by Ian Barclay
They took the boat out in the dark and again cut the engine about two miles offshore. Dartley oiled the oarlocks and placed the oars, padded with burlap on their shafts, into the oarlocks and began to row toward the Velez estate. There was no moon, but they could see plenty by starlight. Dartley spotted the wall where it neared the water and rowed along about three hundred yards offshore. Harry sat in the prow, staring into the darkness for a sign of anything. Benjael sat in the stern, with an M16 mounted with a night scope. Dartley was not convinced that the scope worked properly but could not risk testing it. The weapon, supplied by Sumiran himself, was obviously stolen property from either the American or Philippines armed forces. Benjael handled the weapon with familiarity. Harry had not even known how to hold it, so he was lookout and would handle the boat while Dartley was ashore, although earlier he had not handled the oars any better than he had handled the M16. But he couldn’t cause as much harm with a mishandled oar as he could with an automatic rifle.
“Just don’t make noise,” Dartley had told Harry, “and try not to lose the oars.”
After floating offshore and watching for a short time, Dartley rowed to shore and put the prow against the sand. He stepped past Harry and jumped out onto dry sand. As Harry went to the middle seat to row, the prow lifted and the boat floated out. Harry splashed with the oars but did his best to be quiet. They were to wait a hundred yards or so out on the lake until Dartley lit a match in his cupped hands, when they would come in to get him, still rowing unless Dartley was being pursued. If there was trouble, Harry would go aft and work the engine, while Benjael would provide Dartley with cover from the middle of the boat. Dartley swore to himself that if this worked, he’d never in his life again depend on such a half-assed plan.
He moved fast through the undergrowth toward where he had seen the house from the air. Everything was quiet except for the sound he made pushing his way through the shrubs. He had the .22 automatic he had bought from Harry and the razor-sharp frogman’s knife he had carried earlier. If the dogs came at him, he would fend them off with these and retreat for the boat. The German shepherds should have heard or scented him by now. They must be groggy, asleep, or dead.
Dartley came abruptly to the edge of the trees and shrubs. Between him and the house there was nothing now but grass and what looked like pebbly sand in the lights outside the house. A long dinner table draped in a white cloth and stacked with empty plates and empty bottles stood beneath a tree. The dinner guests had departed, leaving some chairs on their sides and a sole man sleeping off a drunk at one end of the table. The man was big and heavy. He did not seem comfortable sitting there with his head lying sideways on the table in front of him. He shifted his shoulders and scratched his leg, like a sleeper uncomfortable in a bed. Dartley stared, and a cold smile spread across his face. The sleeping drunk was Happy Man Velez.
Dartley did not need to look at the photos again to know the man. He was a bit fatter and maybe older-looking than he would have expected, but if this was what he did with himself, some wear and tear was not surprising. A woman came out of the house. She was good-looking in a severe way and wore a long black evening gown. She spoke to Happy Man in what Dartley assumed was Tagalog, not sounding too friendly. She then shook his shoulder. He looked as if he was saying something to her and he smiled, the side of his face still on the tablecloth. She strutted back into the house, her fists clenched, mad as hell.
Dartley had to act fast. He whipped out the frogman’s knife as he stealthily ran across the sand to the table. Standing next to the passed-out man, he eased the flattened blade between his neck and the tablecloth, sliding it in all the way until the hilt almost touched his chin. The sleeping man felt the cool blade next to his skin and mumbled something Dartley could not make out.
Putting his left hand on the crown of the man’s head, Dartley pressed his chin down as he simultaneously twisted the sharp edge of the blade up and drew it across the man’s throat. The steel sank easily into the flesh and slithered through it.
Dartley pressed harder on the head, forcing the man’s chin into his neck and closing the deep slice across his throat.
He was hoping they would not notice and decide to let the drunk sleep it off where he sat. This would give him a start of several hours before they began searching for his killer. And Dartley knew that a nationwide hunt would be undertaken for the assassin of such an important figure. Every hour he could gain would count.
He made it as far as the cover of the bushes before the woman came out of the house again. This time she had a man with her. He had been afraid that she intended this. Well, at least he had reached his target. Dartley stopped to watch—not out of morbid interest but in the hope that the man might change the woman’s mind and let the sleeping man be. But that was not about to happen.
She shook him by the shoulder again. This time he did not smile or say anything to her. Instead his head lolled sideways at an unnatural angle, and a spout of bright red blood splashed over the dirty dishes and the white tablecloth.
Dartley heard the woman screaming as he ran through the undergrowth toward the lake.
Before he reached the lake, Dartley heard the kicks and sputters of an outboard engine failing to start. Dartley loudly cursed Harry as he rushed through the undergrowth. When he got to the lake edge, he saw Harry and Benjael, illuminated by a beam of light, sitting in the boat with their hands raised above their heads, maybe fifty yards offshore. The beam of light originated from another craft on the water, also about fifty yards from the shore and about the same distance again from the boat. The point of origin of the powerful beam showed the front end of a rubber raft. The light was fixed on some kind of support on the raft, and its rays glinted on an M16 rifle barrel leveled on Benjael and Harry. A shadowy figure, hardly visible behind the light, stooped over the raft’s outboard, which was repeatedly failing to start. So far, as Dartley could make out, there were only two men in the raft.
