In the high country of Haliap, guerrillas caught a man lurking near their mountain trails — a spy for the enemy, they judged him — and put him to death on the spot. In the war of the hills there were no courts and little mercy; a stranger near the paths could mean a garrison at the camp by morning. The mountains kept their secrets with hard hands.

Days into the new year Laurel called the absentee landowners of Luzon to Malacanang and demanded they sell their crops to the government agencies — by force of law if not of will — to put rice where the hunger was worst. It was a desperate measure for a desperate season. The republic could command the harvest on paper; whether it could move a single sack was another matter.

Ramsey and his friend Roeder pedaled quietly out of Manila on bicycles, two ordinary men on the road, to meet the agents of the underground. The word they carried back was grim: Major Phillips's coastwatch net on Mindoro was in deadly danger. In the shadow war a warning outran a rescue only if it was believed and acted on in time. This one would not be.

Volckmann left his Ifugao base to walk his own country — district by district, camp by camp — heading first for Tammicapao's Camp Seven in the Taboy Valley. A commander who would lead an army in the open one day had first to know every trail and every man of it in the dark. The north was being made ready by a man who counted it in footsteps.

Far across the sea the Commonwealth fought on in exile, and its president, Quezon, lay ill and failing — though the islands did not know how near his end was. What they knew was that the flag of the free Philippines still flew somewhere beyond the water, and that under it MacArthur had sworn to bring it home. A sick man in America and a promise on a matchbox: on such things the country's hope was fed.

The new year opened on a famine with no floor. Rice had all but vanished from Manila; the money bought nothing; and a cold report out of the city said it had become cheaper to buy a child than a hog. The occupation was starving the islands by design, and the worst of it was not yet come. Hunger, plain and patient, was killing more than any battle.

On Masbate the guerrilla leaders Tansiongco and Gamboa sat down with the puppet officials and the Japanese to talk a truce. Such bargains were the murky middle of the war — a breathing space bought with words, distrusted by both sides, kept only as long as it served. On the small islands, survival often wore the face of accommodation.

The enemy shut its last door. When the final amnesty closed, a military decree took its place: any American soldier or civilian still un-surrendered in the islands, once caught, would be killed without trial. The stranded Americans who led and fought beside the guerrillas — Volckmann, Ramsey, Fertig, and the rest — now carried a sentence of death on their heads by simple decree.

The empire's hunger for labor grew with its fear of the return. Tens of thousands of Filipinos — the romusha, the levied laborers — were driven to dig the fortifications and airstrips the occupation now raised against the coming fleet. Many did not come home; the work, the beatings, the hunger, and the fevers took them. The islands were being spent, body and soil, for a war not their own.

Across the islands the hidden radios multiplied. In these weeks agents raised station MAA on the Bondoc Peninsula, MAB on Masbate, MAD on occupied Cebu — new eyes on new coasts, each one a set, a code, and men willing to die beside it. The net MacArthur needed was weaving itself, station by secret station, toward the day the ships would follow its reports in.

Laurel's republic entered its first full year with nothing to give. It could not feed the towns, could not stop the seizures, could not free a single soul from the Kempeitai. Its ministers signed their papers and made their speeches while the country starved beneath them. The independence the enemy had granted was a roof with no house under it.

The Narwhal came to Libertad on Panay with forty-five tons for the guerrillas, and brought Chick Parsons ashore to meet Macario Peralta at last, face to face — the master of the submarine supply and the master of Free Panay. Two men who had built the resistance from opposite ends of a radio link shook hands on a dark beach. The Aid and the army it fed were one now.

Two nights later the Narwhal put another forty-five tons ashore at Balatong Point on Negros, and took aboard twenty-eight souls — men, women, and children — to carry them out of the occupied islands to safety. The great submarine came laden with war and left laden with refugees. It gave the guerrillas guns and gave the helpless a road out.

The double agent's work came due. Acting on the rosters Franco Vera Reyes had stolen, the enemy struck the Baguio net and swept up its people, and in Manila they seized Major Enriquez a second time — the officer they had freed under their own amnesty only months before. What the sweeps could not find, a traitor's list delivered. The north's intelligence paid a heavy price for one bought man.

On the northeast shoulder of Samar, at Palapag Mesa, Major Smith and Robert Ball raised station MACA and settled to the grinding work of the coastwatcher — long daily shifts hunched over the set, straining to pull weak signals out of the air. Glory was for the fighters; the watchers only listened, day on day, and made the return possible.

