Gold Fever
by
Tom Stern
For Yolanda, who is not in this book.
Inspired by a true story
Names, characters and locations changed for reasons that will become obvious
Acknowledgments
My deep thanks to Professor Ken Atchity, founder of AEI, for his guidance and support; to Monica Faulkner, editor par excellence, for her wonderful work; and to my many friends who offered valuable suggestions and comments.
The War-Prayer
O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief. We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
Mark Twain
(Written during America's 1898 to 1913 war to colonize the Philippines, Twain decided not to have the prayer published until after his death. "I have told the truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world.")
Prologue
General Yamashita’s Gold
South China Sea, off the Philippines, before dawn, 1942
"Wake up, captain! Multiple sonar contacts just came out of a squall. They're almost on top of us, sir!"
Richard Jamieson, captain of USS Racer, snapped awake, his heart racing. In enemy waters he slept fully dressed--ten seconds later he was in the control room.
"Take her up to periscope depth."
As the sub rose toward the ocean surface, he had time for a moment's appreciation of his crew's drilled teamwork. Now four weeks at sea out of Australia, they were the first Americans to venture into the main shipping lanes to Japan. The men, every one of them, were as ready for combat as they'd ever be.
"Up periscope."
The first officer leaned toward him and whispered, "For Chrissake, Rick, don't keep the scope up as long as last time."
Moments later the lens broke through the rolling sea, the movement generating a phosphorescent froth that could betray them to a trained eye even in the near-darkness after nautical dawn. Jamieson was tempted to take only a quick look before down-scoping, but he knew better than to be hasty. With the careful, deliberate eyes of a predator he scanned the faintly illuminated sea--and froze.
"Down scope!" he barked. It was the strangest convoy he'd ever seen, one huge freighter and a couple of smaller ones. Surprisingly, one of the escorts was an aircraft carrier of perhaps forty thousand tons, and the convoy was led by a Nagato-class battleship with sixteen-inch guns.
"Hell of an escort for a convoy this size," he muttered. His voice hardened. "Let 'em pass. Then we'll shove a couple of steel fish up the carrier's ass."
"They're zigging toward us, sir!"
"Set the torpedoes for impact detonation. Range'll be fifteen hundred yards, running time two minutes."
"Aye-aye, sir."
"Up scope!"
He tried to make the order sound routine. In the few minutess that had passed, night had changed to early dawn. Now, less than a mile from the convoy, he could see Japanese crewmen servicing fighter planes on the flight deck of the enormous man of war, and beyond them sailors polishing the huge guns of the looming battleship. The carrier was Zaikaku class, the same ships that had hit Pearl Harbor.
"Fire all forward torpedoes at the carrier, then turn left full rudder and fire a rear salvo at the battleship. Be ready to dive as soon as the fish are away."
"Torpedoes fore and aft ready, captain."
"Ready to fire on my mark."
"Aye-aye, sir."
"Fire one!"
Racer shuddered as an explosion of compressed air signaled the launch of the first weapon.
"Fire two through four!"
A deadly fan of fluorescent wakes sped toward the massive carrier.
"Down scope! Dive! Dive! They saw us launch and they're turning this way!"
Racer had just attacked the largest and most fabled treasure trove in history, one equal to almost half of the world's wealth, but neither Jamieson nor his doomed crew would ever know.
The Japanese carrier's helmsman spotted Racer's onrushing torpedoes and took evasive action, but in doing so exposed the freighter nestled closest to the warship. The first torpedo slammed into the carrier, igniting the munitions in its magazine. Seconds later, the hull exploded in a fireball, sending eighty thousand gallons of seawater per second thundering into the ship as it began its death plunge to the sea bottom four miles below.
Fleet Admiral Kenjiro Watanabe, who had been asleep when the torpedo detonated, dove into the last lifeboat as his carrier sank. He watched in despair as Racer's second torpedo flashed past his sinking warship and tore a twenty-foot hole in the side of the lightly armored freighter Shinjuku, destroying its propulsion system and leaving it dead in the water.
He gazed at the crippled freighter sinking bow-first into the sea. In a few moments, the golden treasure that it had been his duty to see safely to Japan--a fortune far greater than the total of all those lost at sea during centuries of expeditions by sultans and rajahs--would join his planes, his warship, and his four thousand men at the bottom of the sea.
Kenjiro Watanabe, descendant of twenty generations of warriors, had failed. His shame could be expunged in only one way.
"When you reach safety, send this wire to General Yamashita in Singapore." He pencilled a few characters on a scrap of paper and turned again to the blazing oil slick that marked the grave of his command. "The curse of the gold!" His voice was so bitter that the surviving crewmen were shocked. "May it curse anyone who touches it!"
He handed his highest-ranking crewman the death poem he had composed long ago for his family. The others crawled gingerly to the edges of the lifeboat and turned to face the sea, averting their eyes. After Watanabe disrobed, he disemboweled himself with a seven-inch knife.
As Watanabe lay dying in the lifeboat, the Japanese battleship's depth charges crushed the fleeing Racer. The Japanese crew kept watch for survivors bobbing up amid Racer's mobile tombstone, the flotsam and bunker fuel that fouled the smooth sea, but none appeared.
Like Jamieson, Watanabe died without knowing the consequences of their deadly encounter. His men had already lowered his body into the deep when the battleship's crew managed to harness a line to the foundering Shinjuku and tow it--and its gold--to Basilan Island in the Philippines.
***
Singapore, Japanese Army Headquarters, 1942
General Tomoyuki Yamashita meditated silently. His massive shoulders, developed in the gymnastics of his youth, barely moved with each measured breath. Through half-open eyes, he re-read the flimsy telegraph on the low desk in front of him and pondered its implications.
