Dragon (12 page)

He rammed the throttle against its stop, then pulled back as he shifted into reverse, then full forward again as he rocked Big John back and forth. The compact nuclear reactor had the power, but the tracks could not find the traction. Rock and silt flew from the pivoted cleats as they ripped through the slimy gumbo.

Still the DSMV remained stuck in its narrow prison.

“Maybe we should call a halt and scoop the mud off,” said Plunkett, dead serious. “Or better yet, sit back and review the situation.”

Pitt spared a few moments to give the big Britisher a hard, icy stare. Plunkett swore Pitt’s eyes burned out a goodly number of his brain cells.

“A lot of my people and I worked hard and long to build the first deep-water community,” he said in a voice that bordered on satanic. “And someone, somewhere, is responsible for its destruction. They’re also the cause behind the loss of your submersible, your support ship, and its crew. That’s the situation. Now, speaking for myself, I’m going to bust through this crap if I have to tear the guts out of this thing, get to the surface in one piece, find the scum behind the disaster, and punch their teeth down their lungs.”

Then he turned and sent the tracks thrashing through the encasement of silt and rock. With an awkward wobble, the great machine dug in and lurched a meter forward, then two meters.

Plunkett sat like a tree, thoroughly intimidated yet quite convinced. By God, he thought, I think the man might damn well do it!

13

E
IGHT THOUSAND KILOMETERS
distant, deep in a shaft carved out of volcanic rock, a crew of diggers stepped aside as two men moved forward and peered through an excavated break in a concrete wall. A sickening stench drifted from the opening, filling the twenty-man mining crew with a dread of the unknown.

The floodlights illuminating the narrow shaft cast eerie distorted shadows in what appeared to be a large tunnel beyond the one-meter-thick concrete. Inside, an old rusty truck could be distinguished, surrounded by what looked to be a vast bed of graybrown scrubwood.

Despite the cool damp air deep under the battle-scarred slopes of Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay, the two men who peered through the hole were sweating heavily. After years of research, they knew they were on the brink of discovering part of the huge World War II cache of war loot known as “Yamashita’s Gold,” named after General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines after October of 1944.

The immense hoard that was seized by the Japanese during the war—from China, the Southeast Asian countries, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines—consisted of thousands of metric tons of exotic gems and jewelry, silver and gold bullion, and Buddhas and Catholic altarpieces encrusted with priceless gems and cast in solid gold.

Manila had been the collection point for future transshipment to Japan, but because of heavy shipping losses in the later stages of the war from American submarines, less than twenty percent of the loot actually arrived in Tokyo. With nowhere to go and faced with certain invasion by the avenging Americans, the Japanese guardians of the treasure were in a dilemma. They weren’t about to give it back to the nations and people they had pillaged. Their only option was to hide the immense hoard in over a hundred different sites on and around the island of Luzon, hoping to return after the war and smuggle it home.

Conservative estimates of the stolen treasure on the current money markets were put at between 450 and 500 billion dollars.

The digging in this particular location on Corregidor, a few hundred meters west and a good kilometer deeper than the lateral tunnel that served as General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters before he was evacuated to Australia, had gone on for four months. Using copies of old OSS maps recently found buried in CIA archives at Langley, American and Philippine intelligence agents worked as a team directing the excavation. It was exhausting and very slow going.

The map instructions were deciphered from an ancient Japanese dialect unused for a thousand years. The shaft to the treasure location had to be approached from a side angle because the original access tunnel was booby-trapped with several one and two-thousand-pound bombs and designed to collapse from a direct entry. The penetration through the twenty-mile labyrinth burrowed by the Japanese during their occupation of Luzon had to be precisely calculated or the miners might have wasted months by excavating on the wrong level and missing the treasure tunnel by centimeters.

The taller of the two men, Frank Mancuso, gestured for a large flashlight. One was passed, and he thrust it through the breach in the wall. His face turned pale in the yellow half-light. With numbed horror he realized what the scrubwood really was.

Rico Acosta, a mining engineer attached to the Philippine security forces, moved in closer to Mancuso. “What do you see, Frank?”

