'It's overkill for Nips,' Shaftoe continues, jacking the tommy gun and the magazine together. The Huks all laugh nastily. One of them is moving up from the stern, making the whole boat rock from side to side. He is a very young, slight fellow. He holds out his hand to Bobby Shaftoe. 'Uncle Robert, do you remember me?'
Being called Uncle Robert is hardly the weirdest thing that has happened to Shaftoe in the last few years, so he lets it slide. He peers at the boy's face, which is dimly illuminated by the combustion of Manila. 'You're one of the Altamira boys,' he guesses.
The boy salutes him crisply, and grins.
Then, Shaftoe remembers. Three years ago, the Altamira family apartment, carrying the freshly impregnated Glory up the stairs as air raid sirens wailed all around the city. An apartment filled with Altamiras. A squad of boys with wooden swords and rifles, staring at Bobby Shaftoe in awe. Shaftoe throwing them a salute, then running out of the place.
'All of us fought the Nips,' the boy says. Then his face falls, and he crosses himself. 'Two are dead.'
'Some of you were pretty damn young.'
'The youngest ones are still in Manila,' the boy says. He and Shaftoe silently stare across the water into the flames, which have merged into a wall now.
'In the apartment? In Malate?'
'I think so. My name is Fidel.'
'Is my son in the same place?'
'I think so. Maybe not.'
'We'll go find those kids, Fidel.'
Half the population of Manila seems to be standing along the water's edge, or in the water, waiting for a boat like theirs to show up. MacArthur is coming down from the north, and the Nipponese Air Force troops are coming up from the south, so the isthmus between Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay is corked at both ends by great military forces waging total war. A ragged Dunkirk-style evacuation is in progress along the lake side of the isthmus, but the number of boats is not adequate. Some of the refugees are behaving like civilized human beings, but others are wading and swimming out towards them trying to get first dibs. A wet hand reaches up out of the water and grabs the boat's gunwale until Shaftoe crushes it with the butt of his trench broom. The swimmer falls away, clutching his hand and screaming, and Shaftoe tells him he's ugly.
There is about half an hour's more ugliness as the boat cruises back and forth just out of swimming range and the padre handpicks an assortment of women carrying small children. They are pulled up into the boat one by one, and the Huks climb off the boat one by one, and when it's all finished the boat turns around and glides off into the darkness. Shaftoe and the Huks wade ashore, carrying crates of ammunition between them. By this point, Shaftoe has grenades dangling off his body all over the place, like teats on a pregnant sow, and most of the Huks are walking all slow and stiff-legged, trying not to collapse under the weight of the bandoliers in which they have practically mummified themselves. They stagger into the city, bucking a tide of smoky refugees.
This low land along the shore of the lake is not the city proper-it is a suburb of humble buildings made in the traditional style, of woven rattan screens with thatched roofs. They burn effortlessly, throwing up the red sheets of flame that they watched from the boat. Inland, and a few miles north, is the city proper, with many masonry buildings. The Nipponese have put it to the torch also, but it burns sporadically, as isolated towers of flame and smoke.
Shaftoe and his band had been expecting to hit the beach like Marines and get mowed down at the water's edge. Instead, they march for a good mile and a half inland before they actually lay eyes on the enemy.
Shaftoe's actually glad to see some real Nips; he has been getting nervous, because the lack of opposition has made the Huks giddy and overconfident. Then half a dozen Nip Air Force troops spill out of a store which they have evidently been looting-they are all carrying liquor bottles-and stop on the sidewalk to set fire to the place, fashioning Molotov cocktails from stolen bottles of firewater. Shaftoe pulls the pin on a grenade and underhands it down the sidewalk, watches it skitter for a while, and then ducks into a doorway. When he hears the explosion, and sees shrapnel crack the windshield of a car parked along the street, he jumps out onto the sidewalk, ready to open up with the tommy gun. But it's not necessary; all of the Nips are down, thrashing weakly in the gutter. Shaftoe and the other Huks all take cover and wait for more Nipponese troops to arrive, and help their injured comrades, but it doesn't happen.
The Huks are elated. Shaftoe stands in the street brooding while the padre administers last rites to the dead and dying Nipponese. Obviously, discipline has completely broken down. The Nips know they are trapped. They know MacArthur is about to run right over them, like a lawn mower plowing through an anthill. They have become a mob. For Shaftoe, it's going to be easier to fight mobs of drunken, deranged looters, but there's no telling what they might be doing to civilians farther north.
'We're wasting our fucking time,' Shaftoe says, 'let's get to Malate and avoid further engagements.'
'You are not in command of this group,' says one of the others. 'I am.'
'Who's that?' Shaftoe asks, squinting against the light of the burning liquor store.
It turns out to be a Fil-American lieutenant, who was sitting way back in the boat, and who has been of no use at all to this point. Shaftoe knows in his bones that this guy is not going to be a good combat leader. He inhales deeply, trying to heave a sigh, then gags on smoke instead.
'Sir, yes sir!' he says, and salutes.
'I am Lieutenant Morales, and if you have any more suggestions, bring them to me, or keep them to yourself.'
'Sir, yes sir!' Shaftoe says. He doesn't bother to memorize the lieutenant's name.
They work their way north through narrow, clogged streets for a couple of hours. The sun comes up. A small airplane flies over the city, drawing ragged fire from exhausted, drunken Nipponese troops.
'It is a P-51 Mustang!' Lieutenant Morales exclaims.
'It's a fucking Piper Cub, goddamn it!' Shaftoe says. He has been holding his tongue to this point, but he can't help it now. 'It's an artillery spotter plane.'
'Then why is it flying over Manila?' Lieutenant Morales asks smugly. He enjoys this rhetorical triumph for about thirty seconds. Then the first artillery rounds begin to bore in from the north and blast the shit out of various buildings.
They get into their first serious firefight about half an hour later, against a platoon of Nipponese Air Force troops holed up in a stone bank at the vee formed by a couple of intersecting avenues. Lieutenant Morales comes up with an extremely complicated plan that involves breaking up into three smaller groups. Morales takes three men forward into the cover of a large fountain that sits in the middle of the square. There, they are immediately trapped by heavy fire from the Nipponese. They squat and huddle behind the shelter of the fountain for about a quarter of an hour, at which point an artillery shell glides in from the north, a black pellet easing downwards in a flawless parabolic trajectory, and scores a direct hit on the fountain. It turns out to be a high-explosive shell, which does not blow up until it hits something-the fountain, in this case. The padre gives Lieutenant Morales and his men last rites from a safe distance of a hundred yards or so, which is as good a place as any, since there is nothing left of their physical bodies.
Bobby Shaftoe is voted new squad leader by acclamation. He leads them around the square, giving the whole intersection a wide berth. Way up north somewhere, one of The General's batteries is doggedly trying to zero in on that fucking bank, blowing up half the neighborhood in the process. A Piper Cub banks overhead doing lazy figure-eights, offering suggestions over the radio: 'Almost there-a little to the left-no, too far-now bring it in a little bit.'
It takes Shaftoe's group a whole day to make another mile's progress towards Malate. They could get there in no time by simply running up the middle of major streets, but the artillery fire is coming in heavier and heavier as they head north. Worse, much of it consists of antipersonnel rounds with radar proximity fuses that blow up while they're still several yards above the ground, the better to spray shrapnel all over the place. The air bursts look like the splayed foliage of burned coconut palms.
Shaftoe sees no point in getting them all killed. So they take it a block at a time, sprinting one by one from doorway to doorway, and scouting the buildings with great care in case there are any Nips lying in wait to shoot at
