Blood Tide

by Robert F. Jones

  Curt piled. Chalmers yelled something to the driver, and they hydroplaned back out into a sea of spume and blaring horns.

  “Goddamn it, Curt, don’t ever call me at the office.” Phil was pissed. “Ever!”

  “Good to see you, too, old buddy.”

  “Well, goddamn it, I mean it. There’s CIA all over the place. And other initials, too. You shoulda—”

  “The only address I had for you was MATS,” Curt said. He was whispering, but there was no need to. The driver had the tape deck on full blast—sounded like Jan and Dean’s “Deadman’s Curve.” Appropriate.

  Curt pulled out his Marlboros. Brown slush. Chalmers gave him a Benson & Hedges and a light from his gold Ronson. Just like downtown. They both cooled off.

  “Where we going?”

  “A little place up the way a bit.”

  It was a dark, loud little place on a dark, quiet street, full of diddy-bopping Filipinos. But Chalmers found a booth in the back where they could talk. They ordered a couple of beers—Chalmers drank 33, smuggled in from Ho Chi Minh City, he said. He was hooked on the formaldehyde, he added, kept him youthful. Curt stuck with San Miguel.

  “Whatta ya got?” Curt asked.

  “Not much,” Chalmers replied. “It’s tight as a spinster’s pussy right now, has been for the past year or more. Worse than it ever was in Panama. Not just the drug guys, either. Actually DEA’s a minor nuisance since Marcos left. The whole place is crawling with spooks—round-eyes, Chi Coms, even some Japanese. There’s a spook under every toilet seat, under every manhole cover. They’re scared of a Commie takeover. Dominoes again. The same old paranoia—who knows? They could be right. Aquino’s weak. The government’s full of the same brand of crooks that ran it under Marcos. Only the names have changed. Trouble is, nobody knows which way to jump just yet. There’s a million deals being cut every minute, and another million welshed on. The bottom line is, with all the spooks in the country, you can’t get anything in or out. Certainly not from Manila.”

  “Well,” Curt said, “looks like I came a long way for nothing.”

  “Looks like you did, pal.”

  “You said Manila. Anyplace else where it’s looser?”

  “I don’t know,” Chalmers said. He sucked on his 33. When he belched, it smelled like a funeral parlor. “Taiwan, maybe. Bangkok? Hong Kong? Singapore? I just don’t know, I’ve been keeping my nose clean for so long now.”

  “I mean in the Philippines. There’s a lot of islands in the PI. More than they got spooks to cover each one of them.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Chalmers said. “What kind of boat you got?”

  “Small yawl with a kicker, not much for fast. Seven knots tops. But it’s beamy. I could carry a lot, and nobody’s gonna mess with a mere sailboat.”

  “Oh yeah? I’d sell it and buy a Pan Am ticket Stateside,” Chalmers said. “Cut your losses.”

  “No way. I’m on everyone’s computer by now.”

  “You got a problem, all right.” Chalmers sucked down the last of his beer and socked the bottle down on the table. It sounded final. His eyes were remote, a man listening to a disaster report from a minor-league country. “I just can’t help you at the moment, Curt. Maybe Bangkok, I don’t know . . .” His voice trailed off, and he started to stand up.

  “Hey Phil,” Curt said quietly. “Remember Colón? Remember Port-au-Prince? I made you a lot of money, pal.” He didn’t want to say the obvious: he could blow a whistle on Chalmers that would be heard clear back to the Pentagon. “We had some good times.”

  Chalmers sat back down and signaled the waitress for more beers.

  “Yeah,” he said wearily. “Good times. Okay. This is just hearsay, let me warn you, but I’ve been getting stuff on a guy down south of Palawan. Round-eye, calls himself Commodore Millikan. He’s supposed to have his own private navy of fast boats down there and run a lot of stuff out of Thailand. He’s got the mundo—the pirates—” Chalmers winced at the word—how hokey can you get? “He’s got them eating out of his hand. I don’t know what this is—Millikan is what they call any American down there, like Joe up here—but it smells kind of strange to me. Maybe a DEA scam, maybe Langley, or the mob, I don’t know.”

  “That would count me out.”

