A couple of squads of Nipponese Air Force soldiers, armed with rifles and Nambus, pursue Bobby Shaftoe and his crew of Huks towards the Manila Bay seawall. If it comes to the point where they must stand and slug it out, they can probably kill a lot of Nips before they are overwhelmed. But they are here to find and assist the Altamiras, not to die heroically, and so they retreat through the neighborhood of Ermita. One of MacArthur’s circling Piper Cubs catches sight of one of those Nip squads as it is clambering over the ruins of a collapsed building, and calls in a strike—artillery rounds spiral in from the north like long passes in a football game. Shaftoe and the Huks try to time the incoming rounds, guessing at how many tubes are firing on them, trying to run from one place of concealment to the next when they think there’s going to be a few seconds’ pause in the shrapnel. Maybe half of the Nips are killed or wounded by this barrage, but they are fighting at such close quarters that two of Shaftoe’s Huks are hit as well. Shaftoe is trying to drag one of them out of danger when he looks down and sees that he is stomping across a mess of shattered white crockery that is marked with the name of a hotel—the same hotel where he slow-danced with Glory on the night that the war started.