The Nugget

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Trouble?” I asked.

  “There’s a Jap patrol squad at the waterfall,” he said. “They’ve brought dogs.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rooster said. “You got any extra guns?”

  “Not here,” he said. “But we probably won’t need them. We’ve talked about this eventuality and made some plans. Come with me.”

  Father Abriol, who still had that hoss-pistol strapped on, gave us each a bamboo canteen to fill at the wall weep. He produced some binoculars and then we went out of the tunnel. We retraced our steps to that crack in the rim. Coming out of the crack, we turned right, went about a hundred yards, dropped into a small ravine, and then lay down behind some of those big lava rocks. Below us the valley stretched out in the rising sunlight. The cone-shaped volcano in the distance was no longer sending smoke into the air.

  “I keep patrols of my own going in this area and all around Orotai,” he told us. “As I said before, the Japs usually don’t come near this place. But if they’ve brought dogs, they must suspect that somebody from that submarine not only survived but escaped into the interior, and they’ll also know we had to be involved in that. Two birds with one stone, if they can find us.”

  “So what happens now?” Rooster asked.

  “We wait for the bait,” he announced, making a rhyme out of it.

  “The bait.”

  “Keep your eye on that clump of trees that extends out into the valley. There, on the right. Watch for a runner.”

  We waited. And then we waited some more. The air above the valley was beginning to shimmer. Obviously Abriol was going to tell us what the plan was as soon as he saw that it was actually being executed. With Japs, one never knew. I decided to find out some more about Father Abriol.

  “Tell me, Father. How did you end up here?”

  “I’ll give you the short version,” he said, taking another sweep with the binoculars. “Simply put, I was banished by Holy Mother Church. I made the grave mistake of falling in love with a lovely but married young woman in my first parish assignment. I not only fell in love, I managed to get her pregnant. When her husband found out, the monsignor found out and he went to the bishop. The cardinal bishop was in his eighties and had a predictably medieval reaction to this situation. He sought Rome’s help in exiling me to the ‘ends of the earth,’ as he quaintly demanded. The ‘ends of the earth’ turned out to mean the very bottom of the Philippine Islands chain, namely the island of Talawan. In all fairness, they needed a priest. It was a tiny congregation, much more animist than Catholic and as far from Manila as one could get, so down I came. This was ten years ago.”

  “Couldn’t you have just resigned from the priesthood, and, I don’t know, stayed there in Manila?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “One doesn’t ‘resign’ from the priesthood,” he said. “You undertake Holy Orders, as it’s called, you’re a priest for life in the eyes of God. Or at least the Church, which is much the same thing. Besides, the husband was a member of the provincial police. The Diocese was informed that an ‘accident’ was in my future, like the one that had befallen his unfaithful wife, so, suddenly, exile started to look pretty good. Ah, there he is.”

  “There who is?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the morning sun to search that long valley again.

  “Paulino Magsay,” he replied, staring through the binoculars. “He’s a village elder and an expert tracker. Probably fifty years old and tough as a mahogany railroad tie. One of his daughters was kidnapped by the Japs. For the past hour or so he’s been trotting in this direction laying a scent trail for those dogs, probably using some urine.”

  “He’s bringing the Japs here?” I asked, trying not to reveal my concern.

  “Not quite here,” Father Abriol said. “He’s taking them to a small cave below us. You can’t see it from here. He’ll drop little bits of urine as he runs. The dogs will get on his human scent, of course, but that urine will be the brighter trail for those amazing noses. And if those dogs go into that particular cave, they won’t be coming back out.”

  “What’s in there?” Rooster asked.

  “A pair of Samar cobras are known to nest there,” he said. “Those are the spitting cobras. You’ve seen what they can do.”

  Indeed we had. Poor Macklin. I’d already forgotten all about him.

  “I thought cobras were something you only found in India,” I said. “Or Africa.”

  He smiled. “We have cobras, green pit vipers, and some of the world’s deadliest sea snakes here in the Philippines. You have to want to provoke a sea snake, but all the others are easily provoked. We also have some truly large pythons, but they don’t bother people unless people bother them—the usual story with snakes. But if the patrol leader orders his men into that cave, they’ll probably die there, too.”

  “You make that sound like you don’t want that to happen,” I said.

  “Well, personally, I don’t. First, because I’m a Catholic priest—I don’t want to see anyone die unnecessarily. Second, if the Japs figure out that this was a setup, they’ll exact retribution against the entire local population.”

  “All the more reason for them all to die,” I said. “By the way, I was at Pearl Harbor.”

  “Oh,” he said, suddenly at a loss for words.

  “That him?” Rooster said, pointing down into the valley. “I thought I saw somebody running.”

  Father Abriol swept the area with his binoculars again and then steadied. “Yes, that’s him. He’ll run to the cave, throw in the urine pouch, and then disappear. Everybody keep down now—the Japs have pretty good binoculars of their own.”

  We heard the dogs before we ever saw them. They came about thirty minutes after our sighting of Magsay. We kept our heads down while Father Abriol crawled along our parapet to watch through a crack.