“Bones,” Mancuso said, his voice just above a whisper. “Skeletons. God, there must be hundreds of them in there.” He stepped back and nodded at Acosta.

The short little man motioned the diggers toward the opening. “Widen it up,” he ordered.

It took less than an hour for the crew of Philippine miners to smash a hole with sledgehammers large enough for a man to pass through. The cement forming the tunnel walls was of poor quality, crusty and crumbling, and easy to break away. It was looked upon as a piece of luck, since none of them wished to run the risk of a cave-in by using explosives.

Mancuso sat off to one side and lit a stubby curved pipe while he waited. At forty-two, he still kept the long-limbed, thin body of a basketball player. His long brown hair draped around the nape of his neck in oily strands badly in need of washing, and his soft, round Germanic face seemed better suited to an accountant than a get-dirty engineer. His blue eyes had a dreamy quality that never seemed to focus, and yet they took in everything in view and then some.

A graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, he’d spent his early years wandering the world prospecting and working mines in search of precious gems. Opals in Australia, emeralds in Colombia, and rubies in Tanzania, with varying degrees of success. There was also a fruitless three-year hunt on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido for the rarest of the rare, red painite.

Shortly before he reached thirty, he was courted and recruited by an obscure intelligence agency in Washington and appointed a special agent under contract. His first assignment was to search for Yamashita’s gold as part of a Philippine security force team.

The excavation was carried out in the strictest secrecy. None of the gold or gems were to be turned over to their former owners. All treasure found was to be kept by the Philippine government to decrease the debt burden and pump up the sagging economy devastated by the incalculable financial rape of the Marcos reign.

His counterpart, Acosta, had also served as a mining engineer before joining the security forces. He was tall for a Filipino, and his eyes indicated more than a trace of Chinese ancestry.

“So the stories are true,” said Acosta.

Mancuso looked up. “Sorry?”

“The Nips forcing Allied prisoners to dig these tunnels, and then burying them alive so they could never reveal the location.”

“It looks that way. We’ll know better when we get inside.”

Acosta lifted his hard hat and wiped one sleeve across his forehead. “My grandfather was in the Fifty-seventh Philippine Scouts. He was taken prisoner and thrown in the Spanish dungeon at Fort Santiago. He never came out. Over two thousand POWs died either from suffocation or starvation. The count was never known.”

Mancuso nodded heavily. “Later generations can’t imagine the ungodly barbarism that stained the Pacific theater of the war.” He drew from the pipe and exhaled a puff of blue smoke before continuing. “The terrible statistic is that fifty-seven percent of the Allied soldiers in Japanese prison camps died, versus only one percent of those held by the Germans.”

“Strange the Japanese didn’t come back and make an all-out effort to snatch the treasure,” said Acosta.

“Groups posing as construction companies did try to obtain contracts for postwar rebuilding so they could covertly excavate for the gold, but once Ferdinand Marcos learned of the treasure, he slammed the door and searched for it himself.”

“And he found some,” added Acosta. “Maybe thirty billion U.S. dollars’ worth, which he smuggled out of the country before he was thrown out of office.”

“Plus what he stole from your own people.”

Acosta spit on the shaft floor disgustedly. “He and his wife were sick with greed. It will take us a hundred years to recover from their rule.”

The foreman of the diggers waved a hand, beckoning them. “You should be able to squeeze through now,” he said.

“Go ahead.” Acosta nodded to Mancuso. “You first.”

The odor was rotten and nauseating. Mancuso tied a bandanna around his lower face and wiggled through the narrow breach in the tunnel wall. He heard a soft snap followed by a splashing sound as his boots met a small puddle. Standing clear, he waited a moment, hearing water dripping from cracks in the arched ceiling. Then he switched his flashlight on, aiming its naked beam downward.

He had stepped on and broken an outstretched bony arm that was attached to a skeleton dressed in the moldering remains of a uniform and covered with slime. A pair of encrusted dog tags lay off to one side of the skull, the tiny chain still strung around the neck.

Mancuso knelt and held one of the tags under the light. He rubbed off the grime with one index finger and thumb until he could make out a name, William A. Miller.

