Free Camouflage by Joe Haldeman Page B

Scrape it, corrode it, chip it, burn it—do anything to make the artifact acknowledge the existence of humanity.
    When it was still underwater, Poseidon divers had tried a diamond-tipped drill on it, to no effect. But now they rolled in a huge mining drill: it used a 200-horsepower electric motor to spin its diamond tip at 10,000 r.p.m., with more than a ton of force behind it.
    The scream it made was too much for the scientists' earplugs; they had to rig a remote control for it. At the maximum push, just before the diamond tip evaporated, it shattered all the useless windows and ruined the positron microscope beyond repair.
    The electron microscope worked, though, and all it showed was a film of oxides from the metallic part of the ruined drill bit. When they cleaned that off, even at the highest magnification there was no difference between the test square and the undrilled surface next to it: a perfect mirror.

    -17 -

    Bataan, Philippines, 7 December 1941

    Many of Jimmy's boot camp compadres steamed across the Pacific with him, to join the Fourth Marine Regiment in Shanghai. They arrived in November 1941, and barely had time to get their land legs before they were ordered to sail again, this time for the Philippines, assigned to provide beach defense for Corregidor.
    The naval command knew it was only a matter of time before Japan attacked American forces in the Pacific. America had severed trade ties with Japan in July, and frozen her assets in American banks. The Navy and the Army set about redistributing their meager forces to places that seemed most vulnerable to attack. That included the Philippines, which blocked Japanese access to the East Indies.
    The Fourth Regiment set up shop in Corregidor and sent a detachment, including Jimmy, south to the small base at Bataan. They called it a "shit assignment," one step farther away from the amenities of Manila, but they didn't know how terminally bad it was going to become.
    When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor on the morning of the seventh (which was the eighth on Jimmy's side of the international date line), there was an immediate air raid alert in Manila and American fighters and bombers scrambled into the air to do battle. The timing was off, though; there were no Japanese in sight. They landed again, and when, a few hours later, the Japanese did come screaming out of the sun, there was no warning for the planes on the ground.
    Bataan and Corregidor were constantly bombed and strafed, with little or no help from the air. Meanwhile, Japanese land forces were coming ashore to the north and south, in Luzon and Mindanao.
    The original War Plan, before Pearl Harbor, had called for all American forces to go south to Bataan, and maintain a holding action there, delaying the Japanese advance into the East Indies. Instead, General MacArthur moved his forces up to meet the Japanese where they were landing.
    MacArthur had at his disposal 120,000 Filipino troops, most of them reservists who had never fired a shot, and one-tenth that many Americans. They had the Japanese outnumbered but not outgunned, and the defensive move was an unmitigated disaster. He went back to the original plan on 27 December, and within a week all the northern Luzon forces were sharing Bataan's limited resources with Jimmy. They were soon joined by thousands of Filipino civilians, fleeing the invaders. In two weeks, everyone's food ration was cut in half; in February, they were reduced to a thousand calories per day, mostly from rice. They got a little tough meat from the slaughter of starving horses and mules.
    Defeat inevitable, MacArthur and other top brass were evacuated to the safety of Australia, while the Japanese continued to pound the Bataan Peninsula.
    In April, the Japanese ground troops moved down to take over. On the eighth, General Wainwright concentrated all his viable forces for a last-ditch effort on Corregidor, and on the nineteenth formally surrendered the starvelings left behind on