Blood Tide

by Robert F. Jones

  “Yes, yes, Rosa. Good thing there’s still some Christians among us. I count on you to keep the faith for this household.”

  “What would she have to confess?” Billy asked when Rosa had left. “Old lady like that.”

  “Plenty, Billy,” the commodore said. He was studying the contact prints where they hung from clips on the drying wire. “Ever notice how she smiles some mornings when she’s serving breakfast? Hand me a loupe.”

  He studied one strip of contacts closely with the magnifier, then unclipped it and took it over to a table with a strong overhead light. He looked closer still.

  “Weird,” he said. “Have a look.”

  Billy saw a girl—the crook-nosed one, but still a kid in this picture, her nose still short and unbent, like a proper human being, not a round-eye. There was a round-eye woman with her, kind of prim-faced. And a guy in a Donald Duck suit. Navy blues. The sailor wore crossed anchors above his three chevrons. Four hash marks on his sleeve. Mean-looking fucker, with a bent nose like the girl when she grew up. BM1—a deck ape. Torres had been an ET—an electronics technician—before they sent him to OCS. Operations sailors hated deck apes. Deck apes hated everything but other deck apes, and they didn’t even like many of them that much.

  “What do you see, sir?”

  “That white hat. I know that man. I knew him on another assignment, long ago. Thought about him just the other day, matter of fact. I figured he was long dead. Now here we get a new recruit—a dope runner you tell me, an outlaw from the word go—and he just happens to be sailing a boat that is carrying pictures of this old, well, shipmate of mine. I call that weird.”

  “The file we got says this Curt guy stole the boat from some girl he was working with. Broad named Dundee, it said.”

  “Not Culdee?”

  “Dundee, sir, I just reread it this morning.”

  “Some fuckup in the office. The white hat’s name was Culdee.”

  “That’s an old photo, sir,” Billy said. “The white hat might very well be dead. The file said the broad is in her thirties. She’s only about five or six in that picture.”

  “I still don’t like it,” the commodore said. “The Brits have a saying, Billy. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. This is a very strong once.”

  TWENTY

  Curt came down the esplanade with Brillo at heel. It was dark now, and the cobbles glinted under weak lamplight. Rock music blared from a few honky-tonks and from the transistors in the open-air barter stalls. Turbaned old Tausuqs glowered at him and fingered their cutlery. The dimly lighted pawn shops, packed with all manner of goods from ship’s clocks to golf clubs, seemed empty of life, save for the inevitable Chinese pawnbroker who inevitably beckoned with a wide, warm smile.

  He wants a piece of somebody, Curt thought. So do I, but different. We all do. The commodore’s right—no streetwalkers in this town. He passed another pawnshop with golf clubs in the window. Golf clubs? The nearest course was probably no closer than Zambo or Davao.

  A mongrel came down a side alley and trotted over stiff-legged to check out Brillo.

  “Easy, boy.” Brillo would break its neck with one snap. That might piss off some bolo-man, and they’d both be shish kebab. Brillo looked up at him with a cutting, pissed-off look of his own. Curt saw a stairway leading up the bluff toward the cathedral. Might as well check it out. No Tausuqs up there. They climbed. Down in a workyard lighted by torches, Curt saw carpenters planing and chiseling away at what looked like three very large wooden crosses. They worked solemnly, with none of the chatter and laughter Filipinos bring to most jobs. The wood shavings smelled musky, almost like incense, as the breeze spun their odor up to him. Church music played softly from a transistor—Gregorian chants.

  No music sounded from the cathedral when they reached it, just the mutter of old women praying their penances in the rearmost pews, and the occasional growl of a priest in the one working confessional. It was dark in there. Red candlelight, the stale smell of holy water and the distant seafront. Christ hung bleeding and twisted from crosses all over the walls, the same long, black-bearded agonized face at every turning, like that of crazed dopers Curt had seen as they checked out after an inadvertent hot shot. Or a planned one, for that matter. He winced at the sight of the realistic thorns on Christ’s crown, feeling again his own experience of them on the commo’s mad bird hunt. Never again, if he could help it.

