Section 8 by Robert Doherty

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