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They had worked out a cipher:

On the fifth of February KSP had sent a message, as opposed to responding to one of Fertig's messages. So far, all that establishing a radio link with the United States had done was to enable Fertig to get word to his wife that he was alive and not in a Japanese POW camp.

KSF FOR MFS NAMES OF TOWN AMD STATE WHERE PATRICIA LIVES

WILL BE USED AS CODE PHRASES FOR DOUBLE TRANSPOSITION STOP

SEND TEST MESSAGE IMMEDIATELY KSF BY

Patricia, Fertig's daughter, was living with her mother in Golden, Colorado.

Using that as the basis for a rudimentary double transposition code, Fertig's homemade transmitter sent a meaningless phrase to KSF. Receipt of the message was acknowledged, but the reply, in the new code was only:

KSF FOR MFS MO TRAFFIC FOR YOU AT THIS TIME KSF OUT

Two days later, on February 11,1943, there had been

another message for

MFS:

YOUR STATION DESIGNATED WYZB REPEAT WYZB STOP ALL REPEAT

ALL FUTURE TRAFFIC WILL BE WITH KAZ REPEAT KAZ STOP KAZ

HAS FILE OF ALL PAST TRAFFIC KSF OUT

KAZ was the call sign of General Douglas MacArthur's General Headquarters, Southwest Pacific Command, in Australia. They heard KAZ on the air all the time, but had been unable to get KAZ to respond to their calls.

Now things might be different. But several hours of calls to KAZ had produced no response whatever. There were several possible explanations for that, the most likely that radiations from Gerardo Almendres's homemade transmitter were for some reason unable to reach Australia. Fertig did not permit himself to dwell on the possibility that MacArthur did not want to talk to him, While Fertig did not personally know MacArthur, he had a number of friends who did. To a man, they reported that Douglas MacArthur, onetime Army Chief of Staff, later Marshal of the Philippine Army, and now once again in U.S. Army uniform, had an ego on a par with, say, Charlemagne's.

While Fertig did not believe that the fall of the Philippines was MacArthur's fault--indeed, he had acquired a deep respect for MacArthur's military ability;

MacArthur's delaying actions with his limited resources had been undeniably brilliant--he suspected that MacArthur was personally shamed by his defeat.

If that were the case, that shame might be deepened by proof that not all American officers and Philippine forces had hoisted the white flag and marched docilely into Japanese captivity.

During his brief service as an officer, Fertig had quickly learned an old soldier's requisitioning trick. If you need something for one hundred men, and you want to be sure you get it, you requisition a quantity sufficient for two hundred. Or four hundred. Then, when the supply authorities cut your requisition by fifty percent, or seventy-five percent, you still wind up with what you really need.

Fertig had been "generous "in his communications with KSF with regard to his estimated strength report for the troop strength of the U.S. force in the Philippines. Not dishonest, just generous. He had elected to take the word of Philippine army officers who had not elected to surrender (putting his own serious doubts aside), when they told him how many men they had at their disposal, and how anxious--providing he could supply and pay them--they were to put themselves and their men under the command of Brigadier General Wendell W. Fertig and the U.S. forces in the Philippines.

If they told him, for example, that they had five hundred troops just waiting for the arms and food that would permit them to engage the Japanese, he took them at their word, even if it looked to him as if the five-hundred-man force consisted of a couple of officers and maybe sixty Philippine Scouts.

He had added up all the Philippine forces he was told were anxious to place themselves under his command and come up with a figure just in excess of six thousand officers and men.

His "requisitions" for arms and food and gold coins had been based on this strength figure.

MacArthur, according to the radio message from San Francisco, had been made aware of this troop strength.

Fertig wondered how Douglas MacArthur was going to react to learning that, after he had reported his forces had fought to the last man and the last bullet, there were six thousand troops under a brigadier general still fighting on Mindanao.

When Second Lieutenant (formerly Private) Robert Ball of USFIP came to report that MacArthur (or at least KAZ, his radio station) was finally being heard from, Brigadier General Fertig, a Thompson submachine gun beside him, was drinking a cup of tea on the shaded veranda of his combined headquarters and quarters. The tea was Lipton's. It had been grown in the Far East, sent to the United States, blended, put in tea bags, and then sent back to the Far East. How it had passed into the hands of the Moro tribal chief who had given it to Fertig, Fertig didn't know.

All he knew was that Lipton was putting out a better product than he had previously suspected. The tea bag that had produced the tea he was now drinking was on its fourth brewing cycle. (Brew, dry, brew again, dry, etcetera.) He knew this because he was a methodical man, and each time he drenched the tea bag in boiling water, he tore one of the corners of the tea bag-tag off. The tea-bag-tag drying on the bamboo railing beside him was corner less

He felt that it behooved him to conceal from his subordinate staff the excitement he felt now that MacArthur was finally being heard from.

"Thank you. Ball," he said, with as much savoir-faire as he could muster.