Section 8 (9 page)

Jolo Island

Abayon smiled for a moment, but it passed quickly as the cigarette smoke reached his lungs and he doubled over in his chair, hacking and coughing. He cursed as he stubbed out the cigarette on the armrest of his wheelchair. This one vice had been taken from him by the frailties of his aging body.
He watched the small dot of light that represented Moreno move through the strait between Jolo and Pata islands into the open sea until it disappeared around the headland. Then he wheeled himself inside the complex, the camouflaged steel door sliding down behind him. He rolled down the corridor, the only sound the rhythmic hiss of air being moved through the large pipes bolted to the ceiling. It was a sound he had lived with for many decades so it went unnoticed. Somewhere in the distance another steel door clanged shut.
Abayon reached an elevator. The doors slid open and he rolled inside. Reaching up, he could just barely reach the buttons. They had faded Japanese writing next to them. He punched the one for the lowest level of the complex. With a slight jerk, the old elevator slowly began descending into the bowels of Hono Mountain. It took over two minutes for him to get to the level he wanted.
The doors opened, presenting him with two of his men armed with submachine guns standing in a small anteroom. They snapped to attention upon recognizing him. One turned to the control mechanism for the door behind them, sliding a large metal key into one of the slots. Abayon wheeled to the other side of the door, pulled out his own version of the large key and slid it into the slot on that side.
"On three," Abayon said. "One, two, three." They turned their keys in unison.
With a squeal of reluctance, the heavy steel door began to rumble open. Whatever was on the other side was bathed in darkness. When the doors stopped moving, Abayon rolled himself into the darkness. He paused as the door shut behind him. Then he reached out to his right, his hand finding the familiar switch. He threw it and large lights spaced along the ceiling of the huge tunnel he was in came on.
The light was reflected back many times as it struck six-foot-high piles of gold bullion stacked on either side, the entire eighty-foot length of the tunnel.
And this was just the beginning of what was hidden here. A steel door at the far end of the tunnel beckoned, and Abayon rolled his wheelchair toward it. It was the front end of an air lock. The chamber beyond was climate controlled, with three backup generators on constant standby to ensure that the system never failed. Abayon went past the gold without a glance at it. After decades of seeing it, the yellow metal had lost its hold on him.
However, what lay beyond the air lock was a different story. Abayon opened the closest door and entered the lock. He impatiently waited as the humidity and temperature were brought in line with the chamber beyond. The red light on the door turned to green, and Abayon leaned forward in the chair, turning the wheel that unlatched the door. It swung open and he pushed himself inside, turning on the lights as he did.
It was the museum a pack rat might put together—a pack rat with exquisite taste. Paintings lined the walls, frame-to-frame, competing for space. Statues and sculptures were lined shoulder-to-shoulder. Tables covered with exquisite artifacts were in front of the statues. It was a treasure that matched in potential wealth the bullion in the preceding chamber. It was actually more valuable, though, in emotional terms, because almost every piece of art in the room was ancient and irreplaceable, and long believed lost during the mayhem of the Second World War as the Rising Sun spread across the western Pacific Rim.
There were artifacts in this chamber from every country the Japanese had invaded. This was the result of the rape of those cultures under the guise of the Golden Lily Project, a most misleading name. In several places there were gaps on the wall and floor, where some of the treasure had recently been removed. A small but significant portion.
There was something else in the chamber. Bodies. Dozens of them. Mummified in the room's dry air. Still garbed in their Imperial Army uniforms. Abayon moved into the room until he was in front of one of the bodies. The rank insignia indicated he was a colonel. A sword was still buckled around his waist. A faded red gash across his throat indicated how he had died.
Abayon had made that cut. He remembered the event like it was yesterday.

CHAPTER 6
Jolo Island, the Philippines, 1942

They had known only defeat and retreat ever since answering General MacArthur's call to arms. Then MacArthur ran away in the middle of the night to Australia, and the Americans surrendered at Bataan. Rogelio Abayon and his comrades had watched from the jungle as the tattered prisoners—American and Filipino—were marched by. What they saw convinced them that their decision to take to the hills and not follow the order to give up had been the right one.
