The war economy of the occupation was breaking down. Short of the raw materials and the labor to run it, the Japanese firm at Mankayan shut the great copper mine in the northern mountains for good. The wealth the empire had come to strip could no longer be stripped. The occupation was running down like a clock no one could wind.

Over the Manila radio Laurel told the country that no right-thinking Filipino should allow the re-conquest of the islands, and urged the people to cooperate with the Japanese. The words fell on a nation that had already made its choice, and it was not his. The puppet state spoke louder as its ground grew softer beneath it.

The submarine Nautilus slipped into the Amaay River on Mindoro and put ashore Commander Rowe and twenty-two men with twelve tons of gear to raise a high post for weather, radar, and the watch on enemy shipping. Within eight days their radio was talking to Australia. Another eye opened on the enemy's sea road, and this one could see the storms as well as the ships.

The Kempeitai swept up a hundred and twenty men and women it named as underground — and among them priests and nuns, taken from their churches and convents for the crime of helping the resistance. The occupation would spare no cloth and no vow. To feed a guerrilla or hide a message was enough, whoever you were, to end in the cells.

At one in the morning the city shook. In a single synchronized stroke the underground set off its pipe bombs across Manila — the Tanque fuel depot blown, railroad tanker cars burst into flame in the yards, the oil tanks of the Manufacture Company set alight, and a ten-thousand-ton tanker sunk at its moorings in the harbor. The enemy's security fell into chaos. The hidden war had struck in the heart of the occupied capital.

At Balatong Point on Negros the submarine Nautilus took aboard the final segment of the captured Z-Plan and two more packages from the guerrilla contacts. The great find was complete now, every page, gone into the deep and away to Australia. What had washed onto a Cebu beach in April had made its whole secret journey out. The enemy had burned islands to stop it, and failed at every turn.

The Manila Tribune ran its boast across the front page: there was one thing that could be said without reservation, that the defense of the Philippines was complete. In the same weeks the underground had blown the city's fuel to the sky and American planes were massing far to the east. The louder the enemy's paper crowed, the emptier it read.

The famine reached its cruelest. Real rice had fallen by nearly three-quarters from the years before the war, and a cavan on the black market cost past two thousand pesos — a fortune for a sack of grain. The fields lay ruined, the weak and the young died quietly, and whatever came would come to a starving country. The land had almost nothing left to give.

On the first of August, President Quezon died. That same day Sergio Osmena took the oath as President of the Commonwealth — the office and the flag passing on unbroken even in exile. The man who had raised the free Philippines did not live to carry it home; but the Philippines he served did not die with him, and the return he had promised was now only weeks away.

The news came in by hidden radio: Quezon was dead, Osmena president. A nation mourned in secret, unable to fly its flag at half-mast or say his name in the plazas. In Baguio the president's own family, the wife and children of Osmena, asked to be taken out by the northern guerrillas — but the new president radioed them to stay where they were, and wait.

An intelligence team pushed through to the Davao Penal Colony, where thousands of American and Filipino prisoners had been held — and found it empty. The enemy had already shipped the prisoners away, packed into the holds of unmarked freighters bound for Japan. The rescuers came to open the gates and found there was no one left behind them.

From their watch on a small island off Palawan, the men of Sergeant Corpus's team saw a sudden fire on the water — the American submarine Flier, striking a mine in the Balabac Strait, gone down in moments. Friendly islanders pulled eight survivors from the sea and got them to Mantagule. Even the boats that carried the war to the enemy paid their own hard price in those waters.

In the hills the guerrilla commands made ready. They mapped the beaches and the airfields, counted the garrisons, laid their radios and their runners, and waited for the word from the sea. Kangleon on Leyte, Peralta on Panay, Fertig on Mindanao, Volckmann in the north — each stood poised to turn from watching to war the moment the ships appeared.

The net of eyes reached its full strength — well over a hundred and sixty stations now, ringing the archipelago and reporting every enemy ship and plane to Australia and the fleet. Nothing moved on the sea road that the islands did not see and send onward. The return would land with the enemy's whole hand already read.

The far north came fully onto the web. Volckmann's USAFIP-NL tied its communications into Ball's station on the Tayabas coast and through it to Australia; the submarine Stingray slipped the Valera intelligence team ashore at Bangui to raise weather and air-warning posts; and Volckmann signaled south the missions his army would run on the day of the landings — cut the enemy's lines, harry his columns, blow his supply dumps. The north had its orders now, and its voice.

In Fort Santiago the Kempeitai put to death Blanche Jurika — an old woman, the mother-in-law of the submarine man Parsons — and as many as forty others, all charged with helping the guerrillas. She had given her aid to the resistance and paid for it with her life. The occupation, cornered now, killed its prisoners the more freely as its own end drew near.