Dartley still had the foot-long blood-smeared underwater knife in his right hand, and he waded quietly into the water, trying not to splash as he moved his legs forward through it. This was no time to wonder how Benjael and Harry had let themselves be surprised and had surrendered without a fight. This was only a time to do something about it, if he could. The water crept up over Dartley’s waist, and he sank into it after taking a deep breath. He did the breaststroke vigorously, his limbs not breaking the surface and thus making no noise; only his head was visible. If the beam of the light swung his way, he could duck his head beneath the surface in a second.
The second man in the raft had given up on the engine and had started to paddle by the time Dartley reached the side of the raft. He saw the swimmer an instant before he dived under the raft. Dartley dived deep. His intention had been to puncture the raft with his knife, but now he realized that this would collapse and sink it slowly, giving the man with the M16 plenty of time to use his weapon on the two men in the boat and on Dartley, himself, in the water. So instead of plunging the blade through the raft’s rubber skin, he came upward from his deep dive so that both his shoulders caught one side of the raft in a powerful thrust.
At the moment Dartley hit the raft from underneath the man who had been paddling was firing a .38 revolver at random into the water, and the one with the M16, who still half doubted the existence of this swimmer his comrade claimed to have seen, had taken his eye off the boat’s occupants and was scanning the surface close to the beam of the light. Dartley raised up beneath the air-filled rubber raft the way an angry hippo can surface beneath a boat in an African river. As the raft’s side raised into the air Dartley used up the last of his momentum in giving it one last violent shove with both hands, which succeeded in overturning the ungainly, ultralight craft.
The raft came down on top of the man toting the M16, its inverted sides confusing and trapping him for seconds that were valuable to Dartley. The American went after the one who had been tinkering with the engine and found him floundering and
splashing like a child a few yards away. Dartley breathed deep, sank below the surface, and kicked forward with violent froglike leg movements, holding the knife before him in both hands.
He hit the man who was clumsily swimming like a charging swordfish, the blade a deadly extension of both his arms held stiffly out before him, the unforgiving metal edge sinking into the man at the top of his belly. His own sharp reaction and wild struggle to avoid the pain caused the honed steel to rip through his abdominal muscle and innards, until his guts spilled out through the opening and hung beneath him in the water like strings of sausages.
Meanwhile the second man had escaped from beneath the raft. The light continued to shine under water, though now its once powerful beam was diffused to a greenish glow after only a short distance. Dartley saw the escaping man caught in the beam for a few seconds as he swam in a strong crawl toward shore. Dartley took after him. He had to drop the knife so he could swim fast enough to catch him before he reached land and the cover of the undergrowth. This man was a witness, and Dartley wanted no unfriendly witnesses to survive. He gained on him steadily until a rip of bullets cut across the water a yard to the right of his head. A wild slash of bullets raised a line of miniature water columns from left to right between him and the man he was trying to catch. Dartley was about to give up the chase and dive to avoid enemy fire when he realized that Benjael Sumiran was responsible for the shooting!
He heard Harry, in the boat, curse out Sumiran, and the shooting stopped. Fortunately the gunfire had also caused the fleeing man to ease up. Now Dartley tore after him in a fierce overarm with his head and neck right out of the water. He caught up with him as the escaping man found sand under his feet and lost time in trying to walk, instead of swim, the last few yards to shore. In water up to their chests now, both standing on the sandy bottom, the two men fought to the death with their bare hands. The water softened the blows beneath the surface.
Dartley’s opponent punched at his face and caught him a beautiful right-hander on the left cheekbone that knocked him back in the water. As Dartley floundered, trying to regain his footing in the soft sand beneath, the Velez goon charged him. Dartley let him come, hauled in a deep breath, and sank beneath the onslaught, taking the attacker down with him. Eyes open in the clear water, Dartley grappled with him, dragging him down, clutching at him, holding him under.
Under water, the man’s eyes widened in fear as it occurred to him that the victor of this fight would be the man who had taken in the most air in his lungs and could hold his breath longest—long enough for his opponent to lose consciousness. He struggled fiercely in increasing panic as his breath gave out. Dartley held grimly on to him, hitting off the sandy bottom in no more than four feet of water.
The goon kicked, punched, gouged, scratched, kneed, but it was no good; Dartley hung on to him and kept his head near the sandy bottom. Finally the man’s mouth exploded in a stream of bubbles when he could hold his breath no longer. Dartley watched him suck water into his lungs.
Another man might have pitied the slowly drowning man for the look of pleading terror in his eyes and on his face as he gradually choked from breathing water. Not Dartley. He gained new strength from watching his enemy die.
When the features of the man’s face finally relaxed into a dull, fishlike look, Dartley felt he could have held his breath another full two minutes if it had taken that long for the goon to drown. He stood up in chest-deep water and expelled his lungs like a whale sounding. Then he breathed in the warm, sticky tropical air, which felt ice-cold and sparkling to his starved lungs.
