Rebound

by Ian Barclay

  “That’s not why I am here, Mr. Solano,” the lawyer said apologetically, getting to his feet. “I have your brother’s and your two sisters’ addresses. I’ll make sure they get word about you. Anyone else you want me to contact for you?”

  “No.” Joker grew alert.

  “Sure?” The lawyer stood and looked him in the eye. “I’m sympathetic to the cause. I do what I can to help.”

  At that moment Joker became certain. This man was a plant, sent here to pry information from him. Joker grinned and said, “Next time you meet your friends in the New People’s Army, tell them to come rescue me.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  Ken Hodges, the assistant military attaché at the U.S. Embassy, had driven north to Clark Air Base and sat with the serviceman and his wife in their living room. Roscoe James had told him it was worth going just to make sure. They had heard three Tagalog newscasts from three different radio stations and had been able to pick out the serviceman’s name.

  “It’s going down,” Hodges said with satisfaction.

  The serviceman looked doubtful, and his wife looked really pissed off. No one had told her until the last moment. Orders.

  Finally Hodges found an English-language newscast. The first item mentioned how the American serviceman had been knifed to death in a supermarket near the base by a young Filipino male who had subsequently escaped.

  “I don’t see why it had to be my husband,” the wife complained.

  “The Air Force picked him, not I,” Hodges snapped, tired of her uncooperative attitude.

  He turned up the radio’s volume as she continued to complain how it was unlucky to make such a false claim that her husband had been murdered, that it was sure to bring sickness or worse down upon them, that it was flaunting God’s will in such matters, and so on. Then Hodges heard what he had been listening for—an item mentioning that Happy Man Velez was meeting with General Bonifacio to discuss the recent attacks on Velez’s men. The newscaster went on to say that the two men were to meet outside the Manila Hotel and walk together in Rizal Park, that they were old friends who had grown apart under the strain of recent events but were now getting together to renew their friendship. It sounded like bullshit, and of course it was.

  They caught a couple of other English-language newscasts on other stations before Hodges rose to go. The serviceman was looking flattered to hear his name over the airwaves, even if it was only to announce his murder.

  “It’s great to be noticed at last,” he told Hodges with a grin.

  “This is nothing,” Hodges told him. “Wait until your friends see you walk toward them tomorrow. I bet some of them run.”

  The serviceman guffawed. “Yeah, they’re going to repent their sins, all right, when they see this ghost coming at them from afterlife.”

  His wife didn’t think it was so funny. “This is stupid. I don’t care who or what you are at the embassy, Mr. Hodges. I’m telling you, this is just dumb.”

  “We don’t want to wait till another American gets killed,” Hodges told her for the tenth time or so. “This way maybe we can trap the man who attacked those men who worked for Velez—”

  “But he ain’t the one who’s been killing Americans,” she pointed out.

  “It’s complicated, but believe me, it’s going to work out,” Hodges assured her.

  “It still sounds dumb to me,” she insisted.

  “Honey, it’s going to be just fine,” her husband said to her.

  Benjael Sumiran had decided to be difficult at the last moment, according to Harry.

  “He said we were not to pick him up, that he’d meet us at the rapids at Pagsanjan,” Harry explained to Dartley as they drove from his building in the Tondo section. “He sent a boy around late last night to tell me.” When he saw Dartley scowling, he hurriedly added, “I’m certain he’s not pulling something. It’s just that Benjael is used to being his own boss and doesn’t like to have to take orders from anyone. This is his way of showing you that you just can’t tell him to be somewhere. He’ll follow orders as long as you let him play his little independent games every so often.”

  “That’s childish,” Dartley snapped.

  Harry smiled and shrugged.

