Robert Doherty - Section 8

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.

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.