Mindanao

The story takes place in the United States and the Mindanao Region in the Philippines where the Japanese were occupiers during WWII and used the region to bury diamonds, gems and gold that they looted and pillaged as invaders to finance their war efforts. It was the United States military who patrolled the Pacific Ocean preventing the Japanese ships from reaching Japan forcing them to find alternative ways to harbor their spoils.

Seven United States Army elite specialists including, Jonathan Watkins Sr. recovered the booty the Japanese had buried. The men became the center of an intense search by Islamic separatists and other scavengers, a term used to identify treasure-hunters, to find the buried treasure that they believed they were entitled to.

However, the story takes place around the Islamic Separatists Movement, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and its splinter groups who all seemed to be vying to recover the spoils to finance their separatist movements. They and other ‘scavengers’ were in pursuit of any information Jonathan Watkins Sr. shared with his eldest daughter, prior to his death. That is, about the location of the spoils while at the same time the drama was used as a backdrop for a conspiracy to frame the socialite-financier, Condolesa Escobar.

Ms. Escobar just happened to be in a position to acquire her dead husband’s empire only to be the target of her stepson who had vowed to destroy her, hence the conspiracy.

It was Roland Cavalier, an award winning investigative journalist for the New York Daily News, who while covering the story of the signing of the accord between one of the splinter Islamic separatist groups, the MILN and the Philippine government, in Manila, had to also investigate the conspiracy. So he hooks up with two private detectives Jonathan Watkins Jr., an American, and Filipino Katrina Chavez to expose the culprits only to find out the person first suspected of being at the center of this conspiracy was being framed.

-- Theodore Josiha Haig