  “Not necessarily. They take all kinds in that church nowadays. And you’re good in a fast boat. I can vouch for that.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “I’ve done business with one of his people, his CEO I guess you’d call him. Strictly on the up-and-up. They’ve got a shipping line down that way as a kind of front. Millikan Shipping. The exec’s name is Torres, Billy Torres. He’s got an office in Zambo City—that’s Zamboanga, nice town, on Mindanao. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s out at Millikan’s private island south of Palawan. I gotta call him tomorrow anyway on some machinery he’s got coming in from the States. I’ll make an appointment for you.”

  “Fine,” Curt said.

  “How long will it take you to get down there?” Chalmers asked.

  “I guess a week or ten days.”

  “I’ll ask Torres to look you over, or one of his people. I’ll give you a good introduction. That’s really all I can do, pal. Right now, anyway . . . no, no, I’ll buy the beers. You need any money? I’m about tapped out, but I could spare you a couple a thousand pee. Just don’t stop along the way to rescue any drowning dogs. You read about that in the papers? Guy uses his dog as bait to rip off tourist boats. These Flips have got initiative, all right.”

  “That was me,” Curt said. “Me and my dog, Brillo.”

  Chalmers stood up, half-laughing. He checked his watch—a Rolex, the platinum one. He peeled off some pesos from a wad in his pocket. He was shaking his head in admiration. True or bullshit? Then he remembered the dog from Colón.

  “I should’ve known. That dog of yours. Good times, all right. Now listen, let me know what’s happening. Don’t be a stranger.” He headed for the door. “Keep in touch. Take care. Have a nice day.” Then his eyes went scared for a moment. “But don’t call me at the office.”

  “Hey, Phil, what’s the name of that island down there, the one near Palawan?”

  “San Lázaro,” Chalmers said.

  FIFTEEN

  From Miranda’s log:

  Better than halfway there now. Still making good time, nearly 200 miles a day, but the wind’s suddenly shifted to the SE. Some glitch in the trades, I guess, maybe El Niño’s doing, who knows? If it continues this way, we might make better time by heading up to Wake Island for a midpoint landfall rather than proceeding to Majuro in the Marshalls. Suggested that to Freddie and Culdee this afternoon. “Whatever you think, Skipper,” Freddie said. Culdee disagreed. “If we head NW at this point, we’ll probably pick up the NE trades when we’re only partway there. Better stick to your original plot. Anyway, Wake sucks. Nothing but thornbushes and coral. No fresh water there except what they ferry in. No fresh fruit. Just fucking navy types who’ll treat us like spies.”

  Makes sense. We’re holding our track for Majuro. Odd, though, how Culdee loves the navy and hates it at the same time. Usually he can’t say a good word about anything but the navy—the old navy he knew, I guess—and certainly nothing good about civilians. What does he figure he is if not one or the other? Just some Flying Dutchman, I suppose. No, Flying Irishman is more like it. The apostate heir of Saint Brendan, maybe. Culdees were unordained priests of the old Scotch-Irish Church, I read somewhere. After the Vikings invaded Ireland, many of them sailed off to Iceland, and some disappeared to the West. Maybe they reached America?

  * * *

  Flying west to Japan many years ago, Culdee’s plane—a prop-driven Boeing Constellation—had put down at Wake Island to refuel. Culdee was on his way to join a new ship in Yokosuka. He’d read about Wake’s valiant defense in the early days of the war, seen the movie four or five times—big Bill Bendix skewering cowardly Japs on his bayonet, tough marines in World War I tin-pot helmets and puttee
s, courageous civilians grabbing up old Springfield bolt-action rifles to do their bit. Culdee was only seven or eight years old when he read that series in The Saturday Evening Post, “The Last Man off Wake Island.” It and the movie brought the war alive for him for the first time, thrilling, horrifying, the most exciting thing imaginable to a small, immortal boy. Now here he was, a jaded, salty young white hat with his own war wounds still red from Korea, about to land on Wake a full fourteen years after it had fallen. He was as excited as ever.

  From the air, as the Connie swept in to land, Wake looked scruffy—no waving palms trees, just dusty desert scrub and huge masses of bone-white coral rubble. Surf crashed high on the windward reefs, turning the brilliant blue of the lagoon to a milky green. The rusty bow of a sunken Japanese maru stuck from the shallows near the boat channel like so many red bones. Be interesting to dive from that hull, good spearfishing in wrecks. There was no air-conditioning in the bar adjacent to the airstrip, just slow old ceiling fans stirring the hot, humid salty-tasting air. The Connie’s passengers bellied up to the bar. At least the beer was cold. One of the passengers, a civilian hard hat enroute to a job at Atsugi Airfield in Japan, wiped his sweating forehead and chugged down can after can of Blatz.

