Rebound

by Ian Barclay

  Dartley went back to the bedroom and woke Harry, who suddenly was as wide-awake as a startled rabbit when he realized what was happening.

  “I’m going to open the door!” Dartley shouted, and eased it open slowly, staying out of the rectangular view this presented to those outside. “Who are you?”

  “Army of the Philippines! How many there?”

  “Two.”

  “Come out slowly, one by one, hands on the backs of your necks.”

  Harry motioned for Dartley to go first. The American stepped out into the blinding glare. Nobody fired. Thus reassured, Harry followed a few seconds later. They were left standing before the lights while troops with helmets and full combat gear ran into the cottage behind them. In a couple of minutes a sergeant emerged to say that they had “secured this position.”

  The voice that had spoken before out of the darkness now said, “Both of you go back in.”

  “This is not so good,” Harry whispered. “They don’t want people to see them killing us.”

  “Do what the man says,” Dartley warned him, and they went inside.

  Soldiers slouched against the walls of both rooms, and the contents of the four golf bags were spread out on the two beds and bedroom floor. The sergeant slapped both of them face-first against a wall and performed a rapid, expert search of each of them. They carried no weapons. Two men entered while they were left facing the wall. They looked over the weapons in the bedroom and rifled through Dartley’s and Harry’s papers.

  “Sit on the couch,” the voice they’d heard before told them from right behind their backs.

  They obeyed. The speaker was a tough-looking middle-aged Filipino, obviously a military man, although he wore civilian clothes. To Dartley’s surprise the second man was an American, also middle-aged, also tough-looking. They sat themselves at the table across the room from the couch. Each of them placed a Colt .45 automatic on the table in front of him so that there would be no misunderstandings.

  “All right, boys, you can go now,” the Filipino said. “Turn all those damn lights off.” After all the soldiers trooped out in their combat boots and closed the door after them, the Filipinos said to the American, “Roscoe, you talk to him.”

  The American glared at Dartley and jerked his thumb toward the man next to him. “You know who he is?”

  “No,” Dartley answered.

  “That’s General Bonifacio.”

  Harry made an audible whimper at the sound of this name, and this cracked a malevolent smile on the American’s face. He said, “Your friend reads leftist newspapers and listens to gossip about the general. Those pinko rags are always saying he tortures and kills people, makes them disappear, interferes with their human rights, runs prison camps, you name it. Me, I think lie’s a nice man. Where did you find this fella?” he asked Dartley, pointing to Harry.

  “He’s from Tondo,” Dartley answered quietly.

  “And you?”

  “I’m not Filipino,” Dartley answered, as if supplying valuable information.

  “A fucking humorist,” the American complained. “I’m not even going to bother with that garbage name on your ID, Milton Morrison or whatever. Frankly I don’t give a shit what your name is, boy, but when I tell you mine, you better listen carefully because you’re in one heap of trouble, and you’re going to have to grasp at any straw you can catch hold of.”

  He paused to let that sink in. Dartley was amazed by his sudden transformation into a Southern good ol’ boy. And he was hinting at some kind of deal!

  “My name is Roscoe James, and I’m military attaché at the American Embassy. Now, those same newspapers that spread lies about my good friend the general also say bad things about me. They claim that I’m the top CIA man in the Philippines. Imagine that! You got anything to say to me?”

  “No,” Dartley answered.

  “That’s what I expected,” Roscoe said agreeably. “You land in trouble, you’re on your own. You don’t work for anybody. You thought it all up yourself.”

  “Oh, no, I was hired, all right,” Dartley told him, “but not by Langley or the Pentagon.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “Four businessmen.”

  “American?”

  “One. Three Filipino.”

  “Names?”

  “Sorry, I can’t tell you that,” Dartley answered pleasantly. “Also, I don’t know if they have connections with the CIA or anyone else.”

  “What did they hire you to do?”

  “Waste Happy Man.”

  “You on the level about no Washington connections?” Roscoe asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  Roscoe exchanged a look with the general, who nodded his approval.

