Brekker went to the cockpit and put them back on course. NUMA had helpfully provided the longitude and latitude of the wreckage to Polten, and the GPS system was guiding him to that precise spot only five hundred yards from the islet.
Though fishermen had discovered the Pearsall weeks ago, the wreck was located far from the normal tourist dive spots, and recreational companies had been warned to stay away until NUMA had completed its survey to assess the danger from unexploded ordnance on board.
It looked like the warning had worked because when the yacht arrived, they had the place all to themselves. At the indicated location, Brekker motored back and forth over the coordinates, a sandy stretch of seafloor fifty feet deep. He kept an eye on the bottom-scanning sonar until he saw the angular shape of a ship’s bow jutting from the sand.
After dropping anchor and shutting off the engine, he went back to the aft deck to find his four mercenaries already donning their wetsuits.
“How could the Pearsall have been undiscovered here for more than seventy years?” one of them asked as he checked his oxygen tank. “It’s deserted right now, but we’re not exactly in the middle of nowhere.”
Brekker shrugged into his own suit. “It was probably covered by sand in a typhoon like the one that’s approaching and then uncovered by normal erosion, which is why we need to get down there now. Hidalgo might cover it up again.”
When they were ready, the five of them went over the side.
Brekker immediately spotted the prow of the destroyer in the crystal clear water. He could make out the top of the ship’s hull number stenciled on the side: DD-542. The warship must have come to rest on the bottom with its stern lower than the bow. The top of the superstructure barely peeked above the surface of the sand. Most of the metal showed very little corrosion, supporting the theory that the entire ship had been buried in the sand until recently.
If they were going to explore the interior of the Pearsall, they’d have to find a way inside, but all of the visible port hull was intact. Brekker had acquired underwater cutting torches, but he hoped to find an easier way in.
He led his men around the ship and saw just what he was looking for: a jagged hole where the Japanese torpedo had hit. Most of the hole was filled with sand, but Brekker thought they could dig their way through.
And if they couldn’t, carefully placed explosives would make sure no one else would be able to, either.
44
CORREGIDOR
At the sound of a vehicle in the distance, Juan held up his hand to stop his team. Eddie, Linc, MacD, Raven, and Max all froze in their tracks. When it was clear that the vehicle was approaching, Juan motioned for them to take cover. They all dropped to the ground, shielded from the road by the island’s thick woods.
Getting from the Gator onto Corregidor had gone as expected. No one had been at the unused airfield to see them come ashore. They’d been making their way through the underbrush to avoid being spotted along the road. All of them were equipped with M4 assault rifles, except for MacD, who had his crossbow. They wore green and sand colored camouflaged fatigues and helmets similar to those worn by the Philippine National Police Special Action Force. On their chests and backs were Velcro panels that would reveal the words PNP-SAF and POLICE when torn away. Around their necks were balaclavas that could be pulled up over their faces to conceal their identities, just like the police would wear on a drug raid.
Juan didn’t know if Locsin was inside the tunnel, but the plan was to capture Locsin’s men alive and then march them the quarter mile to the south dock, where the Oregon’s more spacious lifeboat would pick them up. By the time the actual Philippine police made it out to the island, they’d be long gone and would be able to conduct the interrogation in private to find out Beth’s location.
The tranvía tram passed by without slowing, likely heading to the Japanese Garden of Peace, which they’d already passed. Juan gestured for them to get back up and keep moving.
They stopped again when they reached the base of Malinta Hill. Juan crouched with the rest of them and they watched another tranvía drop off a load of tourists, snapping photos, before they were escorted into the main tunnel for a guided visit of the attraction.
Juan then led his team along the south side of Malinta Hill. He could see the Oregon anchored in the distance. Linda, who was in command of the ship, would send the lifeboat as soon as she got word from Juan that he had Locsin in custody.
They reached the Navy Tunnels south entrance, where the excavation was in progress, and Juan positioned his team behind the trees and undergrowth in three sets of two—Juan with Max directly in front of the tunnel, Eddie with Raven to the right, where the dirt pile lay, and MacD with Linc to the left, where the dusty road led down the hill—so they had it covered from all angles. The Bobcat had to be inside the tunnel.
“Ready to see who’s in there?” Juan asked Max.
“Absolutely.” Max handed him a bulky set of glasses and put on a pair himself. Then he removed a remotely operated tracked vehicle the size of a paperback novel from his backpack, an ROV of Max’s own design that he called the Crawler. He set it on the ground and flipped a switch. A tiny camera mounted on the top of the Crawler came to life and swiveled around. The view from the camera showed up on an offset screen in Juan’s glasses. Max’s grinning face filled the image.
“High definition isn’t your friend,” Juan said with a smile.
“Hey, I earned these wrinkles. Besides, most of them are your fault. One for every Plan C you concoct.”
“Then let’s stick with Plan A for today. Wouldn’t want to break the camera next time.”
