From the submarine Thresher, at Catmon Point on Negros, came a strange cargo — five hundred pounds of supplies, fifty thousand rounds, and one man alone: Major Emigdio Cruz, President Quezon's own physician, under the name Suylan. His errand from the government-in-exile was to see with his own eyes how the islands fared, and whether they held to America. He set off at once on a long, disguised road to Manila.

On Panay the Japanese command under Watanabe set its policy in plain words: the people who fed and hid the guerrillas would be made to bear a heavy sacrifice. The leaflets and the amnesties were finished. What followed on the ground would carry a signature — terror, ordered from above.

The order became fire. On Panay the enemy turned the war on the people — barrios burned, crops destroyed, livestock killed, and civilians of every age cut down. It was a new and terrible thing, a deliberate campaign against the unarmed, and it would run for months. The island learned that the price of the guerrillas in the hills would be paid in the barrios below.

The Military Administration tried to command the market by decree. Ordinance Number Fifteen fixed the price of the small necessities — matches, salt, soap, paper — against the runaway inflation the occupation's own money had made. But a price on paper does not fill a shelf. The goods vanished from the stores and reappeared in the black market at the old, impossible prices.

By the middle of 1943 the famine had bitten deep. The harvests were seized, the transport broken, the money worthless, and in Manila people began to die quietly of hunger and the sicknesses that follow it. There was no battle in it, and no headline — only the slow arithmetic of an occupied country running short of food.

Even as the terror fell on the barrios, Peralta's Free Panay forces held together in the mountains, sheltering the people who fled the burning and striking back where they could. The campaign was meant to turn the people against the guerrillas. On Panay, as often as not, it did the opposite, and drove them into the hills together.

On the last night of July the submarine Grayling stole into Pucio Point on the Panay coast and put Lieutenant Ireneo Ames ashore with equipment and supplies for Peralta's guerrillas. It was a small landing, a token, but a token that mattered — the Aid was reaching even the island the enemy was burning. Panay would fight on knowing it was not alone.

In the Tribune, Laurel gave his first interview as chairman of the commission writing the new state, and announced a hard turn: the constabulary would be reorganized to hunt and liquidate the 'unruly elements' — the guerrillas and those who helped them. The nation being drafted in Manila would come with a sword pointed at the nation in the hills.

At Pililla in Rizal the Japanese seized Colonel Hugh Straughn, the old Spanish-war veteran who had built the Fil-American Irregular Troops across the country south of Manila. They put him before a microphone and made him call on his followers to surrender. He would be beheaded at the Chinese Cemetery. One of the fathers of the Luzon resistance was gone, and his voice turned against his own.

With Straughn taken, the guerrilla families his FAIT had sheltered — Marking's men, the Hunters ROTC, the President Quezon's Own Guerrillas — became independent commands, each under its own leader. The father was gone; the sons multiplied. The resistance around Manila did not shrink. It spread.

By submarine and by parachute the tokens of the promise reached the islands: cigarettes and matchboxes and a magazine, all stamped I SHALL RETURN, and small mirrors to signal the planes. Passed hand to hand in the barrios, they were worth more than tobacco. They were proof the promise still stood, and that the world beyond the water had not forgotten.

At Baybay, Kangleon's men beat the rival band of Blas Miranda; the loser's followers came over, and Leyte at last had one command. Kangleon gathered the island's guerrillas into his 92nd Division. The island that would one day receive MacArthur was made ready, more than a year before he came.

On Cebu the resistance turned on one of its own. Lieutenant Richard Estrella gathered a few commanders in secret and resolved to arrest Harry Fenton, Cushing's co-commander, whose hunt for spies had put innocent people and even a missionary priest, Father Drumm, to death. Fenton's fear had become a terror of its own. His comrades meant to end it.

Cruz worked north island by island, posing as a trader, a seller of fowl, a peddler of vegetables. Twice the Japanese nearly had him; arrests and interrogations came and went. He carried no weapon, only his eyes and his memory, gathering for Quezon the one answer that mattered: how the islands suffered, and where their hearts lay.

