In Abra, Japanese patrols took Captain William Peryam, only just named to command the 121st Infantry of the northern guerrillas. The regiment that had already broken once in La Union now lost its new commander before he could lead it. In the mountains of the north the war was a hunt, and the hunters were patient.

In Bicol the enemy found Captain Padua's Camp Balayan and raided it. Juan Miranda, the Tangcong Vaca leader who had merged the Bicol bands only weeks before, was shot through the left leg but got away. The wound would slow him; it would not stop the work he had begun.

The Kempeitai seized the bodyguard of Lieutenant Joe Barker in Manila, and under three days of torture the man led them to Barker's network. A wave of arrests followed, and much of the Manila underground was torn up by the roots. Barker went to Fort Santiago. The city learned again how thin the line was between a safe house and a cell.

The second year of the occupation opened hungry. Rice was scarce and dear, the ration thin, and the agencies that were meant to feed the city fed the army first. Families sold what they had for a cavan of rice, and the black market became the real market. Hunger, more than any proclamation, ruled the day.

On the dark of the fourteenth a submarine crept toward the south coast of Negros on charts a hundred years old, and put Major Jesus Villamor and his PLANET team ashore at Catmon Point. Sent by MacArthur himself, they carried no army — only the means to build a net of eyes across the Visayas and a radio to carry what those eyes saw. The return had begun, in the quietest possible way.

On the rice plain the Hukbalahap took the field again — five thousand fighters in thirty-five squadrons, back on the roads after the lean months. They struck the constabulary garrisons and the Japanese supply depots, and the harvest of the plain answered to them as much as to any landlord. The peasant army was growing, and it would double before spring was out.

The Japanese closed the death camp at O'Donnell and sent the Filipino soldiers home on parole. Each man signed an oath never to take up arms again, and his town mayor was made answerable for him. Thin and broken, they walked back to their barrios. Some kept the oath; others rested, healed, and slipped away to the hills, and the enemy's parole roll became a roster for the resistance.

The Kempeitai raided the Manila law office of Senator Elpidio Quirino and took everyone in it. For five days they swept the city and filled the cells of Fort Santiago with near three hundred suspects. Quirino, who had refused every invitation to serve the puppet government, was held some fifteen days and let go — they could prove nothing but his refusal. Others were not so fortunate.

Near Sipalay the PLANET radioman, Emilio Quinto, raised his set — station 4E7 — and reached across the sea to Darwin. On the twenty-seventh the answer came back: two-way contact with the Southwest Pacific command. After the long silence, the Visayas had a steady voice to Australia, and Australia had ears in the islands.

From the Diet in Tokyo, Premier Tojo promised the islands their independence — in the shortest possible time, if the people would cooperate. On the twenty-ninth the Manila papers carried the words, and they travelled fast. To some it was hope; to many it was a bargain offered at gunpoint, freedom promised by the power that had taken it away.

Early in February a heavy Japanese sweep rolled across northern Luzon. It struck at the free government of Governor Roque Ablan of Ilocos Norte — and Ablan, who had kept Philippine authority alive in the hills for a year, vanished into the mountains and was never certainly seen again. In Benguet the enemy scattered Parker Calvert's men. The north paid for its defiance.

The Manila Tribune spread the word across its front page: GUERRILLAS SURRENDER — thirteen hundred and sixty-seven fighters, it said, had laid down their arms under amnesty to a Colonel Suzuki. In the town it was meant to break hope. In the hills, where the men knew their own numbers, it was read aloud and laughed at. Print was the occupation's weapon too.

To mark Tojo's pledge, the KALIBAPI declared a public holiday, and Benigno Ramos led his Ganap followers through the streets in rallies of thanks. The collaborationist ranks made their loyalty loud. Most of the country watched from the sidewalk and kept its own counsel.

The USAFIP-NL commanders, Moses and Noble, made their way to Captain Praeger's hidden headquarters in Cagayan, the one set in the far north still reaching the outside. Through it they reported the doings of the northern guerrillas to Australia. It was a long thread, and a fragile one; before the year was out both men would be in Japanese hands.

With wages worth nothing and work scarce, the city lived by the buy-and-sell. Clerks and teachers became vendors; heirlooms, watches, and wedding rings went across the counter for rice and salt. The sidewalks filled with little stalls, and a proud people learned to trade the last of the old life for the next day's meal.

Near Iloilo, Peralta's Panay guerrillas sprang an ambush on a Japanese column and almost took the greatest prize of all — Lieutenant General Tanaka, the commander of the Fourteenth Army in the islands. He escaped, shaken, but the message was plain: not even the highest officer of the occupation was safe on a Panay road.

