Satan's Cage Read online

  “Banzai!”

  The Japanese soldiers charged through the jungle and the GIs froze. The Japanese were only twenty yards away—hundreds stampeding through the jungle, brandishing rifles, bayonets, samurai swords, and pistols. General Yokozowa’s flank attack was underway!

  A bullet passed so close to McGurk’s cheek he could feel its heat. McGurk looked for his Thompson submachine gun, but didn’t have time to go for it. The Japs already were on top of him. He reared back his hatchet and snarled . . .

  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

  Suicide River

  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

  * * *

  Satan's Cage

  * * *

  Book 15 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.

  SATAN'S CAGE

  Copyright © 1985 by Len Levinson. All Rights Reserved.

  EBook © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-856-8

  Library ISBN 978-1-62460-197-2

  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 . . .

  The jungle was carpeted with dead bodies reeking in the morning sun. Flies buzzed around the blood and gore, and rats chomped on rotting flesh. It was July 11, 1944, on the island of New Guinea. The Japanese Eighteenth Army had attacked across the Driniumor River during the previous night, and lost ten thousand men.

  They lay in shell craters and on open ground, their bodies frozen into grotesque contorted sculptures. Around them were trees and other vegetation blasted and shredded by artillery bombardments. Mixed with the odor of putrefaction was gunsmoke and cordite. Mist arose like steam from the jungle floor and curled in the humid air. Birds chirped in the trees still standing, and vultures swooped down from the sky for opulent breakfasts.

  American GIs lay among the Japanese, their rifles and bayonets in their hands. They’d been outnumbered and overwhelmed, but fought hard and had been cut down by Japanese bullets and samurai swords during the initial Japanese breakthrough.

  Soldiers from Graves Registration Units worked their way through the jungle, loading bodies of dead American GIs into trucks. Dog tags were confiscated by sergeants who’d compile rosters of casualties, and in a few weeks letters from the Department of the Army would be received in households all across America, notifying them that a husband, brother, or son had died valiantly for his country “somewhere in the South Pacific Theater of Operations.”

  It was the aftermath of a titanic struggle. The Driniumor River had run red with blood, but now it was muddy and filthy again as it rushed toward the sea. American survivors of the battle lay in holes or against trees, filthy, bloody, and battered, sleeping soundly. They were the victors—but there were no spoils in the New Guinea jungle.

  A soldier with pale blond hair, six feet, two inches tall with wide rounded shoulders and a husky build, stood in the middle of a jungle clearing, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. A Japanese samurai sword was jammed into his belt on the left side, a Colt .45 service pistol on the right side. His M 1 rifle was slung crossways across his back and he had a bullet hole in the left-front pocket of his shirt.

  A two-inch cut was on his left cheek and his right ear had been half-chewed off by a Japanese soldier. He pulled his canteen out of its case, raised it to his lips, and took a swig. The water was tepid, tasting of chlorine, but it slaked his thirst and he said “Aaaahhhh” as he stuffed the canteen back into its case.

  He was Private Victor Yabalonka, a former longshoreman from San Francisco, now a member of the Twenty-third Regiment’s notorious Reconnaissance Platoon, and he was looking for something that he’d lost during the night at a machine-gun nest somewhere in the vicinity of where he was now.

  He put his helmet back on his head and moved toward his right, the direction where he thought the machine-gun nest had been. The jungle looked different in the daylight and he wasn’t completely sure of where he was. He’d torn the sleeves off his shirt for air-conditioning, and the shirt was unbuttoned down to his belt buckle. His chest, stomach, and arms were striated with bayonet cuts and fingernail scratches, and his more serious wounds were covered with bandages.

  Yabalonka knew he should be resting with the other men in his platoon, but he couldn’t rest. A strange thing had happened to him during the night, stranger even than the bloody gruesome battle. He’d been shot in the chest by a Japanese bullet, and should be dead right now; but a small Bible had been in his shirt pocket, and the Bible had stopped the bullet.

  It had been an extremely weird circumstance, and Yabalonka still couldn’t believe that it had happened. Now Yabalonka wanted that Bible. He’d lost the Bible because he’d had to drop it and fight for his life against a Japanese officer wielding a samurai sword. Yabalonka killed the officer, but had no time to go back for the Bible. Japs had been all around him and didn’t give him any free time.

  Yabalonka stepped over a dead Japanese soldier whose arms stretched out stiffly in rigor mortis. He saw two American soldiers carrying a dead GI toward a deuce-and-a-half truck. Stepping over a log, he saw a shell crater filled with dead Japanese and American soldiers, cheek by jowl, in the grim embrace of death.

