Vaughn considered this as Tai began loading magazines with nine-millimeter rounds for her MP-5 submachine gun. He noted her precision as she made sure each round was properly seated.
"Why do you think Orson didn't want to talk about it?" Vaughn asked.
Tai paused, bullet in one hand, magazine in the other, and looked at him.
"As he said, the target – our target – is Abayon."
"But if Abayon has some of this Golden Lily treasure – "
"Listen," Tai said, cutting him off.
"There's no doubt Yamashita received a lot of the Golden Lily shipments in the Philippines. Hirohito's cousin, Prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi, was stationed in the Philippines to oversee the secreting away of the treasure. Some say there were over 175 sites prepared all over the islands. No matter how good they were at secrecy, word of this leaked. Some have been found. But the rumor is a couple of the truly key ones, containing hundreds of millions – if not billions – of dollars worth of gold and art are still hidden.
"When Yamashita surrendered on September second, 1945, he was charged with war crimes, but there was no mention of plundered treasure – not a single mention of it in the trial transcripts. Yamashita was convicted and sentenced to death. He was hanged. Pretty damn quickly too. War was different back then. None of this bleeding heart stuff you see these days."
She said this with a tone of contempt that even Vaughn found striking.
"But…" She drew the word out.
"Have you ever heard of Operation Paper Clip?"
Vaughn shook his head. He had stopped packing and, while focused on what Tai was saying, felt as if he were at the edge of a vast, dark chasm, the ground on which he stood not exactly secure.
"Operation Paper Clip has also been well-documented, yet no one ever talks about it," Tai said.
"And when they do, they focus on Europe and the German rocket scientists. Paper Clip was instituted in the last years of the war, when the tide had turned and we were pretty confident we were going to win. Some smart person figured out that there was going to be a wealth of technical information to be gained from those we defeated. After all, the Germans had built V-2 rockets capable of hitting London.
"Operation Paper Clip, a rather innocuous name for a rather devious endeavor, was started in 1944 as those at the strategic level started looking beyond the end of the war. The Japanese and Germans might have plundered the lands they conquered of their physical riches, but in the States there were those who realized that there were other, more valuable riches which needed to be harvested."
Tai tapped the side of her head.
"Brain power."
Vaughn nodded.
"Yeah. I read about that. A lot of the scientists who worked on the early space program were ex-Nazis."
"Ex-Nazis who we could use," Tai said.
"They hanged Yamashita in the Philippines for war crimes, yet they welcomed into the United States Nazi scientists who had done terrible things, because they had knowledge we wanted. Like the Kempetai, we sent intelligence officers from the JIOA – Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency – with our frontline troops as they swept into Germany. There are actually recorded instances where the JIOA officers almost got into firefights with officers from the war crimes units as both groups went after the same people, but for very different reasons. And when official decisions had to be made over jurisdiction, the JIOA almost always took precedence. And this was despite the fact that President Truman signed an executive order banning the immigration of war criminals from the Axis powers into the United States."
"How do you know all this stuff?" Vaughn asked.
"My specialty is intelligence."
"Yeah," Vaughn said, "but all this history. World War II. I mean, that's old stuff."
"Old stuff that still has repercussions today," Tai said. She put another bullet into the magazine in her hand, held it up to check that it was full, then slid it into a pocket on her vest.
"Abayon came out of the Second World War. Everything has a history. The best way to understand things now is to examine where they came from. Most Americans have little sense of history, and because of that, they have little sense of why things are the way they are."
Vaughn held the thought. His brother-in-law had died on a mission to free hostages. The justification for the mission had been enough for Vaughn's team in isolation. But they had never examined why the Abu Sayef had taken those hostages. It was an axiom of guerrilla warfare that few openly discussed anymore, but one man's terrorist was another man's freedom fighter.
"Listen," Tai said. She had stopped loading bullets.
"You know the saying, 'Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it'? Well, those who don't learn from history end up not making it, but being footnotes in it. Bad footnotes. And for everything that's written down in history books, think about all the things that aren't written down.
"You said you heard of the German rocket scientists we used after the war. But what about the German chemical and biological scientists? No one ever wrote about them or talked about them. But the Germans were the world's foremost experts on chemical warfare by the end of the war because they used it. On an unimaginable scale in the concentration camps. Tabun. Soman. Sarin. They invented them all."
Vaughn held his hand up.
"Wait a second. Let's not go off on a tangent here. This" – he pointed down at the rock floor – "is Okinawa, not Europe."
Tai nodded.
"I know. I was just using examples. But don't you think we did the same thing out here in the Pacific at the end of the war? You have to admit that despite the war crimes trials, overall, we were pretty lenient on both the Germans and the Japanese after the war."
"Okay," Vaughn acknowledged.
"Getting back to the Golden Lily project…wasn't a lot of treasure recovered after the war?"
"No. Some say Marcos came to power because he had some of Yamashita's gold. Then there's the rumors about the Black Eagle Trust."
Tai paused and shook her head.
"You're right. I'm going too far afield. We have to keep our eye on our balclass="underline" Abayon. He's the target, and we're going in tonight to figure out how to terminate him."
Vaughn was tempted to ask about the Black Eagle Trust, but knew it was time to focus on the upcoming mission. There was still some last-minute planning before they headed out to the airfield.
He went into the latrine and stopped in surprise when he saw Kasen seated on one of the open toilets, a rubber tube around one arm and a syringe in the other hand, the needle sunk deep into his arm. Kasen looked up and saw Vaughn but pushed the plunger anyway.
"What the hell are you doing?" Vaughn demanded.
Kasen slid the needle out of his arm, removed the rubber tube, and flexed that hand several times. He stood, sliding the gear into a small black pouch.
"None of your fucking business."
"We're on a team," Vaughn said.
"So?"
"I don't want to be on a team with a junkie."
"Oh, fuck off," Kasen said, trying to push past.
Vaughn put an arm out, blocking him.
"Wait a second."
Kasen swung and Vaughn ducked the blow, backing up.
"The others need to know about this."
"Why?" Kasen asked, pausing, looking at Vaughn as if he were speaking to an idiot.
"Everyone here has secrets. At least you know mine. Tell Orson. Tell the others. You don't think Orson and the people he works for know about this?" He held up the black case.