Blood Tide

by Robert F. Jones

  At night they slipped aboard Japanese vessels where they lay at anchor in the islands and cut the crews’ throats, taking their testicles as trophies. They mined harbor entrances with stolen Japanese contact mines. They wiped out whole garrisons of Japanese occupation troops on the smaller islands. They sank a Japanese troopship carrying reinforcements to beleaguered Leyte in the fall of 1944, using a twenty-four-inch oxygen-propelled Japanese torpedo taken from a light cruiser, the Abukuma, that with fitting justice had been crippled by a U.S. PT boat in the Battle of Surigao Strait. The seas around the wreck boiled with feeding fish for weeks afterward. When the Japanese withdrew from the Philippines, Commodore Millikan’s sea guerrillas combed the evacuated islands mercilessly, killing every Japanese straggler they found. And they found them all. The stragglers did not die swiftly.

  Commodore Millikan rejoined the U.S. Navy. As Lieutenant (j.g.) Downes, he was killed at Okinawa the following year, when a kamikaze hit the gun mount he commanded aboard an attack transport anchored in Buckner Bay.

  But the ONI, recognizing the value of the Millikan legend, reactivated the title after the war, when the pro-Communist Hukba-lahap movement flared in the Philippines. Another commodore was dispatched to San Lázaro and welcomed with great warmth. The Tausuqs had enjoyed the war. They’d never had so much fun before, at least since the Spanish left.

  The Huk movement died down. Southeast Asia flared up. The southern Philippines, always rebellious, never totally under Manila’s control even in Spain’s long day, lie close to the Asian mainland, a natural and political soft spot in the flank of America’s most prized Pacific ally. A third Commodore Millikan replaced the second, just to make sure the Commies didn’t try any cute stuff down there.

  Men age and die; bureaucracies live forever. When the U.S. pulled back from Vietnam in 1973, there was no need to maintain the Millikan force in the Sulu Sea. But you never can tell. The operation, after all, was inexpensive, self-sustaining in large part through the very institutions that sustained the Tausuq. Smuggling really hurt no one but the Manila government, and the U.S. was already pumping millions into the Malacañang Palace, anyway. Slavery was a way of life among Moslems that would continue regardless of a Commodore Millikan’s presence. And what the hell, a little piracy never hurt anyone. The commodore remained on station.

  When Magellan first spied the archipelago that would be named the Philippines, on March 15, 1521, Islam was still moving northward through the islands. Though Spain stopped that movement, she never quite quelled it. From Mindanao south through Basilan and the Sulu archipelago, and through all of Palawan below Puerto Princesa, Moro insurgency continued to smolder, but at low heat, localized, endemic. Then, when Ferdinand Marcos imposed his arbitrary but Draconian martial law on the nation in the early 1970s, the insurgency flared to real rebellion. A Moro National Liberation Front was formed, well organized, armed with modern automatic weapons and explosives, demanding an autonomous Moslem nation for the southern Philippines and willing to wreak terror to win it.

  Grenades blew at night, then in restaurants at sundown. Sugar plantations controlled by absentee landlords out of Manila flared sweetly under the pirate wind. Small-town alcaldes woke briefly in the hot, dark, insect-singing night to find their throats cut ear to ear. Army convoys never reached their new posts, and sent their oily, flesh-scented smoke to mix with that of the plantations and restaurants and movie houses. Sulu Sea mundo grew bolder, attacking even tankers and freighters as they steamed slowly up the Sulu toward Manila. Planners in Washington began muttering the unholy litany—Qadafi, Arafat, Khomeini. It couldn’t be local, it made no sense, how could a cluster of scruffy islands with little or no mineral wealth, oil, or industry hope to forge a self-sustaining nation?

  Well, what if the rebellion succeeded? The Moro nation could never last. Its very existence would demand aid from the rest of the Moslem world, especially those parts of it most troublesome to American interests. Let Qadafi, Khomeini & Co. bleed themselves even paler into the wide, blue Sulu Sea. The real importance of the Philippines lay to the north—strategically with the U.S. strongholds at Subic Bay and Clark Air Base, economically with the markets for American trade in populous Luzon and the other big islands. Marcos would keep them in line.

  Then Marcos fell.