  “Never thought I’d live to see this fuckin’ rathole again,” he told Culdee.

  “You been here before?”

  “Here when the fuckin’ Japs took the island.”

  “Navy or Corps?”

  “Neither. I was driving a Cat on a government contract. Straight up and down civilian, this fella.” He ordered two more beers and slid one to Culdee.

  “You guys fought alongside the jarheads, didn’t you?”

  “Fuck,” the hard hat said, and laughed bitterly. “Hell no! We hid out in the puckerbrush, most of us. Lived on land crabs and rainwater while those jerks tried to hold off the whole fuckin’ Jap Navy.”

  “But some of the civilians fought, didn’t they?”

  “Just the stupes. Got killed for it, too. Ten in the first Jap air raid on December eighth—same day as Pearl Harbor, but we’re across the date line here. Then fifty-five more when the Japs bombed the hospital the next day. There were about twelve hundred civilians on the island when it started. Only about a dozen, maybe fifteen, were nutso enough to work during the fighting. Mainly PanAm mechanics who helped with the marine Wildcats while they lasted. Some of them joined the gun crews, too.”

  “Didn’t they sink some Jap ships, those guns?”

  “Sank a destroyer I heard, shot up a couple or three more. A leatherneck pilot sank another destroyer. But that just made the Japs madder. They went away and regrouped. That was on the eleventh. Ten days later they came back and kicked ass.”

  He flagged down two more beers. Culdee was about to refuse his, or at least insist on paying for them. This civilian wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear. Then he thought, fuck it. If he’s fool enough to buy them . . .

  “Our so-called government had no right to keep us there,” the hard hat said. “No right to have hired us for that job in the first place. Don’t tell me Rooz-veld and those Yid advisers of his didn’t know what the Japs were up to. They just wanted to get the U.S. into the war and save their Jew-boy relatives in Europe from Hitler’s soap works. Needed a couple of sacrificial lambs to get America fighting mad, to shut up the isolationists. So they gave the Nips Pearl, Wake, the whole fuckin’ Philippines to boot.”

  “So what happened when the Japs came back?” Culdee asked. He couldn’t look at the man now.

  “Shit happened,” the hard hat said. “After they’d pounded us flat with dive-bombers and cruiser guns, they sent a couple a thousand Jap marines ashore—big guys, mean as hell, the Maizuru Second Special Naval Landing Force. The marines killed a bunch of them on Wilkes Island, where I was hiding out, just across the boat channel from Wake proper. But the Japs kept coming. Wave after wave. Even when one of the guns on the airstrip hammered a transport and set it on fire, the troops still came ashore. They killed all the fighters on Wake, then rounded up the rest of us. Tied us up with wire. They were pissed that there were no women to fuck on the island. So they took it out on us—boots, rifle butts, whips made of bob wire.”

  “I don’t believe Washington set you guys up as sacrifices,” Culdee said at last. “Just doesn’t make sense. Lose those places on purpose and then have to fight for four years just to get ’em back?”

  “Bullshit!” the hard hat yelled. “It was a setup! Hell, the navy had a relief force under way from Pearl—carriers, cruisers, oilers, destroyers, the works. Then at the last minute the brass in Honolulu called them back. They were just over the fuckin’ horizon all that time. We’d even sent a message—‘issue in doubt.’ One air strike might have turned it. But they called them back. Rooz-veld and them.” He shook his head and spit between his boots.

  “So what happened then?”

  “You don’t wanna know, kid. Just pray you’re never a prisoner of war. Not a prisoner of the slopes, anyways. But we got Uncle Sugar back for it, after the war. Those of us who survived the camps, that is. About twelve of us—civilian working stiffs—we sued the contractor who’d hired us for half a million in back pay and fuckin’ damages.” He cackled happily at the memory. “We had ’em by the balls, and they had to cough up.”

  “How much you get—I mean, you personally?”

  “Not a fuckin’ lot, after the lawyers’ bite was took out of it. About enough to buy a little cracker-box house in Levittown, out on Long Island. But then my old lady divorced me and got the house. So here I am again, a working stiff for Uncle Sugar.”