There was an Army serial number, but Mancuso let the tag drop. Once he notified his superior of what he found, a graves registration team would be sent to Corregidor, and William A. Miller and his long-dead comrades would be returned to their homes for honored burial fifty years late.

Mancuso turned and swung the flashlight in a full circle. As far as the beam could reach, the tunnel was carpeted with skeletons, some scattered, some heaped in piles. He’d studied several more ID tags before Acosta entered with a small floodlight on a cord.

“Holy mother of Jesus,” he gasped as he viewed the grisly remains. “An army of the dead.”

“An Allied army,” said Mancuso. “American, Philippine, even a few British and Australian. Looks like the Japs brought prisoners to Manila from other sectors of the war for slave labor.”

“Only God knows the hell they suffered,” Acosta muttered, his face reddening with anger, the bile rising in his throat. He fingered a cross hanging around his neck. “How were they murdered?”

“No sign of bullet injuries. They must have suffocated after being sealed in.”

“Those who gave the orders for this mass execution must pay.”

“They’re probably dead, killed in the slaughter around Manila by MacArthur’s army. And if they’re still breathing, their trail is cold. The Allies in the Pacific were too forgiving. No prolonged manhunt was launched after those responsible for atrocities, like the Jews did with the Nazis. If they haven’t been found and hanged by now, they never will.”

“They must still pay,” Acosta repeated, his anger turned to frustrated hatred.

“Don’t waste thoughts on revenge,” said Mancuso. “Our job is to locate the gold.”

He walked toward the first truck in a long column that stood parked amid the dead. The tires were flattened and the canvas top over the bed had rotted under the constant drip of the water. He jerked down the rusty tailgate and shone his light inside. Except for a litter of wood from broken crates it was empty.

A foreboding began to squeeze Mancuso’s stomach. He rushed to the next truck, carefully stepping around and over the dead, his boots splashing in the slime-covered water. His sweat from the dampness had turned cold. He needed a strong effort of will to go on, a growing fear now of what he might not find.

The second truck was empty, as were the next six. Two hundred meters into the tunnel, he came to a blockage from a cave-in that his miner’s eye recognized as caused by explosives. But the shocker was the sight of a small auto house trailer whose modern aluminum construction did not fit in the time frame of the 1940s. There were no signs on the sides, but Mancuso noted the manufacturer’s markings on the tires.

He climbed a metal stand of steps and stopped in the doorway, playing the beam of his flashlight around the interior. It was furnished as an office, the kind often seen on construction sites.

Acosta came up, followed by four of his men who unreeled the cable to his floodlight. He stood back and lit the entire trailer in a bright halo.

“Where in hell did this come from?” Acosta said in astonishment.

“Bring your light inside,” said Mancuso, his worst fear realized.

With the added brightness they could see the trailer was clean. The desks were uncluttered, the wastebaskets emptied, and no ashtrays were to be seen anywhere. The only sign of previous occupancy was a construction worker’s hardhat perched on a hook and a large blackboard hung on one wall. Mancuso studied the lined columns. The numerals were in Arabic, while the headings were written in katakana symbols.

“A schedule?” asked Acosta.

“An inventory of the treasure.”

Acosta sank into a chair in back of a desk. “Gone, all of it smuggled away.”

“About twenty-five years ago, according to a date on the board.”

“Marcos?” asked Acosta. “He must have gotten here first.”

“No, not Marcos,” Mancuso answered as though he’d always known the truth. “The Japanese. They returned, took the gold, and left us with the bones.”

14

C
URTIS
M
EEKER PARKED
his wife’s Mercury Cougar and casually strode the three blocks to Ford’s Theater between E and F streets on Tenth. He buttoned his overcoat against the brisk fall air and fell in step with a group of senior citizens who were on a late Saturday evening walking tour of the capital city.

Their guide stopped them in front of the theater where John Wilkes Booth had shot Abraham Lincoln and gave a brief lecture before taking them across the street to the Petersen House where the President had died. Unobtrusively, Meeker slipped away, flipped his federal shield at the doorman, and passed into the lobby of the theater. He conversed briefly with the manager and then sat down on a sofa, where he appeared to be calmly reading a program.