  Dartley had to allow that the delicately built peddler had accurately summed up the tattooed gun dealer. He took the southern route around the big lake called Laguna de Bay, which would take them to Pagsanjan without having to pass near the Velez estate. He wanted to go close to Happy Man’s residence as few times as possible now, even along the main road, because of the off chance that Velez’s guards or government troops on the watch for communist guerrillas might notice. Dartley was convinced that in his business a man could not ignore the long-shot odds of something happening if there was some way to avoid it. He was already extended beyond the way he liked to work, which was solo, and one of his two associates was showing signs of becoming a prima donna. Dartley decided there and then that if Benjael Sumiran tried to mess with him today, he would kill him on the spot. Having decided that, Dartley felt better, and his good mood returned on the drive around the southern shore of Laguna de Bay.

  The town of Pagsanjan was inland from the lake, at the fork of two rivers. It was more old-fashioned and traditional than the so-called swinging resorts along the lakeshore. There was no sign of Sumiran.

  “I think maybe he meant us to go down the rapids,” Harry suggested somewhat nervously to Dartley, expecting the American to become angry.

  Dartley only nodded expressionlessly, which Harry had not yet learned was a danger signal. They each took a long canoelike craft called a banca to descend the rapids, of which there were eleven in all. Their bancas eased out over the still, brown water of the Pagsanjan River, each navigated by two boatmen. As the craft entered the shallow rapids, the boatmen, one fore and one aft, steered between rocks jutting out of the fast-moving water. The man in the prow kicked his left or right leg in the water to steer and shouted back and forth with the man in the stern, who pushed the long narrow craft with hair’s-breadth accuracy between jagged boulders in the surging waters.

  While this was going on, the man aft also kept up a tourist commentary in English for Dartley’s entertainment, touching on the world at large, the Philippines in particular, and life in general. Dartley could see that this commentary was almost as fixed and calculated as the rocks they had to avoid in the rapids, so that at any given boulder or swirl of water the boatman would be saying the exact same words at the exact same time on each trip. The boatman recited how the Chinese thought Filipinos were too Americanized, how Indians thought they abused the English language, and how Malays were upset by people so like themselves who were not gentle Buddhists. This led to his claim that the Philippines was the only Catholic country in Asia and that Dartley was about to see the only Buddhist temple in the Philippines, which had been built by an American. Dartley expected to see some dopey-looking cult members from California doing the lotus position at the side of the stream. Instead he saw a ruined temple and a bamboo shack clinging to a cliff ledge, looking ancient and overgrown. There was something familiar about it that Dartley could not place, until the boatman told him that it had been built by Francis Ford Coppola for the movie Apocalypse Now.

  The river narrowed into a gorge, the sheer walls of which rose above them for hundreds of feet so that the sky was a narrow blue ribbon far up between the wet, glistening walls, encrusted with moss and other plants, dripping cold water on their heads. They came to the first of two big waterfalls. At the second falls they rode a raft, guided by long ropes from the banks, to a cavern under the falling water. Benjael Sumiran sat on a rock in the dank interior, smoking a cigarette and waiting for them.

  Dartley could not get mad at him for having dragged him through all this, because he could see that Benjael was taking it all very seriously. The tattooed Filipino slum dweller was a romantic at heart. Meeting Dartley beneath a waterfall after a run down rapids past a set from Apocalypse Now pro
bably seemed to him just a good way to set the mood for their upcoming day’s work. It was Dartley’s experience that guys involved in all the trappings and atmosphere were never much good when hit with the real thing. But as he and Harry stood and watched Sumiran posing under the waterfall, he figured he wouldn’t kill him for trying hard.

  Sumiran had everything in his car and a boat fitted with a high-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor in tow. Dartley did not ask where they came from. Sumiran backed the car down a public boat ramp until Dartley and Harry could slide the boat off its trailer into the water. They loaded the fishing poles, tackle, and provisions into the boat and put out on the water. As they went, Dartley cut tallow candles into sections, and all three men worked the wax sections in their hands until they became soft and pliable. Sumiran had bought fifty 7.5 mg Tranxene capsules on the street, and they enclosed each of the red-and-gray tranquilizer capsules in its own small wax ball. Next they made fifty meatballs out of five pounds of ground beef and put a wax ball inside each meatball. They divided the meatballs into two strong plastic bags and tied off the necks of the bags.

