by J. E. Park
The shovel squad was first to find success, ransacking a nearby groundskeeping shack. It does not snow much in the Philippines, so the scavenged shovels were not quite the right tool for the job. Still, they were better than nothing. Upon their return, Payan’s men tied bandanas around their mouths to keep ash out of their lungs. They then climbed atop the building and started shoveling feverishly to save it.
Despite their obstacles, the frantic digging of the Philippine airmen gave the roof a fighting chance. None of Payan’s men had construction experience, so the scaffolding the other half rigged up was worthless. The sergeant ended up sending them for shovels, also. Trying to reinforce the roof at that point was proving little more than an exercise in futility.
Digging was an exhausting effort. The airmen were working in a blizzard of ash that was accumulating quicker than Yukon snow. Still, the troops’ efforts were paying off, and they could get ahead of the crisis. Eventually, they even earned brief periods of rest after the girders stopped groaning. Then the rain started.
June is the beginning of the monsoon season in the Philippines, and torrential rainfall at that time was the norm. At that point, any moisture at all added to the volcano’s ash would have been devastating to the men trying to save the armory. What the airmen had to deal with the day Pinatubo blew defied comprehension. While at the peak of a historic volcanic eruption, the island of Luzon had to contend with the added catastrophe of getting slammed by Typhoon Yunya as well.
The battle for the armory was lost. Payan ordered his men down off of the roof. “Airman Zubiri!” the sergeant screamed, trying to get the attention of a mechanic in the motor pool.
“Yes, Sergeant!” Sonny Zubiri answered.
“Do you know how to hotwire a truck?”
Sonny grinned. He was from Olongapo. He knew how to hotwire a car long before the Philippine Air Force trained him to be a mechanic. “Of course I do, Sergeant!”
“Good,” Payan said, placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I need you to go out on base and steal me every truck you can! Bring them back here. We need to move these weapons before we lose them.”
“Where are you going to move them to?” the airman asked.
Payan shook his head. “I don’t know! One problem at a time! Go get me my trucks!”
Another airman, Ronaldo Dela Rosa, approached the sergeant once Sonny Zubiri left. “There’s an Aglipayan Church a few kilometers from here. It’s been empty a while, but the building is still good. It has a pointed roof, so the ash should fall off instead of building up like it is here. The weapons should be safer there.” A blast of wind shook the armory and started the roof supports protesting again. After hearing that, Airman Dela Rosa added, “And so will we.”
Payan nodded in agreement. He looked at his watch and then out the door that Zubiri had used, shaking his head in disbelief. It was one in the afternoon, yet it was dark as midnight outside. The wind was screaming, it was raining concrete, and the volcano was making the ground shake. Turning to the airman, Sergeant Payan sighed. “Yes, I would feel much better sheltered in a house built by God than one built by a relative of Ferdinand Marcos. Even if it’s not Catholic.”
Emilio Payan tried to radio his plans back to the command center, but there was no answer. When Airman Zubiri returned with the first transport, a Kia-built M35, he tried again with the truck’s CB. Still, he came up with nothing. “I think the main base is out of power,” the airman said. “The road to it is cut off, and I couldn’t see any lights at all ahead of me.”
“You can’t see anything in this shit,” Payan answered. “Not even the sun.”
Zubiri turned a dial on the console, and the men heard a local news announcer come over the truck’s speakers. “At least the regular radio is working.”
“What have they been saying?” Payan asked.
Zubiri looked at the sergeant. “They’re saying it’s bad out there. Very bad. Bridges are washed out, and landslides are happening all over Pampanga and Zambales. There are reports that a couple of villages were completely swept away.”
That concerned Sergeant Payan. The base was close to the Gumain River, which originated somewhere up on Pinatubo’s slopes. He feared that the ash could form dams in some of the highland streams. If that happened, they could burst and send lahars, towering waves of mud, barrelling down the sides of the volcano, burying them all alive. “We need to get these weapons the hell out of here.”
“Fuck the weapons, Sergeant,” Airman Zubiri said. “We need to get the hell out of here ourselves!”
The sergeant shook his head. “This base is going to take some severe damage. It’s going to be very compromised when this is all over. You know as well as I do that the New People’s Army is all over these mountains. If we don’t secure this armory, the communists are going to march right in here and take…”
It was 13:42 military time. Mount Pinatubo roared with the second most powerful volcanic explosion of the twentieth century. It was exceeded only by Alaska’s Novarupta in 1912. The shockwave rocked the truck Payan and Zubiri were sheltering in and blasted them from the M35’s cockpit and into the mud.
Nine hundred feet of mountain top was blown high into the sky, some of it landing as far away as the South China Sea, twenty-five miles away. Much more of it poured into where Payan and his men were struggling to hold their ground. Besides the wind, the ash, and the water, Payan’s detail now had to contend with volcanic rocks raining down upon them like mortar fire.