The Military Administration ordered nearly half the cane fields — forty-six parts in a hundred — turned over to cotton for the empire. Cotton could not be eaten. As the food land shrank, the price of rice in Manila leapt from thirty pesos a sack toward two hundred. Policy had become famine by decree.

The word Fertig had waited for came on the twenty-third: MacArthur recognized him as commander of the Tenth Military District — all Mindanao and Sulu — after the outside had tested, days before, whether the Mindanao signal was truly his. Australia allowed no new generals, so Fertig stepped himself down to colonel, and wore the general's stars a Filipino smith had made for him just the same.

On a narrow tongue of land reaching into Laguna de Bay, the Marking guerrillas under Marcos Agustin played hide-and-seek with the Japanese patrols. At his side was the journalist Yay Panlilio — Colonel Yay — the brains and the second in command, a woman leading fighting men. Hunted and hungry, they held their ground and their nerve, and waited for the war to turn.

From Panay a Japanese propaganda officer, Hitomi, sent word up the line: fine speeches meant nothing without a show of force. So the enemy began to empty the countryside — moving the rural people into the garrisoned towns where they could be watched, and leaving the guerrilla hills bare. The leaflets had failed; the fist would try.

On a beach at Labangan the submarine Tambor put ashore Chick Parsons, Charles Smith, and two tons of supplies for Fertig's men. It was small — a few crates against a whole occupation — but its meaning was enormous. The Aid had come. The islands had proof at last that the outside remembered them, and that the promise made from Corregidor was being kept.

The enemy struck back at the peasant army. In a surprise dawn attack the Japanese fell on the Hukbalahap headquarters at Cabiao and carried off a large number of the movement's cadres and fighters. The Huk had grown bold in its success; the raid was the price of being found.

Under Laurel's department of the interior, the Executive Commission ordered the Catholic clergy to preach loyalty to the occupation and to help its pacification. Some priests read the words and no more; some did not read them at all. The memory of Bishop Finnemann, thrown into the sea only months before, sat in every parish that heard the order.

The hunt closed on Praeger. With Japanese patrols on his trail, he took apart his heavy homemade radio at Kabugao to carry it deeper into Apayao, to Bulu. For a time the far-northern set went quiet, and one of the oldest voices of the resistance dropped from the air.

On the same plain fought the Wha-Chi — Squadron 48 — the Chinese of the labor union who had taken up arms against Japan. They marched and bled beside the Huk, and later helped raise new squadrons for the peasant army. The war against the occupier was fought by Filipino and Chinese hands together on the rice land.

The Japanese answered the Huk with a heavy hand. A major operation swept northeastern Pampanga, striking the squadrons hard and driving the survivors into the Zambales mountains. The peasant army was not destroyed, but it was bloodied and scattered, and it learned again that a victory in the open drew a reckoning on the barrios.

The Executive Commission issued Order One Hundred Thirty-Seven, carrying the neighborhood-association watch out of Manila and across the whole country. Every district now had its rolls, its night patrols, its duty to report, and travel between towns grew harder. The net of eyes the occupation had woven in the capital was thrown over the provinces.

On Cebu, James Cushing came back from Negros to find his organization torn by a mutiny. He put it down, gathered the pieces, and rebuilt the island's resistance under constant Japanese pressure and never enough food. The mining engineer turned colonel would hold Cebu for the rest of the war.

The great Candaba swamp and the lone bulk of Mount Arayat were the fortress of the plain. Their reeds and water hid the Huk and the Wha-Chi from the enemy, and no column could easily follow them in. But the marsh took its own toll — malaria burned through the camps, and the fever killed men the Japanese could not reach. The land sheltered the resistance and taxed it in the same breath.

At the end of March the enemy struck southern Negros by land, sea, and air, and drove hard against the very coast where Villamor had come ashore. The PLANET team scattered before the offensive. The net of eyes survived — its men slipped away to their tasks across the islands — but its founder was hunted now on the ground he had chosen.

On the central plain the war turned on families. Major Lapham learned that Charles Cushing had given himself up to the Japanese after they seized his wife and held her in Santo Tomas. In the same weeks Major Ed Ramsey set out on a dangerous trek north, to knit the guerrillas of Nueva Ecija and Pangasinan into one web. One man was taken by love; another walked toward the fight.

Villamor sent his PLANET men out across the Visayas — YuHico to Panay, Jorge to Bohol, Bell to Cebu — so the eyes would cover every island. And Chick Parsons, crossing from Mindanao to Leyte, found the resistance there at war with itself, two leaders, Lang and Peters, locked in a deadly quarrel. The network was spreading; so were the feuds it would have to master.