Out of a night storm a great Japanese flying boat came down in the Bohol Strait off Cebu. Guerrillas and fishermen pulled the survivors from the water — among them a Japanese admiral, Fukudome — and, from a waterproof bag he clung to, a sheaf of the enemy's most secret papers. The sea had delivered into island hands something the guerrillas did not yet understand the worth of.

At Magtalisay on the Cebu coast two villagers, Pedro Gantuangoko and Rufo Wamer, found a wooden box washed up from the fallen plane and hid it from the searching enemy. Inside was a red portfolio marked with a single letter, Z. They passed it hand to hand to a guerrilla corporal, Berting Varga, and up toward Cushing's command. Two fishermen had caught the enemy's whole battle plan out of the sea.

The enemy came for the papers in fury. The Cebu garrison commander, Onishi, threw two thousand soldiers across the south of the island to find them, and where they searched they burned — villages given to the torch, people driven out or killed, all for a box the searchers never found. The price of the Z-Plan began to be paid, and it was paid by Cebu.

Under hard pressure from Laurel, Manuel Roxas took the chair of a new Economic Planning Board, charged to master the famine and the black market. It was a cruel post — a man who held in secret to Quezon and the return, made now to manage the hunger of the puppet state. He took it as he took everything in those years: outwardly serving, inwardly waiting.

Cushing had twenty-five men; the enemy hunting him had thousands, and the island was burning. So he made his bargain: the admiral and his officers returned, in exchange for the people left in peace. On the tenth Fukudome was carried back to the Japanese lines, and the reprisals eased. The enemy thought he had won. But the box with the red portfolio was already gone to the sea.

Laurel went on the radio to call up a Labor Recruitment Agency and forty thousand Filipino hands to build the defenses the enemy wanted against the coming Americans. The country answered with its feet: the boycott was near total. Filipinos would go hungry and risk the gun before they would dig the trenches meant to hold their own liberators out. Even under threat, the people found a way to refuse.

Benigno Aquino led a mission of thanks to Tokyo — with Yulo, de las Alas, and Osias — and there received from the emperor's hand the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun. He told the world that MacArthur could never return, that victory would be Japan's. He spoke for the enemy's Philippines. The other Philippines, in the hills and the barrios, knew better, and waited.

In Rizal the enemy closed a ring on Marking's guerrillas — eighteen hundred troops with cavalry, aircraft, mountain guns, even a tank — and for four hours the trap tightened. Four hundred fighters, starving and half-armed, broke out by a thread and ran for Sampaloc. Marking's band had slipped the noose again, but only just, and left much behind in the running.

In the towns the famine wore its daily face — the queues, the buy-and-sell, the swollen bellies of children, the quiet funerals. People sold the last of the old life for a cup of rice and boiled what the sea and the ditches gave. To live another day had become the whole of the work of living.

Across the water on Negros, the intelligence man Ed Andrews took delivery of the first of the Z-Plan documents, carried over from Cebu. The box was moving toward the sea and the submarines, one careful hand to the next. What had washed up on a Cebu beach was now in the hands of men who knew how to send it where it would matter.

At dusk off Basay the submarine Crevalle surfaced, and Colonel Abcede brought out to her the refugees from Tolong — some twenty-eight souls — and the wooden box of the Z-Plan. She took them all down into the deep and ran for Australia, and reached Darwin safe eight days later. The enemy's secret and a boatload of the saved rode out together beneath his own patrols.

By the third week of May the box had reached the translators in Brisbane, and the enemy's whole plan for the great sea battle lay open in Allied hands before a shot was fired. The guerrillas who had found it and fought for it and sent it out heard nothing back. They could not know what they had done — that a red portfolio off a Cebu beach would help decide a battle a thousand miles away. They had changed the war, and would never see it.

The Cebu naval commander Watanabe scattered leaflets across the island: Cushing was to give up all that came from the crash by noon on the thirtieth, or else. Cushing sent back a lie with a straight face — that fishermen had seen a boat carry the satchel off to Bohol. It bought him days. But the enemy's patience had a bottom, and the thirtieth was coming.

The Narwhal ran into Alusan Bay on Samar with twenty-five tons and twenty-two men — among them American airmen come to raise a weather station on the coast. The fleet that would return needed to know the sky as much as the sea, and so, on a Samar shore, men began to read the winds for the ships still far away.