The enemy gathered himself for the blow. Fresh troops poured in, the coasts were fortified, and in Manila a field hospital rose to mend the wounded back into the defense. The garrisons swelled and the checkpoints multiplied. The occupation braced for a fight it now knew was coming, and could not stop.

At Camp V in Kapangan, Volckmann took in a special team from Australia — Ancheta and Luz — and with them raised a radio that spoke straight to the stations in Australia, no longer through any relay. The north's voice was clear and its own now, and the men who had built an army in silence could talk to the fleet direct. The last wires of the return were being connected.

On the central plain the Hukbalahap struck in force — two thousand fighters in a coordinated assault on the Japanese base at Mount Arayat, the great lone mountain that had been their fortress and refuge for years. The peasant army that had endured every sweep now hit the enemy hard and openly. The rising was beginning on the rice land.

An American submarine, the Paddle, put its torpedoes into an unmarked Japanese freighter off the Mindanao coast — not knowing that the Shinyo Maru carried seven hundred and fifty Allied prisoners of war in its holds. She went down fast. Only eighty-two men reached the shore alive. The enemy shipped his prisoners in the dark, unmarked, and the sea took them for enemies.

Out of the eastern sky came the planes — American bombers on Davao, and then the carrier planes, the first since the first dark year, falling on the Mindanao fields. The sky that had belonged to the enemy for so long showed the white star again. Word of it ran through the islands faster than any radio: they are back, they are here, look up.

Halsey's planes swept over the Visayas — Cebu, Leyte, Panay, Negros, the coasts and the shipping — and the enemy barely rose to meet them. Where a plane went down, guerrillas and villagers raced the Japanese to the wreck to save the flier. The skies over the central islands were American now, and everyone below could see it and take heart.

A downed American flier, carried out through the guerrillas of Leyte, brought a small piece of news that moved a great weight: Leyte was thinly held. On that word, and on the photographs of an enemy sky that would not fight, the high command tore up its timetable — it would bypass Mindanao and strike straight at Leyte, in October, two months early. The resistance had bent the whole course of the liberation.

The Narwhal made her fourteenth run to the islands, landing thirty-five men and thirty-five tons near Kiamba and more men and tons off Balingasag on the Mindanao coast. Even as the sky filled with the return, the boats kept running the guns and the agents in. The lifeline held to the very edge of the landings it had prepared.

Even as hope rose into the sky, the land lay ruined below it. The September fields were thin and half-worked, the carabao gone, the young men in the hills; the famine held its grip unbroken. Liberation, when it came, would come to a country too starved to feed the armies or itself. The war had beaten the soil as hard as the people.

As the sky turned against it, the enemy's secret police tightened its fist. More arrests, more of the zona, more taken to Fort Santiago as the occupation tried to crush the underground before it could rise to meet the landings. The closer the liberation came, the more dangerous the last months of the occupation grew.

On the twenty-first the planes came at last over Manila itself. American aircraft filled the sky above the capital, diving on the port and the airfields, and by the day's end nine in ten of their targets were wrecked and forty and more ships lay sunk in the bay. The people forgot their fear and poured onto the rooftops, weeping and cheering and waving at the sky. After nearly three years, the return had come home to the capital, on wings.

With the American planes still in its sky, the republic proclaimed martial law over the whole country. The puppet state seized emergency powers in its last hour as its world came apart above it. The proclamation carried the enemy's fear in every line, and fooled no one about whose hand had written it.

Forced at last, after holding off for more than a year, Laurel declared a state of war between the Philippines and the United States and Britain. But he would conscript no Filipino to fight it — a war declared on paper and no further. In the same days the enemy set a bounty of a sack of rice on every guerrilla head and loosed his Filipino auxiliaries to collect it. The paper war was the enemy's; the real one was already overhead.

With the star back in the sky, the guerrillas came out of the shadows. They struck the garrisons in daylight, cut the roads and the wires, guided the fliers, and sent their reports pouring out to the fleet. The long, patient, hidden war was becoming an open one. The islands were rising to clear the road for the return.

The enemy answered the planes and the rising with reprisal, and choked on his own collapse. Villages burned and hostages were shot; and of a hundred thousand drums of fuel the occupation begged for, barely forty thousand reached Manila, and the American bombs burned most of those. Cornered and starving of oil, the occupation grew crueler as it weakened.

Off the Zamboanga coast the Narwhal came for the survivors of the Shinyo Maru — eighty-two men, most of them the prisoners who had reached the shore, brought out to her in rubber boats the guerrilla captain Chandler Thomas had sent. Men the enemy had shipped off to die were pulled from the sea by the resistance and carried home. Even the worst of the sea's tragedies could end in a rescue.

After three years, the whispered promise had become a roar in the sky. The hunger still gnawed, the police still hunted, and no one was safe; but the people had seen it now, with their own eyes — the planes, the star, the enemy's ships burning in the bay. They had believed on faith for so long. Now they knew. The return was real, and it was near.