Chapter 77 BUDDHA

A car is coming. The engine noise is expensively muffled, but it sounds like a diesel. Goto Dengo is awake, waiting for it, and so is the rest of the camp. No one stirs at Bundok during the day anymore, except for the radio men and those manning the anti aircraft guns. They have not been told that MacArthur is on Luzon, but they all sense The General's presence. The American planes rip across the sky all day long, glittering and proud, like starships from a distant future that none of them will ever see, and the earth rings like a bell from the impacts of distant naval guns. The shipments have become smaller but more frequent: one or two broken-down lorries every night, their rear bumpers practically scraping the road under crippling burdens of gold.

Lieutenant Mori has placed anther machine gun at the front gate, concealed in the foliage, just in case some Americans happen to blunder up this road in a jeep. Somewhere out there in the dark, the barrel of that weapon is tracking this car as it jounces up the road. The men know every dip and rise in that road, and can tell where the vehicles are by listening for the scrape of their undercarriages against the hardpan, a signature pattern of metallic dots and dashes.

The car's headlamps are off, of course, and the guards at the gate dare not shine bright lights around. One of them risks opening up a kerosene lantern, and aims its beam at the visitor. A silver Mercedes-Benz hood ornament springs forth from the blackness, supported by a chrome-plated radiator grille. The beam of the lantern fondles the car's black fenders, its sweeping silver exhaust pipes, its running boards, clotted with the meat of young coconuts-it must have sideswiped a pile on its way up here. In the driver's side window is the face of a Nipponese man in his forties, so haggard and tired he looks as though he is about to burst into tears. But he is just a driver. Next to him is a sergeant with a sawed-off shotgun, Nipponese rifles being generally too long to wield in the front seat of a luxury car. Behind them, a drawn curtain conceals whatever, or whoever, is in the backseat.

"Open!" demands the guard, and the driver reaches up behind his head and parts the curtain. The lantern beam falls through the opening and bounces back sharply from a pale face in the back seat. Several of the soldiers shout. Goto Dengo steps back, rattled, then moves in for a better look.

The man in the backseat has a very large head. But the strange thing about him is that his skin is a rich yellow color-not the normal Asian yellow-and it glitters. He is wearing a peculiar, pointed hat, and he has a calm smile on his face-an expression the likes of which Goto Dengo has not seen since the war began.

More lantern beams come on, the ring of soldiers and officers closes in on the Mercedes. Someone pulls the rear door open and then jumps back as if he has burned his hand on it.

The passenger is sitting crosslegged on the backseat, which has been crushed into a broad V beneath his weight.

It is a solid gold Buddha, looted from somewhere else in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, coming to meditate in serene darkness atop the hoard of Golgotha.

It turns out to be small enough to fit through the entrance, but too big to go in one of the little railway cars, and so the strongest Filipino men must spend the next hours shoving it down the tunnel one inch at a tame.

The early shipments were neatly crated, and the crates were stenciled with labels identifying the contents as machine gun ammunition or mortar rounds or the like. The crates that come later don't have the stencils. At a certain point, the gold begins to arrive in cardboard boxes and rotten steamer trunks. They fall open all the time, and the workers patiently gather the gold up and carry it to the tunnel entrance in their arms and throw it into the hand cars. The bars tumble end over end and smash into the sheet-metal with a din that scares clouds of birds out of the overhanging trees. Goto Dengo cannot help looking at the bars. They come in different sizes, some of them so large that it takes two men to carry one. They are stamped with the names of central banks from a few places Goto Dengo has been and many he's only heard of: Singapore, Saigon, Batavia, Manila, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton. There is French gold that was apparently shipped to Cambodia, and Dutch gold shipped to Jakarta, and British gold shipped to Singapore-all to keep it out of the hands of the Germans.

But some shipments consist entirely of gold from the Bank of Tokyo. They get five convoys in a row of the stuff. According to the tally that Goto Dengo is keeping in his head, two-thirds of the tonnage stored in Golgotha ends up coming straight from Nippon's central reserves. All of it is cold to the touch, and stored in good but old crates. He concludes that it was shipped to the Philippines a long time ago and has been sitting in a cellar in Manila ever since, waiting for this moment. They must have shipped it here at about the same time that Goto Dengo was plucked off the beach in New Guinea, way back in late 1943.

They have known. They have known for that long that they were going to lose the war.

By the middle of January, Goto Dengo has begun to look back on the Christmas Day massacre with something almost like nostalgia, missing the atmosphere of naive innocence that made the killings necessary. Until that morning, even he had managed to convince himself that Golgotha was an arms cache that the emperor's soldiers would someday use to stage a glorious reconquest of Luzon. He knows that the workers believed it too. Now everyone knows about the gold, and the camp has changed. Everyone understands that there will be no exit.

