Slocum paused and looked about the room.

"Is that clear?"

The reply was a thunderous, "Yes, sir."

In the control room, Foster shook his head. It was as if they were still in college, playing on the team. He had left the team behind a long time ago.

"What is this Yamashita's gold thing you mentioned?" Vaughn asked Tai. The two of them were in the corridor outside the main isolation room, packing their rucksacks for the upcoming mission. Vaughn could tell that Tai had been on airborne missions before, because she was going through the same process he was: packing and repacking, each time leaving something out to lighten and tighten the load. You took a whole different view about what you packed when you had to carry it on your back.

For example, they were carrying a week's worth of food – just in case – even though they planned to be on the ground for only a few days. But they were cutting down the meal packages, taking out unnecessary and "heavy" items such as extra plastic spoons. To an outsider it would seem ridiculous, but it was almost a ritual of mission preparation in Special Operations. Of course, a week's worth of food for a mission was only seven meals. On the other hand, they both were going heavy on items such as ammunition.

Tai looked up from her gear, which was laid out on a poncho liner.

"General Tomoyuki Yamashita was the commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines during the Second World War. It's been well-documented that the Japanese conducted a systematic pillage of the countries they conquered during the war. They took all the riches they could get their hands on, particularly gold – the accumulated wealth of twelve Asian countries. Not only gold, but other treasures, such as pieces of art.

"There were special teams accompanying Japanese forces in the early days of the war, when the Rising Sun spread around the western Pacific Rim. They were tasked with emptying banks, treasuries, art galleries, museums, palaces – even pawnshops and private homes – of anything of value. It was a special branch of the Kempetai – the Japanese military intelligence service."

Vaughn didn't find that very surprising. He'd been to Kuwait during the first Gulf war and seen what the Iraqis had done there. Plundering was an age-old companion of military conquest. Sometimes it was done officially, and often unofficially. He knew the Nazis had done it in Europe and Russia during the Second World War, so it didn't take a great leap of logic to figure the Japanese had done it too.

"There's a lot that's not known about the entire thing," Tai continued, "but there are some facts. The overall plundering project was called kin no yuri, which means Golden Lily, named after a poem written by the Emperor Hirohito."

She snorted.

"That's one war criminal who got to skate. He professed ignorance of Golden Lily after the war and said it didn't exist. Yet his brother, Prince Chichibu, was in charge of the project. You don't think they chatted about it over a meal? Of course, Hirohito also expressed ignorance about the rape of Nanking. Seems everyone always gets memory failure or they weren't really in charge when bad things that occurred under their watch are brought up."

"I don't get it," Vaughn said as he refolded his Gore-Tex waterproof jacket and stuffed it once more in an outside pocket on his rucksack, trying to have it take up fewer square inches of room.

"Why do you think this treasure ended up in the Philippines and not Japan? Seems like the emperor would have wanted those riches close at hand."

"Because the U.S. Navy instituted a submarine blockade of Japan very early in the war," Tai explained.

"Many ships heading back to the homeland were sunk, and Chichibu didn't want to take the risk of losing the treasure. It was easier – and more secure – to send the ships carrying the loot to the Philippines. The Americans were leery of sinking ships in that area because some of them carried American POWs. In fact, a couple of POW ships were accidentally sunk late in the war, with great loss of friendly life."

Vaughn considered this as Tai began loading magazines with nine-millimeter rounds for her MP-5 submachine gun. He noted her precision as she made sure each round was properly seated.

"Why do you think Orson didn't want to talk about it?" Vaughn asked.

Tai paused, bullet in one hand, magazine in the other, and looked at him.

"As he said, the target – our target – is Abayon."

"But if Abayon has some of this Golden Lily treasure – "

"Listen," Tai said, cutting him off.

"There's no doubt Yamashita received a lot of the Golden Lily shipments in the Philippines. Hirohito's cousin, Prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi, was stationed in the Philippines to oversee the secreting away of the treasure. Some say there were over 175 sites prepared all over the islands. No matter how good they were at secrecy, word of this leaked. Some have been found. But the rumor is a couple of the truly key ones, containing hundreds of millions – if not billions – of dollars worth of gold and art are still hidden.

"When Yamashita surrendered on September second, 1945, he was charged with war crimes, but there was no mention of plundered treasure – not a single mention of it in the trial transcripts. Yamashita was convicted and sentenced to death. He was hanged. Pretty damn quickly too. War was different back then. None of this bleeding heart stuff you see these days."

She said this with a tone of contempt that even Vaughn found striking.

"But…" She drew the word out.

"Have you ever heard of Operation Paper Clip?"

Vaughn shook his head. He had stopped packing and, while focused on what Tai was saying, felt as if he were at the edge of a vast, dark chasm, the ground on which he stood not exactly secure.

"Operation Paper Clip has also been well-documented, yet no one ever talks about it," Tai said.

"And when they do, they focus on Europe and the German rocket scientists. Paper Clip was instituted in the last years of the war, when the tide had turned and we were pretty confident we were going to win. Some smart person figured out that there was going to be a wealth of technical information to be gained from those we defeated. After all, the Germans had built V-2 rockets capable of hitting London.

"Operation Paper Clip, a rather innocuous name for a rather devious endeavor, was started in 1944 as those at the strategic level started looking beyond the end of the war. The Japanese and Germans might have plundered the lands they conquered of their physical riches, but in the States there were those who realized that there were other, more valuable riches which needed to be harvested."

Tai tapped the side of her head.

"Brain power."

Vaughn nodded.

"Yeah. I read about that. A lot of the scientists who worked on the early space program were ex-Nazis."

"Ex-Nazis who we could use," Tai said.

"They hanged Yamashita in the Philippines for war crimes, yet they welcomed into the United States Nazi scientists who had done terrible things, because they had knowledge we wanted. Like the Kempetai, we sent intelligence officers from the JIOA – Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency – with our frontline troops as they swept into Germany. There are actually recorded instances where the JIOA officers almost got into firefights with officers from the war crimes units as both groups went after the same people, but for very different reasons. And when official decisions had to be made over jurisdiction, the JIOA almost always took precedence. And this was despite the fact that President Truman signed an executive order banning the immigration of war criminals from the Axis powers into the United States."