The route to the prison camps was lined with the bodies of those who could not make it and those the Japanese guards randomly executed. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to delineate those whom the guards bayoneted or shot. The brutality combined with the shocking collapse of the apparently invincible American military left the young band of thirty-odd former Filipino recruits bewildered. For a week after the last prisoners had been marched by they lived in the jungle, content to hide and afraid to move.
Abayon was only nineteen years old and a private. There were several noncommissioned officers among the group, but none seemed eager to take charge. They'd had an American officer, but he disappeared during the last days of the fighting. After the week, with their food supplies running low, it was Rogelio who took command. He knew it was too soon to take action against the Japanese. Indeed, from the few reports they received from frightened civilians, it appeared as if the Japanese might actually win this war. There were rumors that the Japanese had destroyed the mighty American fleet in Hawaii and even invaded those islands, taking them over. If that were true, Abayon had his doubts whether the Americans would once more establish their presence in the Pacific. After all, it had been obvious to all even before the invasion that the eyes of the white men were turned toward the war in Europe, not Asia.
On the morning marking the seventh day since they had run into the jungle, Abayon gathered the men around him. He proposed that they leave the main island and go to the island he had grown up on: Jolo. It was remote, and he knew he could find support among the people. He had family there, and a young wife whom he longed to see once more. His best friend, Alfons Moreno, who was with them, also was from Jolo, and seconded Abayon's suggestion.
Most of the others agreed, more out of a lack of any better suggestion than an eagerness to follow him. A few headed off to their own villages. Abayon led the rest through the jungle to the coast. He organized a raid where they seized a small fishing boat. He and Moreno, who had been a fisherman before being inducted into the army, captained the boat, traveling only at night to avoid the Japanese patrol boats and planes. It took them over ten days to make it to Jolo.
They put in at Abayon and Moreno's village. Abayon was overjoyed to be reunited with his wife, but they were not greeted with open arms by most of the villagers. The Japanese were on Jolo, the village elder told Abayon late at night. There were Japanese soldiers on Hono Mountain, and they had conscripted every able-bodied man they could capture for some construction project. What exactly was going on at the mountain, the elder did not know, since no one who was captured had come back, and the one road that had been built leading to the mountain was guarded by soldiers.
Abayon made a pact with the old man—he would take his group into the jungle and hide, as long as the village provided them with food. Anxious to be rid of the group—and the threat of Japanese reprisal—the elder agreed. With his wife accompanying him, Abayon led the men into the center of the island, to a place he knew of, next to a stream that supplied them with drinking water.
For several months they lay low, not wishing to draw attention to themselves, while more ex-soldiers and men avoiding the Japanese labor conscription filtered into their camp. Eventually over one hundred men, along with a handful of their women, were living there. It was a number the food supply could not sustain much longer.
The presence of the Japanese on his island bothered Abayon. Even more than that, he was curious about what they were doing on Hono Mountain. What did they need the slave labor for? His and Moreno's relatives were among those who had been taken. All that, and the growing pressure to take some sort of action against the invaders, led Abayon and Moreno to leave their hidden camp on a reconnaissance mission to Hono.
It turned out that what was happening was not on the mountain, but in it.
They spent a week scouting in the vicinity of the mountain, discovering where the Japanese were boring a tunnel. They found unmarked graves where the slaves who had died had been summarily buried. And from what they could see, they were the lucky ones. Men and women went into the black hole on the side of the mountain each day. The only ones who came out were those carrying rock and dirt, who immediately went back in, and the dead, who did not.
The tunnel entrance was about two hundred meters up the side of the mountain, at the farthest place where a vehicle could climb up the track cut through the jungle and up the slope. Abayon and Moreno were puzzled. They could think of no tactical reason to build such a complex in Hono Mountain. Their puzzlement turned to rage during their second week of surveillance when the Japanese soldiers lined up all the surviving laborers and machine-gunned them, the bodies tumbling into ditches the doomed had been forced to dig before their execution.