The land gave less with every season of the war. The paddies lay short of hands and seed and water buffalo; the burned fields of the campaigns had not come back; the soil itself seemed tired. What the enemy did not seize, the exhausted earth could not grow. The famine was written now in the ground.

The word came down to Ramsey at last: no longer only watch, but strike. His East Central Luzon net turned from counting the enemy to cutting him — the depots, the lines, the small sure sabotage that would matter most when the ships came. The underground was sharpening from an eye into a knife.

The secret police hunted all the harder as their fear grew. Agents were taken, safe houses lost, couriers followed to their contacts and then to the cells. The closer the return came, the more desperate the enemy was to blind and deafen the resistance before it could rise. Every message now was carried at the price of a life.

When the deadline passed, the enemy struck. A Japanese offensive fell on Cushing's headquarters, took it by surprise, and sent his battered command running through the hills. The price of the papers came due in full — his men scattered, his island hunted. But the papers were safe in Australia, and no offensive could bring them back. Cushing had lost his camp and kept the secret.

The submarine Nautilus came into Tukuran on Mindanao with ninety-two tons and put ashore an agent, Rosenquist, to make his way inland to Laureta's guerrilla headquarters. The great boats were running the southern coasts almost at will now, laying in the guns and the men for the day the front would reach the islands.

Still the enemy pressed Laurel's government to declare war on America and Britain, and still Laurel and his ministers held back, spending words to buy time. They would not make the country a formal enemy of the power they believed was coming. The pressure mounted with the enemy's fear; the answer would not come until later in the year.

Far to the west the submarine Redfin landed a six-man Filipino watching team under Sergeant Corpus, with twenty-five tons of gear, on a small island off Palawan. Within a fortnight their radio was talking to Australia. Even Palawan, the long western wall of the islands, now had its eyes on the enemy's sea road.

General Vicente Lim — the first Filipino of West Point, a soldier who would not quit the fight — set out by boat to reach a Negros submarine and join MacArthur's planning for the return. Off Batangas the enemy flagged his boat down and found guns in the hold. They took him to Calapan, then to Fort Santiago. One of the finest the country had was in the enemy's hands.

Across the sea President Quezon was dying by inches at a sanatorium, his lungs failing, his heart set on a homecoming he would not live to see. He held to the promise of return to the last. The country did not know how near his end was — only that its flag still flew somewhere free, and that the man who had raised it was fading beneath it.

The enemy remade his command for the battle he now knew was coming. A Fourteenth Area Army rose in Manila, a Thirty-Fifth Army in Cebu, and a planning staff under Yamaguchi set to laying out seventy airfields across the islands. Trees fell, caves were dug, coasts were wired. The occupation was turning the whole archipelago into a fortress to be held against its own people's liberation.

Through June the boats came and went like a tide. The Nautilus put ninety-two tons and four men ashore at Balatong Point on Negros and took off seventeen refugees; the Narwhal carried tons and men to Peralta on Panay and to Fertig on Mindanao and slipped away again. Guns in, refugees out, night after night. The lifeline was a flood now, and the enemy could not stop it.

Far to the east, past the edge of everything the islands could see, the Americans landed on the enemy's islands and a great sea-and-air battle was fought. The people knew none of the truth of it — only rumors, a new tension in the garrisons, more planes in the sky. But the rumors said the same thing the matchboxes did: the tide had turned, and it was turning toward home.

At Malabang in Lanao a man the enemy had trusted turned on them. Ali Dimaporo fell upon the Japanese commander Ishima and a dozen of his soldiers, killed them, and took to the hills as a guerrilla leader. In the Moro country the occupation learned again that a collaborator's loyalty lasted exactly as long as it served him, and no longer.

The rains came down on a countryside too broken to use them. Fields no one had strength to plant, dikes no one had mended, the fever thick in the standing water. The old cycle of the planting turned over a land that could barely answer it. The sky gave what it always had; the war had taken the hands to meet it.

A courier from Volckmann in the far north made his way down to Captain Ball's hidden coastal station near Baler, on the Pacific shore, to knot the northern net into the wider web that ran through Samar to Australia. The resistance was stitching itself together across the whole length of the islands — north to south, mountain to sea — into one instrument for the return.

Late in June Cushing's guerrillas gathered the last of the scattered Z-Plan papers and passed them to Andrews, with word from Australia that a submarine would come for them within ten days. The great find was complete and on its way out, every page. The enemy had burned half of Cebu to prevent exactly this, and failed. The islands had kept the secret and would send it home.