“GO GET ME MORE TRUCKS!” the sergeant screamed as they both dove back into the deuce-and-a-half for cover. Zubiri could not hear him, however. Temporarily deafened by the explosion, the only thing the airman registered was the ringing in his ears. Still, he was able to read Payan’s lips beneath the vehicle’s dome light. Leaving the truck, Zubiri scrambled to carry out his orders. He figured that the faster they completed their mission, the sooner they could get the hell out of there.
The next truck Airman Zubiri got to the armory broke down as soon as it arrived. The other vehicle was already gone, delivering its first load of weaponry to the church. The mechanic discovered that the ash had plugged up the air filters and, starved of oxygen, the engine stalled. It was not a difficult situation to rectify in a closed garage, but trying to fix it in the midst of a cement storm was something else entirely. It took far more time to get the second truck running than it should have, yet the first M35 did not return before Zubiri finished. Worried that it could have stalled too, the airman rode with the men on the second gun run instead of looking for another vehicle.
As the airman suspected, the first team had broken down on the way back to base in Pabanlag, short of the bridge to Apalit. Zubiri disembarked to get their transport running again while the crew doubled up to unload back at the church. They at least passed the airman on the return trip before breaking down again.
Staff Sergeant Payan decided that was the best that they could do. They would run two trucks back and forth while keeping Zubiri on the road to get them running again when they broke down. In three hours, the sergeant’s men made five trips. They dropped a considerable amount of weaponry on hallowed ground but barely made a dent in the cache still left in the armory.
*****
Airman Zubiri was finishing up the seventh repair of the exercise when a loud crash went off behind him. He was in Apalit, about a half kilometer from the bridge. Judging by the sound, Zubiri suspected that the span over the Gumain River had just been obliterated. At first, he wanted to run up the road to confirm his suspicions, but the racket was loud enough to be heard over the ringing that still filled his ears. That alone was enough to convince him to drive in the opposite direction as fast as possible.
Sonny cursed. If the men were to be stranded, it was better to be at the church where the roof was less likely to collapse. The armory was a death trap. Zubiri already knew that they were cut off from the rest of the base, so there was no option to retreat to the command center. “What the
hell are we going to do?” the airman asked himself as he raced back to Sergeant Payan to give him the news. Stay in those flimsy houses outside the perimeter? They can’t survive this any better than the armory. Nothing can.
As the airman approached the base’s fence, he sensed that things were beginning to lighten up. He could see the headlights of the other truck from the far side of the guard post. Zubiri was using them to guide himself to the armory when he heard another roar rising in front of him. Then the lights suddenly went out. The truck, along with the buildings, weapons, and men, were swept away by a massive lahar that swallowed them from the west. They vanished right before Zubiri’s eyes. Instinctively, Sonny threw the M35 into reverse and stomped on the gas, but it was a futile gesture. He did not make it twenty-five yards before the wall of mud slammed into him too.
The M35 weighed more than two tons, but it was thrown to its side as if it were a toy. The lahar pushed the vehicle off the road and into a field, relentlessly forcing it forward until it slammed into a row of trees. The impact snapped the palms like toothpicks and blew the truck’s side windows out. The Kia then flipped onto its back, allowing the mud to pour in with no way for Zubiri to escape.
“SERGEANT PAYAN!” the airman screamed. He knew no one could answer his cries, but it was all that he could do. The mud was rising fast inside the cab, and Zubiri could sense that drowning in it seemed inevitable. Near tears, the airman cried out again. “SERGEANT PAYAN! PLEASE!” When the sergeant failed to answer, Zubiri appealed to someone higher up in the chain of command. “JESUS CHRIST! HELP ME! JESUS, SAVE ME!”
Nothing. The mud crept up the cab, engulfing Sonny to his waist. At that point, he gave up trying to call on his sergeant and his savior. He started crying for his mother instead.
Of all the names the airman invoked to save his life, only Imelda Zubiri proved powerful enough to intervene. As if guided by her divine hand, the overturned truck struck something solid enough to flip it over onto its side again. The mud within the cab lurched up and slammed Zubiri into the dashboard hard enough to force all the air out of his lungs, then it buried him. But only for a moment. When the airman fought his way to the surface, he not only caught a breath of precious oxygen; he found a path of escape through the window of the passenger door as well. Sonny was able to climb up the seat and pull himself from the M35.
Once out of the truck, Zubiri discovered that he was much higher off the ground than he realized. The Kia was riding atop a lahar that was at least twenty feet high. It stopped moving with the wave of mud only after becoming entangled within a clutch of trees a kilometer from where the airman had started. Sonny was among the upper limbs, balancing upon a massive vehicle being sucked into the muck. From the cab, Zubiri raced along the side of the transport until he could reach branches thick enough to support his weight. The airman then scrambled as high up into the canopy as he dared. As Sonny held on for dear life against the wind, he watched the mud engulf his truck beneath him until it completely disappeared.