  Dartley signaled to Sumiran to cut the motor, and when the boat lay still, he said, “I guess we’re about two miles away. It’d be safer not to go closer. I can make it there and back easy from here. It will take time but that’s okay. You guys are just sitting in a boat fishing. If you see me in trouble, come get me. Otherwise, stay out here and fish. Don’t come any closer, no matter how curious you get.”

  Dartley stripped down to his swimming trunks. He snapped on a frogman’s belt, with a sheathed, foot-long knife, and tied the two plastic bags to it, one at each hip. He fitted on flippers and a snorkeling mask, which he pushed up on his forehead. Then he went over the far side of the boat from the shore, surfaced to dip his mask in the water, and fit the mouthpiece. He did not waste time on good lucks or last words of advice, being accustomed to working alone without backup of any kind.

  Using his compass watch, he swam steadily due north without surfacing once. It was as hard to swim underwater in a straight line without a compass as it was to walk through a forest. He saw nothing in the deeper water, which faded into a lime-green color beneath him as he swam just beneath the surface with slow, methodical leg movements and a minimum of arm work. As he approached shallower water he glided over the tips of clusters of tall, waving weeds. Then he found himself pushing his way through them as he got into the shallows of twelve feet or so. It was time to take a look.

  So far he had been swimming with only his breathing tube protruding above the surface. Now he would have to raise his entire head and lift his mask, since droplets on its glass front would block his vision if he didn’t. However, this was better than swimming all the way in and suddenly standing up in water to his knees, only to find himself looking into the barrel of a gun.

  He raised his head, lifted the mask onto his forehead, and looked toward shore. He found himself off an undeveloped marshy area of shore. To his left the cinder-block wall that formed the perimeter of the Velez estate came to the water’s edge and supported multiple coils of knife wires where it ended. Dartley guessed that there would be a guard just inside to watch this obviously vulnerable place in the estate’s defenses. He estimated that if he went back in the water and swam slowly west for fifteen minutes, he would emerge out of sight of the guard on the far side. This would also bring him closer to where he wanted to go inside the estate.

  Next time he stuck his head out of the water, all that could be seen were the wavelets beating on a narrow strip of sand and the luxuriant growth of palms, shrubs, and creepers. He waded quickly out of the water, kicked off his flippers, and moved fast into the undergrowth, watching as he went for TV cameras that might be hanging from branches or trip wires stretched inches above the ground. He saw neither and moved quickly ahead after stashing his mask and flippers. This was not the time for slow, cautious movement—either he had been seen or he hadn’t, and either way speed would count in his favor.

  The dogs yelped when they smelled or heard him coming. When they saw him—seven German shepherds—they bared their teeth and snarled. But they did not bark. He threw meatballs over the nine-foot hurricane fence, scattering them widely to make sure all seven dogs got their share. The animals gobbled them down. Only one spat out the wax ball and then promptly ate it again. Some dogs got more than others, but all got at least four meatballs.

  The Tranxene tranquilizer capsules were adult human strength. Dartley knew that a big dog rated medication at the level of a human child. Four adult-strength capsules would knock the dogs for a loop. It would take some time for the dogs’ stomach acids to dissolve the wax balls around each capsule, how much time Dartley did not know, but hopefully long enough so that they would all be still alert when it came time to release them on the estate grounds. Dartley assumed that would be at dusk, still more than two hours away. If the person who released them noticed they were drugged, in all likelihood he would raise an alarm. Once the dogs were free to run the grounds, they would have been impossible to approach, even with the most tempting food.

  Dartley made his way back through the undergrowth and spent some time before he found the place where he had hidden his mask and flippers. He flopped out onto the sand, waded into the water, wet his mask fast, fitted the mouthpiece, and swam outward beneath the surface. He did not break the surface again for a long time. When he did, he found himself only a few hundred yards ‘from the boat in which Harry and Benjael were still fishing. They had caught nothing.