  An old woman in black shuffled out of the confessional, her face as doleful as Christ’s, except for the lack of a beard—she had only a white, potato-sprout mustache. Another woman got up to go into the box, and Curt recognized Rosalinda, the commo’s housekeeper. A bit long in the tooth, he thought, but sexy in a hot, smutty way. Maybe he ought to stick around and buy her a drink down in town when she came out. Maybe he could give her some more ammunition for her next confession.

  Padre Cotinho sat behind the confessional screen, sipping something from his chalice. Rosalinda sniffed—tuba asesina, the wicked local toddy that was said to corrode the brain more than absinthe. What are the Jesuits coming to? Not long ago they were like other priests, righteous supporters of the status quo and whatever regime was in power. Then suddenly they were out on the streets with the opposition coalition, Bayan, the enemies of Macoy Marcos, the movement that had brought Cory Aquino to power. Even priests had been salvaged by the Marcos goon squads—that is, they’d achieved salvation by knife, gun, or electrode. Their bodies would be found along with those of suspected Communists, New People’s Army sympathizers, election workers, and anyone who took part in Aquino’s Laban campaign, the bodies smoldering on Smoky Mountain, that giant garbage dump in Manila’s Tondo section, where the poor scavenged their miserable livings. Most of the salvage victims were beheaded, the women raped for good measure, usually beforehand. Laban was a Tagalog word meaning “battle” or “fight.” Rosalinda was fighting still. So was Padre Cotinho.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said. “The Milikan hijacker Hughes showed up today. In fact, he’s at the back of the cathedral right now. I saw him just as I entered the confessional.”

  “Did he follow you?” The priest’s voice was husky with assassin’s rum.

  “I don’t think so. He probably just wandered up from town to look around.”

  “You’re sure it’s the right man?”

  “Look for yourself, Padre.”

  The priest rose quickly and leaned out the back of the screens. He was quiet and steady enough on his feet despite the chalice.

  “Yes, the very one,” he said. “I photographed him in Zamboanga the day he met with Torres. Bueno. Effredio and his lady friend will be here soon, and the seafighters from Tawitawi with their boats. What else?”

  “Hughes has the big dog with him, the one you mentioned. With him even now, in church.” She laughed quietly. Rum and killer dogs in San Lázaro’s holy of holies. “Torres went aboard to search the sailboat this afternoon while the commodore took Hughes out hunting on Balbal. The dog trapped Torres in the cabin. If only he’d torn him apart and eaten him.”

  “In time, cornpañera. What did Torres find in the boat?”

  “He made many photographs with the small camera. Some were photographs of photographs themselves. Of the girl of Effredio and her father. I saw three pictures. The father wore the uniform of a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy. Boatswain’s mate. He looked, how do they say, salty?”

  “Good,” Padre Cotinho said. “He may prove of more value than we thought.”

  “Orders, Padre?”

  “For your penance, my child, get close to this Hughes man. Whatever you need to do. You are practiced in those arts. Get him to anchor the sailboat out in the harbor, away from the fast-boat basin. Suggest it might make your rendezvous with him less publicly embarrassing to you. Study the boat carefully. Disarm all weapons—break firing pins, defuse hand grenades, even dull the edges of his knives when you cook for him. Make friends, if you can, with
the dog. When we move, we don’t want any alarms in the night. Again, if you have something important to tell me before your next confession, attend the early mass and leave a message in your missal. I will find it and return it to you. Now go in peace, my child, and Christ be with you.”

  As she rose, she saw him lift the chalice.

  Curt took her the first time less than a hundred meters from the cathedral, on the wet grass beside a crypt in the graveyard. He was easy. She had smiled, taken his hand as they walked into the dark, leaned against his shoulder, tickled his palm with her middle finger in the universal let’s-fuck manner, then led him grinning ear to ear down the pathway to the tombs. His urgency was that of a schoolboy.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had a woman?” she asked him as he slumped, finished, onto her belly.

  “Too damned long.”

  “But there are many in the Philippines.”

  “Not so’s I could find them,” he said. “All the ones I tried were hung with the same gear I’ve got. What do you call them? Benny boys?”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “Very bad for business, in my former profession. Unfair competition.”

  “Especially to the prospective buyer,” Curt said. They both laughed. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Why, nothing!” she yelped. Offended pride was the ticket. “I am a proper working woman now, with a salary. I am the commodore’s private secretary.” She turned her hips and shrugged him off onto the grass. It was wet and cold on your back down there. She rose huffily and straightened her dress, then stuffed her panties into her handbag. She felt his come creep down her leg like a cold garden slug. The dog was watching her from the darkness. Unsmiling. She waited, rather than walking off in pretended outrage.

