"How do you know all this?" she asked.
"Afterward I met one of the members of that plane's crew," Abayon said.
"They managed to make it to China, but ran out of fuel and had to bail out. They suffered the misfortune of being captured by the Japanese. I had suffered the same misfortune almost two months before and was shipped to China en route to Unit 731 in Manchuria."
Fatima frowned.
"But I don't understand why this is important. Three men parachuted out of one of those planes. And…? Do you know who they were? What they were going to do? It sounds as if the crew of the plane certainly didn't."
"No, the crew had no clue who the men were or why they were parachuting into Japan," Abayon said.
"But I discovered more."
"How?"
He held up a hand.
"First, let me tell you a little more about what happened after the Doolittle raid so you get a sense of perspective. History, particularly American history, paints the raid as a great success and a turning point in the war. The Americans, as is their way, made a movie about it in 1944, even before the war was over. The commander, Doolittle, was given their Medal of Honor.
"Militarily, the raid accomplished very little. Each plane – other than number sixteen – carried only four five-hundred-pound bombs because of weight restrictions. The damage done was negligible. And all sixteen planes were lost when they crash-landed after running out of fuel.
"The Japanese, as they did here in the Philippines against the guerrillas, responded to this gnat's strike with fury. Since the planes all went on to China, and most of the crews were saved by Chinese partisans, the Japanese vented their rage on the Chinese people. First, they conducted more than six hundred air raids of their own on Chinese villages and towns. Any village where an American airman passed through was burned to the ground and the people murdered. No one knows the exact number, but the American moral victory cost almost 100,000 Chinese their lives."
"And the Americans did not care."
Fatima said it as a statement.
Abayon nodded.
"Most Americans care nothing for people killed as long as it is not their own people. A hundred thousand Chinese dead so that there can be exciting headlines in their newspapers and newsreel was fine for them.
"Some Americans did suffer. The Japanese captured eight of the men who were on the planes, including the crew of the Bat Out of Hell that the three mystery men had jumped out of. The eight were first taken to Tokyo by the Kempetai, where they were interrogated."
"But you said you talked to one of these men in China," Fatima noted.
"Yes," Abayon said.
"That was later. The Americans were kept in Tokyo for about two months, where they were tortured until they agreed to sign documents admitting they were war criminals. Then they were shipped back to China. I ran into them there in a prison camp. Surprisingly, though, the crew of the sixteenth plane was never interrogated about the three men, even though, under torture, they told of the jump."
Fatima was now intrigued with this story of events over sixty years ago.
"You're saying the crew told the Kempetai that three Americans parachuted into Japan during the raid, but the Kempetai never pursued that line of questioning?"
"Yes. Strange, isn't it? And the secret should have died with them. The Japanese held a trial of the crew. It took them all of twenty minutes. The Americans couldn't understand anything, since it was all done in Japanese. There was no defense counsel, and it wasn't until after they were taken out of the courtroom that they discovered they had been condemned to death.
"The sentence was to be carried out several weeks later, but it wasn't until the day before they were to be killed that the Americans were informed of their sentence. They wrote letters to their families – which were never sent. Then, the next day, the Japanese took them into a cemetery. There were three small wooden crosses stuck in the ground, and the men were made to kneel with their backs against the crosses. Their hands were tied to the cross pieces. White cloth was wrapped around their faces – not as blindfolds, but with a large X marked on it just above the nose as a target point. It only took one volley from the firing squad."
Abayon paused. Fatima had seen death in her work for the Abu Sayef, but the horrors of World War II were on a scale that her generation could not visualize.
She waited a few moments, then asked, "But what does any of that have to do with the Golden Lily? And what is in this complex?"
Abayon ran his hands along the worn arms of his wheelchair. It had been years since he'd been able to walk. Years since he'd left the complex. He knew his present condition was a direct result of what had been done to him by the Japanese so many years ago. He was lucky to have survived when so many others had not, but revisiting that place, even in conversation, was painful. Still, Fatima had to know what he knew and what he suspected.
"The men who jumped out of that bomber into Japan are the connection," he finally said.
"After we were captured, my wife and I were taken from the Philippines to China for a while and then eventually to Manchuria, to a place called Pingfan, about twenty-five kilometers southeast of Harbin.
"At first we thought it was just a concentration camp. But the collection of prisoners was strange. There were Chinese, of course, but there were two dozen Filipinos; some Europeans who had been captured; a handful of Australians; many nationalities were represented, in small numbers for some reason. And there was one American."
"One of the jumpers," Fatima said.
Abayon smiled despite the terrible memories bubbling in his mind. She was indeed the right one.
"Yes. One of the jumpers. I talked to him. His name was Martin. Kevin Martin. At first he said nothing of his past or how he had been captured or even who he was. But when I told him of the American aircrew from Doolittle's raid and that I had seen that they were prisoners of the Japanese, it was the key to opening him up. Martin wanted to know what had happened to the men. He was quite upset when I told him they were executed, even though we were in a place where it was obvious we would not live long either."
Abayon paused, gnarled hands moving back and forth on the arms of his wheelchair in agitation.
"What do you know of Unit 731?"
"What you have told me," Fatima said.
"It was the biological warfare experimental laboratory for the Japanese."
"I have studied the unit and its history as much as any person since the end of the war," he said.
"The Japanese made no secret of their interest in developing biological and chemical weapons. Early on, they knew they were at a technical disadvantage to the West, but in this field they felt they might be able to gain the upper hand.
"In 1925 the Japanese made this clear when they refused to sign the Geneva Convention ban on biological weapons. In fact, I believe, given information I have examined over the years, that in a perverse way the fact that there was a ban on these weapons is what made the Japanese actually more interested in them. High-ranking Japanese officers figured that if something was so terrible it was outlawed, then it must be an effective weapon.
"They weren't stupid, though. They knew better than to build facilities in their own country. When they invaded Manchuria in 1932, accompanying the troops was an army officer who was also a physician, Dr. Ishii. He began the preliminary work that would lead four years later to Unit 731 being established. Besides the remoteness of the site, it also allowed them access to numerous test subjects: namely, Chinese soldiers and citizens, whom they considered less than human.
"It was a large compound," Abayon said, remembering.
"Around 150 buildings covering several square kilometers. The Japanese used bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, and other diseases in controlled tests on humans. They decided they also needed to make sure that the diseases worked the same on different races, so they began importing prisoners from other theaters of the war. That is how I ended up there.