by Ian Barclay
When the rebels moved cautiously forward to investigate, the sergeant blasted two of the more trusting ones, spraying them with shots to the torso. After that the survivors of both sides lay low for a while, before pulling back and losing contact in the dense tree cover.
The platoon leader at the prison compound sent a signal to the men on the east wall, and both men with the M79 grenade launchers fired simultaneously on the two machine guns. The grenades lifted out of the shotgunlike launchers, arced through the air, and wiped out the two-man crew on each of the M60s.
The barricades caught fire at the points of explosion, and the flames swept through the dry palm logs and bamboo stakes. The guerrillas waited only long enough for an opening to show, and they entered through the breach. The prison guards and the lieutenant fired on the ten men running through the flaming logs. They hit two, but the other eight guerrillas came forward at a run, half concealed as a breeze blew smoke toward the cell blocks. One rifle stitched a line of lead across the lieutenant’s chest, and he sank to his knees, still trying to raise his M16 to return fire.
Three of the prison guards died in the open, fighting like men. One killed another guerrilla with the last bullet in his magazine as he staggered, finger pressed on the trigger, after being hit in the gut and shoulder. The guerrillas found the other five guards hiding in an empty cell. They were pleading for mercy and offering to make bargains when high-velocity bullets smacked into their bodies and stopped their voices. Bullets ricocheting off the six concrete surfaces of the cell further peppered their fallen forms, and a few whistled out the open door, narrowly missing the men who fired them.
“Joker Solano!” the platoon leader yelled.
“Here!” a voice shouted from inside a cell.
A rebel ran to unlock the door with a key taken from a guard’s body.
The guerrilla leader called out six other names, and these seven men left right away with two guerrillas. The others then unlocked the rest of the cells. The prisoners in better shape helped those no longer able to walk unaided. Others gathered weapons and ammunition. They had no explosives strong enough to destroy the cell blocks.
When the sergeant and five soldiers who had escaped the ambush reached the prison camp, the barricades were reduced to ashes and all the cell doors hung open. They saw the lieutenant’s body through the smoke.
CHAPTER
9
Ruperto Velez arrived at his hacienda not far outside the town of Balbalasang, in the northern part of the large island of Luzon. Although the huge city of Manila was also on this island, the northern areas were some of the wildest in the Philippines, and some of the people there were nearly untouched by the twentieth century. Happy Man felt far from untouched by current events. He hoped that coming up here to his northern stronghold would make him impervious to outside agents once again.
Ruben Montova had met his white Gulf-stream II twin-engine jet with orange-and-burgundy stripes and glistening chrome trim as it touched down and parked at Balbalasang’s small airport. Happy Man had had the main runway extended a couple of years ago, to accommodate this private jet. He had come directly from the family estates in the province of Negros Occidental, where his brother was interred in the family cemetery.
“Damn, Ruben, I have to leave my Laguna house because it’s not safe for me to be in anymore. I have a stranger trying to kill me—someone who can’t even tell me from my brother. Fortunately for me. You know, I hadn’t realized how much he had grown to look like me in the last year or two.”
“Since he started to put on weight,” Ruben said maliciously.
Happy Man grinned. “It cost the poor bastard his life. Ah, well, better him than me. The bright side of it, of course, is that with my older brother dead I am now head of the family.”
“You were always head of the family, Ruperto. Your brother always did what you told him.”
“He was weak and stupid, and his bitch of a wife was trying to turn him against me.” Happy Man scowled. “I’ll see to it that she gets left out in the cold now that I’m in control of everything.”
“There was no will?” Ruben asked.
“Sure, there was a will. But I didn’t like it. I’m having it changed.”
Montova nodded.
“Anyway, like I was saying,” Happy Man went on, “I had to run for my life out of my Laguna house, and when I got to our lands down in Negros Occidental on the morning of my brother’s funeral, there was a rebel attack on a detention center near one of our plantations, which succeeded in freeing all the dangerous troublemakers who had been put out of circulation there.”
