rails. Turning, he ran toward the closest hatch and ducked inside, grabbing the banister and jumping down the steel ladderwell. The siren continued to wail and sailors in helmets and life preservers climbed toward him, rushing toward their battle stations. Bannon pressed his shoulder against the bulkhead and tried to make himself small so that the sailors could pass. He was frightened, because he didn't know what was going on. The entire Japanese navy could be converging on the tiny convoy. Maybe submarines were out there, launching torpedoes. Perhaps a torpedo would strike the General Pershing at any moment. Corporal Bannon knew what to do on a battlefield, because he'd fought in many battles, but the thought of drowning like a rat on a sinking ship scared the shit out of him.

  He fought his way through the swarms of naval gun crews and then came to the lower reaches of the troop ship, where the air was dank and heavy, the sour odor of vomit predominating. Passing through a hatchway, he entered a large hold full of GIs sweating in the dim light. They lay on canvas cots stacked five high, without enough room to raise their knees when they were lying on their backs. Some sat in small circles in the crowded passageways, unshaven and puffing cigarettes, a little green around the gills. They were nervous because of the sirens resounding through the troop ship: They didn't know what to expect.

&n
bsp; Bannon made his way through the narrow passageways and 1 finally came to the comer of the room where his outfit, the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment's reconnaissance platoon, was situated. All the guys were sitting on their cots or huddled around in the passageway, their shirts off, dog tags dangling from their necks.

  Master Sergeant John Butsko, big and burly, with scars on his face and his nose bent out of shape by the butt of a Japanese rifle, sat on a bottom bunk, his big combat boots planted on the floor. He wore a khaki tank-top undershirt and smoked a Pall Mall.

  “Where you been?” he asked Bannon.

  “On deck.”

  “What's going on?”

  “I don't know.”

  “You didn't see nothing?”

  “No.”

  Bannon sat on the bunk beside Butsko. Opposite them on a bottom bunk lay Frankie La Barbara from New York City, who was looking at a drawing of a girl in her underwear in a dog-eared, mangled old copy of Esquire magazine. He was trying to think of what would happen if he could stick his dick between the girl's legs. Frankie was trying not to think about the bomb that might be hurtling toward the deck of the General Pershing at that very moment.

  On the bunk above Frankie, Pfc. Tommy Shaw lay on his side, using his pack for a pillow. “I can't wait to get off this fucking pig boat,” he mumbled. He was a former prizefighter and suffered from mild attacks of claustrophobia in cramped quarters. He also was afflicted with seasickness and had vomited up everything in his stomach, but that didn't keep him from having the dry heaves, which he felt coming on again. “Outta my way!” he gurgled, swinging his legs around.

  Everybody moved back as he jumped down and rushed drunkenly toward the latrine. The men could hear the waves crashing against the bulkhead of the ship as the General Pershing rolled in the sea.

  Butsko watched Shaw turn a bend and move out of sight. “Poor son of a bitch has lost twenty pounds since he's been on this barge.”

  “He looks like something that got shot at and was missed, then got shot at and was hit,” said Homer Gladley, the big farm boy from Nebraska.

  “I never seen a grown man puke so much,” said Pfc. Billie Jones, a former itinerant preacher from Georgia.

  On the top bunk, with his nose two inches from the ceiling (called the overhead by the sailors), Corporal Sam Longtree lay on his back. A full-blooded Apache Indian from a reservation in Arizona, he also felt like puking, but was concentrating hard and using all his willpower to overcome the horrible sensations coming out of his throat and stomach.

  He gritted his teeth and stared at the gray paint on the steel ceiling just above him. His fists were balled up and his body was tense. He'd rather be out on the desert of Arizona in the hot sun, surrounded by rattlesnakes, bobcats, scorpions, and coyotes, than on this infernal ship. Corporal Longtree didn't know how to swim. There were no lakes or swimming pools on the reservation.

  Bannon took out a cigarette and lit it up with his trusty old Zippo, which he'd had since basic training at Ford Ord, California, and carried through the Guadalcanal campaign and the fight for New Georgia. He puffed the cigarette and felt a mild ache on the left side of his head, where the steel plate was. He'd stopped a shell fragment with his skull on New Georgia, and they'd replaced the damaged bone with a piece of steel four inches long and three inches wide. Underneath his light brown hair was a horseshoe-shaped scar where the doctors peeled back his scalp to do the job. They didn't tell him he'd get headaches all the time, especially when the humidity was high or he became a little tense, as he was now.

  Bannon puffed his cigarette and looked around at the others. Except for Butsko and Sergeant Cameron, all the old veterans had been wounded on New Georgia. Frankie La Barbara had been bayoneted in the stomach and was now minus about ten feet of his guts. Longtree had been shot in the chest. Shaw's jaw had been blown away and rebuilt by Army doctors. Homer Gladley had been shot in the leg and walked with a slight gimp. Billie Jones's left arm had nearly been chewed off by a Japanese attack dog, and he couldn't work his fingers very well, but his right hand could still pull the trigger of his M 1 rifle.

