“All right, I’d suggest that everybody clear out of the tunnel for now,” Sparks said. He held up a pair of pliers and snapped them open and shut. “Fuze and I need to decommission these booby traps before we can start to haul this out of here.”
“You sure about this?” Steele asked.
Despite all his wisecracks, Sparks seemed serious and competent when it came to his job. “As sure as I’m going to be, Honcho. When it comes to the bomb squad, we like to say that you only make a mistake once in your career.”
“I don’t like leaving you boys alone,” the lieutenant said. “If nothing else, someone ought to stay down here to watch your back in case there are any Japanese lurking around. They could take you guys out and blow up this whole damn hill.”
“We won’t say no to that if you can spare a couple of guys,” Sparks said. “As long as they’re volunteers.”
“That’s easy, because one of them will be me,” Steele said. He turned to his men. “Anybody else?”
Deke found himself stepping forward. Maybe he was a fool, but he wasn’t about to leave the lieutenant alone on guard duty. “I reckon I’ll hang back with you, Honcho.”
“All right, Deke. I appreciate it, but it’s your funeral. The rest of you, get the hell out of here until you get the all clear from us.”
Not much rattled Deke, but as he watched the two wisecracking soldiers of the demolitions team prepare to deactivate the devices that the enemy had left behind, he discovered that his heart was pounding. In fact, he was a bit surprised that the lieutenant couldn’t hear it a few feet away.
The two bomb squad guys had grown serious, emphasizing the fact that the stakes were high, and one wrong move could be the end for all of them. They worked meticulously, sweat beading on their foreheads as they carefully maneuvered around the Japanese munitions, using their flashlights to catch a glimpse of any trip wires glittering in the flashlight beam.
Meanwhile, Deke pulled his eyes away to join the lieutenant in keeping an eye on the darkness beyond. They were confident that they had swept the tunnel clean earlier, but all it would take was one leftover enemy soldier with suicide on his mind to blow them all sky high. He and Honcho kept their own flashlights off so that they wouldn’t be targeted easily if there were any Japanese around.
Deke’s heart raced faster with each motion of the demolitions team, the weight of impending danger bearing down on him as if the walls of the tunnel were constricting. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something could still go wrong, that their lives hung in the balance. As Sparks and Fuze edged their way through the darkness, Deke silently prayed that they’d make it through this unscathed. He cursed himself for volunteering to stay behind, but there was no way that he was going to leave the lieutenant down here.
“Almost there,” Sparks muttered, his voice barely audible. Fuze nodded, his breaths coming shallow and rapid. There was no wisecracking now. In the pale flashlight beam, sweat beaded both men’s faces.
“Got it,” Sparks whispered triumphantly, holding up the last piece of wire. Fuze let out a slow, shaky breath before breaking into a wide grin.
“Piece of cake,” he said, winking at Sparks.
“Let’s not celebrate just yet,” Sparks cautioned, gesturing toward the tunnel’s exit. “We still need to get these babies out of here.”
“Right,” Sparks agreed, straightening up and making his way back to Deke and Honcho. He addressed the lieutenant. “With your permission, could we get the rest of your patrol down here to help us figure out what we’ve got in this tunnel?”
“All right. Deke, go fetch the boys.”
Under the capable eyes of Sparks and Fuze, Patrol Easy reentered the tunnel to help with the inventory so that they knew what was being dealt with. But first Sparks offered some instruction.
“Unless you want to meet Saint Peter ahead of schedule, don’t touch anything that doesn’t look right,” Sparks said. “You’ve all got two eyes, so use ’em.”
It turned out that there was quite a lot to lay eyes on, not all of it ammunition, but explosive just the same. Fuze wrote it all down as the men called it out to him. They counted eight hundred drums of aviation fuel, nearly five hundred massive five-hundred-pound bombs, assorted mines and smaller bombs intended to be dropped from observation planes, and one hundred bomb fuses, each with enough juice to take off a man’s hand — or trigger a massive blast. The larger bombs had been intended for planes flying out of the nearby Japanese airstrip.
The question was, What to do with it all? As the lieutenant had stated before, they couldn’t simply leave it. Steele got on the radio and contacted HQ. He was told to salvage the fuel — and blow up the rest. The fuel could be used in American planes in a pinch, but Japanese ammunition wasn’t any good in US guns.