“I heard about it.”
“We were responsible for having a lot of them arrested, and now it’s my guess that they’ll try to get back at the Velez family. Things are bad enough with the collapse of the sugarcane business down there. These dangerous radicals on the loose again are bound to cause serious trouble. I got the hell out as fast as I could and came up here. My younger brothers can handle things for a while. Let them earn their keep for a change.”
“You’ll be pleased to hear that things are going well for us here in Balbalasang,” Ruben told him.
“I want to keep this as my power base,” Happy Man said. “The government doesn’t show its face up here without a company of soldiers in armored personnel carriers. We’re already much stronger than all the New People’s Army forces combined in the area, and if we keep building our strength here, it will give me the kind of credibility I need to be a national force.”
Montova nodded in agreement. “You think General Bonifacio wants to form an alliance with you?”
“I don’t know what he wants. He had something on his mind that night we met in Rizal Park, but he sure took his time about getting it out. If we hadn’t been interrupted by the news of my brother’s murder, I’m sure he finally would have got around to it. Though he’s so pro-American, I don’t see how he could think of himself being allied with me.”
“At least you know he wasn’t out to kill you,” Montova said.
Happy Man laughed. “In a way I owe my life to Bonifacio. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been at the Laguna house when the attack took place. He came down for my brother’s funeral and told me that the Americans believe a career officer at one of the bases is responsible, a deranged man working alone. I agreed that it sounded likely and thanked him for coming. He never mentioned a word about our interrupted meeting in Rizal Park, though.”
“Perhaps he thought the occasion wasn’t suitable,” Ruben suggested.
Happy Man looked puzzled.
“It was your brother’s funeral,” Ruben explained.
“That must have been it,” Happy Man agreed. “You got some people together so we can party tonight?”
Dartley, Harry, Benjael, and his cousin, Rafael Sumiran, took turns at driving every few hours. They had avoided the large resort city of Baguio by taking this road north. They left the flat rice-growing province of Nueva Ecija as the road zigzagged up into the brown foothills of the Caraballo to Dalton Pass. According to Rafael, the pass was named after an American World War II general who had led a division of American and Filipino troops in a bloody clash with retreating Japanese forces at this place. North of the pass lay the province of Nueva Vizcaya, flat and heavily forested. The road was mainly a truck route, and the heavily loaded vehicles traveled at suicidal speeds with ore from the mines, lumber from the forests, and agricultural produce from the fertile valleys. Roadside stands sold peppers, sweet potatoes, and woven bamboo baskets. They passed through country towns with names such as Bambang, Bayombong, and Bagabag.
Then they hit Igorot country. The Igorots were the people of the mountainous north, traditionally enemies of the central government, whether it be Spanish, American, Japanese, or Filipino. Happy Man’s stronghold at Balbalasang was in the northernmost province of Kalinga-Apayo, and they had to cross the Ifugao and mountain provinces to get there. The road climbed gradually up to the town of Lagaw
e and, from there, climbed steadily higher to Banawe. The town of Banawe wasn’t much, with muddy streets, tourist hotels, and souvenir shops, yet it was not the town that tourists came to see but the famous rice terraces on the sides of the local mountains.
Harry and Benjael were annoyed when Dartley would not stop to see the sights.
“I’m paying you well enough,” he said, snarling at them, “so you can afford to come back here and gawk on your own time after we see this mission through. Right now we got work to do, and the only reason we’re going by road instead of air is so we can bring weapons along. So forget the sight-seeing crap. We’re up here to kill a man.”