Max chuffed good-naturedly but said nothing as he extended an antenna and set it on the ground. Then he checked that the audio feed was working, and Juan heard Max’s voice echoing in his earpiece. Satisfied that everything was ready, he used the handheld controller to set the Crawler in motion. It silently glided away, only the occasional crackle of leaves betraying its location. Juan was impressed at how Max had eliminated the motor’s whine.
“What’s the range on that?” Juan asked.
“Since we have a direct line of sight into the tunnel, I’d say it could get two hundred feet inside before we lose the signal, depending on how many turns it has to make.”
The Crawler reached the entrance and went inside, hugging the concrete wall as Max drove it over the smooth tunnel floor. For a moment, the screen went dark as the sensor adjusted to the change in light. Then Juan could make out a string of lights going down the tunnel, bare bulbs hung from the arched ceiling. Piles of debris and pockmarks in the walls were reminders of the intense World War II battle to retake the fortress.
When the Crawler had gone another twenty feet, Juan heard the sound of machinery and voices, but he still couldn’t see anything but empty tunnel. The sound of a motor grew louder. The Bobcat came around the corner fifty feet away, its bucket trailing dirt that overflowed its sides.
Max maneuvered the Crawler into a small notch in the wall and let the Bobcat pass by. Seconds later, the Bobcat emerged from the tunnel and dumped another load on the pile before disappearing back inside.
“This is perfect,” Max said. “We’ve got our own escort.”
As the Bobcat passed, Max switched the Crawler into high gear, and it shot forward, racing after the Bobcat, until it was underneath the loader.
“Nice work,” Juan said.
“Gotta earn my keep somehow.”
The Bobcat made a left turn to go back the way it had come. Max deftly guided the Crawler to match course. A few seconds after that, Juan could make out people at the end of the tunnel. All of them, dressed in hard hats and colored vests like any normal construction crew, were digging or operating machinery, except for one man who stood off to the side directing their efforts. When Juan saw him, it confirmed that this was no ordinary archaeological dig.
&n
bsp; “Is that Locsin?” Max asked.
“That’s him,” Juan said. “If he risked coming here himself, they must be close to breaking through.”
The Bobcat stopped next to a man operating a hydraulic rock hammer that was pounding away at the collapsed heap of concrete blocking the way. Some of the men tossed what they had already loosened into the bucket of the Bobcat while the rest unloaded beams from a trailer to shore up the dirt walls of the tunnel that they’d already dug out.
“We’ll lose cover once the Bobcat comes back out,” Juan said.
“I’ll move the Crawler under the trailer,” Max said.
“You read my mind.”
Max waited until all the men had moved away from the Bobcat and raced the Crawler across the open space to the underside of the trailer, the rock hammer masking the sound of the high-speed motor. Max switched it back to low gear and moved the Crawler around until it had a good view of the worksite while remaining in the shadows.
“If they get through, will you be able to move over that debris?” Juan asked.
“No, it’s too jagged, but it won’t matter,” Max replied. “I’m getting a really low signal from the Crawler. If it goes in any farther, we’ll lose it.”
“Then all we can do is watch and wait. But, either way, we’re taking them when they come out.” Juan radioed the rest of the team to report what he and Max had seen so they could prep for the upcoming ambush. They’d wait until Locsin and all his men were clear of the tunnel.
Juan and Max settled in and watched their tiny monitors like they were catching a game on TV, the most boring one they’d ever seen. There wasn’t even a good beer commercial to liven things up. The monotony, however, didn’t last long.
Twenty minutes and two more Bobcat runs later, the man operating the rock hammer shut it down and yelled to Locsin. He pointed at a black hole in the debris.
Locsin climbed up and shined a flashlight through the opening. When he looked back at his men, he was smiling. They had broken through.
45
The quick view of the area past the blockage didn’t show Locsin much, so he was eager to get inside and retrieve what they had come for. It took another ten minutes before the hole was wide enough for him to squeeze through. Without waiting for his men to shore up the hole, he climbed past the obstruction, leaving his men to widen the opening.
He shined the flashlight around and saw nothing at first. He walked several yards and then spotted a desk with papers and files piled on it and some lab tables holding a variety of equipment. All of it had corroded from the moisture leaking into the tunnel where the concrete had been blown away. A blanket of dust coated everything.
The Typhoon pills that they’d recovered from the other Japanese lab on Negros Island had been carefully packed in tins and sealed with wax, which was why the drug had maintained its potency. The records they found implied there was a much larger stash on Corregidor, which had been the primary laboratory facility during the World War II occupation.
Locsin yanked open all the desk drawers, looking for the same kind of tins, but all he found were more files. He desperately searched the rest of the tunnel, getting angrier and more frantic as he went. He tossed aside microscopes and smashed vials, shouting in frustration at the fruitless hunt.
When he reached the end of the tunnel without discovering the mother lode they’d been hoping to find, he had the urge to blow up the place all over again. He screamed for his Japanese translator to stop digging and come inside the tunnel.
The translator climbed through, shining his own flashlight at the mess Locsin had created.
Locsin pointed at the desk. “Examine those files. Tell me if the formula is in there.”
The man looked at the pile of folders and said, “That may take some time with this many papers to go—”
“Then get started!”
