Dragon - Cussler Clive - Страница 21

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

CURTIS MEEKER 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.

To any late first-nighters who quickly passed by Meeker to their seats, he looked like an indifferent theatergoer who was bored with the restaging of a late-nineteenth-century play based on the Spanish-American War and preferred to sit it out in the lobby.