The party started with a terrific bomb barrage about midnight. The Japs evidently believed that neither aircraft detectors nor antiaircraft equipment were as yet set up. They were wrong about both. Another thing they didn’t know was that most of the living quarters, supplies, and even planes, had been moved into the jungle that fringed the field.
A few moments after the bombs started falling, the new antiaircraft batteries went into action. They caught three of the Jap bombers with their shells. In return, bombs wiped out two guns, three searchlights, and their crews. Then came the parachute troops.
There weren’t many of them—not more than fifty in all. Apparently the fire was too intense for the Jap transport planes to risk. Why these few suicide squads were dropped remained a mystery until morning.
Barry reached the field as the first ’chutists landed. He saw a Garand rifle in the hand of a soldier who had been killed by shrapnel. The weapon, he found, was fully loaded—and unharmed. As he turned to pick a target, the field’s floodlights went on.
A dozen of the Japs lay motionless, tangled in their parachutes. The others were squirming free, or firing from bombholes with their small caliber sub-machine guns. Barry felt a bullet tug at his trouser leg; another burned the skin of his shoulder. He threw himself prone.
A Jap had just wriggled free of his chute and was diving toward a bomb crater. Barry took a snap shot at the man, and saw him collapse. He switched his aim to a hole from which the pale flames of Jap machine guns were licking like serpents’ tongues. They were firing at the floodlights, which were rapidly going out.
The shadows deepened across the bomb-torn field. Barry was sure that some of them were Japs crawling toward the jungle. He fired at the nearest. Suddenly he realized that he was trying to shoot an empty gun.
Bullets were kicking up dirt too close for comfort. Barry glanced about and spotted a convenient bomb crater. It was strange that he hadn’t noticed it before. Clutching his empty gun, he rolled into the hole.
As he reached the bottom a steely hand seized him by the throat. Instinctively his hand shot up, grasped a muscular wrist. Moonlight glinted faintly on the long knife in the hand that he had blocked.
While he struggled with both hands to wrest the weapon away, a rocket streaked up the sky. Directly overhead the flare burst, flooding everything with white light. Barry’s enemy gasped and dropped his butcher knife. He was Fred Marmon.