Bontoc was fifty kilometers to the northwest, over a Cordillera skyway. Here there were terraced vegetable gardens with spiral beds, and mountain orchids grew on gnarled oak trees. At Bontoc, Dartley relented and allowed a stay-over at a hotel. Here the air smelled of pine, and the temperature was in the sixties, a pleasant change from the nineties in the dusty plains. Bontoc had its own rice terraces on the mountainsides, which the locals claimed were superior to the more famous ones at Banawe, the Bontoc ones having stone, instead of mud, walls. The town itself was in the deep valley of the Chico River. Before leaving the next day, they stocked up on provisions, enough to fill four backpacks and to keep them for at least a week in the wilderness.
Dartley had no illusions about being able to operate from the town of Balbalasang. Now that Velez had come up here, the unexplained appearance of one American with three Filipinos would probably be enough to cause the police to ask questions. No doubt Happy Man would have a lot of influence with the local authorities. Even if he talked his way out of their questions, any attempt on Happy Man’s life would bring the police after him again. Up here there was nowhere to run except in the wilderness, which was everywhere. Dartley decided that they would be better off taking to the hills sooner rather than later, and that the less the town of Balbalasang saw of them, the better.
The road steadily deteriorated the farther north they drove.
“Go by bus!’” Dartley had been warned by an American missionary at the hotel in Bontoc. “The guerrillas and Kalinga warriors do not usually hold up local buses. You may have to share your seat with a baby pig or some chickens, but at least you’ll get there alive.”
“Kalinga warriors?” Dartley asked, not sure he had heard right.
“Tribal people,” the missionary told him. “Very honest, decent people but inclined to be a bit warlike. They’re upset over a proposed government dam, which will flood their lands.”
Dartley later confronted Benjael’s cousin, Rafael, with this information. He dismissed them by saying, “They’re out in the hills. They don’t come into the town of Balbalasang.”
“We’re going to be out in the hills, Rafael,” Dartley said.
“When we get there, I will find out what the Kalingas have been doing lately,” he promised. “They won’t kill us unless they think we work for the government.”
Balbalasang was a pleasant surprise. They had expected a huddle of tin-roofed houses in a valley, although Rafael told them it was a nice town. Rugged mountains gave it a spectacular setting, and even Dartley allowed that the place had lots of pretty women, orange trees, and waterfalls. They spent an hour familiarizing themselves with the town’s layout. Then they drove out past the Velez hacienda.
“We’re coming out this way only once,” Dartley warned, “so look and see whatever you need to see. Where will this road take us, Rafael? It just sort of dies out on the map.”
“It just goes far enough into the forest and mountains to haul timber out or work a mine,” Rafael said. “I don’t remember this road, but all the roads north out of Balbalasang turn into horse trails after a while, and farther on, the horse trails turn into foot trails. We are going to have to turn around and come back on this road. If you pass the Velez place and they see you going out and not coming back real soon, they get suspicious. When you come back into the town, I will take you out on a road I know and find a safe place for us to make camp.”
The Velez hacienda, about five miles outside the town, was a big house in a cluster of trees at the end of a long tree-lined driveway. The fields were planted in neat rows with vegetables of some kind, and a small collection of tin-roofed shacks in a hollow belonged to the tenant farmers.
“They work the land in exchange for one-third of the produce,” Rafael explained. “The landowner keeps two-thirds. When the NPA guerrillas gain control of an area, they change that arrangement so that the tenant farmer gets two-thirds. In the last few years all the big landowners here have had to go along with the guerrillas’ demands, except Happy Man. Anytime one of his tenants make demands, he soon disappears. ‘He went to work in Manila,’ the strong-arm men say, but his family never sees or hears of him again. That’s the way things work up here.”
There were no signs of anyone watching them as they passed the Velez place. About a half a mile farther on, the road became a pair of tire tracks climbing a hillside. Dartley turned the car around and went back, again passing Happy Man’s house and not seeing any guards. But Rafael was nervous and uneasy.
“When I worked up in this place,” he said, “I never once came out this road, and neither did anyone else who did not have business here. Velez’s men will be asking in town this evening who it was that drove out this way. We have to make it look like we are just dumb tourists who didn’t know what they were doing and who have now moved on. Bear to the right up here and it will take you up toward the forests, and we’ll avoid the town.”