Harry nearly ran him down with the boat when he came to pick him out of the water, but Dartley was too content to bother cussing him or Benjael out for making mistakes. His mission was complete. He had taken out Happy Man in the middle of his estate. Now he sat back in the boat contentedly, as it made its way over the dark, calm lake. Everything had gone well, if not smoothly. He was on his way home to America.
Bonifacio delayed and delayed as he and Happy Man walked in Rizal Park. The general kept waiting for the attack to take place from the dark shadows of the park. But nothing happened. The general was hopeful when he heard a man running toward them—until he saw that it was one of his own men.
“Excuse me, sir,” the sergeant gasped, out of breath. “Bad news just came by telephone. Mr. Velez, your brother has been killed out at your Laguna estate.”
CHAPTER
8
It was Good Friday morning as they drove north out of Manila, and everything in this normally colorful, vibrant place seemed cloaked in mourning. Dartley had Harry and Benjael Sumiran along with him, in spite of his previous vows never to work with any amateurs again, and certainly never with these two, no matter what happened! Yet it was only a matter of hours before Dartley realized how helpless and ignorant he was in this society, without contacts. An American could make out in Manila and probably in a few of the larger cities, but beyond the heavily urbanized areas, Dartley recognized that the people would treat him as an oddity for whom they might pose for photographs or to whom they might sell native crafts. He could not move around undetected, and he was bound to break all sorts of local customs and otherwise cause offense, and therefore hostility, through his lack of familiarity with traditions. It was one thing for a foreigner to bumble his way through as a tourist, with no serious purpose to be achieved. It was quite another thing for a foreigner to intrude into an ancient society of complex ethnic patterns in order to assassinate one of the best-known men in the country. Dartley always added one important condition to each mission that he undertook—succeed or fail, he wanted to get out alive.
“There’s no way I’m going to take Benjael,” Dartley told Harry.
“He can get you guns.”
“I can get all the guns I need myself,” Dartley told him.
Happy Man Velez did not return to his lakeside estate after Dartley had killed his older brother by mistake. When Dartley learned of his mistake—while packing his bags at the Las Palmas Hotel in readiness for the flight home—he went through the file on Happy Man provided by Herbert Malleson. There were photos of Happy Man’s three brothers in it, and none of them resembled him. They were all much thinner than he was. This brother must have put on weight fairly recently and gotten to look like Happy Man. Dartley could not blame Malleson for missing a detail like that, especially since the Englishman had to do his research from newspaper files at a distance of seven thousand miles or so, without attracting attention to what he was doing. Yet it was a small thing like this that could tip the balance one way or the other, which made relying on research a chancy thing to do.
Dartley blamed himself for not having a radio along that day. It was an incredible oversight. He told himself over and over that if only he had heard about another American serviceman being killed, plus the fact that Velez was going to be in Rizal Park, he would have hit him there. The next day, when he heard that the report about another American having been killed was in error, he saw that the meeting in Rizal Park had been a trap set for him. Harry came to the same conclusion independently and arrived at the Las Palmas Hotel to warn him. This made Dartley decide to continue working with him.
They heard that Happy Man had left the Manila area for his northern stronghold in the town of Balbalasang. Harry said he knew no one up in that wild country and suggested that they take Benjael along. This was when Dartley said no and that he didn’t need Benjael’s guns.
“He has cousins who live up that way,” Harry said.
Dartley looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure?”
“I’m certain. That’s where his family came from originally. Not all the way up at Balbalasang, but far enough up there. That’s why he is a wild man. Now, my family has always lived in Manila, for many generations, which is what makes us so civilized.”
So it turned out that Dartley, who prided himself on his intricate planning and faultless execution of detail, who only liked to work alone, found himself dri
ving north with two amateurs he hadn’t even bothered to argue with when they had fucked up previously. He had no plan. No details were worked out. He had no knowledge of the place they were going, except that it was wild and hot and had plenty of mosquitoes. If Happy Man had ordered anyone besides American servicemen killed, Dartley would have abandoned the mission and gone home. He had no wish to take on overwhelming odds or to operate under unfavorable conditions. But Happy Man had murdered innocent young GIs, and Dartley was determined to make him pay for that with the only price that fitted the crime—Happy Man’s own life.
They drove north out of Metro Manila not long after dawn. The urban sprawl covered the lower part of Bulacan province, with housing subdivisions, memorial parks, factories and warehouses, and only traces left of old rice fields, fish ponds, mango groves, tanneries, duck farms, and clay-pot kilns. They took the Cagayan Valley road, and this led northward into open rice fields and volcanic hills with caves and springs. All Dartley knew was that they would find Benjael’s cousin at a penitensya, which seemed to be some kind of religious ritual, in a village near San Jose in the next province north, called Nueva Ecija.
Dartley asked, “You have all these places with Spanish names, and the Spanish were here until the end of the last century, but how come the Spanish language died out so fast?”
“It didn’t,” Harry answered. “It was never spoken much when they ruled here because the Spanish allowed only the small Filipino upper class to learn it. They thought that if the common people learned the language, it might help to overthrow them. So the monks translated the bible into our languages and preached to the people in the local language. The religious orders were in control when the Americans arrived at the turn of the century, and that’s when we began to speak English.”