Rodolfo turns around again, looking so irritated that Goto Dengo must stifle a laugh.
'MacArthur is on Leyte.'
Rodolfo's chest inflates like a weather balloon and he gains about three inches in height, but the expression on his face does not change.
The news ramifies through the Filipino camp like lightning seeking the ground. The tactic has the desired effect of giving the Filipinos a reason to live again; they suddenly display great energy and verve. A supply of badly worn drills and air compressors has arrived on carabao drawn carts, evidently brought in from one of the other Bundok-like sites around Luzon. The Filipinos, experts at internal combustion, cannibalize some compressors to fix others. Meanwhile the drills are passed around to Rodolfo's squads, who drag them up onto the top of the ridge between the rivers and begin sinking the new 'ventilation shafts' while Wing's Chinese men put the last touches on the Golgotha complex below.
The carts that brought in the equipment were simply grabbed off the roads by the Nipponese Army, along with their drivers-mostly farm-boys-and pressed into service on the spot. The farmboys can never leave Bundok, of course. The weaker carabaos are slaughtered for meat, the stronger ones put to work on Golgotha, and the drivers are assimilated into the workforce. One of these is a boy named Juan with a big round head and a distinctly Chinese cast to his features. He turns out to be trilingual in English, Tagalog, and Cantonese. He can communicate in a sort of pidgin with Wing and the other Chinese, frequently by using a finger to draw Chinese characters on the palm of his hand. Juan is small, healthy, and has a kind of wary agility that Goto Dengo thinks may be useful in what is to come, and so he becomes one of the special crew.
The submerged plumbing in Lake Yamamoto needs to be inspected. Goto Dengo has Rodolfo ask around and see if there are any men among them who have worked as pearl divers. He quickly finds one, a lithe, frail- looking fellow from Palawan, named Agustin. Agustin is weak from dysentery, but he seems to perk up around water, and after a couple of days' rest is diving down to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto with no trouble. He becomes another one of Rodolfo's picked men.
There are really too many Filipinos for the number of tools and holes that they have available, and so the work goes quickly at first as fresh men are quickly rotated through by the squad leaders. Then, one night at about two in the morning, an unfamiliar sound reverberates through the jungle, filtering up from the lowlands where the Tojo River meanders through cane fields and rice paddies.
It is the sound of vehicles. Masses of them. Since the Nipponese have been out of fuel for months, Goto Dengo's first thought is that it must be MacArthur.
He throws on a uniform and runs down to Bundok's main gate along with the other officers. Dozens of trucks, and a few automobiles, are queued up there, engines running, headlights off. When he hears a Nipponese voice coming from the lead car, his heart sinks. He long ago stopped feeling bad about wanting to be rescued by General Douglas MacArthur.
Many soldiers ride atop the trucks. When the sun rises, Goto Dengo savors the novel and curious sight of fresh, healthy, well-fed Nipponese men. They are armed with light and heavy machine guns. They look like Nipponese soldiers did way back in 1937, when they were rolling across northern China. It gives Goto Dengo a strange feeling of nostalgia to remember a day when a terrible defeat was not imminent, when they were not going to lose everything horribly. A lump actually gathers in his throat, and his nose begins to run.
Then he snaps out of it, realizing that the big day has finally arrived. The part of him that is still a loyal soldier of the emperor has a duty to see that the vital war materiel, which has just arrived, is stored away in the big vault of Golgotha. The part of him that isn't a loyal soldier anymore still has a lot to accomplish.
In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can't find your ass with both hands. This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get straightened out, people learn their roles. The heavier trucks cannot make it up the rough road that Goto Dengo has had built up the streambed of the Tojo River, but a couple of the small ones can, and these become the shuttles. So the big trucks pull, one by one, into a heavily fenced and guarded area-well sheltered from MacArthur's observation planes-that was built months ago. Filipinos swarm into these trucks and unload crates, which are small, but evidently quite heavy. Meanwhile the smaller trucks shuttle the crates up the Tojo River Road to the entrance of Golgotha, where they are unloaded onto hand cars and rolled into the tunnel to the main vault. As per the instructions handed down from on high, Goto Dengo sees to it that every twentieth crate is diverted to the fool's chamber.