As they watched helplessly from the jungle, the people they knew were being killed; Abayon had to hold Moreno back. A group including Moreno's brother had been lined up in front of the smoking barrels of the machine guns, and there was nothing they could do for them, except get themselves killed. He told his best friend as much, while restraining him, but it did little to comfort either of them.
"Vengeance will be ours," Abayon whispered in Moreno's ear as the machine guns spit death, sending the bodies tumbling on top of those who had been killed before them.
"Vengeance," Abayon repeated again and again to Moreno, trying to contain his friend's white hot rage. "Whatever they have built in the mountain, it must be important. They are killing all who know the way in and what was built. But we know. And we know what they have done here. We will have vengeance."
Moreno was shaking his head, tears streaming down his face. They were on a hill across the valley from Hono, well hidden, but with an excellent view of not only the mountain, but the valley where the executions were taking place. "What good is vengeance?" Moreno asked. "It will not bring back the dead."
"It is all we have," Abayon said simply. "It is what we must feed on. Until every last Japanese soldier is dead."
The distinctive chatter of the Japanese machine guns echoed once more as the last group of laborers were executed. Abayon pointed. "See that officer?"
Moreno blinked away his tears and nodded. The man had an ornate samurai sword strapped to his side, and the rank insignia on his collar indicated he was a colonel in the Imperial Army.
"I have been watching," Abayon said. "He is in command. Every soldier and other officer he comes in contact with defers to him. He will be dead within the month. I promise you that. All of them will be dead."
"How?" Moreno asked. They had counted at least three hundred Japanese soldiers on the mountain. Even though most of them appeared to be engineers and not infantrymen, there were still too many for their poorly armed and equipped group to take on.
"I will think of a way," Abayon promised.
Surprisingly, it was the officer he had pointed out who gave him the means.
The next day, as the corpses of the Filipino men and women who had worked in the mountain rotted in their shallow graves, the colonel led a large contingent of his men to the beach to greet a Japanese ship that appeared in the water to the south. They had cut a rough road through the jungle from the mountain to the beach, and now drove a half-dozen small trucks to the edge of the ocean, where they lined up on the sand.
Crate after crate was off-loaded from the ship, brought ashore, and loaded onto the trucks. Abayon and Moreno watched as the trucks made over two dozen trips, hauling crates to the mountain, where the Japanese soldiers man-handled them into the gaping black opening.
"What do you think they are hiding?" Moreno asked as the last load disappeared into the mountain. The ship had already departed, gone over the horizon even as the trucks made their last trip back from the beach. In its place, a small patrol boat was at anchor offshore.
Before Abayon could reply, they heard the chatter of machine-gun fire echo out of the black hole across from them.
"What is going on?" Moreno asked. "Were there more of our people in there?"
The Japanese colonel appeared in the mouth of the cave with three men. Two of them were firing machine guns back the way they had come. Abayon frowned, trying to make sense of it. The colonel gestured to the third man who was unreeling wire. The man attached the wire to a small box, and it was suddenly clear to Abayon.
"They're sealing the entrance," he said.
The man pushed down the plunger, then dust blew out of the tunnel entrance, the rumble of the explosion drifting across the valley to Abayon and Moreno. A second explosion followed, and the mouth of the tunnel crumbled, leaving behind a tumble of rocks blocking the entrance.
"But where are the rest of the Japanese?" Moreno asked.
Abayon simply pointed. The colonel had his pistol out. He lifted it and fired three times, killing the men who had been with him.
"My God," Moreno muttered. "What is going? Has he lost his mind?"
"A secret," Abayon whispered, realizing the import of what they had just witnessed. "He's the only one who knows this location. The jungle will grow over those rocks." Abayon nodded grimly. "But we know." He stood. "Come."