  Yabalonka made his way like a ghost across the battlefield. A few other GIs wandered about the area also, their eyes dazed, shell-shocked and suffering from battle fatigue, but Yabalonka wasn’t suffering from those symptoms. Yabalonka was trying to understand what had happened to him during the night.

  Before the war he’d been an active member of the Long-shoreman’s Union, and also had gone to Communist Party meetings. He’d been a radical and a troublemaker, and his bosses often referred to him as a union goon, but Yabalonka had been poor all his life, and believed working people should earn more money than they did. He’d been an atheist for as long as he could remember, but last night a Bible saved his life. It still was difficult for him to accept that it had happened.

  Ever since he’d been in the Army he’d heard rumors about Bibles stopping bullets, and
had thought those rumors were nothing more than sentimental religious bullshit stories put forward by people who didn’t know what they were talking about. But last night a Bible given to him by a well-intentioned buddy had stopped a bullet and saved his life. That was a fact, not a rumor, and Yabalonka didn’t know what to do about it. The experience unhinged his mind. He had to find that Bible.

  He emerged from a thicket and the next clearing looked familiar. He saw a line of trenches and foxholes running north and south. Turning around, he saw the hill where General Hawkins’s command post had been. It was here that the Eighty-first Division made its last stand.

  Yabalonka figured out where the machine-gun nest had been relative to the command post, and trudged in that direction. This was where the worst of the battle had taken place. The Eighty-first Division had borne the brunt of the Japanese attack. They were ordered to stand and fight on this line until help arrived. They stood and fought and nearly were wiped out before the reinforcements arrived.

  The trenches and ditches were full of dead American and Japanese soldiers. Yabalonka was amazed at how many men had died, and for what? Some jungle acreage that no one ever cared about before, and never would care about again? They’re all fucking crazy, Yabalonka thought, and I must be crazy, too.

  Yabalonka paused and drank more water from his canteen. He took out a Camel cigarette and lit it with his trusty old Zippo. Then he continued across the line that had been the scene of so much bitter fighting, dragging his feet, thinking he should be sacked out with the other guys from the recon platoon. Fucking war must be getting to me, Yabalonka thought.

  He saw dead American soldiers on the ground before him. He didn’t know any of the dead men because he hadn’t been in the division long. New Guinea had been his baptism of fire. Whatever friends he had were in the recon platoon, but he saw a few vaguely familiar faces on the ground, men he knew by sight but not by name, men who’d died in the stinking sweltering jungle of New Guinea.

  Yabalonka looked ahead and spotted the machine-gun nest he was searching for. He gulped hard and there was a sour taste in his throat, the beginning of heartburn. He hadn’t even had breakfast yet, only a cup of coffee that tasted shitty. Puffing the cigarette, he approached the machine-gun bunker where he’d fought for his life during the night.

  The machine gun was knocked onto its side. GIs and Japanese soldiers lay inside the hole. Yabalonka stood on the edge of the hole and tried to figure out where the Bible had been. After being shot, he’d regained consciousness next to some dead GIs and that machine gun down there.

  He’d been carried to this spot by the Reverend Gillie Jones, the former itinerant preacher from Georgia, after Yabalonka had been knocked out by the bullet. It was the Reverend Billie Jones who’d given him the Bible in the first place.

  Yabalonka jumped into the hole, careful not to land on a dead body. He picked up a dead Japanese soldier and threw him out of the hole, but the Bible wasn’t lying in the dried blood where the Japanese soldier had lain. Next to the Japanese soldier was an American buck sergeant. Yabalonka lifted him up and laid him gently on the edge of the hole. You poor son of a bitch, Yabalonka thought. You zigged when you shoulda zagged.

  Yabalonka looked at the ground where the American sergeant had been, and there it was, covered with dried blood: the pocket Bible. Yabalonka bent over and picked it up, feeling eerie and weird. The front of the Bible was smashed in, and Yabalonka recalled that when the bullet struck him it’d felt like a Mack truck going eighty miles an hour.

  The bullet pierced the Bible and finally came to a stop in the middle of it. Yabalonka opened the bible to the page where the bullet ended its flight, and read:

  Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?

  Yabalonka knelt in the foxhole and stared at the words dancing on the page in front of him. He tried to convince himself that the whole episode had been a mere coincidence, that the Reverend Billie Jones just happened to give him the Bible because the Reverend Billie Jones was a religious fanatic, and the Bible just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

  Now he realized that those stories about bullet-stopping Bibles might have been true. Religious groups back home sent small Bibles to God-fearing servicemen, and the best place to carry them was in the pocket of GI fatigue shirts. It was inevitable that some of the Bibles would stop bullets and shrapnel because tons of lead flew around battlefields in small pieces when both sides really were going at it.

