Suicide River Read online

  MCGURK STOOD ON THE EDGE OF THE TRENCH.

  Now he had the fighting room he needed. He snorted through both nostrils like a wild bull and glowered at the Japanese soldiers rushing toward him, murder and destruction in their eyes. He heard rifle fire and grenade explosions all around him, and was aware other GIs were climbing out of their holes too. He raised his rifle and bayonet high in the air and screamed: "Come on! Here I am!”

  Lowering his rifle, he aimed the tip of his bayonet at the Japanese men and charged...

  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

  Do or Die

  Kill Crazy

  Nightmare Alley

  Go For Broke

  Tough Guys Die Hard

  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

  * * *

  Suicide River

  * * *

  Book 14 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.

  SUICIDE RIVER

  Copyright © 1985 by Len Levinson. All Rights Reserved.

  EBook © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-855-1

  Library ISBN 978-1-62460-196-5

  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 night in the jungle, and the full moon bathed the trees and bushes in a spectral glow. The young Japanese officer walked along the path confidently, because he was far behind his lines and didn't think American soldiers were about. He carried his pack on his back and a Nambu pistol in its holster attached to his belt. His cap perched low over his eyes; his knee-high boots were highly polished. He was a staff officer, on his way to the headquarters of Colonel Yukio Katsumata.

  Birds sang in the trees and crickets chirped all around the young Japanese officer. He was tall and emaciated, because rations weren't plentiful for Japanese soldiers on New Guinea. It was July 2, 1944, and they'd been taking a beating on the hot, steamy island since 1942, but still had plenty of fight left in them. A major offensive was being planned by General Adachi, to retake the Tadji airfields and expel the Americans from the territory around Aitape.

  The young officer was in a good mood. He wanted to whistle a tune, but that wasn't proper in a war zone where so many Japanese soldiers were suffering from inadequate rations and medical supplies. The young officer felt excellent because he believed General Adachi's big offensive would succeed. He knew General Adachi had been working on it for weeks, and the general had a brilliant tactical mind. It would be wonderful if the offensive succeeded, because the Imperial Japanese Eighteenth Army on New Guinea badly needed a victory to boost morale and improve its strategic situation in the Aitape area.

  If a major victory was won, the young officer hoped he'd get a promotion and perhaps a furlough back to Japan. He was from Tokyo and wanted very much to see his family again, especially his younger sister, whom he adored. He also wanted to go to the Ginza at night and spend time with geisha girls, drinking sake, smoking cigarettes, and getting laid. The young officer was only twenty-two years old and got awfully lonely sometimes. It'd be fabulous if he could hold a beautiful woman for a while, and have her hold him. He imagined himself rolling around on a tatami mat with a geisha girl whose face was painted white, her hair shining like a net full of diamonds. Slowly he'd take off her clothes and fondle her soft skin. An erection grew in his pants when he thought of the pleasures he'd enjoy if ever he returned to Tokyo again.

  He became so involved with his vision of glamorous geisha girls that he was barely aware of mosquitoes biting his neck and arms. A faint rustle in the bushes in front of him hardly registered in his turbulent mind. The narrow path wound through the jungle in front of him and eerie shadows were cast by the pale moonlight, but the young lieutenant saw only a tiny room in a geisha house off the Ginza, and he made wild passionate love to the prettiest geisha he'd ever seen.

  Something metallic flashed for a split second in the moonlight, and then chung!—an American Army-issue Ka-bar knife slammed blade-first into his chest. The young Japanese officer stopped dead in his tracks. He dropped to his knees, and two American soldiers burst out of the bushes beside him, one grabbing his arm, another grabbing a leg; they dragged him into the thick tangled vegetation. The first American soldier returned to the path and messed up all traces of the dragging. Then he joined the other American soldier in the bushes.

  The first American soldier was Pfc. Frankie La Barbara from New York City. “He got anything on him?” he asked.

  Lieutenant Dale Breckenridge from Richmond, Virginia, searched the young Japanese officer's pockets, as blood oozed from the wound made by the knife.

  “Nothing yet,” said Lieutenant Breckenridge, turning the Japanese officer onto his side.

  Lieutenant Breckenridge opened the pack on the back of the dead man and found a leather case inside. “What's this?” he asked.

  He opened the flap of the leather case and saw a sheaf of papers. He thumbed through the pages, and they were covered with typed Japanese characters. “Looks like something important,” he said, answering his own question.

  He took off his pack and opened it, stuffing the Japanese leather case inside. The bushes swished behind them and Private Clement R. Bisbee appeared, a smile on his baby face.

  “Gimme my knife,” he said.

  ‘Take it yourself,” replied Lieutenant Breckenridge.