Dartley was pleased with the change in Rafael’s attitude. Both Benjael and Harry had noticed how Rafael had lost his laid-back, self-possessed air once they neared Happy Man’s hideaway. This was a man who had seen and heard stories about Happy Man’s goons and who knew they had now entered the lion’s den. Dartley never allowed himself to be governed by fear, but he recognized that it could serve to bring others to their senses very fast.
He followed Rafael’s directions up logging trails into the hills. From an overlook on the summit of one hill they looked out over the large valley that held the Velez hacienda. Rafael grinned at Dartley’s surprise to find himself poised far above his target like this and pointed out the face of another hill to the American.
“That is where we make camp. Last year we finished logging there and the trails will not be overgrown yet, so you can bring the car far in and hide it well. These hills are not worth clear-cutting. We just came in and felled select big trees marked for us and hauled them out. It will be another five years or more before the loggers come to the face of that hill again. We will be safe there.”
Harry and Benjael walked after the car on the trails through the forest, using leafy branches to beat any tire trails left in the ground. The trail branched frequently, but each turnoff was marked with two paint splashes on a tree to identify it for timber trucks. Blue over white marked the main exit trail to the road. They left the main trail on green over blue and left that on the white-over-red trail, which terminated in a circle to allow long trucks to turn around. Dartley drove the car out of the circle in among the trunks of seventy-foot pines. When it could no longer be seen from the trail or from the air because of the tree canopy, he cut boughs and placed them loosely over the roof, hood, trunk, and against the sides. Someone who didn’t know that the car was there could walk by it only twenty yards away and not notice it among the trees, yet it was ready to move in a hurry, since the concealing boughs would drop off once it was moving.
They loaded four backpacks with provisions and took along two two-man tents, a camp stove, four M16 rifles, four Pindad pistols, ammunition, combat knives, medical kits, and extra clothing. Locked in the car trunk they left spare food and bottled water, two M16s and ammo, two inflatable rafts, a cylinder of pressured air, nylon mountaineering ropes, tackle and pitons, plus other odds and ends Dartley hoped they would never have to use. They moved out along a winding path through the bush and set u
p the tents in a clearing about a mile away from the car. Dartley laid down a few simple rules: no cooking fires, no shooting of weapons, no quarrels, and one man always on watch. He ordered Rafael to go back to check the car, Benjael to guard camp, and Harry to come with him on a circular tour of their position. They would all meet an hour later at the camp, eat their evening meal of K rations, and turn in for the night.
Dartley and Harry saw nothing out of the ordinary on their tour. They found a stream with clear water that would be good to drink after being boiled and saw the sawed-off stumps of a number of large trees. Rafael hadn’t gotten back yet when they returned to camp. They waited a while and then went to look for him, leaving Benjael behind again, not looking nearly as fierce out here in the forest as he had in the Tondo slums. They found Rafael talking to almost twenty women around the car. Dartley moved forward, furious that Rafael would spend his time flirting instead of coming to warn them that the place to which he had brought them was not deserted and secure, like he had promised it would be. They were unusually tall for Filipino women and were dressed in brightly colored, traditional, long skirts and wore beads and shells in their hair and big bronze earrings.
“Kalingas,” Rafael said in a neutral tone. “They send their women when they want to avoid a confrontation. They’re giving us a chance to leave.”
It was then that Dartley noticed that the air had been let out of the car’s tires. “How can they expect us to leave with four flats?”
“You don’t understand,” Rafael said. “They want us to leave the car behind. Our guns too.”
“Tell them they are out of luck.” Dartley cocked his M16 and snapped it to full automatic.
Rafael stumbled in a language Dartley had not heard before. In response the women heaped abuse on him, a fresh one taking up where another left off, until most of them had their say.