  “Hey, sorry,” Curt said. “I just thought—”

  “Is okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They passed the carpenters, still busy at their crosses.

  “What’s that?” Curt asked. “New shrines in the works for the cathedral?”

  “Not really,” Rosalinda said. She hooked her thumb back over her shoulder toward the graveyard. “Gólgota. The crosses are for the crucifixions on Good Friday.”

  “You mean real people are going to get nailed to that wood up there?”

  “Certainly,” she said, as if to a backward child. “We are a very religious people.”

  Curt stopped and stared back up the hill toward the graveyard. It lay just under the bare, rocky crest. Moonlight made the coral blocks of the crypts look white as marble against the dark, kneelike thrust of the hilltop, and looking closely he could make out the shapes of three—no, four—no, half a dozen or more—crosses tilting crazily against the tropical stars.

  “Gólgota,” Rosalinda said again as she took his hand in hers. “The Place of the Skull.” She tickled his palm again.

  With the island of Negros abeam to starboard and Mindanao slumped black against the southern sky, Venganza plowed her way into the Sulu Sea. Culdee was at the wheel, watching for the dim lights of fishing boats off either bow. Surigao Strait had been thick with them, none paying the least attention, of course, to any known rules of the road. They’d stayed to the centerline of the broader Bohol Strait to avoid inshore boat traffic, and now, with the vast Sulu opening out dead ahead, the piloting would be less hazardous. Miranda came up from the galley with three mugs of coffee. Tonight they all had the midwatch. Freddie was up in the masthead watching for hazards and for the boats from Tawitawi that were to meet them.

  “Hey, Freddie,” Culdee yelled up into the dark. “You want some jamoke?”

  “Not now already,” the voice came back. “I got da lookout. You drink it for me, Boats.”

  Culdee spun the wheel to meet a following sea, kicked up by a warm, steady northeast trade that smelled of fire and jungle. Loggers were burning slash high on Negros, and they could see fires flaring and guttering on Mindanao as well. Freddie said the Mindanao fires might be the work of the NPA or the MNLF, the two rebel groups working together in these mountains. To Culdee it all smelled of Vietnam.

  “Last leg, Boats,” Miranda said.

  “How far do you make it on the chart?”

  “A little over six hundred kilometers, rhumb line from here to San Lázaro. That’s about three hundred twenty or thirty nautical miles. If this wind holds, we’ll make it in well under two days at eight knots. Did you read what the entry in The Philippine Pilot had to say about Lázaro?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pretty freaky down there.”

  “Flips are great bullshitters,” Culdee said. “If you thought Mark Twain could spin a tall tale, just ask a Manila jeepney driver about the dent in his front fender or the Band-Aid on his knuckle. You’ll hear a yarn that’ll turn your hair green.”

  “But there must be something to it. All the other entries sound legitimate.”

  “Well, if it was printed by any government printing office, especially one connected with navy brass anywhere, you can bet it’s hiding something. They’ve probably got some big top-secret military installation down there, covert operations up the ying-yang. They don’t want tourists hanging around, clicking cameras and talking to the hometown newspaper when they get back to wherever. Even the snoopiest American reporters didn’t see half of what went down in Vietnam.”

  “I don’t know,” Miranda said. “Some of these far-out corners can be dangerous. We don’t even have any weapons aboard to speak of. Just the 12-gauge and that .30/30 of yours.”

  “That’s all the blackbirders needed in these waters,” Culdee said. “And if it gets tougher, there’s that old punt gun of my granddad’s up in the fo’c’sle. It’s a 0-gauge—shoots a half-pound of shot with a load of black powder behind it. He called it Whiplash Willie, because that’s what you got when you fired it. Said he killed two hundred and nineteen sprig with it one night, with one shot, down in that little delta where I took you. Part of the loading instructions is to swallow two headache powders before you shoot, and two right after. A gun like that ought to scare these outlaws off.”

  “Flashing light on the port bow,” Freddie yelled from the masthead. “Three short, two long, one short. They’re repeating it.”

  “That’s the signal,” Miranda said. She grabbed a flashlight and ran for the rigging. “Bring her up into the wind, Boats.”