  “We’re really taking this seriously,” Roscoe James assured General Bonifacio in the lobby of the Manila Hotel. “Hodges, here, went up to talk to the supposedly dead serviceman and his wife earlier today to make sure there would be no hitches from that end. All he had to do was stay out of sight. The newscasts have been on every radio station throughout the Philippines and on TV. Also in the newspapers. He reacted twice before on hearing about the deaths of U.S. servicemen, so chances are he’ll react this time too. On every one of those newscasts it mentioned that you and Happy Man were going to walk together for old time’s sake in Rizal Park tonight. He’ll show up, all right. My only fear is that he’ll use an automatic weapon and cut you down too.”

  “That’s the chance I will have to take,” the general said calmly. “So far he’s used a pistol and no weapon at all in the Makati office building. My guess is that he prides himself on how he does things and will go to great lengths to show how he can get Velez and meanwhile spare me. Doing that will give him even a greater sense of power than just mowing both of us down.”

  “If he’s taken the trouble to check out who you are, sir,” Hodges put in.

  “He’s taken the trouble to carefully select two business employees of Velez whose deaths would really hurt their boss economically. The man who did that knows the difference between me and Happy Man Velez.”

  “I agree, General,” Roscoe said, “but Hodges is pointing out that you are running a heavy risk, and both he and I admire your guts to do it.”

  Bonifacio looked at him in surprise. “I’m a soldier. Do you think this is the first time I’ve put my life on the line?” When the Americans were silent, he went on. “I am not one of the incompetent, corrupt officers who know more about polo and polite conversation than they do about combat. Roscoe, you know all about my war record in Mindanao and in the Moro rebellion a few years ago. Why do I have to say all this?”

  “I don’t want you to get into this to try to relive your glory days, General,” Roscoe said. “This is not a military campaign—it’s strictly the dirty tricks department. We want to nail this rogue serviceman who has killed Velez’s men, but only after he has killed Velez for us. It’s not pretty, but we’ve found ourselves an assassin in spite of Washington’s orders. If all goes well.”

  “I’d do an awful lot to be rid of Happy Man,” the general said with a sinister smile. “Sooner or later we had to settle this between us. If I can do it now and escape all blame, i
t’s going to ease a lot of roadblocks for me.”

  “You’re very candid, sir,” Roscoe said, complimenting him.

  “When it suits me,” the general replied. “My chief worry tonight is that when Happy Man’s motorcade arrives, some of his security men will notice that I have not placed a military cordon around this section of the park, as I promised him I would. Happy Man may jump back in his car and take off.”

  “No,” Roscoe said, “that would make him look like a coward in public. He could never allow that. Besides, I’ll be there to assure him that a hidden military cordon is in place.”

  The general shook hands vigorously with the two Americans as they told him they would be rooting for him. After Bonifacio had strode away from them across the lobby, Roscoe James remarked to Hodges, “Once Happy Man is out of the way, there’ll be no holding back this son of a bitch. That’s why he’s being so agreeable. You heard him. He even has the cheek to tell us so. What he’s really saying to us is that we’re going to have to pay through the nose to him someday soon when he’s top dog here. Stay friends with that bastard, Hodges. He’ll be your ticket to a lot of promotions in the Agency until he gets what’s coming to him. By that time you’ll have found someone to replace him.”

  Hodges smiled his thanks. For a CIA field man Roscoe James could be a real fatherly sort.

  Dartley, Harry, and Benjael had been on the go since early morning, making preparations, traveling out to Laguna province, meeting with Benjael after the rapids trip, doping the dogs in the Velez compound, and now, getting ready for the night assault. Dartley missed being in contact with what was going on. Their radios did not pick up outside wavelengths, and they had no time to listen to their car radios or buy newspapers. Dartley realized that this was a mistake on his part, since some unforeseen event could have occurred that would have caused a change in their plans. When Dartley worked alone, as he was accustomed to, he did not make such oversights. Having to work with others broke his concentration. But, as he saw it, he had no choice.