  But still, to have it actually happen, was astonishing. The words rose up from the page and hit him between the eyes:

  Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?

  Yabalonka took a deep breath. It was all so strange. I’d better not let myself get carried away by this, he thought. It was all just a coincidence, wasn’t it?

  It had to be a coincidence. He didn’t believe there was a God and a supernatural world. He thought people bowed down to gods because they lacked the courage to face the plain honest ugly truth of human existence, which was that life was a vicious struggle to survive, the rich pitted against the poor. The bullet-stopping Bible was a mere fluke of nature, not the intervention of any God.

  Yabalonka smiled thinly. Goddamn war is screwing up my mind, he thought. I’m starting to go nuts like everybody else around here.

  Yabalonka’s cigarette was down to the last inch. He took out another Camel and lit it with the butt of the one he’d been smoking. He looked at the Bible in his hand and tossed it up and down a few times.

  “Thanks for saving my life,” he said, his eyes following the Bible’s flight. “I really do appreciate it.”

  He let the Bible fall into the palm of his hand, and stared at its smashed-in cover stained with the blood of the dead soldiers in the machine-gun nest. He realized he’d be dead somewhere on the battlefield with all the other stiffs, if it hadn’t been for that little book in his hand.

  “You’re gonna be my lucky charm from now on,” he said to the Bible. “I’m gonna keep you with me all the time.”

  He tossed the Bible into the air again, and it opened on his palm. I’d better not read what’s there, he thought, because it’ll probably spook me again.

  But he couldn’t help himself. He bent over the Bible, expecting to see the same page it had opened to previously, but this time different words appeared to his eyes.

  How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?

  The words were like a slap in the face. It was as if the Bible spoke to him, and Private Yabalonka’s mind started to go again, but he caught himself and grinned. It’s my imagination playing tricks on me. No matter where I turn in the fucking book, it’ll say something that means something. That’s the way it was set up, so it could influence the weak minds of ignorant people. A person can really get all fucked up if he takes this shit seriously. He laughed and flipped the Bible a few inches into the air. It landed on his palm and opened to a new page. He bent over it and read:

  . . . the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

  Yabalonka’s hair stood on end, and the laughter died in his throat. His hand trembled and the wind turned another page of the Bible. Yabalonka didn’t want to look at the new page, but curiosity got the best of him. He blinked his eyes and saw:

  As he came forth of his mother’s womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labour, which he may carry away in his hand.

  Yabalonka closed the Bible and looked around him. Dead bodies were everywhere, putrefying and entwined, mouths open and eyes glazed with horror. The stench arose to Yabalonka’s nostrils, and he stood. The higher vantage point gave him a more comprehensive view of the battlefield, and everywhere he looked he saw dead soldiers.

  It’s true, Yabalonka thought. These guys left behind everything they ever had in the world. Even if they were millionaires in civilian life, they couldn’t take a penny of it with them. Yabalo
nka held up the Bible in his hand and looked at it. I guess some of the stuff in here makes sense.

  He moved his hand to put the Bible back into his shirt pocket, but once again became curious. He closed his eyes, opened the Bible, and then opened his eyes, looking down at the first sentence he saw:

  Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

  Yabalonka swallowed hard. He closed the Bible, dropping it into his shirt pocket, and buttoned the flap. Adjusting the M 1 rifle on his back, he climbed out of the foxhole and headed back toward the bivouac of the recon platoon.

  Ten miles away, deep in the jungle, General Hatazo Adachi sat cross-legged on the tatami mat in his tent. He wore only a flimsy white undergarment similar to a jockstrap, and before him was a low table on which was a portrait of the Emperor next to a hara-kiri knife in its sheath.

  General Adachi was going to commit ritual suicide. His attack of the previous night had failed. He’d lost half of his entire army, and had not defeated the American army in front of him. The Americans had held him off. Now there was nothing for him to do except kill himself. That was the code of Bushido, the Japanese warrior’s way of life and death.

  General Adachi was fifty-four years old and was built on the slender side. He wore a thin mustache that gave him the appearance of a Puerto Rican. He was a graduate of the Japanese Military Academy (1910) and the Japanese War College (1922). He’d been appointed commander of the Eighteenth Army in November of 1942, when it was formed, and the Americans had been kicking the shit out of him ever since.

  General Hatazo Adachi was disgraced. His gigantic offensive had been a dismal bloody failure. He withdrew the hara-kiri knife from its sheath and gently lay the sheath down on the little table in front of him. Bowing to the photograph of the Emperor, he brought himself erect again and held the knife in his fist, the blade pointed inward toward his stomach.