Page 1 of The Atlas Maneuver

PROLOGUE

LUZONISLAND, PHILIPPINES

MONDAY, JUNE4, 1945

11:54P.M.

GENERALTOMOYUKIYAMASHITA TOASTED THE GROUP FOR THE FINALtime. A hundred and seventy-five men stood before him in the dimly lit underground chamber. All engineers. Specially selected. Each having accomplished his task to perfection. They’d performed so well and so fast that he’d ordered a celebration. Fried brown rice, boiled eggs, grilled sweet potatoes, and dried cow’s meat. All washed down with copious amounts of sake. For the past two hours they’d sung patriotic songs and shoutedbanzaí, long life, until they were hoarse. All the harshness of war had been set aside for a few precious hours.

He’d been reassigned to the islands last October, charged with stopping the rapidly advancing American forces. Prior to that he’d led the Imperial Army during the invasion of Malaya and the Battle of Singapore. Both resounding victories. He took pride in how Churchill had described the fall of Singapore.The worst disaster and largest capitulation in British military history.

But everything here had gone wrong.

Now he was doing nothing more than delaying the inevitable. The war was lost. MacArthur had returned. Japan was isolated. And he was trapped in the mountains north of Manila, low on supplies, with the Americans rapidly closing in. For the past fewmonths he’d been less a military commander and more a miner. And banker. Taking deposits. Building vaults. Securing their presence for future withdrawals.

“For you,” he said to the engineers, his metal cup held high. “And a job well done.Banzaí.”

They echoed his good wishes.

The underground chamber around him was the largest they’d constructed, perhaps as much as twenty meters square, illuminated by battery-powered bulbs. Rectangular bronze boxes, filled with gold bars, were stacked eight-high against the walls, each bar around seventy-five kilograms and individually marked by weight and purity. A little under thirty-seven million total kilograms.

An enormous amount of wealth.

And there were 174 other buried vaults, each containing a similar hoard of treasure. All plundered from Asian countries, starting with China in 1937. More came from Korea, Thailand, Burma, French Indochina, Cambodia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Timor, Indonesia, and New Guinea. National treasuries, banks, religious shrines, private estates, museums, factories, homes, galleries. Anything and everything had been looted. A grand larceny of wealth that had been accumulated by its owners for thousands of years. A lot of it had already made it to Japan. The rest was to go by sea. But the Americans had stopped that redistribution with a submarine blockade. No way now to ship anything, much less something as heavy and bulky as gold.

So another way had been conceived.

Hide it all in the mountains of Luzon and come back for it after the war.

The plan had been formulated at the highest level, all the way to Emperor Hirohito himself. Several of the lesser royal princes had headed teams of thieves that had fanned out across the conquered territories, but the emperor’s charming and cultivated brother, Prince Chichibu, had supervised the overall plunder, along with its secreting away, naming the entire schemekin no yuri, Golden Lily, after a poem the emperor had written.

“To each of you,” Prince Chichibu said, his metal cup raised. “The emperor extends his thanks for your dedicated work. He wishes great blessings to you all.”

The engineers returned the toast and offered long life and blessings to the emperor. Many of their eyes were watering with emotion. None of them had ever been this close to someone of the royal house. Nearly all Japanese, Yamashita included, spent their life in awe of the imperial family. The emperor controlled the entire sovereign state, commanded the armed forces, headed the national religion, and was believed to be a living god.

Chichibu stepped close to Yamashita and whispered, “Is all ready?”

He nodded.

Months ago, Prince Chichibu had moved his headquarters from Singapore to Manila and ordered all plunder still on the Asian mainland to be brought to the islands. Thousands of slave laborers and prisoners of war had spent the past few months digging tunnels and fortifying caves with concrete. Each site had to withstand earthquakes, aerial bombing, flooding, and, most of all, time. So the vaults had been constructed like military bunkers. As each was completed the prince had come to personally inspect, like tonight, so there was nothing unusual about his presence.

The men continued to enjoy the revelry, their job completed. The last of the 175 vaults—this one—had been finished three days ago. All of the architectural drawings, inventories, instruments, and tools had been crated and removed. With each vault’s completion the prisoner-of-war laborers had been shot, their bodies sealed inside. Also, some Japanese soldiers had been included with the doomed so that their spirits would help guard the treasure in the years ahead. Which sounded good, but it only masked the real purpose, which was to limit the number of eyewitnesses.

“Is the map secure?” the prince asked him.

“In your car, awaiting your departure.”

Everything had been sped up after MacArthur landed at Leyte. Two hundred thousand enemy troops were gaining ground every day, the Japanese forces slowly retreating ever higher into themountains. A submarine awaited Prince Chichibu to take him back to Japan, along with the map that led to each of the vaults. Natural markers that worked as pointers had been left across the lush landscape. Subtle. Hard to decipher. Part of the jungle. All of it in an ancient code called Chako. The map would be returned to the emperor, who would hold it until the time for retrieval arrived. They might lose the war militarily, but Japan had no intention of losing financially. The idea was to hold the Philippines through a negotiated peace so they could return and retrieve the gold. How much wealth had they hidden? More than anyone could have ever imagined. Somewhere around fifty million kilograms of precious metals.

For the glory of the emperor.

“Time for us to leave,” he whispered to the prince. Then he turned his attention back to the engineers. “Enjoy the food and the drink. You have earned it. It is private, quiet, and safe here. We shall see you in the morning when we evacuate.”

The group offered him a collectivebanzaí, which he returned, noticing the smiles all around from the men. Then he and the prince left the chamber and made their way to a crude elevator that led back up seventy meters to ground level. Along the way he noticed the dynamite that had been set in the shaft while the celebration had been ongoing. A separate access tunnel had also been rigged to explode, the charges spaced far enough apart to seal the passage, but not close enough to totally destroy the path.

He and the prince left the elevator and emerged out into the steamy tropical night. Three demolition experts waited for them. Once the shaft and tunnel were blown the last remnants of human consciousness, the 175 engineers who knew the precise location of the caches, would be dead. Most would suffocate, but some would surely commit ritual suicide in service to their emperor.

He turned to one of the soldiers and nodded.

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