  The faint click of dominoes was heard once more in the corridors of Washington. But this time they were falling from different directions. Certain thinkers at certain agencies suddenly remembered the Millikan force. It might be well—a kind of insurance—to strengthen that little operation. Always good to have a foothold, small as it might be, deep in enemy territory. From tiny beachheads whole reconquests grow . . .

  Commodore Millikan IV thought of all this as he lay in a hammock one hot, humid morning under the nipa roof of his veranda. An ice-cold bottle of San Miguel stood balanced on his flat belly, puddling coolly into his naval. It was the hour between the land breeze and the sea breeze, and though he was wearing only a sarong, he wished the sea breeze would hurry up. In the still air he could hear church bells pealing from the ancient stone cathedral in San Lázaro City. The fifth Sunday of Lent was fast approaching, the feast day of Saint Lazarus, the island’s patron. Like many a Commodore Millikan before him, he thought of the irony—or perhaps it was a historical portent—implicit in that name.

  Magellan had discovered the Philippines on the Feast of San Lázaro. In keeping with Spanish nautical custom of the day, he’d named the entire archipelago for Lazarus. It was not until 1542, fully twenty-one years later, that the islands had been renamed for the infante of Spain, Don Felipe—las Islas Filipinas. As far as Commodore Millikan knew, his little island deep in the heart of Asian Islam was the only one that still bore the original European name of the place. Perhaps though, in the months and years to come, the name might once again reverberate with geopolitical significance throughout the Indies, symbol and tocsin of a new resurrection. And he’d be the man to arouse it.

  The Catholic population of San Lázaro was small—there was a tiny Buddhist colony on the island as well, along with a dwindling population of pagan animists on nearby Balbal—but like all Filipino Catholics, the Lazareños were very devout. Passing the cathedral on his way to or from the Millikan Shipping offices, he sometimes saw penitentes, grown men, not your usual soft-minded old women or pubescent boys confusing religious ardor with sexuality, stumping across the crushed-coral square and up the stone steps on their raw, bleeding knees to pray at the statue of Lazarus in the cathedral’s gloomy nave. He’d gone in there once to look at the statue. It was carved of wood and painted a ghastly, bilious blue-green, a scrawny, limp, dead old man in the last stages of rot, his skin—his very flesh, it seemed—flaking away onto his winding sheet. Yet the old man’s eyes (they must have been carved of some local semiprecious stone) were alive, a bright, sparkling, almost vengeful sea green. The rough coral prie-dieu before the statue was worn smooth by the knees of past penitents. The grooves were brown with the blood of stale sins.

  This Commodore Millikan was nominally a Protestant of the Congregational persuasion, but he hadn’t been to church since he left the naval academy, except when duty required it. Over the years he’d prayed, or pretended to, in Buddhist temples, Jewish synagogues, Moslem mosques, and even, once—ironically—in an austere Dutch Reformed chapel in the Namib Desert of South-West Africa. That wasn’t long ago, and he’d prayed sincerely that white-hot morning. He was on his way north from Windhoek to the Angolan border.

  He couldn’t pray in this cathedral, though. His men wouldn’t approve. But Billy Torres, his exec, prayed there every Sunday, prayed there sincerely, humbly, from the depths of his black Filipino heart. He was as cruel as he was pious. Perhaps the two went hand in hand. At least here they seemed to. Torres had told him the other day that on Good Friday there would be three crucifixions in the city—voluntary crucifixions, like the ones you could see for the goodness of your soul every Holy Week in that rice paddy in Barangay San Pedro,
outside San Fernando de Papanga on Luzon. “Ours are better than that,” Torres assured him. “Last year one of the men died. Actually bled to death on the cross from the holes in his feet. The spike nicked an artery. Bled out before they could pull him down. You ought to come along with me this year—the Tausuqs think it’s the only worthwhile rite in the whole Catholic religion. Put you in good with the men.”

  “Why don’t you be my surrogate, Billy?” the commodore said. “You really seem to enjoy it.” Torres had laughed in that way he had. Like when he gunned down boat people, or even his own countrymen. Torres pulled it all together, every sadistic trait of the three cultures that made up his background—every Filipino’s, for that matter—Malay, Spanish, American. Along with a few tricks learned from the Japanese during the war. Wicked mean cultures, sure enough. Still, for all that, Torres was a sissy compared with some of the men the commodore had known in the course of his career. On a scale of one to ten, Afghans ranked at the top; the Reclamos in Mozambique, the Simbas in Kivu (what remained of them), the Somalis in Eritrea—all black Africans rated right up there. Brits, Boers, and Rhodesians barely got on the scale, at least those he’d known. They didn’t really enjoy it. Not like the Koreans, or the Vietnamese, for that matter . . .

