Armed with this information, Yuki gathered his troops, consulted his maps, and deduced that Major Hiro had gone to ground in the cave network leading to the village of Sawan at the end of a tunnel called Thum Huk. The war with America was coming to an end. The Viet Minh had a number of captured helicopters at their disposal. The mechanic responsible for maintaining them was another Japanese deserter who had befriended the salvagers. He knew of three mercenary pilots who didn’t ask questions. He suggested that nobody would miss three old helicopters for a few hours. They flew across the border, did one low pass over the village so everyone would identify the invaders, and landed in the central square certain there would be no retaliation. They searched every building and the lower caves. There wasn’t much of value, so they didn’t waste their time pilfering. They all knew what they were looking for and the quickest way to find it was to burn down the entire village and sweep the land around it with metal detectors. Yuki-san spent longer in the headman’s house looking for evidence of contact between the village and Hiro. He emptied all the documents from the single metal file cabinet and trashed the place. His last gesture was to rip the mattress with his knife. And there, beneath it, was a small trapdoor leading down to two layers of bamboo flooring. And tucked between them was a box containing US dollars, some personal documents, and Hiro’s diary. Yuki-san opened it at the last page and his heart raced. He was certain the diary would give up the location of Hiro’s gold. Even after they’d burned down every house, scoured every meter of ground, and had found nothing, Yuki’s heart still beat wildly. They returned to the helicopters and flew back across the mountains and Yuki began his frustrating journey through the pages of the diary.