  “What you just seen walking out the door is one of the elite squads of the Philippine army,” Roscoe went on. “In case you don’t know, the general here doesn’t fuck around when he wants something done. You see for yourself how he found you when he got here. It took him an hour and a half.”

  Dartley smiled. “I kept worrying about that.”

  “You ever bet on a cockfight?” Roscoe asked quickly.

  “Once.”

  “How much? On what kind of bird?”

  “Five bucks on a pied cock. It came in last.”

  “So we heard,” Roscoe said. “And that was you at his place in Laguna?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been unlucky so far.”

  Dartley shook his head. “Happy Man has been lucky.”

  “Whatever,” Roscoe said. “Main thing is, I’ve lost an assistant attaché out on San Geronimo today. We figure they mistook him for you. General Bonifacio lost two intelligence officers.”

  Harry suddenly spoke. “They mistook them for me.”

  Roscoe scowled at him, and Harry subsided.

  “We heard some shooting,” Dartley volunteered.

  “Near where?”

  “Harry was driving.”

  Harry perked up again. “It was near Happy Man’s residence.”

  “That’s what I thought happened,” Roscoe growled. “Happy Man claims it was the NPA guerrillas who killed them. I think that’s bullshit because my assistant had his papers on him, and if the communists had managed to kill an embassy staff man and supposed CIA agent—the newspapers got to him, too—they’d have made a big deal about him being a spy and so forth, to try to embarrass the United States.”

  Dartley asked, “Why didn’t Happy Man bury the body and keep quiet about it?”

  “Well, number one, he’s got to figure that we know where he went—and probably more important to him, he realizes that he’s just blown away two of Bonifacio’s men, and the general also knows where they were.” Roscoe paused. “But that ain’t all. Just before we left Manila for here, word got to us that Happy Man is going public in the next few days in his accusation that my assistant, Ken Hodges, was the American assassin on his trail. He can leave it to the Washington Post or New York Times to trace Ken’s CIA connections—and there you have it, the CIA has a contract out on Happy Man. It will fan anti-American flames here and make Happy Man into a public hero. The newspapers here will link the two dead agents to General Bonifacio, and so he will be implicated. I can already hear them calling him a tool of the CIA, a yes-man to Washington, who is capable of scheming with foreigners to murder a prominent fellow countryman. It’ll finish the general. It’ll finish me. It may finish the U.S. bases here. And if Happy Man gets in power, it’ll finish the Philippines.”

  Roscoe slowly looked Dartley and Harry over. “So, you can see now why the general thought it might be an idea for us to sit down and talk instead of him just putting you out against some wall and shooting you?”

  Dartley nodded appreciatively in Bonifacio’s direction. “I’m sure we won’t let the general down.”

  * * *

  They got maybe an hour’s rest before starting out the next morning. Both Dartley and Harry were pale and tense, but they still had the four golf bags of weapo
ns and the yellow Toyota.

  “I’m not sure I understand what we are doing,” Harry announced halfway out to the Velez plantations.

  “Just get in a firefight with the NPA.”

  “You say that like it was a basketball game we’re going to play,” Harry said irritably. “Why, Santa Maria, why do you and I have to attack these dangerous guerrillas?”

  “Harry, I’ve told you many times that you are not cut out for this line of work.”

  “I agree. Murdering people one at a time I think I am good at. Attacking NPA guerrilla squads, not so good. I think maybe I am not insane enough.”

  “You may be right,” Dartley agreed equably.

  “According to the general’s spies, the NPA has half of Happy Man’s land. We go in there and get them to attack us, which gives the general’s elite squad an excuse to come in and finish them off. And which also gives them an excuse to rush into Happy Man’s house and kill him. That’s madness! You think that plan will work?”

  “It’s crude,” Dartley conceded, “but considering the circumstances and the short time available, it was the best plan we could come up with. You had dozed off by then.”

  “Something struck me as funny,” Harry said. “It seemed to me like getting the NPA was equally as important as Happy Man. Why don’t we go start a fight with Happy Man’s guards?”