At the beginning of January, the workers are made up of two types: those who are resigned to die here, and those who aren't. The latter group make various escape attempts of a desultory and hopeless nature and are shot by the guards. The era of hoarding ammunition seems to be over, or perhaps the guards are just too sick and hungry to climb down out of the watch towers and personally bayonet all of the people who present themselves to be killed. So it is all done with bullets, and the bodies left to balloon and blacken. Bundok is immanent with their stench.

Goto Dengo hardly notices, though, because the camp is suffused with the crazy, sick tension that always precedes a battle. Or so he supposes; he has seen a lot of excitement in this war, but he has never been in a proper battle. The same is automatically true of most of the Nipponese here, because essentially all of the Nipponese who go into battles wind up dead. In this army you are either a greenhorn or a corpse.

Sometimes, a briefcase arrives along with the gold shipment. The briefcase is always handcuffed to the wrist of a soldier who has grenades dangling all over his body so that he can blow himself and it to powder if the convoy should be assaulted by Huks. The briefcases go straight to the Bundok radio station and their contents are placed in a safe. Goto Dengo knows that they must contain codes-not the usual books, but some kind of special codes that are changed every day-because every morning, after the sun has come up, the radio officer performs a ceremony of burning a single sheet of paper in front of the transmitter shack, and then rubbing the withered leaf of ash between his hands.

It is through that radio station that they will receive the final order. All is in readiness, and Goto Dengo goes through the complex once a day checking everything.

The diagonal tunnel finally reached the stub tunnel at the bottom of Lake Yamamoto a couple of weeks ago. The stub was filled with water that had seeped past the concrete plug during the months since it had been put into place, and so when the two tunnels were finally joined, several tons of water ran down the diagonal into Golgotha. This was expected and planned for; all of it went into a sump and drained from there into the Tojo River. Now it is possible to go all the way up the diagonal and look at the concrete plug from the underside. Lake Yamamoto is on the other side. Goto Dengo goes up there every couple of days, ostensibly to check the plug and its demolition charges, but really to check on the progress being made, unbeknownst to Captain Noda, by Wing's and Rodolfo's crews. They are mostly drilling upwards, making more of those short, vertical, dead-end shafts, and enlarging the chambers at their tops. The system (including the new "ventilation shafts" ordered by The General, and dug from the top down just to the east of the ridgeline) looks like this now:

Inside the primary storage complex is a small room that Captain Noda has dubbed the Hall of Glory. It does not look very glorious right now. Most of it is filled with a snarl of wires which have been run into it from all parts of the Golgotha complex, and which dangle from the ceiling or trail on the floor with hand-lettered paper tags dangling from them, saying things like MAIN ENTRANCE DEMOLITION CHARGES. There are several crates of lead-acid batteries to supply power for the detonations, and to give Goto Dengo a few minutes of electric light by which to read those paper tags. Extra boxes of dynamite and blasting caps are stacked at one end of the Hall of Glory in case some tunnels need a little extra destruction, and coils of red fuse cord in case the electrical system fails completely.

But the demolition order hasn't yet come, so Goto Dengo does the things soldiers do while waiting to die. He writes letters to his family that will never be delivered or even mailed. He smokes. He plays cards. He goes and checks his equipment another time, and then another. A week goes by without any gold deliveries. Twenty prisoners try to escape together. The ones who don't get sprayed across the killing ground by mines get tangled in barbed wire and are each shot by a team of two guards, one aiming a flashlight and the other aiming a rifle. Captain Noda spends all night, every night, pacing back and forth in front of the main gate and smoking cigarettes, then drinks himself to sleep at dawn. The radio men sit in front of their rig watching the tubes glow, jerking like electrified frog legs whenever a feeble string of beeps comes in on their frequency. But the order does not come.

One night, then, the trucks come again, just as they did the first time. The convoy must contain all that's left of the Nipponese motor pool on Luzon. They all come together, making a rumble that can be heard half an hour before they actually reach the gate. When their cargo has been taken out and stacked on the ground, the soldiers guarding this convoy remain behind at Bundok. The only people who leave are the drivers.

It takes two days to move this last hoard into the tunnels. One of their shuttle trucks has broken down for good and been cannibalized to keep the other one going. It is running on half of its cylinders and is so feeble that it has to be pushed up the riverbed road by teams of workers and hauled over the rough patches on ropes. It has finally begun to rain, and the Tojo River is rising.

The main vault is nearly full of treasure, and so is the fool's vault. The new shipment has to be packed in wherever it will fit; they break it out of its crates and jam it into crannies. The crates are stenciled with double-headed eagles and swastikas, and the gold bars inside come from Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, Riga, Copenhagen, Budapest, Bucharest, Milan. There are also cardboard boxes filled with diamonds. Some of the crates are still damp, and smell of the sea. Seeing this, Goto Dengo knows that a big submarine must have arrived from Germany, filled with Nazi treasure. So that explains the two-week lull: they've been awaiting the arrival of this U-boat.