  Their platoon leader, Lieutenant Dale Breckenridge, was back in the States, recuperating from shrapnel wounds in his chest, stomach, and pelvis. All the men in the recon platoon missed him, because their new platoon leader, Lieutenant Stanley Horsfall, was a pain in the ass.

  Over half the men in the recon platoon had died on New Georgia, and there were many new faces. Bannon wondered who would live and who would die when the bullets started flying around on Bougainville. They were a tough bunch—the recon platoon always got the toughest ones—but New Georgia and Guadalcanal had shown that no one was tougher than a bullet or a chunk of shrapnel.

  The sirens stopped wailing and they could hear the steady hum of the ship's engines and waves slamming against the hull. The men puffed their cigarettes and looked wan in the ghostly light of the low-wattage bulbs.

  “I wonder what's going on up there,” said Private Nutsy Gafooley, the former hobo, who had been shot in the ass on New Georgia.

  “Nothing,” muttered Butsko. “If something was going on, you'd hear it.”

  “Probably a false alarm,” said Private Morris Shilansky, the former bank robber from Boston. He'd been kicked in the balls by a Japanese soldier in hand-to-hand fighting and had been operated on for two double hernias.

  Private Shaw came staggering back through the aisles, his face a bit lopsided: The Army plastic surgeons who had worked on him hadn't cared that much about what they were doing, because they weren't getting the high fees they charged in civilian life.

  “How you feel?” asked Bannon.

  “Like shit,” replied Shaw, crawling onto his cot.

  The ship's bow rose as it climbed over waves, then crashed down into the valley between them. The GIs sat around in the vast hold, tense, listening for the sounds of battle, worrying about drowning like rats in the sinking troop ship.

  After several minutes the all-clear signal was blown on the sirens and everybody loosened up. Shilansky had been right: It was a false alarm. Frankie La Barbara took two dice out of his shirt pocket.

  “Anybody interested in a little craps?” he asked.

  The men smiled and crawled out of their cots, gathering around Frankie La Barbara. They'd do anything to relieve the boredom of the long ocean passage, even if they had to lose their pay for three months to come. It wouldn't matter, because there was noplace to spend money on Bougainville.

  Frankie knelt on the deck of the ship and wiped the dust off the steel plates with the palm of his hand. His stomach sent him a wild message of pain, but it was nothing like what he'd gone through after they'd cut out his guts. It just reminded him that he'd stopped a Jap bayonet six months earlier and that he might stop one again on Bougainville.

  “All right, boys, here we go!” he said, shaking the dice in his fist. “Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”

  TWO . . .

  The Japanese troops on Bougainville were designated as the Seventeenth Army, and their commander was Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, who'd led the Japanese army to defeat on Guadalcanal. His headquarters was not on Bougainville itself, but on the tiny island of Erventa, about a mile offshore from the Japanese airfield at Kahili on the mainland. Wood shacks, tents, and bunkers were spread out over Erventa, and the most sumptuous shack was occupied by General Hyakutake himself, a short, slender man fifty-five years old who wore spectacles and looked like a harsh schoolmaster.

  On the morning of January Sixth, as the recon platoon drew closer to Bougainville, he sat cross-legged on his tatami mat, wearing only his jockstrap and drinking his first cup of tea of the day to wake himself up.

  The room was twelve feet square, with a statue of the Buddha in the corner; the only wall decoration was a photograph of the Emperor. An unlit candle sat on the floor next to General Hyakutake's tatami mat, and beside it was an incense pot. The windows were covered with bamboo shades to keep out the sun's heat, but Gene
ral Hyakutake was sweating anyway. He thought of how pleasant it would be to live in Tokyo again someday, where the weather was cool and a man could enjoy life.

  There was a knock on his door.

  “Come in!”

  The door opened and Lieutenant Oyagi entered. “Message from General Imamura's headquarters, sir.”

  “Give it here.”

  Lieutenant Oyagi handed over the document and General Hyakutake read it. It said that more American transport ships were headed toward Empress Augusta Bay and that General Imamura had decided that the main American effort would emanate from that point. General Imamura ordered General Hyakutake to take appropriate measures to destroy the American beachhead on Empress Augusta Bay.

  “Advise General Imamura that the message has been received and that I shall follow through forthwith.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You may go.”

  Lieutenant Oyagi turned and marched out of the room, and General Hyakutake let the message fall to the floor, realizing with a sinking sensation in his gut that the Americans had outsmarted him again. They'd defeated him on Guadalcanal and now had fooled him on Bougainville, if General Imamura was right. He'd thought that the landings in Empress Augusta Bay were diversionary and that the main American effort would be aimed elsewhere, probably at one or more of the Japanese airfields on Bougainville. The surf was ferocious at Empress Augusta Bay, making it difficult to land troops, and the surrounding countryside was a big swamp, the worst terrain on which to build an airfield and supply depot. There was nothing of strategic value nearby.

  But the Americans had landed there anyway, drained the swamp, and built their airfield and supply depot while General Hyakutake held back most of his troops, waiting for an attack elsewhere, which never came. General Hyakutake tried to contain the American beachhead with elements of one infantry regiment, but the Americans had pushed back the regiment and gained more ground. Now it appeared that they would use that beachhead as the base for their conquest of Bougainville.