The eruptions of Mount Pinatubo ceased at about 10:30 that night. Typhoon Yunya, by then a tropical depression, ended a short time later, pushing out into the South China Sea. Airman Zubiri remained stuck in the trees, wet and freezing, while the winds lashed at him through the night. Morning brought little relief. When the sun finally rose for the first time in thirty-six hours, it baked him without mercy. There was no cover. The leaves had been ripped off the trees by wind shear that often exceeded ninety miles an hour.
By the time he was discovered by an American helicopter surveying the damage to Clark Air Base nearby, Zubiri was delirious. Driven mad with thirst and ravaged by both hypo- and hyperthermia, he was hallucinating and hysterical. The airman had stripped down to his underwear and was shrieking for his mother to save him once more. When a rescue chopper from the Philippine Air Force finally plucked Sonny from his perch, he collapsed from exhaustion. He passed out the moment the medics placed him on a stretcher and did not wake up again for more than three days.
*****
A week later, Zubiri was in a hospital on the outskirts of Manila. Lieutenant Carlos Enverga from the Basa Air Base told him that he was the only survivor of the twelve-man detail sent to secure the armory. The search and rescue teams located two bodies, but hopes were not high that they would find any more. There was little left of that part of the base. The only thing that remained of the armory was the foundation, and even that sat beneath fifteen feet of hardening sludge.
“What about the weapons?” Zubiri asked.
The lieutenant shrugged. “Lost. We found a few that were salvageable, but most of what we recovered was ruined.”
Since the officer did not mention anything about what they had stashed at the church, neither did Zubiri. “Payan was worried about the NPA getting hold of them.”
Enverga laughed. “Good luck to them. It’s like trying to find pencils in quicksand. We can’t even locate the truck you said you were swept away in. I don’t see how they would ever come across the odd rifle in that stuff.”
Sonny nodded. “What a waste. Eleven men gone, and we lost the armory anyway. It hardly seems worth it.”
“It wasn’t.” Lieutenant Enverga thought for a moment, then asked, “You don’t blame yourself for this at all, do you? For not getting to them with the truck in time to evacuate?”
Zubiri flinched as a realization struck him. The lieutenant thinks the truck was for the men, not the weapons. He has no idea what we were doing. Airman Zubiri shrugged, running with the lieutenant’s assumption. “I failed. How can I not?”
“Stop it. You men were up against the fury of God that night. Your opinion of yourself must be very high to think you had any chance of holding back that kind of power. Is there anything I can do for you, airman? Have you heard from your family?”
Zubiri shook his head. “They’re all displaced, too. Phones are down. We don’t know where they’re at.”
“You know anyone else we can get in touch with who may be able to track them down?”
Sonny thought for a moment. “I have a cousin in the Philippine National Police. It might help if you somehow got in touch with him.”
The lieutenant pulled a small notebook and a pencil out of his shirt pocket. “Do you have a name?”
Zubiri nodded. “Sergeant Tejada. Rico Tejada. He works in Olongapo.” He’ll know what to do with the weapons we saved.
*****
“…and now TJ’s sitting on five truckloads of M-16s, hand grenades, MP5s, 9mm pistols, and a bunch of ammo.” Master Chief Darrow stubbed out his cigarette as he finished the story. Leaning back in his chair and putting his feet up on his desk, he added, “As far as the Philippine government is concerned, it’s gone. It’s buried beneath a couple dozen feet of volcanic concrete. The only people he can sell it to in PI are drug runners, communists, mutineers, or Moro separatists. The kind of people most likely to use the weapons against him. He’s willing to unload the cache at a bargain to someone who can get it out of the country.”
“And he thinks we can find someone like that in Japan?” I asked.
Darrow shrugged. “I do too. The yakuza are a pretty sophisticated group with international contacts. They could unload them to the Burmese or someone else in the Golden Triangle. Or even the Chinese triads. The trick is going to be finding someone to talk to.”
“And you think I can do that?”
My master chief shrugged. “You speak a little Japanese. You’re pretty knowledgeable about the culture. You’d be better doing it than I would. That also happens to be the least risky part of this too. The way I see it is we split the operation to keep our exposure down. I’ll handle the merchandise, the samples, and never be seen with our contacts. You manage the connections so you’ll never be seen with the merchandise. If I get pinched, I’m fucked, but I can’t give up our yakuza guys. If you get pinched, they can’t tie you to the guns.”
I had to trust Darrow on the operational side of what he was proposing. It wa
s too far out of my area of expertise. “What’s our cut on this?” I asked him.
“Ten percent.”
“Of what?”
Darrow grinned. “TJ thinks he’s sitting on roughly eight million of product. He might be overestimating a bit, though.”
My jaw dropped as I did the calculation in my head. “That’d be $400,000 apiece.”
“It would,” my master chief agreed. “Not bad for simply arranging a meeting, is it?”
*****