The carts that brought in the equipment were simply grabbed off the roads by the Nipponese Army, along with their drivers--mostly farm-boys--and pressed into service on the spot. The farmboys can never leave Bundok, of course. The weaker carabaos are slaughtered for meat, the stronger ones put to work on Golgotha, and the drivers are assimilated into the workforce. One of these is a boy named Juan with a big round head and a distinctly Chinese cast to his features. He turns out to be trilingual in English, Tagalog, and Cantonese. He can communicate in a sort of pidgin with Wing and the other Chinese, frequently by using a finger to draw Chinese characters on the palm of his hand. Juan is small, healthy, and has a kind of wary agility that Goto Dengo thinks may be useful in what is to come, and so he becomes one of the special crew.
The submerged plumbing in Lake Yamamoto needs to be inspected. Goto Dengo has Rodolfo ask around and see if there are any men among them who have worked as pearl divers. He quickly finds one, a lithe, frail-looking fellow from Palawan, named Agustin. Agustin is weak from dysentery, but he seems to perk up around water, and after a couple of days' rest is diving down to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto with no trouble. He becomes another one of Rodolfo's picked men.
There are really too many Filipinos for the number of tools and holes that they have available, and so the work goes quickly at first as fresh men are quickly rotated through by the squad leaders. Then, one night at about two in the morning, an unfamiliar sound reverberates through the jungle, filtering up from the lowlands where the Tojo River meanders through cane fields and rice paddies.
It is the sound of vehicles. Masses of them. Since the Nipponese have been out of fuel for months, Goto Dengo's first thought is that it must be MacArthur.
He throws on a uniform and runs down to Bundok's main gate along with the other officers. Dozens of trucks, and a few automobiles, are queued up there, engines running, headlights off. When he hears a Nipponese voice coming from the lead car, his heart sinks. He long ago stopped feeling bad about wanting to be rescued by General Douglas MacArthur.
Many soldiers ride atop the trucks. When the sun rises, Goto Dengo savors the novel and curious sight of fresh, healthy, well-fed Nipponese men. They are armed with light and heavy machine guns. They look like Nipponese soldiers did way back in 1937, when they were rolling across northern China. It gives Goto Dengo a strange feeling of nostalgia to remember a day when a terrible defeat was not imminent, when they were not going to lose everything horribly. A lump actually gathers in his throat, and his nose begins to run.
Then he snaps out of it, realizing that the big day has finally arrived. The part of him that is still a loyal soldier of the emperor has a duty to see that the vital war materiel, which has just arrived, is stored away in the big vault of Golgotha. The part of him that isn't a loyal soldier anymore still has a lot to accomplish.
In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can't find your ass with both hands. This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get straightened out, people learn their roles. The heavier trucks cannot make it up the rough road that Goto Dengo has had built up the streambed of the Tojo River, but a couple of the small ones can, and these become the shuttles. So the big trucks pull, one by one, into a heavily fenced and guarded area--well sheltered from MacArthur's observation planes--that was built months ago. Filipinos swarm into these trucks and unload crates, which are small, but evidently quite heavy. Meanwhile the smaller trucks shuttle the crates up the Tojo River Road to the entrance of Golgotha, where they are unloaded onto hand cars and rolled into the tunnel to the main vault. As per the instructions handed down from on high, Goto Dengo sees to it that every twentieth crate is diverted to the fool's chamber.
The unloading proceeds automatically from there, and Goto Dengo devotes most of these days to supervising the final stages of the digging. The new ventilation shafts are proceeding on schedule, and he only needs to check them once a day. The diagonal is now only a few meters away from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. Groundwater has begun to seep through small cracks in the bedrock and trickle down the diagonal into Golgotha, where it collects in a sump that drains into the Tojo. Another few meters of cutting and they will break through into the short stub tunnel that Wing and his men created many months ago, digging downwards from what later became the bottom of the lake.