Chapter 8: The Raid

By February, the camp had stopped counting the days until the war ended and started counting, instead, the days it might have left to survive it.

Rations had fallen past anything Ruth would once have called survivable, a few hundred calories a day stretched across bodies already stripped to the last of their reserves, and rumors moved through the internee committee with a new and sharpened dread—not of neglect now, but of intent. Manila had fallen to advancing American forces weeks earlier, word of it reaching the camp in fragments too unreliable to trust and too persistent to dismiss, and with the mainland garrison collapsing, the whispered fear running fence to fence was that a losing army, cornered, might choose to leave no witnesses behind when it finally abandoned Los Baños.

“They’ve done it elsewhere,” Dorothy said, low, to the five of them gathered in what had once been Vivian’s corner of the dormitory and now stood, unspoken, as a kind of shrine none of them disturbed. “Other camps, I mean. When the garrison knows it’s finished and the prisoners know too much to be left as witnesses. I’m not saying it to frighten anyone. I’m saying it because I think we should be ready to move fast if the chance ever comes, and I don’t think any of us can afford to still be gathering our belongings when it does.”

Connie had heard the same current running through whatever remained of her contacts beyond the wire—thinner now, slower, but not entirely severed even at this distance. “There’s talk of American paratroopers massing somewhere south of here. I don’t know how much of it is true and how much is what starving people tell each other to survive the nights. I know I’d rather believe it and be wrong than not believe it and miss whatever chance it gives us.”

Helen, thinner herself now than any of the patients she’d once judged too far gone to treat, kept working through the camp’s collapsing supply with whatever grim ingenuity two years of practice had taught her, and said little about the rumors beyond a single, characteristic instruction. “Whatever’s coming, it’s coming for people too weak to run far on their own legs. If it’s real, we’ll need every hand free to carry someone. Keep that in mind before you decide what’s worth holding onto when the moment comes.”

~ ☆ ~

It came before dawn on the twenty-third of February, and it came the way Dorothy had warned them it might—fast, and without any warning beyond what their own instincts had already been straining to catch for weeks.

Ruth woke to the sound of engines she didn’t recognize, low and many, followed within seconds by parachutes blooming pale against a sky still more black than gray, dropping men into the fields beyond the fence in numbers that made the whole horizon seem to be falling at once. Somewhere near the main gate, gunfire opened—short, controlled bursts, nothing like the sustained chaos of Bataan, more like a lock being forced than a battle being fought—and within minutes the camp’s Japanese guards, most of them still at their morning exercises beyond the wire when the assault began, were being overrun before they could organize any real resistance at all.