  “There are two dog handlers and four more soldiers,” he reported softly. “The handlers are out in front with the dogs and the soldiers look to be struggling to keep up. I think one’s wearing a sword.”

  “That’ll be the officer in charge,” I said.

  The sun was getting hotter and I was grateful for the primitive canteen. Rooster was giving me that “what in hell are we doing here” look again. Twenty minutes later Father Abriol started giving us a whispered play-by-play report. The dogs and handlers are at the cave entrance. The handlers are waiting for the guys with rifles to catch up. Everybody waited some more. Then: they’ve loosed the dogs into the cave. I halfway expected to hear screams of agony from the dogs but we didn’t hear a sound.

  Looks like that officer is telling two of the squad to go in there, Father Abriol continued, changing his position to get a better look. That cave was a couple hundred feet below us but those sheer stone walls carried the sound of voices straight up. It sounded like an argument, although all the newsreels I had ever seen featuring Japanese army officers talking to each other sounded like they were getting ready to kill each other. They don’t seem to want to go in there, Father Abriol reported. Then we heard the crack of a rifle or a pistol—I couldn’t tell which.

  “Wow,” Father Abriol said softly. “The officer just shot one of his own men. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t obey an order. The other soldier is going in. He’s mounted his bayonet. The dog handlers are getting out of the way. They don’t have guns. And—”

  This time we did hear a scream, but not from a dog. Father Abriol gasped.

  “What’s happened?” Rooster asked.

  “That soldier came back out,” he said in a shocked voice. “There was a snake hanging from his throat. Now he’s down on the ground and writhing around. The officer is going after the snake with his sword. Holy Mother!”

  “What are the rest of them doing?” I asked.

  “Backing up. Backing way up. Oh!”

  I put my index finger up to my lips—the priest was getting loud.

  “He cut that snake in half,” he said, back to whispering. “But then he picked it up and—and—I think it
struck him, right in the face. That’s a cobra, all right. They’re very aggressive. Now the officer is down. God, what a mess!”

  I sat back against the warm stone, realizing now that Abriol had set a trap that worked much better than he’d anticipated. So now we had an officer and presumably two soldiers probably dead or dying, plus two tracking dogs who never came out. I remembered being told as a kid: never pick up a “dead” snake. Some of them aren’t willing to admit they’re dead. I wondered what the Japs would do when the remains of the patrol got back to their base in town—send up a whole company? We didn’t need that. I asked Father Abriol if he could see anyone using a radio.

  “Not that I can see,” he said. “Now there are three men on the ground down there and nobody’s moving except the front end of that snake.”

  I tried to cast that image out of my mind. Father Abriol said the handlers were each picking up a rifle. One of them bent to retrieve the officer’s sword but that snake tried to strike him.

  “They’re leaving,” Father Abriol said. “And so are we. Jesus wept.”

  NINETEEN

  That evening four of us went out through the lava tube’s other end and headed west down the mountainside. Father Abriol took the lead; I brought up the rear. Rooster and one of the Filipinos were in the middle and each was carrying a bolt-action rifle that looked like a weapon left over from World War One. Father Abriol had asked if I wanted a weapon but I’d declined. My legs still weren’t a hundred percent after the mining, so what I really wanted was a stout walking stick to deal with all that volcanic sand and slippery gravel. The lava tube thumped out a friendly goodbye earthquake just as we emerged into the twilight.

  We walked for a little over an hour into the scrublands that surrounded the volcanic area. Ahead we could make out the dark line of thicker vegetation. As we got closer we could see a pond of sorts, surrounded by trees that were taller than all the rest. The pond was like a small oasis in these dry upland rock gardens. Three tall volcanic boulders stood guard over a small clearing next to the pond, where some more of Father Abriol’s people were waiting, their rifles leaning up against the big rocks. I asked him what we were doing.

  “We’re going to meet with the competition,” he said. When he saw my consternation he grinned. “It’s a long story,” he said. “First let’s sit down. Hopefully my friends here have brought food.”

  They had. It consisted of a clay pot full of golf-ball-sized rice balls, containing bits of smoked fish and some vegetables I couldn’t identify mixed in with the sticky rice. It was, if anything, spicier than the stew we’d had last night, but we hadn’t eaten since dawn and thus made short work of it. This time Father Abriol joined in. My mouth was stinging a bit when we were done so we were each offered a piece of freshly cut sugarcane, which mollified the fires pretty well if you chewed and sucked on it long enough.

  Some of the other scouts had built a low fire up against the biggest of the boulders. After we’d all eaten, the four of us sat down on the ground near the fire while the scouts slipped away into the forest, leaving one man to tend the fire. He went into the nearby woods with his machete and came back with a tube of bamboo, maybe five inches in diameter and two feet long. He filled that from the pond and parked it upright against the big rock. Then he went back out, apparently to find more wood for the fire. A half moon hung in the tropical sky, providing weak light.

  “The competition,” I said, still baffled.

  “Yes, well, the Spanish came to the Philippines in the sixteen hundreds and established the One True Faith as the official religion, but these days it’s one of three religions practiced in these islands: Catholicism, Animism, and Mohammedanism.”

