Typhoon Fury

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.”