  The outriggers roared out of the dark, then throttled back. Wiry brown men swarmed over the gunwales, all of them hung with bandoliers and automatic weapons. Some in sarongs, some in ridiculous double-knit Ban-Lon bell-bottoms, stained and ripped and garish in the running lights—electric blues, puke greens, dog-shit oranges—must’ve been some kind of special at the Sulu Sea K Mart. They were tough-looking little men, though, wiry as VC, but darker. Their weapons gleamed rustless, well oiled, when they caught the light. An older man stepped up to the helm and saluted Culdee.

  “Permission to come aboard, sir,” he said in unaccented English. Then grinned in amazement at his success with the phrase.

  “Granted,” Culdee said.

  “Are you Captain Culdee already?”

  “No,” Miranda said, coming up behind him. “I’m the skipper. What can I do for you?”

  “I have these communication from Padre Cotinho,” he said, looking up at her with the same surprised grin. “Advising me to divulge to you anyway. Also many boxes of things for the storing of them in your ship’s belly.” His men were already swaying heavy crates onto the foredeck from a kumpit that had wallowed up behind them. The crates clanked faintly, with the heavy, businesslike sound of weapons, and Culdee smelled Cosmoline grease as they came aboard. Miranda took the canvas envelope from the little man’s hand, and he saluted smartly. She squared her shoulders, half-smiling, and saluted him back.

  “Let’s look at these in the chart room.”

  Freddie came in with a basket of melons, oysters, and what smelled like a rich fish stew. The mundo had given it to him.

  “Okay,” Miranda said, after reading
the brief note from the padre. “Curt’s there, all right.” She flipped quickly through the sheaf of photographs enclosed with the letter. “And here’s Seamark—shit, he’s repainted her and rigged her as a yawl! And Curt and Brillo and some guy he says is Commodore Millikan.” She handed the photos to Culdee. “Cotinho says Curt is working for this Millikan, running dope in from Thailand. It’s a big operation, he says. Fast boats and lots of guns. I don’t know what this means to our plans.”

  Culdee had been staring long and solemnly at one of the photographs.

  “I know what it means,” he said. He slid the snapshot across the chart table to Miranda. She saw a middle-aged man with a handsome but rather weak face. Like the faces of the yachtsmen she’d crewed for so long ago. He seemed to be giving orders to someone out of the picture, and his face wore a look of weary petulance. He had on a dark blue baseball cap over his close-cropped hair. The cap bore no slogans or insignia, but there was gold leaf on its bill. Underneath, in a cramped, spiky handwriting—Cotinho’s fist, all right—it said, “Commodore Millikan, U.S.N.”

  “Millikan, my ass,” Culdee said. “I know that guy. He’s the fucker who jobbed me in North Vietnam, who got me kicked out of the navy.” He grabbed an oyster from Freddie’s gift basket and shucked it with his rigging knife. The juice ran down over his scarred, lumpy knuckles. “What it means,” he said, “what it means is that this boat has the right name for both of us. Venganza, hey? We’ve both got a shipmate to kill down there.”

  He slurped the oyster and grabbed another, his knife wet in the lamplight. Freddie, watching, smiled.

  As dawn broke behind them, Venganza made all sail and squared her yards for San Lázaro.

  Part Four

  THE DANGEROUS GROUND

  TWENTY-ONE

  The last pickup was scheduled for sunset at a small dirt airstrip on a Thai island called Ko Kut, just across the Cambodian border. The planes would be old ADs, the prop-driven Spads from the early days of the Vietnam War, now foisted off on the Thai Air Force by the U.S. They’d be coming down from Ban Sattahip, via Chanthaburi and Trat, loaded with smack. Curt glassed the island from a mile offshore, scanning the ’groves until he picked up the jetty he’d been told to look for. Its pilings were spiky with barnacles now that the tide was out. A trail from the red smear of the runway atop the bluff led downhill to it. There was a tin-roofed hut at one end of the runway with a radar mast and a wind sock on opposite corners and a jeep parked near the door. The radar dish was looking northwest. Then it swung due north and locked there, quivering. Curt was about to put down the binoculars when the door of the hut burst open. Two men ran out and jumped into the jeep. They disappeared in a cloud of red dust. A moment later he heard the planes. They were jets.