  That last floored me. Mohammedanism? Here? I could understand animism—local gods, ancestors, tribal customs and taboos, house spirits, animal spirits, the volcanoes—things the natives had either feared or believed in since long before Christ and His missionary hordes. Father Abriol saw my disbelief.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Arab traders came out of the Indian Ocean in the thirteenth century, almost two, three hundred years before the Spaniards got here. When the Spanish became aware of them, they pushed them down mainly into Mindanao Province and called them Moros.”

  “As in, the Moors.”

  “Yes. As you may remember from school, the Spanish have some unpleasant history with the Moors.”

  At that moment a small, brown-faced man stepped out of the forest and made a hand signal to Father Abriol. He then melted back into the darkness.

  “Okay,” Father Abriol said. “They’re coming. We will be speaking in Tagalog; I’ll translate later. You two relax and make no sudden moves, okay? These people fought a long war against the American occupiers at the turn of the century. The one I’ll be talking to is an important and revered figure on Talawan, so if you can, look respectful. They won’t be happy you’re here.”

  “Makes two of us,” Rooster muttered, but we both acknowledged the warning. If my memory served me, the Moros were the reason the 1911 Colt .45 was invented. They were the guerillas who’d charge American forces and keep coming despite being hit several times.

  A few minutes later six figures dressed in white emerged cautiously from the woods. They looked different from the local tribesmen. Each of them wore a white headdress, either tied around their heads or in the form of a full turban. They wore a white sash around their waists and baggy loincloths that looked like diapers over their bare legs. Their expressions were grimly hostile. They wore long knives at their waists and all but one also carried a rifle. That individual was older and taller than the rest, with a more elaborate headdress, robes instead of the loincloth, and he was using a tall walking stick.

  The men with rifles stopped short of the firelight and spread out into a semicircle, where they squatted down to keep watch, their rifles across their legs. They were calm but guarded. The older man came forward and greeted Father Abriol in Tagalog. In the firelight we could see that he was indeed old, with skin like brown parchment stretched over a hatchet-shaped face, a hooked nose, and fierce black eyes. He bowed formally to Father Abriol, who bowed right back and then stepped forward and pressed his forehead against the old man’s outstretched hand. They then both sat down cross-legged on the ground and began to talk.

  The old man asked a question and Father Abriol responded at length. When he was done the old one responded at an even greater length. His tone was emotionless and he stared into the fire as he talked. Father Abriol waited until he was sure that the elder was done, and then he spoke for about five minutes. It went on like that for half an hour before the elder nodded once and then got up with the help of his walking stick. He politely inclined his head to Father Abriol. Then they all walked back into the forest.

  Father Abriol let out a sigh of what sounded like great relief. I asked him what he’d been worried about.

  “I called them the ‘competition’ earlier,” he said. “When some American priests visited our seminary in Manila, they jokingly referred to the Protestant churches as ‘the competition.’ Here it’s no joke, and that’s because of the bloody history between Philippine native Mohammedans and foreign Christians. They’re mad at the Church for two reasons: the Koran says Christians are unbelievers and therefore worthy of death. They also consider the Catholic Church and its priests to be occupiers, even though the Church hierarchy in Manila today is entirely Filipino. We agreed to a truce of sorts when the Japs came. Everybody hates the Japs.”

  “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” he replied. “I told him you were here to help with the resistance and that you were not the advance party for another American occupation.”

  “These guys live in Orotai?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, their territory is the northern half of Talawan, beyond the central volcano fields. That’s the part that’s closest to the province of Mindanao and its islands, where the Moros are. Their relationship with the Mor
os is complicated, because these people are Shia, and the Mindanao Moros are Sunni Mohammedans. Shia and Sunni do not get along, but they hate foreigners, especially Christians, more than they hate each other.”

  “And everybody hates the Japs,” I echoed.

  “Now you understand, Lieutenant,” he said. “I told you—it’s complicated. I was told that he, Emir Mohammed al Raqui, already knew that there were Americans on Talawan, so I asked for a meeting to head off any possible problems. I wish I could claim that we coordinate our ‘resistance efforts,’ but a wary truce is more like it.”

  “And emir is like the chief?” Rooster asked.

  “He’s much more than that,” Abriol replied. “He’s an extraordinary healer. As you could see from his looks, he is definitely descended from the Arabs of long ago. Our people on this side of the volcanoes both revere him and fear him. The Moros are violent people. They tend to settle disputes with guns. And yet, when a mysterious fever swept through Orotai and the surrounding villages, he came down from the north with strange medicines and stopped the outbreak.”

  Okay, I thought. I’m impressed. “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Now I think it’s important we get to our radio and notify Manila that you’re here, preferably before al Raqui decides to inform the Japs that there are Americans on the island.”

  “He’d do that?”

  Father Abriol hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said, finally. “When the Japs came, he met with them and told them Allah did not permit them to help either side. Basically, that they’d stay out of the conflict as long as the Japs left them alone. The Japs promised they would. They exchanged some more pretty lies like that, and so far, that’s how it’s working. It helps that the Japs are down here and they are up on the northern end, where there’s nothing the Japs want.”

  “But they know that you and your men are watching and reporting to the resistance in Manila?”