by Ian Barclay
One man walking along a deserted stretch of road by himself got Dartley’s attention. He stopped the car, got out, and took a cheap Kodak from his canvas bag.
“Can I take your photo?”
“One peso,” the man said.
Dartley gave him five and clicked the camera once. Then he asked, “Are you Happy Man?”
“Me?” The ragged, sun-bronzed worker laughed incredulously. “No, I am not Happy Man.”
“I want to take his photo. Where does he live? Through those big gates we saw back there?”
“No. That is a Velez family house. They own seven big houses here. But Happy Man does not live in that one.”
Dartley looked very interested and serious. “You seem to know this place well.”
“I should. I was born and growed up here. Never been anyplace else.”
“We’re lost. We don’t know what to see. Would you guide us around for an hour or so? We can pay.”
“How much?” The look of hope mingled with greed that crossed the man’s face would have been funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.
“Fifty pesos.” This was about three dollars. Dartley would have given him ten times this if he thought he could do so without arousing the man’s suspicions.
“Give it to me now!”
“Half now, half after you’ve shown us what we want to see.”
Harry drove with the farm worker beside him. They had to speak English between them, too, Harry not understanding the worker’s Ilongo, and the worker not understanding Harry’s Tagalog. Dartley sat in the backseat, following their route by map and carefully adding points of interest in ballpoint pen while Harry kept the worker distracted. They did not press him about the Velez family and, as a result, saw churches, cemeteries, ruined mills, ancient battle sites, and various other geographical and historical items of interest as well as the essential information they needed on Happy Man, his militias, and the NPA. Dartley slid down out of sight in the backseat when he thought he might be noticed as an American inside the car. He thought the worker was not noticing this until the man insisted that Dartley get down and stay down while they were in one area.
“You know what would happen to me if the guerrillas saw me with an American?”
“Why here?” Dartley asked from the floor behind him. “A few fields back, it didn’t seem to worry you so much.”
“This is the guerrilla half of the farm. I hear it only today. The soldiers and guards don’t come over here to this side anymore, and the guerrillas don’t go to the other side. I don’t know why. They say the big boss maybe make a deal.”
“Who is the big boss? Happy Man?”
“Sure.”
“A lot of people been killed here in the last few days. I hope you got nothing to do with that.”
“Killed!” Dartley said in horror. “You mean people are being killed and you bring us around here?”
“I bring you out fast to the main road for a hundred pesos!”
“All right! Do it now! Right away!”
The worker left, happy at having taken the nervous tourists for so much money.
“You think he’ll say anything?” Harry asked.
“To his wife. And she’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut. He’ll get around to thinking about it himself, that maybe he was the one who was took. And he won’t want it to get back to the guerrillas that he showed an American around, even a scared tourist.”
“He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Harry agreed.
“I want to go back to see that NPA area,” Dartley said. “I think he skimmed over that because he was afraid.”
“He had good reason,” Harry observed dryly.
“We need to see the layout of the roads,” Dartley said, and Harry obeyed.
Froilan Quijano’s face twisted into a rage at the news. “He breaks the agreement on the very first day! You say this strange car has been patrolling our area? That it is not Happy Man or any of the Velez family or management? Maybe they are friends or businessmen come to see him. No. If they were lost, they would ask the way. You say ‘patrol.’ What do you mean by that?”
“I didn’t see the car, Ka Froilan, but I think they mean that it passed by places more than once. Our men are experienced. They know how to tell tourists or lost people from someone driving around in order to get the lay of the land.”
“What do you think, Ka Joker?” Quijano asked.
“I think we’d better do something about it,” Joker Solano said, making no move to do anything about it himself.
“Ka Eduardo won’t be back for hours,” Quijano grumbled to himself. “I had better go with you.” The old organizer was developing a taste for action—he had done so well in fingering Montova for the marksman. It had been exciting and easy.
Joker made no comment, made no move.
Quijano emerged from the dugout in a stony section of ground unsuitable for cultivation among thick growths of cane. He persuaded himself that he was going along because he did not want everything ruined by the senseless murder of some innocent motorists, which would bring in special government troops if they were important people. Happy Man had a lot of influential friends, and Froilan felt he had to make sure that none of the trigger-happy clowns in Cristobal’s outfit blew them away. It was irresponsible for Cristobal to leave for hours on end without designating someone to command in his absence, but he did not seem to have enough confidence in himself as commander to risk elevating someone to second in command. Solano was an intellectual who made no pretense of being a fighter. He was not even ashamed for having cracked so easily for the army torturers. Froilan, himself, had been around in the bad old days and had seen a lot of comrades suffer and die for the cause. It was high time that he tasted a little blood in exchange for everything he had seen and his years in hiding….