His eyes were no longer on where the tunnel had been, but on the Japanese officer who was walking down the thin dirt road, unreeling more wire, stopping every so often to attach the leads to charges on trees. The demolitions must have taken days to prepare, Abayon realized as he and Moreno headed into the valley. And the engineers who had prepared them were now trapped inside the mountain, either already dead or dying.
They heard three explosions as they headed toward the road. The colonel was blowing trees on the side of the road. Like the tunnel entrance, it would not take long for the jungle to reclaim the road, hiding what had been there.
They reached the valley floor as a fourth explosion rumbled through the forest, followed by the sound of trees falling. It was not far from their location, less than half a kilometer away, as near as Abayon could tell. He tried to imagine the rationale for building something inside the mountain and then immediately destroying all trace of it and blocking the way in. What had been in those crates? And why was the colonel hiding them even from his own people?
They climbed up out of the stream bed, and the double track trail was in front of them. Abayon signaled to Moreno, and the two took up hidden positions alongside the rutted track. After several minutes the Japanese colonel appeared, hooking up the detonator to fused charges he'd placed on a half-dozen trees spaced out along the way. He did the last one less than one hundred meters from their location and unreeled about half the distance in wire before kneeling and pushing the plunger.
The explosion thundered through the jungle, trees from both sides collapsing across the path, making it impassable for vehicles. The dust-covered colonel retrieved as much of the wire as he could, reeling it up, then turned to continue his destructive journey toward the beach and the waiting patrol boat. Abayon had no doubt what the fate of that crew would be once the colonel returned to civilization.
But that was not going to happen.
As the colonel drew even with their position, Abayon gave Moreno the signal. The two men leapt out of the brush and overwhelmed him as he hooked up the wire to a charge on a tree opposite their location. They had him pinned to the ground within a second, Abayon tying the man's hands securely behind his back. The colonel struggled and fought, but the two guerrillas were too much for him.
Abayon rolled the Japanese over on his back as he unbuckled the samurai sword from around the officer's waist. The colonel kicked out, catching Moreno in the stomach, doubling him over. Abayon drew the sword and placed the point against the man's chest.
"Do not move," he ordered.
The colonel glared up at him, but did as ordered. Moreno got to his feet, cursing. He pointed the muzzle of his rifle at the colonel, his finger curling around the trigger.
"Not yet," Abayon ordered his friend.
Instead of a bullet, Moreno spit, the glob splattering on the officer's face.
"Keep him covered," Abayon ordered as he put the sword down and quickly went through the prisoner's pockets.
He drew out a leather wallet that contained identification and papers. "Colonel Tashama," Abayon read. "From the Kempeitai."
Moreno hissed as he heard the name of the infamous military intelligence branch of the Japanese army. They had led the way in rape and torture on the main island.
"What did you put in the mountain?" Abayon asked.
Tashama just glared at him. Abayon stared back, thinking it through. "You are the only one who knows where the entrance to the tunnel is. In fact, who probably even knows what mountain you tunneled into." He knelt down, the edge of the sword resting across Tashama's neck, and smiled. "Except for my friend and I."
Muscles on Tashama's face twitched, but still he remained silent.
"Whatever you buried there must be very important," Abayon continued, "for you to have killed so many of your own men. For you to go to such extreme lengths to keep this place secret." Abayon shrugged. "It does not matter."
Even as Tashama frowned, Abayon drew the blade across the man's neck, the razor-sharp edge easily slicing through skin, cartilage, and arteries. Blood spouted and Tashama gasped, his body spasming as his life poured out of him.
"He could have told us things," Moreno said disapprovingly, his initial rage having subsided.
"He was Kempeitai," Abayon said, wiping the blood off the blade on Tashama's uniform blouse. "He would never have spoken. Besides, we know where the tunnel is. We can find out for ourselves what is in there."
In the years after, Abayon often reflected that Moreno was right, that in immediately killing Tashama, he'd been too rash that day. They could probably have learned more from the man.