The unloading proceeds automatically from there, and Goto Dengo devotes most of these days to supervising the final stages of the digging. The new ventilation shafts are proceeding on schedule, and he only needs to check them once a day. The diagonal is now only a few meters away from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. Groundwater has begun to seep through small cracks in the bedrock and trickle down the diagonal into Golgotha, where it collects in a sump that drains into the Tojo. Another few meters of cutting and they will break through into the short stub tunnel that Wing and his men created many months ago, digging downwards from what later became the bottom of the lake.
Wing himself is otherwise engaged these days. He and Rodolfo and their special crew are completing final preparations. Rodolfo and company are digging down from the top of the ridge, cutting what looks like just another vertical ventilation shaft. Wing and company are directly below, engaged in a complicated subterranean plumbing project.
Goto Dengo has entirely lost track of what day it is. About four days after the trucks come, though, he gets a clue. The Filipinos spontaneously break into song over their evening rice bowls. Goto Dengo recognizes the tune vaguely; he occasionally heard the American Marines singing it in Shanghai.
What child is this, Who laid to rest, On Mary's lap is sleeping?
The Filipinos sing that and other songs, in English and Spanish and Latin, all evening long. After they get their lungs unlimbered they sing astonishingly well, occasionally breaking into two— and three-part harmony. At first, Lieutenant Mori's guards get itchy trigger fingers, thinking it's some kind of a signal for a mass breakout. Goto Dengo doesn't want to see his work cut short by a massacre, and so he explains to them that it is a religious thing, a peaceful celebration.
That night, another midnight truck convoy arrives and the workers are rousted to unload it. They work cheerfully, singing Christmas carols and making jokes about Santa Claus.
The whole camp stays up well past sunrise unloading trucks. Bundok has gradually become a nocturnal place anyway, to avoid the gaze of observation planes. Goto Dengo is just thinking of hitting the sack when a fusillade of sharp crackling noises breaks out up above the camp on the Tojo River. Ammunition being in short supply, hardly anyone actually fires guns anymore, and he almost doesn't recognize the sound of the Nambu.
Then he jumps onto the running board of a truck and tells the driver to head upstream. The shooting has died down as suddenly as it started. Beneath the bald tires of the truck, the river has turned opaque and bright red.
About two dozen corpses lie in the water before the entrance to Golgotha. Nipponese soldiers stand around them, up to their calves in the red water, their weapons slung from their shoulders. A sergeant is going around with a bayonet, stirring the guts of the Filipinos who are still moving.
'What is going on?' Goto Dengo says. No one answers. But no one shoots him, either; he will be allowed to figure it out himself.
The workers had clearly been unloading another small truck, which is still parked there at the head of the road. Resting beneath its tailgate is a wooden crate that was apparently dropped. Its heavy contents have exploded the crate and spilled across the uneven conglomerate of river rocks, poured concrete and mine tailings that make up the riverbed here.
Goto Dengo sloshes up to it and looks. He sees it clearly enough, but he can't somehow absorb the knowledge until he feels it in his hands. He bends down, wraps his fingers around a cold brick on the bottom of the river, and heaves it up out of the water. It is a glossy ingot of yellow metal, incredibly heavy, stamped with words in English: BANK OF SINGAPORE.
There is a scuffle behind him. The sergeant stands at the ready as two of his men jerk the Filipino driver out of the cab of his truck that Goto Dengo rode in on. Calmly-looking almost bored-the sergeant bayonets the driver. The men drop him in the red water and he disappears. 'Merry Christmas' one of the soldiers cracks. Everyone laughs, except for Goto Dengo.