  His beer had gone warm, but the sea breeze hadn’t come up yet. He didn’t want to get all sweaty climbing out of the hammock. “Rosalinda!” he yelled in to the housekeeper, warbling it almost playfully—Rrrosa-leen-dah! “Could you bring me another San Mig, por favor?” He loved to twit her with the odd Spanish phrase now and then. Though Rosalinda Aguinaldo-Musa (what a name) was from Luzon, where Spanish was almost as prevalent as English, she knew barely a word of the language. Her English was slangy and fluent. A nice old bag, Rosalinda—Christ, she was probably younger than he, but it was different with a woman—and a damn hard worker. Millikan III had hired her after laying her a few times up in Subic, swore she was stone loyal—he’d had Washington run a security check on her. “Throw her a screw now and then,” III had advised him, “and she’ll follow you anywhere. She’ll die for you.” Well, IV didn’t value life quite that highly, though he didn’t tell his predecessor in so many words. She must be getting it someplace else, he thought now, as she brought him the beer and went back to her household accounts, because she’s certainly happy enough.

  Down on the beach a group of naked children were dancing and skipping in a cluster, laughing as they pointed to something on the sand. He took up his binoculars and focused in on them. They had caught a large crab and torn off one of its legs. It was scuttling in backward circles, its claws raised in futile protest. A little boy reached down, quick as a snake, and yanked off another leg. The circles got tighter. The children’s laughter quickened, musical as church bells at dawn. Cruelty, the commodore thought. It’s as natural to us as breathing or sex or eating.

  He hadn’t always felt that way. As a young line officer, newly hatched from the academy, be firmly believed he was defending a better, gentler way of life, a seagoing crusader for the unfettered pursuit of happiness. He’d always had the gift of tongues, and when he applied to the Monterey Language School to study Vietnamese, he was quickly accepted. On graduation (at the top of his class) he was tapped for the ONI. Then began his postgraduate studies in the field—Cruelty 101.

  He was shocked at the joy the torturers took in their work. It was the same on both sides, everywhere. Of course he was naive. He hadn’t learned much yet about human potential. He’d even felt guilty about his first mission in the north. He’d been planted in a POW camp on the coast to foment a breakout while at the same time ensuring that the American prisoners would be massacred when they tried it. The hope, as he understood it, was that when word of the slaughter leaked out Stateside, it would turn the tide of anti-war protest and somehow stiffen the American will to win. Kind of a cross between the Malmédy Massacre and the old movie Brute Force.

  It almost worked. He’d drummed up enthusiasm for the break surreptitiously, using the tap code when his cellmate was out, leaving notes in the head or the shower, and meanwhile brownnosing the camp commander and his swishy assistant. In the end his cellmate queered the deal. He had to get himself tortured to prove he wasn’t slimy—a collaborator. But the damage had been done. Only four men—all enlisted—made the break finally. Only one of them was killed. It was not his cellmate, who was in solitary when the break failed. Too bad for the poor sap. Had he died, they wouldn’t have had to deep-six him from the navy when he was finally released. There’d been talk of arranging a convenient accident for the man in Manila or Subic Bay, but the bastard had won some kind of medal in Korea, and the black-shoe line types wouldn’t hear of it. Instead they busted him back a notch and discharged him. “You won’t have to worry about him crossing your track anywhere down the line,” they assured the commodore. “He won’t be able to get there. Couldn’t afford it on his retirement pay.”

  Culdee. Sure, that was his name. Typical old bosun. Dead stupid. Crusty on the outside, mush at the core. Had the look of a Mick boozer about him. A brawler and a sentimentalist. Wooden men in iron ships. Well, he was probably dead by now.