  About then their flight was called. As they shuffled to the door of the bar, a marine who’d been listening caught Culdee’s eye. He was a real jarhead, this one, with a shaved skull like Yul Brynner in the movies and gunny-sergeant stripes on his khakis. The gunny nodded toward the hard hat’s back. Culdee nodded back. When they got out the door, the marine shouldered the hard hat around the corner, and Culdee grabbed his arms. They hustled him behind the Quonsets and took turns pounding him. They left him unconscious and bleeding into the coral dust.

  “Where’s Mr. Krieger?” a flight attendant asked, counting noses before takeoff.

  “His orders got changed,” the gunny said. “His company needed him there on Wake.” They took off.

  Later, in his own POW days and often afterward, Culdee thought of the hard hat and what he’d said—government setups, sacrificial lambs. Now, as the Venganza left Wake squatting scruffily in the sea far to the northwest, he thought of it again. Turner and the abortive break at Brigadune. The shit the navy’d dropped on him when he got out later. Maybe the whole thing had been a setup—a North Vietnamese massacre of brave American sailors, unarmed and subject to torture as POWs, just at the time when the new isolationists—the long-haired antiwar protesters—were about to turn all of America chicken. By God, they had, hadn’t they?

  Suddenly he wanted a drink, wanted one bad. Instead, he threw knots, faster and faster, deep into the night. There on Wake, he thought, that was the first time I ever fought side by side with a jarhead, not against him. And the last.

  Freddie, at the helm, heard Culdee laughing up on the hatch cover, under the stars. Crazy old coot, he thought, and laughed along with him, not knowing why.

  SIXTEEN

  GOD IS MY COPILOT read the plaque above the jeepney driver’s head. Let’s hope so, Curt thought. He was hanging white-knuckled from the overhead grip as the vehicle careened north from Pershing Square, quadruple horns blaring, bald tires screeching, narrowly missing trishaws, carabao, bicycles, pedestrians, free-ranging chickens, and what seemed like a million other equally suicidal jeepneys. A tape deck in the dash was blasting “My Little Deuce Coupe.” Curt leaned forward and yelled—shrieked—to the driver to stop at Pasonanca Park.

  “You got it, Joe!” The driver turned to grin—a wild golden glare—and sawed the wheel’s necker knob blindly. Curt slammed his eyes shut and gulped hard.
Judging by the clench of his butt muscles, the pucker factor must have been well off the scale.

  By the time the jeepney squealed to a halt, Curt’s knees were guava jelly. He reeled like a drunk as he grubbed through a wad of pesos from his pocket. He peeled off the fare and noticed that the big chrome stallion on the jeepney’s hood was literally prancing in place, eager to be off again. Puffs of steam spurted from its nostrils. But it was just engine knock and a chronically overheated radiator. The driver grinned his double-wide thanks and burned rubber back out into the traffic without checking his side mirror. Horns blared louder for an instant, then muted to the incessant din that shivered every Filipino thoroughfare every moment of every day and night, lacquered steel roosters crowing from dawn to unconsciousness. The charm of the islands.

  It was quieter in the park, though, cool beneath the banyan trees, with bougainvilleas in perennial flame and the smell of blossoms thick on the silky air. Little kids of all colors splashed happily in the self-proclaimed wee-wee pool. Zamboanga was a fragrant city.

  “Psst, hey Milikan!” At first Curt thought the kid in the bushes was calling someone else, and he looked around. Then he remembered what Chalmers had said—Milikan means American down here. The kid stepped out, looked around furtively, then flashed a small cardboard container. REGULAR GUY INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH SUPPOSITORIES, it said on the box. What was this? The kid opened the box and shook out the ends of four thick hand-rolled cigarettes.

  “Zambo Zowie,” he whispered. “You like? Only a hundred peso apiece.”

  Zambo Zowie, Curt thought. Bombers at five bucks each. They ought to grow some potent grass in this climate. He hadn’t smoked in a long time—when you’re in the business, it isn’t a good idea to enjoy the product—but out of professional curiosity he took one and sniffed it.

  “What the fuck is this, cloves?”

  “No, man,” the kid said, “Zambo Zowie. Big bruddah to Maui Wowie, daddy to Matanuska Thunderfuck.”