Abayon was only nineteen years old and a private. There were several noncommissioned officers among the group, but none seemed eager to take charge. They'd had an American officer, but he disappeared during the last days of the fighting. After the week, with their food supplies running low, it was Rogelio who took command. He knew it was too soon to take action against the Japanese. Indeed, from the few reports they received from frightened civilians, it appeared as if the Japanese might actually win this war.
There were rumors that the Japanese had destroyed the mighty American fleet in Hawaii and even invaded those islands, taking them over. If that were true, Abayon had his doubts whether the Americans would once more establish their presence in the Pacific. After all, it had been obvious to all even before the invasion that the eyes of the white men were turned toward the war in Europe, not Asia.
On the morning marking the seventh day since they had run into the jungle, Abayon gathered the men around him. He proposed that they leave the main island and go to the island he had grown up on: Jolo. It was remote, and he knew he could find support among the people. He had family there, and a young wife whom he longed to see once more. His best friend, Alfons Moreno, who was with them, also was from Jolo, and seconded Abayon's suggestion.
Most of the others agreed, more out of a lack of any better suggestion than an eagerness to follow him. A few headed off to their own villages. Abayon led the rest through the jungle to the coast. He organized a raid where they seized a small fishing boat. He and Moreno, who had been a fisherman before being inducted into the army, captained the boat, traveling only at night to avoid the Japanese patrol boats and planes. It took them over ten days to make it to Jolo.
They put in at Abayon and Moreno's village. Abayon was overjoyed to be reunited with his wife, but they were not greeted with open arms by most of the villagers. The Japanese were on Jolo, the village elder told Abayon late at night. There were Japanese soldiers on Hono Mountain, and they had conscripted every able-bodied man they could capture for some construction project. What exactly was going on at the mountain, the elder did not know, since no one who was captured had come back, and the one road that had been built leading to the mountain was guarded by soldiers.
Abayon made a pact with the old man – he would take his group into the jungle and hide, as long as the village provided them with food. Anxious to be rid of the group – and the threat of Japanese reprisal – the elder agreed. With his wife accompanying him, Abayon led the men into the center of the island, to a place he knew of, next to a stream that supplied them with drinking water.
For several months they lay low, not wishing to draw attention to themselves, while more ex-soldiers and men avoiding the Japanese labor conscription filtered into their camp. Eventually over one hundred men, along with a handful of their women, were living there. It was a number the food supply could not sustain much longer.
The presence of the Japanese on his island bothered Abayon. Even more than that, he was curious about what they were doing on Hono Mountain. What did they need the slave labor for? His and Moreno's relatives were among those who had been taken. All that, and the growing pressure to take some sort of action against the invaders, led Abayon and Moreno to leave their hidden camp on a reconnaissance mission to Hono.
It turned out that what was happening was not on the mountain, but in it.
They spent a week scouting in the vicinity of the mountain, discovering where the Japanese were boring a tunnel. They found unmarked graves where the slaves who had died had been summarily buried. And from what they could see, they were the lucky ones. Men and women went into the black hole on the side of the mountain each day. The only ones who came out were those carrying rock and dirt, who immediately went back in, and the dead, who did not.
The tunnel entrance was about two hundred meters up the side of the mountain, at the farthest place where a vehicle could climb up the track cut through the jungle and up the slope. Abayon and Moreno were puzzled. They could think of no tactical reason to build such a complex in Hono Mountain. Their puzzlement turned to rage during their second week of surveillance when the Japanese soldiers lined up all the surviving laborers and machine-gunned them, the bodies tumbling into ditches the doomed had been forced to dig before their execution.
As they watched helplessly from the jungle, the people they knew were being killed; Abayon had to hold Moreno back. A group including Moreno's brother had been lined up in front of the smoking barrels of the machine guns, and there was nothing they could do for them, except get themselves killed. He told his best friend as much, while restraining him, but it did little to comfort either of them.
"Vengeance will be ours," Abayon whispered in Moreno's ear as the machine guns spit death, sending the bodies tumbling on top of those who had been killed before them.
"Vengeance," Abayon repeated again and again to Moreno, trying to contain his friend's white hot rage.
"Whatever they have built in the mountain, it must be important. They are killing all who know the way in and what was built. But we know. And we know what they have done here. We will have vengeance."
Moreno was shaking his head, tears streaming down his face. They were on a hill across the valley from Hono, well hidden, but with an excellent view of not only the mountain, but the valley where the executions were taking place.
"What good is vengeance?" Moreno asked.
"It will not bring back the dead."
"It is all we have," Abayon said simply.
"It is what we must feed on. Until every last Japanese soldier is dead."
The distinctive chatter of the Japanese machine guns echoed once more as the last group of laborers were executed. Abayon pointed.
"See that officer?"
Moreno blinked away his tears and nodded. The man had an ornate samurai sword strapped to 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.