  Bisbee bent over the dead Japanese officer and turned him onto his back, pulling out his Ka-bar knife. Blood welled after it, and Bisbee wiped the knife on the pant leg of the dead Japanese officer. Bisbee had been a roustabout with a carnival before the war, and taken lessons from the knife thrower. His ambition had been to become a knife thrower himself, but the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor and he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

  The bushes rustled again and Private Victor Yabalonka, the former longshoreman from San Francisco, appeared, followed by Pfc. Billie Jones, known as the Reverend Billie Jones because he'd been an itinerant preacher in Georgia before the war. Last came Private Joshua McGurk from Skunk Hollow, Maine. McGurk was seven feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds. He was the giant of the recon platoon, but had the brain of a f
lea.

  Lieutenant Breckenridge closed his pack and put his arms through the straps. He was six feet four inches tall and weighed 250 pounds, with a few old acne scars on his cheeks. Before the war he'd been first-team fullback for the University of Virginia, but a bullet had punctured his left leg two weeks ago and now he walked with a limp. He raised his head and listened to the jungle around him. He and his men were on a reconnaissance far behind enemy lines, and they had to be careful. One wrong move and everybody was dead.

  Lieutenant Breckenridge wondered what to do next. All his men except one looked at him expectantly, hoping he'd end the reconnaissance and return to their lines on the other side of the Driniumor River. The one man who didn't look at him was Private Bisbee, because he was down on his hands and knees, going through the pockets of the dead Japanese officer. Bisbee was a pathological thief and couldn't help himself. He knew the other men despised him for what he was doing, but they could go fuck themselves. Bisbee wasn't sensitive about what other people thought of him.

  He yanked out the Japanese officer's wallet and opened it up. The first thing he saw was a picture of a young girl, around fourteen years old. Bisbee tossed the picture over his shoulder and searched through the wallet for loot. He found Japanese money, and there was no place to spend it, but that didn't stop Bisbee. A smile spread over his baby face as he stuffed the money into his back pocket. The wallet contained nothing else except cards, so he tossed them over his shoulder and opened the Japanese officer's mouth, looking for gold teeth. His smile broadened when he spotted one in back on the bottom, and he reached into his rear pocket for his pliers.

  “Look at this guy,” Frankie La Barbara said disgustedly. “What a fucking scumbag—stealing from the dead!”

  “Up your ass,” Bisbee said. “You wanna do the same thing yourself, but you ain't got the fucking guts.”

  Frankie snarled and bared his teeth. He had swarthy Mediterranean features and his nose was bent and broken in numerous places along its once-noble length due to hand-to-hand combat with Japanese soldiers and other GIs. “Say that again,” Frankie said, balling up his fists.

  Lieutenant Breckenridge turned at him. “Cut it out!”

  “Whataya looking at me for?” Frankie replied. “Why don't you say something to that fucking thief down there?”

  “Shut up,” Lieutenant Breckenridge said. “You two can fight it out when we get out of here.”

  Frankie looked down at Bisbee. “I'm gonna kick your ass,” he said.

  “That's what you think,” Bisbee replied.

  Private McGurk jerked his head three inches to the right and twitched his nose. “I hear something,” he said.

  “Hit it,” Lieutenant Breckenridge said softly.

  The men dropped silently to the ground, holding their Thompson submachine guns ready to fire. At first they heard nothing except ordinary jungle sounds—the chirps of insects and the hoot of an owl—but then they heard footsteps and bodies brushing past leaves and branches. Lieutenant Breckenridge looked at McGurk and realized that the big imbecile had sharp ears. Throughout the patrol McGurk had heard ominous sounds before anyone else. Lieutenant Breckenridge looked at McGurk with new respect, and McGurk turned to Lieutenant Breckenridge and grinned like a happy little puppy. What a strange son of a bitch, Lieutenant Breckenridge thought.

  The sounds drew closer, and the GIs heard them more distinctly. A group of soldiers was headed their way along the trail, and they had to be Japanese. The trail was only eight feet away, on the other side of the bushes, but it was night and the bushes were thick. The Japanese soldiers should pass by without noticing the GIs lying there.

  Lieutenant Breckenridge looked at his watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. They'd been out since 2300 hours roaming around behind enemy lines, an ordinary reconnaissance to gather information. So far they'd seen troop movement and supplies being hand-carried forward. They'd killed the young Japanese officer and taken the papers in his pack. They'd learned that a road on their maps didn't exist in reality. Lieutenant Breckenridge figured that was enough for one night. There was no sense pushing things. It'd start getting light in another hour and a half anyway. When the coast was clear they'd start moving back.

  The Japanese soldiers turned the bend and came into view through the tangled leaves and branches. The GIs lowered their heads and held their breath. Each hoped none of the others would sneeze or make a wrong move. Some of the men on patrol were new to the recon platoon, and the old-timers didn't trust them yet. Their hearts beat faster and their mouths got drier. The Japanese soldiers probably wouldn't spot them, but you could never be sure. Private Bisbee gripped the blade of his Ka-bar knife in his right hand. Bisbee was certain he could pierce the throat of a Japanese soldier with his knife, because he wasn't far away. The Japanese soldier wouldn't even know what hit him.