The translator started with the top file and began skimming the pages.
Locsin examined the tunnel while he waited. Apparently, the Japanese had collapsed the passage in the hopes that the records would be destroyed as well. Locsin would have to excavate the entire pile of concrete and debris to see if any Typhoon pills had been buried in the collapse, but he didn’t have high hopes they’d find any that hadn’t been crushed. In fact, it was possible that it had all been transported back to Japan before the American invasion in 1945.
But Locsin was puzzled. The Japanese would have wanted to remove any trace that it was ever there. He wondered why this part of the tunnel had remained intact. Then he saw why.
Several plastic explosive bricks lining the ceiling had failed to detonate when the Japanese collapsed the tunnel. The cord connecting them to the rest of the bombs had never been tied together, as if they had been interrupted before they could complete the job.
“Well?” Locsin shouted at his translator. “Is the formula in there?”
“I don’t know yet. It might be. But I did find something interesting.” He handed a sheaf of papers to Locsin. The pages were written in English.
As Locsin scanned through them, he felt a surge of renewed confidence. There was another possibility of finding more Typhoon before their supply ran out.
He handed the papers back to the translator. “Gather up everything you can find. We’re leaving soon.” Locsin decided that staying to sift through the rubble was a useless effort.
He climbed back through the hole and told his men to stop digging. Instead, he instructed them to conduct a thorough search of the tunnel in case he missed anything. Then he walked to the tunnel entrance so he could get a phone signal.
Locsin dialed Tagaan.
“Did you find it?” Tagaan asked, as eager as Locsin was to discover another source of Typhoon.
“No pills,” Locsin said, absently scanning the sea around Corregidor as he talked. “But we’ve found documentation that might include the formula. We also found some additional documents that we weren’t expecting. They could lead us to Brekker and . . .”
Locsin’s voice tailed off when he saw a sorry-looking cargo ship anchored to the south of the island. No, he thought. It couldn’t have gotten here so fast.
“Describe the ship that sank the Magellan Sun,” he said to Tagaan.
“About five hundred feet long. Superstructure aft of amidships. Five cranes, but some of them seemed broken.”
Against all logic, Locsin was looking at the same ship.
He turned toward the tunnel entrance and quietly said, “It’s here.”
“What?”
“Juan Cabrillo’s ship is here.”
“Then the speed wasn’t an illusion.”
Locsin yelled down the tunnel for two of his men to get outside.
He hung up on Tagaan and dialed another number.
When it was answered, Locsin said, “We need to leave quickly. How soon can you be here?”
The voice on the other end replied, “Less than ten minutes.”
“Good. We’ll be waiting.”
Locsin hung up but kept the phone at his ear as if he were still listening. He eyed the trees around the entrance, but he couldn’t see anything unusual.
When his soldiers arrived, Locsin whispered, “I want you to go back and get your weapons, then do a sweep of the area.”
“What are we looking for?” one of them asked.
“Anyone who shouldn’t be here.”
46
Juan and Max watched as Locsin ducked back inside the tunnel with his two men. They kept an eye on the camera feed from the Crawler to see what Locsin would do when he got back to the opening they’d widened.
“Something’s up,” Max said, peeking through the bushes. “You think they’re getting ready to leave?”
“Depends what they found inside that tunnel,” Juan said. They’d heard only snippets of Locsin’s phone conversation, something
about documentation but no pills.
“Wait, there are the men he was just talking to.”
“But where’s Locsin?”
The two communist soldiers leaned over the trailer so only their feet were visible to the Crawler’s camera. Juan could hear them unzipping something. Then the men went back toward the tunnel entrance. Max moved the Crawler to the end of the trailer, but Juan could see only the backs of the men. They were each carrying something.
Seconds later, they emerged from the entrance holding Chinese-made Norinco QBZ-95 assault rifles.
Locsin was still nowhere to be seen.
“That’s some high-quality hardware,” Max said.
“And they brought it out for a reason,” Juan said. “We’ve been made.”
Juan looked over his shoulder and saw the Oregon sitting near Manila Bay’s entrance.
“Locsin recognized the Oregon. Someone on his side must have seen it last night when we sank the Magellan Sun and made the connection.”
“But how did they see it? Their trucks were gone by the time we came into the bay at Negros Island.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Juan said, watching Locsin’s men cross the road where Linc and MacD lay.
“You’re about to have some uninvited guests,” Juan said to them over the radio.
“We see that,” Linc whispered back. “ROE?” He wanted to know the rules of engagement.
“Take them out quietly, if you can. That might lure the rest of them out here.”
“Roger that.”
“Remember, act like they’re wearing full body armor.”
Linc didn’t respond this time. Locsin’s men were too close. Juan trained the red-dot sight of his own weapon on them.
Suddenly the head of one of the men snapped back, a crossbow bolt sticking out of his eye. At the same time, a Ka-Bar knife tumbled through the air, striking Locsin’s other man in the neck. It was a beautiful throw from Linc, and any normal human would have gone down instantly, but the man ignored the mortal wound and raised his assault rifle.