  “Because they all believe they’ve killed the American assassin and they’ll try to be nice guys while Happy Man is looking for publicity. No, the objective ones in this are the NPA. They’ve seen us before and now, when they see us again, it will prove that the same American assassin is still on Happy Man’s trail and thus couldn’t have been Ken Hodges, as Happy man asserts.”

  As they drove along the roads on the NPAcontrolled part of the Velez plantations, they saw that in spite of all the killings and turmoil, work still went on at the sugar harvest. Nature did not postpone her cycles to convenience mankind. They watched every agricultural vehicle carefully, knowing that the NPA seized these anytime they needed wheels. Dartley knew that they were being watched, too, and that word would quickly reach Commander Cristobal that intruders were in his stronghold. Unless Cristobal was very, very smart, he would challenge them. Dartley knew better than to expect people to be very, very smart. He let Harry drive and kept himself in readiness to respond to sudden attack.

  When a large flatbed truck, loaded high with cut cane, settled in behind them, completely filling the road from side to side and blocking all retreat, Dartley knew it was going to be any moment now. Dartley removed the cover from one end of the glass-fiber-reinforced plastic tube that lay across his knees. He raised the plastic sights on the tube and cocked the firing mechanism, which made Harry nervous, since the open end of the rocket launcher was pointed at him as it lay bouncing across Dartley’s knees. The Miniman antitank free-flight missile came prepacked in its plastic disposable launcher. The complete missile launcher combinations came in an aluminum and polyethylene pack with a carrying handle and weighing about fifteen pounds— almost as handy as buying beer.

  The 74 mm Swedish missile was 90 cm long and had an effective range of 250 meters. It was unusual in that a propellant-filled combination chamber was connected to the projectile by a breakable joint. This joint held the missile in position within the launcher tube until the gases escaping from the combustion chamber built up sufficient pressure to break the joint. The aluminum-cased, hollow-charge missile had percussion ignition and a piezoelectric detonating device. Its muzzle velocity was 160 meters per second, and it contained 0.9 kilogram of HEAT explosive, capable of penetrating 340 mm of armor plate. Dartley was looking forward to seeing something on the road ahead on which he could use the Miniman. Harry was just hoping that a sudden jolt wouldn’t launch it into his ribs.

  A heavy truck blocked the road ahead, and armed men stood on either side of it. They had amused looks on their faces at the plight of the little yellow Toyota trapped by dense fields of cane on either side, the heavy, stationary truck ahead and the loaded flatbed truck bringing up the rear. There were two men in the little car, fourteen men with M16s waiting for them on the road. They had reason to be pleased with themselves.

  “Stay over to the left,” Dartley said to Harry, and thrust his head and shoulders through the right side window. He placed the plastic Miniman tube on top of his right shoulder, found the truck about seventy meters away on the graduated grid of the plastic sights, and pressed the thumb-operated trigger. The missile whooshed from the launcher, and the truck exploded into an orange ball of fire.

  The blast had knocked down the men standing close to the truck. As Harry took the Toyota past the flaming wreck, squeezing between it and the wall of sugarcane, the rolled-up windows on one side of the Toyota cracked from the heat. Harry grimaced at the sickening thuds beneath the car as they ran over the guerrillas lying on the roadway. The tires bumped over some, but the gruesome thing that got to Harry was the way two bodies scraped along between the car’s underside and the road, like a cardboard carton that can’t get free. Dartley didn’t seem to mind. He tossed the disposable plastic launcher tube on the backseat, since he didn’t believe in littering the countryside.

  The column of smoke from the burning truck brought three Philippine army choppers in. They used the roadway as a landing zone, and the troopers stormed what they expected would be a fiercely defended position. Instead, all they found was dead and injured guerrillas. Any still able to walk had disappeared into the canefields. There was nothing for them to do except kill off the injured men until only two remained. One was a fat man with two broken ankles. An army sergeant pulled his combat knife and pressed the point of it slowly into the injured man’s soft belly, which hung out over his belt. Then the sergeant flicked the blade up sharply, so that it gouged out a nick of fat tissue and skin. The wounded man screamed with pain and watched, with terrified eyes, the blood streaming down his belly as he sat on the road.