Regret to inform you Shinjuku torpedoed by US submarines and sinking, 12 degrees 15 seconds north, 118 degrees east. Treasure may be lost. Sayonara.
Watanabe
The brief message presented him with the biggest dilemma of his life: how to safeguard the greatest treasure in history. Yamashita chuckled as he thought of the story behind his good luck.
In 1931, when the Japanese swept out of Korea to annex Manchuria, all Asia knew that a wider war would soon come. And those who could protect their assets made plans to do so.
For five millennia the Chinese had been collecting gold--trading for it, stealing it in war, wresting vast quantities of it from the mountains of Shandong Province. And for almost as long, so had the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, and Indonesia.
Gold was not their only treasure, for it is in the alluvial beds of these countries that the bulk of the world's diamonds, rubies and sapphires, along with cascades of lesser gems, are to be found. Over the generations, Asia's warlords, nobility, governments, and rich business families had accumulated more than half of all the world's wealth in their storehouses. Now, with war clouds gathering on the Asian horizon, they sought a safe haven for their holdings. The cleverest among them looked to Singapore. Under the protection of the British Royal Navy and 85,000 crack troops, the island fortress was believed impregnable.
Throughout the 1930s, wealth flooded into Singapore, and by the time the Japanese launched their simultaneous attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines on December 7, 1941, its bank vaults were filled to bursting with more than one hundred thousand tons of gold bullion and two metric tons of investment-grade jewels.
Over the centuries, far more gold has been mined from the earth than anyone has ever guessed, but it was only the imminence of war that had brought so much of it together in one place. Fine leather books of account itemized each deposit, giving the rich what turned out to be a false sense of security--for when war finally broke out, Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito's first commands included an order to Yamashita: Take Singapore!
In just seven days, the general's troops overwhelmed Singapore's defenses with a sneak attack by land and captured the fortress city.
In the first flush of this military success, Yamashita devised plans to use both the plundered wealth and his army to create an independent empire with himself as ruler. But within months the Allies under General Douglas MacArthur began fighting their way toward Singapore.
MacArthur's offensive was a direct threat to the treasure--which Yamashita's advisors estimated as worth more than four hundred billion U.S. dollars on the world market. With Hirohito's consent and the help of his navy friends, Yamashita devised a plan to ship the treasure to Tokyo's Fleet Headquarters in a series of clandestine convoys.
The first and second convoys, each carrying a thousand metric tons of gold, completed uneventful voyages to Tokyo. But the third and final convoy had consisted of the ill-fated Shinjuku, now at anchor at Basilan with its three thousand tons of gold. And Yamashita dared not risk losing it--or the ninety thousand tons still in his Singapore vaults.
Spreading his hands in a gesture of decision, Yamashita rose from his meditation cushion and summoned his closest aides. "Until our fleet crushes the American navy, we can't risk trying to ship Shinjuku's treasure or the rest of what remains in Singapore to Japan."
"There's so much open sea north of the Philippines that we can't guarantee the safety of convoys beyond Manila," reported one aide.
"Even if we lose the rest of Southeast Asia, we'll hold the Philippines forever," Yamashita growled, pounding his fist on the table to emphasize his determination. "Move it all! To Basilan Island!"
***
Basilan Island, Southern Philippines, several weeks later
The chain gang, a long, single-file line of Filipino slave laborers, shuffled through the prison gate and along a broad dirt road that led into the volcanic mountains. As the emaciated slaves plodded along, a steady stream of trucks coming from the Shinjuku and a newly arrived fleet of treasure freighters rolled by, covering them with red dust.
One prisoner, exhausted by heat and near-starvation, fell to the ground, unable to rise. A Japanese guard stepped over him, chopped off his feet just above the shackles, and left him to bleed to death. The chain gang, beaten men now dragging one set of empty, bloodstained shackles, trudged on.
Yamashita, driving by in his open command car, took no sadistic pleasure in watching the man fall, but as a military man he could not but approve of his troops' efficiency.
The road narrowed as it climbed into the mountains. Cool streams and waterfalls made musical sounds. Yamashita gazed with pleasure at the Sulu Sea's azure waters sparkling below and at the paradisiacal island of Mindanao just across the Basilan Strait. As his car climbed, the sweltering equatorial heat cooled to near-perfection. Had this been peacetime, he thought, a walk through the rubber plantations and towering coconut groves in the company of his wife or, better, his new young mistress, would have been a heavenly pleasure. But he was at war.
Ten miles into the mountains, above the tree line of a towering volcano, the road came to an end at a mining operation. Japanese army engineers lazed near their Mitsubishi bulldozers while a cement batch plant rattled at the edge of the clearing. A battalion of troops stood guard around a soccer-field sized shed in the center of the clearing. The shed was stacked from floor to ceiling with small wooden crates, several thousand in all, each one bearing a label in Japanese, "Corned Beef, Product of Argentina."
Junior officers led Yamashita into a tunnel that ended in a large underground chamber already half-filled with the crates. Four thousand years ago, he reflected, Egyptian slaves had carried provisions--food and treasure meant to sustain a newly dead pharaoh on his eternal journey--into similar silent caverns. After the slaves did their work, they were killed and left in the burial chamber to serve their ruler and keep him company in the afterlife. Yamashita liked that image.
He stationed himself under a coconut tree, where he spent the afternoon studying war plans and occasionally glancing at the human conveyor belt of Filipinos moving crate after crate from the shed to the subterranean chamber.
By dusk the transfer was complete. Yamashita strolled into the cavern, ordered one of the crates opened, and laughed. It contained not canned corned beef but gold bars, six of them, each the size of a loaf of bread. Even in the dim light the ingots shone with a soft luster, and on each was stamped one word: SUMATRA.