They tore off the sugarcane stalks that concealed the open farm truck they had used to get Montova outside Apo’s shack. As he had then, Quijano climbed into the back with seven or eight men toting M16s. A guerrilla with a hand-held radio got in the cab beside the driver. He held the radio outside the cab window, waiting to receive the latest location on the car, while the truck engine idled. The last word they heard, the car was headed for the main road. Then a voice crackled over the receiver. The car had come back again and was once more patrolling the NPA half of the Velez property. They got a fix on its position in the network of little roads and lanes through the vast sea of canefields, and the driver shifted the truck into gear.
The guerrillas had all been born and bred in the area, and they knew every creek and clump of ferns from long days of working in the fields before they went underground. It was only a matter of minutes before the driver pulled the truck broadside across the road and the guerrillas in the back lined along one side with their M16 stocks resting on its top.
A minute later the car came around a bend at medium speed. There was no way the driver could have seen the truck in time to back away to safety. The car braked to a smooth halt about ten yards from the truck, its driver, alone on the front seat, looking up through the windshield at the row of rifle barrels pointing down at him. The driver blew the horn at them to move. Froilan’s blood boiled in rage at the imperialistic cheekiness of this capitalist, who thought he could push the forces of proletarian revolution to one side with a few blasts from his car horn.
Then the back door of the car swung open….Several rifle barrels raised to cover whoever would emerge. Then an American got out. He smiled at them and waved. He held up a cloth shopping bag in his left hand and gestured that he was going to put his right hand into it to show them something, which he did, slowly.
Froilan saw blotches of fabric scatter like feathers from one side of the bag. The MAC10 bullets tore in a line across the faces of three riflemen in less than a second. The others ducked as the deadly hail of lead cleaved the side of the truck at the eye level of most of the men. The guerrillas were young, and their reflexes were fast. Quijano was past his prime, and the MAC10 be
at him to it. One bullet sheared off his nose and ran along the side of his skull, beneath his left eye orbital, searing a furrow through his cheek muscles. Another bullet smacked his upper teeth and buried itself deep in his brain. His pain had ended before his body hit the truck floor.
Dartley fired a burst in the wide window of the cab and took out both the radioman and driver with multiple 9 mm parabellum projectiles to the head and neck. He exhausted the thirty-two-round magazine in another run across the wooden side of the truck, this time ripping splinters off its top, in case any of the riflemen were tempted to raise their heads.
Harry handed him his own fully loaded MAC10 out the car window, and Dartley eased back into the car, closed the door, and hung out the side window as Harry backed it around the bend and out of sight of the truck. Dartley saw them peeping but did not fire.
As Harry reversed direction he said, “I’m heading for Bacolod to turn this car in.”
Dartley laughed. “You think we should get a different make in another color?”
CHAPTER
14
On the way Happy Man stopped off at Apo’s for more herbal talismans. Cristobal and those outside agitators had sent word that they had to talk with him urgently. It was only an hour or so until dark. Normally he would never have gone, except for the message whispered in his ear by the man they sent. “The American is here!”
In spite of the humid, sticky, late-afternoon heat, Happy Man felt suddenly cold. He moved away from the window he had been standing near. The guerrilla, who could not have been much more than fifteen and was terrified of the guards who had searched and handled him brutally, knew nothing more. Cristobal wanted to talk. He was in the church, which had been burned down two years before because of its leftist priest, the one who had later disappeared without a trace.
Happy Man stopped off for the dried herbs even though he had lost the fervent belief he had held before, that their power had lifted the curse from him. It was not a curse—he knew that now. It had never been a curse. It was a black cloud of guilt for the murders of those American servicemen, and now that the black cloud had once again taken demonic human form in this mad American, who no one knew, who stalked him everywhere, who appeared in unexpected places, bringing slaughter with him.
For a moment Happy Man had the wild hope that the guerrillas had captured this American or, better still, killed him. He didn’t want to hear any explanation of how this American had done what he did or why. He just wanted to be rid of him.
As the two jeeps and Happy Man’s car approached the ruined church, they saw a truck parked at the side of the road about three hundred yards on the far side of it. Armed men stood next to it. Happy Man’s convoy pulled into the side of the road at more or less an equal distance on the near side of the church. Three guards went forward to check out the place. They came back and told Velez that six bodies were stretched on the floor of the burned-out church. The guards recognized five of them as Cristobal guerrillas, all local men, and the sixth was the famous communist organizer from Bacolod, Froilan Quijano.
For a moment Happy Man had palpitations, thinking that the NPA was blaming him for these deaths, since it was generally assumed— correctly—that he had ordered the burning of the church where the bodies were now laid. But then he remembered the American. He was still on the loose. And he had come to San Geronimo not to kill NPA guerrillas but to murder Happy Man himself. He and the NPA now had a mutual enemy and could help each other to destroy him. This was why the guerrillas wanted to meet with him. Laying out the bodies in the church he had ordered burned was only typical NPA dramatics—martyred freedom fighters in the holy place desecrated by the capitalist landowner.