  A sail showed on the horizon and beat in on long reaches toward Lázaro Harbor. The commodore watched it through his glasses—yawl-rigged with a blue hull and high sheer forward, a pretty little vessel. The sea breeze had finally kicked up, and the boat had a bone in her teeth. The commodore couldn’t make out the man at the helm, so he swung from his hammock and walked down to the beach. The angle was better there. It was a round-eye in a pirate bandanna, with two of Billy’s Tausuqs on deck. Appropriate. Must be that kid Torres mentioned, from Zambo. The dope-running boat bum who’d worked that drowning dog routine up near Bugsuk Island last month. The commodore’s first inclination when Billy told him about it was to dust the kid. He could only be bad news. But then the commodore realized it might be good to have a bad news round-eye on tap. That way if Manila or some rival agency in Washington ever started snooping around, they could throw the boat bum to them.

  Something nipped his foot. He jumped back and looked down. It was the crab the children had been torturing. Legless now, it had nonetheless managed to crawl over to him on its stumps and pinch him with its one remaining claw.

  The commodore stomped it flat with his bare heel.

  NINETEEN

  “Ever driven one of these, Cappy?”

  They were standing in a big, shedlike boathouse that covered a complex of rickety piers. From the sea or air its thatched roofs and roughly finished mangrove supporting poles would make it look like a crude structure slapped together by Third World carpenters with hangovers, a lot of palm fronds, a coil of binder twine, and about six nails. The sort of mañana architecture that blows off to Bolivia in the first strong breeze (HUNDREDS DIE!) or collapses in a loud fart. But Curt could see that the thatching overlay a smoothly finished and probably steel-reinforced concrete roof. The corner posts were most likely disguised the same way. And certainly the six boats that lapped at their moorings alongside were top of the line.

  “Blue Thunder,” Curt said. “Built by USA Racing on Northeast 188th Street off Dumbfoundling Bay in the North Dade section of metropolitan Miami. Don Aronow’s far-famed Fleet Street. His last design. Not the quickest fast boat ever launched—sixty or seventy miles an hour tops—but very stable in open water. It won’t kick your kidneys to hash in an hour of heavy seas.” He turned and grinned at Torres and the commodore. “No, I’ve never driven one. The only folks who do are the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs.”

  “Civilians own them, too,” Torres said. “Prince Rainier has one. King Hussein of Jordan has a couple. Plenty of Arabs whose names escape me.”

  Some civilians.

  Curt knew the Blue Thunder. The Caddy—no, the Rolls—of offshore powerboat work. He’d known Aronow, too. A big, strong, swaggering man, good-looking despite those bushy eyebrows that crouched above his hard, brown seaman’s eyes like a couple of porcupines touching noses
. A shtarker in the Yiddish of Aronow’s coreligionists. But smart. He’d built Fleet Street practically single-handed. The names of the boat-building companies he’d founded, made famous, then sold lined the street—Formula, Donzi, Magnum, Cigarette (his masterwork), Squadron VII, USA Racing. He was the latter-day king of that dangerous world, the Mickey Mantle to Gar Wood’s Babe Ruth, a helluva racer. Sixteen deep-sea victories—a record. Two world and three U.S. championships in the late sixties. ’Fraid a nothin’, as the saying goes—hell or high water. Back in the old days guys used to walk in off the street like Curt did, scruffy hippie boat bums, and slap down a Ziploc plastic bag full of thousand-dollar bills, buy a Cigarette right off the floor. Don would pour them an Amaretto from the big swivel jug on his desk and stuff the dough in his pants pocket, then walk around with it for days, they said. No one was gonna rip him off . . .

  He should have been afraid, though. In the end some dude just pulled in off Fleet Street in a big vague car, walked over to where Aronow sat in his Mercedes coupe, and pumped him full of lead. On a work day, too, with loads of potential witnesses. Stole his Rolex right off his wrist as the final indignity. Miami Metro hadn’t arrested anyone for that one yet, and it was a couple of years ago. Claimed they hadn’t the vaguest idea who did it. Neither did Curt. In that crisscross world, it could have been anybody. Curt was lucky to be out of it.

  He walked out to the end of the dock and looked down into the crystal-clear water. Bright fish circled the pilings, and deep in the shadows he saw the mottled backs of dozing barracudas. Their baleful yellow eyes looked up at him, unafraid. One of them yawned. There was no wire-mesh net protecting the entries to the slips, nor could he see the pilings for one farther out in the bay.