They got word from a contact in Thailand who told them about a doctor who had worked at the small hospital in Nakhon Phanom. It appeared that back in 1943 he had been contacted by a Japanese officer who did not speak. The soldier had cash—a lot of it—and a prescription written in Thai for vaccines to counter the childhood condition known as diphtheria. The doctor had told him that the medicine was hard to come by as it was still undergoing tests and very expensive. But the cost didn’t concern the Japanese. The doctor also told him that a qualified medical team would have to attend to the children and administer the vaccine. Again, the officer had no problem with that and even arranged transport across the river and to the site of the epidemic. The only insistence was that the Thai medical team would be blindfolded. Everyone on the team could feel that they were inside a water-filled tunnel for half of the journey. The doctor recognized the smell of bat excrement. One of them cheated and lifted the blindfold to see a beautiful quartz structure in a vast cave. Eventually they found themselves in a picturesque village in the mountains. They stayed there for two nights working with the surviving children.