Around the capital the Hunters ROTC and Marking's men made it their work to hunt the informers — the paid eyes whose word sent barrios to Fort Santiago. It was a quiet, ugly war of the shadows, without glory and without mercy, and it saved lives the Kempeitai would otherwise have taken.

The Kempeitai came to the Manila law office of Antonio Bautista and arrested him — the quiet host of the Free Philippines, whose dinner table had been a war room only weeks before. The city's underground lost one of its finest heads. The enemy was learning the shape of the net, and pulling at its knots one by one.

On the Luzon coast at Bani, under Kempeitai guns, the engineer Ikeda drove a gang of a hundred and fifty paroled Cabanatuan prisoners to load a shipload of high-grade manganese ore for the furnaces of Japan. When the work was done the prisoners were let go. The islands were being carried away piece by piece — their ore, their harvests, the labor of their captured sons.

In the mountains of Kalinga the long hunt for Ralph Praeger ended. Betrayed by a tortured runner, the captain whose radio had been one of the first and last voices of the north was captured with his men. From the year's opening raids on the Cagayan airfields to this, Praeger had never surrendered. Now the far-north set fell silent for good.

Laurel's commission of twenty finished and signed the constitution of the coming republic — written under the enemy's eye, in the spirit of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Yet on one point the drafters held firm: against Tojo's heavy pressure, they refused to write a declaration of war on America and Britain into the charter. Even the men doing the enemy's work drew a line they would not cross.

Three days later the KALIBAPI general assembly ratified the charter. There was no vote of the people; the only party permitted ratified the work of the only commission permitted. The forms of a nation were observed to the letter. The substance belonged to the occupation.

In Baguio the enemy's counter-intelligence found the Nacoco Store, a front that had hidden a node of the northern underground, and took its agents. Another safe place was gone, another thread of the net cut. In the mountain city the resistance learned that no shopfront, however ordinary, was safe from the patient work of the Kempeitai.

The war reached the land itself. On Panay and beyond, rice paddies were burned before the harvest, coconut groves cut down, carabao slaughtered, whole valleys left black. The scorched earth was policy — to starve the guerrillas was to starve the country. The land would be years in the healing.

The enemy herded the people of the guerrilla country into guarded town zones, emptied the barrios, and treated the free land beyond as a place where anything that moved could be shot. Families lost their homes, their fields, and too often their own. To empty the country was to try to starve the resistance out of it.

On Mindanao, Fertig reported to Australia that the mutinous constabulary lieutenant Luis Morgan — who had once tried to make himself master of the island's guerrillas — had been beaten and brought to heel. The Tenth District had faced down a rival from within. The free country of Mindanao would answer to one command.

The rains and the great winds came as they always had, and found a country with less to lose and less to save it. Flooded fields too few hands could drain, roofs no one could mend, the sick with no medicine. Nature kept its old calendar over a broken land, and the year turned heavy toward the harvest.

On Cebu the reckoning came for Harry Fenton. In a swift court-martial, against the counsel of Cushing and others who would have held him prisoner to the war's end, Estrella had Fenton and several of his closest officers shot. The man who had killed so many for fear of traitors died at the hands of his own. It is a dark page, and it is set down plainly.

From the Cordillera, Volckmann gave the North Luzon resistance the shape of a real army. He divided USAFIP-NL into seven districts and set a regular overland courier and radio net to bind the commanders — Manriquez, Lapham, Molintas, Calvert, Barnett — into one force under one hand. It was patient, invisible work, and it built the army that would rise when the Americans returned.

The KALIBAPI convened again and chose fifty-four of its own to sit in a National Assembly. The people did not elect them; the party named them. The machinery of the new state turned on, smooth and hollow, toward the republic the enemy had promised.

The National Assembly met, made Benigno Aquino its Speaker, and elected Jose Laurel — lately shot, lately healed — President of the coming republic. A Filipino would sit at the head of the state; the empire would hold the leash. The inauguration was set for October. A nation was ready to be declared.

At Binui Point on Mindanao the submarine Bowfin met Fertig, unloaded seven tons of supplies, and took off several men the district was better without — the troublesome Morgan among them. The Aid came in and the trouble went out on the same tide. Mindanao grew stronger and quieter at once.