The warning had come too late. Led by local informers, a Japanese patrol cornered Major Lawrence Phillips and his coastwatch team on Mount Calavite in Mindoro, killed him, and destroyed his station. An eye of the net had been put out, and a brave man with it. On Mindoro the enemy had learned that the surest way to blind the fleet was to hunt the watchers on the ground.

On the rice plain the Huk had grown to sixty-seven squadrons, and its quarrel with the American-led bands had grown with it. Through the winter Filipino fought Filipino for the towns and the harvest more than either fought the enemy. It was the occupation's darkest gift — to turn the resistance against its own — and it would poison the plain long after the war.

His tour done, Volckmann came to Major Parker's First District camp in Benguet and made it the headquarters of all USAFIP-NL. From this mountain seat he would run the North Luzon resistance to the end of the war. The scattered bands of the north now had one address, one hand, one plan — and a commander the enemy would never catch.

On Leyte, Kangleon's unified command turned its work to watching — the ships in the gulf, the strength in the towns — and fed what it saw to Fertig's radios and on to Australia. The island was quietly readying itself to be the door of the return, though none yet knew it would be the first to open.

On Mindanao Fertig's Tenth District held its ground and its government — the surest harbor for the submarines and the safest soil in the islands. Courts sat, schools taught, the emergency money passed hand to hand, and the radios were never silent. The free country of the south waited, armed and patient, for the word to rise.

The Narwhal ran up the mouth of the Agusan River and into Nasipit again, this time landing seventy tons and two officers — McClish and Childress — to strengthen the Mindanao command. The great boat had made the free harbors of the south its regular port of call. Guns, radios, men, and the printed promise came ashore where a year before there had been only hope.

To Manila came Major General Hong Sa-ik — Shiyoku Kou to the Japanese — a Korean in the emperor's uniform, to take command of every prisoner-of-war camp in the islands. The men behind the wire of Cabanatuan and Bilibid had a new keeper. After the war a court would hang him for what was done in the camps he ran; but that reckoning was years away, and the prisoners had only the hunger of the present.

The rice year of 1944 opened on exhausted land. The paddies burned in the campaigns, the carabao taken or eaten, the seed short and the hands gone to the hills or the graves — the country could not plant its way out of the hunger. The soil that had always fed the islands was itself worn to the bone.

Where rice still grew, the enemy took it by quota — the army fed first, the barrio last. Men were pressed to the fields under guard to bring in a crop they would not be allowed to eat. Hunger had become the occupation's instrument, wielded as deliberately and as coldly as any rifle.

In Cabanatuan and Bilibid the prisoners of Bataan wasted through another year — rations cut, the sick untended, the strongest shipped off to labor in Japan. Behind the wire the men counted the days by the deaths. The return they prayed for was closer now than ever; for too many of them, it would still come too late.

Off Libertad on northern Panay the submarine Angler surfaced in the dark and took aboard fifty-eight refugees — sixteen of them women and children — fleeing the enemy's tightening sweeps. She dived with them into the deep and carried them clear of the islands. Where the Aid came in, the helpless went out; the submarines ran both errands on the same dangerous nights.

In Manila the occupier pressed Laurel's government toward a formal declaration of war on America and Britain. Laurel and his ministers held back, playing for time, unwilling to make the country an open enemy of the power they believed would return. The pressure would build all year — and only late in it would the enemy have its way.

As the fields failed, the people turned again to the sea and the forest — fish traps in the rivers, wild roots, palm pith, the old famine foods the grandmothers remembered. The land was spent, but the archipelago's water and green kept the islands alive where the rice could not. The country ate as its ancestors had, and endured.

On Cebu, Cushing finished the rebuilding. He gathered five thousand six hundred and eighty-seven fighters into four regiments and, at last, raised a radio that spoke straight to Australia. The island command that had nearly torn itself apart the year before now stood whole, counted, and in touch with the coming fleet — and closer than it dreamed to the greatest windfall of the war.

Yet under the hunger the mood was turning. The I-shall-return matchboxes, the coastwatchers' quiet work, the rumors of American ships far to the south — all whispered that the long night was passing. People bore the worst year yet on the strength of a promise they could not see but had begun, at last, to believe.