  The Japanese soldiers came closer. The GIs could see them clearly now, and counted eight of them. An officer with knee-high boots led the way, his samurai sword swinging back and forth in its scabbard attacked to his belt. The Japanese soldiers came abreast of the GIs and marched by, not looking to the left or right, never suspecting six GIs were so close. The GIs watched them pass, hoping they wouldn't stop suddenly, or that one of the Japs wouldn't see something he shouldn't.

  The last Jap in the column stopped, dropped to one knee, and retied his shoelaces. He made the bow slowly and deliberately, because it was difficult to see in the moonlight. He finished tying the knot on his right shoe, checked the one on his left shoe, and then, as he stood up, saw something glint in the moonlight to his left.

  It was the blade of the Ka-bar knife in Bisbee's hand, but Bisbee and the other GIs didn't know that. All they could see was the Japanese soldier staring suspiciously in their direction. They wondered what he was looking at. The Japanese soldier leaned closer to them, a quizzical expression on his face, and they knew he'd seen something he shouldn't. Lieutenant Breckenridge turned to Bisbee and gave him a meaningful look. Bisbee raised himself up quickly, drew back his arm, and threw the knife.

  The Japanese soldier saw Bisbee's movements and jerked to the side. The knife sailed past him, and he heard it whistle through the air. He shouted at the top of his lungs, and Frankie La Barbara charged out of the bushes, his own Ka-bar knife blade-up in his right hand, thrusting it into the Japanese soldier's belly. The Japanese soldier raised his arms to protect himself, and Frankie's knife ripped his wrists and hands. The Japanese soldier screamed, and the other Japanese soldiers who'd just passed by hollered something in reply. Frankie raised his Ka-bar knife, slashing the Japanese soldier's throat and jugular vein. A torrent of blood gushed out. Frankie heard Japanese soldiers running toward him on the path. Turning around, he jumped back into the bushes, the Ka-bar knife in his right hand dripping blood.

  Lieutenant Breckenridge jumped to his feet. “Let's get out of here!” he said.

  He turned around and plunged into the thickest, most tangled part of the jungle, and the other GIs followed him, leaving behind the body of the dead Japanese soldier on the path, and the body of the dead Japanese officer in the bushes. The Japanese soldiers on the path came to the body of their fallen comrade and were shocked to see him dead because they hadn't imagined American soldiers could be this far behind their lines. They heard a commotion in the jungle straight ahead and their officer told them to open fire. They raised their Arisaka rifles and worked the bolts, but just then Thompson submachine guns blazed in the jungle, and .45-caliber bullets cut them apart.

  The GIs from the recon platoon shot down the Japanese soldiers on the path, and the Japanese soldiers who weren't hit by bullets dropped to their bellies. The firing stopped and the screams and moans of the wounded could be heard.

  In the jungle. Lieutenant Breckenridge raised himself up and turned around. “Follow me!” he said.

  He raised his submachine gun and charged into the jungle with all the speed and power that had made him an outstanding fullback for the University of
Virginia football team. His men followed him and the recon platoon rampaged through the foliage like wild horses, wanting to put as much distance between them and the path as possible, because they knew more Japanese soldiers would be coming soon to find out what all the commotion was about.

  Not more than one thousand yards away, Colonel Yukio Katsumata was awakened out of a deep sleep by the shooting and shouting. He snapped to a sitting position and reached for his Nambu pistol on the little stand beside the tatami mat where he'd lain. Blinking his eyes, his long mustaches twitching, he realized the firing wasn't that close and represented no physical threat to him. “Officer of the Day!” he screamed.

  A sallow sad-faced officer leapt through the tent flap and saluted. “Yes sir!” He was Lieutenant Masaji Fujiwara, assigned to the intelligence staff of Colonel Katsumata's regiment.

  “What's going on out there !” Colonel Katsumata demanded.

  “I don't know, sir!”

  “Find out!”

  “Yes sir!”

  Lieutenant Fujiwara bounded out of the tent. Colonel Katsumata reached for the pack of cigarettes beside him and lit one with his lighter. That shooting was very close, he thought. I'll have to beef up security around here. He wanted to go back to sleep, but knew he couldn't until he found out what was going on. He pushed away his mosquito netting, and immediately the swarms of mosquitoes in his tent attacked him, sticking their needles into his flesh. Cursing, his long mustaches dangling an inch below his chin, he pulled on his uniform pants and put on his shirt, then waddled across the room to his desk, lighting the kerosene lamp with his cigarette lighter and sitting down. He placed his Nambu pistol on the desk beside him and puffed his cigarette, scowling as he waited for Lieutenant Fujiwara's report.

  Approximately two miles away, Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi perked up his ears at the sound of gunfire in the distance. He was sitting at his desk, working on the master plan for his grand offensive, and wondered what was going on. The gunfire sounded close, on his side of the Driniumor. “Officer of the Day!” he shouted.