  The sergeant again slowly pressed in the blade tip a couple of inches above this wound, the blade edge down. The broad edge of the upturned tip tore, rather than cut through, the flesh as it whipped upward. The man screamed again and begged for mercy.

  The sergeant touched him with the blade tip, its cold steel indicating its fierce presence against his skin. “I’m going to cut you here, here, here, and here,” he said, the knife touches forming a circle on the man’s belly, “until we can pull your guts through and you can walk back to your hideout holding them in your hands to keep them off the dusty road.”

  “No! No!” the man screamed. “I’ll do anything you want.”

  “Where is your hideout?” the sergeant asked, showing him a map.

  The fat man put a trembling finger on one place. “Here. It’s stony ground. The command bunker is linked to other dugouts by tunnels.”

  “Tell me more,” the sergeant said, looking at his knife blade again.

  The fat man couldn’t help it. He was not able to stop himself from talking and trembling.

  “Faster!” Dartley rasped at Harry. “I still got a job to do.”

  Harry drove fast for Happy Man’s residence. They had not waited for army regulars at the burning truck. Dartley wanted to beat them to Velez so he could claim his scalp as his own. It took them about twenty minutes on the winding roads to get there. They drove through the big ornamental gates and down the drive. It was almost a half mile long and ended in a big courtyard with an old statue in the middle, next to a very large old house dating from early Spanish days. An army chopper was parked at the far end of this yard, and three dead soldiers lay facedown between it and a door to the house.

  Dartley and Harry cocked their MAClOs and approached with caution. They were met by soldiers who waved them on. General Bonifacio strode to meet them. His right shoulder was soaked in blood, but he was not letting the wound hold him back.

  “I thought I could take him by surprise,” the general said briefly. “I was wrong. I lost some good men, and Happy Man got awa
y.”

  Dartley nodded sympathetically. “He has a talent for that, sir.”

  “Bullshit!” the general said. “I blew it by trying to get him before you could. Also, I figured that if we all arrived here in force, he would just come out to meet us and shake our hands. I had other plans for him.”

  Dartley said, “I get paid no matter whether you, I, or someone else whacks out Happy Man. I don’t want any competition with you, sir, to see who does it first.”

  “You don’t have any competition from now on. He’s all yours.” He had certain men stay behind and ordered Dartley, Harry, and some others to the chopper. When they were aloft, he said, “We’ll see how Roscoe James is getting on,” as if that explained everything.

  The helicopter followed radio instructions and touched down at a landing zone occupied by three others. A colonel reported that the men were all in position, had found several openings to dugouts, and were just waiting for him to say “Go.” The general told him to proceed.

  “Tell them we need some of them alive,” Roscoe James said in a persnickety tone as he walked up to them. “You know, boy,” he said accusingly to Dartley, “you’ve already killed their commander today. Eduardo Cristobal was his name. That goddam missile of yours burned him to a crisp, and I’d have liked to talk to him.”

  “Sorry about that,” Dartley said.

  Roscoe had heard by radio that the general had fucked up over Happy Man. He wasn’t saying a word about that, only picking on Dartley for successfully nailing an NPA regional commander. He punched Dartley on the shoulder to show that he was kidding. In a way both he and the general were testing Dartley to see how much he could take without making a comment. Dartley could take a lot.

  They watched one man work with an old M7 portable flamethrower. He held the riflelike launcher connected by hoses to metal tanks on his backpack, and long spurts of jagged flame spat out of the muzzle, entering the tunnels in the stony ground. Smoke rose from other places on the ground, revealing hidden entrances as things burned inside. Other soldiers were rolling grenades into tunnel mouths, causing the roofs to collapse into the shallow tunnels and dugouts. Guerrillas appeared in two and threes, none showing any signs of fight. As they were led away Roscoe and a Filipino officer compared their faces against photographs. They did not stop any of the total of eleven men who surrendered.