Happy Man walked by himself along the road toward the church, and one man broke away from the opposite group and kept pace with him. The two groups of armed men eyed each other, but none made any threatening moves, everybody being equally exposed on the open roadway. The man approaching him he recognized as Joker Solano. He reached the blackened church walls before Solano and saw the corpses laid on the church floor, on top of carbonized rubble from the collapsed roof. The left side of Quijano’s face was ripped and caked in congealed blood, his mouth was stove in, but he was still recognizable. The others Velez recognized vaguely as local youths whose fathers and brothers still worked for him. Good riddance to bad rubbish, he thought, and turned to face Joker Solano.
“Where’s Cristobal?” Velez snapped, making it clear that a man of his stature expected to speak with the commander.
“Cristobal reports to me,” Solano said quietly. He gave Velez a factual account of the deaths of the six men as described by the surviving witnesses. “He’ll be back if you intend to remain here.”
“I do.”
Solano appeared to give this some thought. “Very well. I may have to ask you to leave if we can’t control this American.”
“That’s ridiculous! Why can’t we control him? You and I have no shortage of armed men at our disposal. If we don’t let him pit us against each other, he simply can’t function here.”
“So we’ll cooperate?” Solano asked.
“As much as we can. You and I are men of the world, Solano. Even if we can’t agree, we recognize that there are situations in which we must compromise and cooperate with each other. But you cannot hope that my guards and militiamen will get on with Cristobal and your guerrillas just because we tell them to. Family feuds and personal quarrels are more important here than leftist beliefs. You police your side of the line and we’ll police ours. I have flare guns I can give you. Next time either side sees this American in San Geronimo, setting off the flares will raise a general alarm.”
Solano nodded, turned on his heel, and walked back along the road.
Happy Man looked after him, thinking that if all NPA commanders were such spineless wimps, the red plague of communism could be checked and cured easily.
* * *
Early next morning a yellow Toyota Celica was followed by a big green Ford LTD off the road from Bacolod to San Geronimo and into a sandy area near a small lake. Two other cars were already parked there, their owners visible down by the lakeshore with fishing rods. Dartley switched off the Toyota’s engine and threw the ignition key under the driver’s seat. Then he joined Harry in the Ford, which pulled back onto the road. Although the place was more than three miles from the nearest boundary of the Velez plantations, it was the closest place they could think of to leave it without attracting attention.
“Let’s hope we don’t have to use it,” Dartley said to Harry.
Harry raised his eyes to heaven and quickly returned them to the road. “Let’s hope we’re not hurt too bad to make it out this far.”
Harry was making no secret of the fact that he considered it a serious error of judgment on Dartley’s part to resume their car tour of the Velez estate the very next morning after their run-in with the guerrillas in the truck. Dartley did not explain his decision—he just said they were going. He did not want to tell Harry right away that he was on the point of suspending the mission, of returning to Manila to lie low for a few days, then slip out to Singapore or Hong Kong and fly from there back to the States. When Happy Man had slipped back into his old ways, he would come back after him again. Like MacArthur said, “I shall return.”
The situation in San Geronimo was too unpromising. He had no secure base of operations, only a rented cottage in a seaside resort, a building impossible either to secure or to defend. He had no accessibility to target; as long as Happy Man stayed put in his great house, surrounded by guards, he was more likely to die of boredom than of gunshot wounds. His failed attempts on Velez’s life and the other incidental deaths had spooked Happy Man. No matter how dull life was down on the farm, Happy Man’s fear would make him stay where he was. For a few weeks, at least. By then, if nothing terrible was happening, he would start peeping out at the world once more. Dartley had no intention of sitting on a beach until then. He’d go back to Maryland, maybe
do another assignment, and come back to strike just when Happy Man thought it was safe to go back in the water again.
He had often put much more time and effort than this into a hit. Usually the effort had gone into observation and meticulous planning. That had not been possible in this case, and it would be difficult to term his mission so far as one of mere reconnaissance. But he did not regard his efforts so far as a failure, only as spadework that had to be done. Nothing had been wasted, except Benjael’s life. Dartley saw one big achievement: He had stopped a series of attacks on American servicemen. Now all he had to do was insure that the attacks would not start up again.
But before he left, Dartley wanted to tangle with Happy Man’s guards. He had had his run-in with the communist guerrillas; now he wanted to see what the Velez goons were made of. Harry almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the point of this, and Dartley saw no reason to argue with him. As far as Harry knew, they were just going to take another look around.
Harry tooled the big car around the narrow roads near Happy Man’s residence. Large ornamental gates hung open on two stone pillars, and a gravel drive twisted off into the canefields. There was no sign of walls, fences, or security devices here, like there had been at Laguna and Balbalasang. No doubt appearances were deceiving. Harry drove past the gateway without slowing. From time to time they saw groups of men cutting cane in the fields but met no one on the narrow, twisting roads where the visibility was limited on both sides by the high growth of sugarcane.
In a while they saw two men by the side of the road. One was kicking the other one along in front of him. As the car neared them, the man doing the kicking did not look around, but the one being kicked held out his hands and shouted something. He could not have been more than thirty, yet he looked thin and wasted. The one kicking him was in his mid-twenties, solidly built, with a brutal, heavy face.