He works in the tunnels for two days, wearing a miner's headlamp, shoving jewels and gold bars into crevices. He goes into a sort of trance that is finally interrupted by a heavy thud reverberating through the rock.

Artillery, he thinks. Or a bomb from one of MacArthur's planes.

He comes up the main ventilation shaft to the top of the ridge, where it's broad daylight. He is crushed to discover that there is no battle underway. MacArthur isn't going to rescue him. Lieutenant Mori has brought almost all of the workers up here, and they are hauling on ropes, dragging Bundok's heavy equipment up and throwing it down into the recently dug "ventilation shafts." Both of the trucks are up here, and men with torches and sledgehammers are breaking them up into pieces small enough to drop down the shafts. Goto Dengo arrives just in time to see the engine block of the radio station's generator tumbling down a shaft into blackness. The rest of the radio gear follows it directly.

Somewhere nearby, concealed in the trees, someone is grunting heavily, doing some kind of hard physical labor. It is a practiced martial-arts type of grunt, from way down in the diaphragm.

"Lieutenant Goto!" says Captain Noda. He is daft with alcohol. "Your duties are below."

"What was that loud noise?"

Noda beckons him over to an outcropping from which they can see down into the valley of the Tojo River. Goto Dengo, unsteady for any number of reasons, suffers a spell of dizziness and nearly falls off. The problem is disorientation: he does not recognize the river. Until now, it has always been a few trickles of water braided down a rocky bed. Even before they ran a road up it, you could get up almost as far as the waterfall by hopping from one dry rock to the next.

Now, all of a sudden, the river is wide, deep, and murky. The tips of a few big rocks protrude from the surface here and there.

He remembers something he saw a hundred years ago, in a previous incarnation, on another planet: a bedsheet from the Manila Hotel with a crude map sketched on it. The Tojo River drawn in with a fat trail of blue fountain-pen ink.

"We dynamited the rockfall," Noda says, "according to the plan."

Long ago, they had poised rocks above a bottleneck in the river, ready to create a little dam. But setting off that dynamite was supposed to be almost the last thing they did before sealing themselves up inside.

"But we are not ready," Goto Dengo says.

Noda laughs. He seems quite high-spirited. "You have been telling me for a month that you are ready."

"Yes," Lieutenant Goto says, slowly and thickly, "you are right. We are ready."

Noda slaps him on the back. "You must get to the main entrance before it floods."

"My crew?"

"Your crew is waiting for you there."

Goto Dengo begins walking towards the trail that will take him down to the main entrance. Along the way, he passes the top of another ventilation shaft, Several dozen workers are queued up there, thumbs lashed together behind their backs with piano wire, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. One by one, prisoners kneel at the lip of the shaft. Lieutenant Mori whips his officer's sword into the nape of each neck with a terrific grunt. Head and body tumble forward into the ventilation shaft and thud meatily into other bodies, far below, a couple of seconds later. Every leaf and pebble within a three-meter radius of the shaft opening is saturated with bright red blood, and so is Lieutenant Mori.

"Don't worry about that," Captain Noda says. "I will see to it that the tops of the shafts are backfilled with rubble, as we discussed. The jungle will grow over them long before the Americans ever find this place."

Goto Dengo averts his eyes and turns to leave.

"Lieutenant Goto!" says a voice. He turns around. It is Lieutenant Mori, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. A Filipino kneels before him, mumbling a prayer in Latin, fumbling with a rosary that dangles from his bound hands.

"Yes, Lieutenant Mori."

"According to my roster, six prisoners are signed out to you. I will need them."

"Those six prisoners are down below, helping to load in the last shipment."

"But all of the shipment is inside the tunnels now."

"Yes, but not well placed. The entire purpose of the fool's vault is ruined if we strew gold and diamonds around the place in such a way as to lead thieves deeper into the caverns. I need these men to continue that work."

"You take full responsibility for them?"

"I do," Goto Dengo says.

"If there are only six," Captain Noda says, "then your crew should be able to keep them under control."

"I will see you at Yasukuni, Goto Dengo," says Lieutenant Mori.

"I will look forward to it," Goto Dengo says. He does not add that Yasukuni must be a very crowded place by now, and they will probably have a terrible time finding each other.

"I envy you. The end will be longer and harder for those of us on the outside." Lieutenant Mori snaps his blade into the back of the Filipino's head, cutting him off between an Ave and a Maria.

"Your heroism will not go unrewarded," Goto Dengo says.

Lieutenant Mori's crew awaits him down below, in front of the mouse-hole that leads into Golgotha: four hand-picked soldiers. Each wears a thousand-stitch headband, and so each has an orange ball centered on his forehead, reminding Goto Dengo not of the Rising Sun but of an exit wound. The water is up to mid-thigh now, and the entrance tunnel is half full. When Goto Dengo arrives, followed closely by Captain Noda, the men all cheer him politely.