“They say it’s a balbal, the giant man-eating flying squirrel for which this island is named,” Sôbô explained. “It swoops down out of the trees and licks up Negritos with its sticky tongue, then takes them off to tiffin. Actually, it’s a haribon, a very large, monkey-eating eagle. One of the largest and rarest eagles in the world. The bird books say you’ll find it only on Mindanao. Let them think so. I’ve seen them once or twice before, coming up here to chat with these fellows.”
Sôbô withdrew a small automatic pistol from inside his shirt and gestured the guides forward. They moved cautiously. Then Sôbô crouched. “There,” he whispered to Culdee.
The big bird stood erect on a limb, glaring down at them. Its hooked beak was red with blood. One great yellow talon was buried in the throat of a very dead monkey. The eagle rattled its beak and screamed—a long, metallic, blood-chilling scream. Then it flapped off into the canopy with the dead monkey trailing from its claws.
“New addition to your life list,” Sôbô said, smiling back at Culdee.
The Negrito village was a small circle of huts surrounding a thatched longhouse in a clearing. Blue, sour-smelling smoke trailed listlessly up from cook fires and pooled under the jungle canopy. Small, dark women with breasts too large for their frail bodies darted away when they appeared. Their children toddled after them. Men came out of the longhouse to greet them. With them was a taller, lighter-skinned Negrito in what looked like an army jungle uniform. He carried a pistol holstered on his hip and wore a floppy-brimmed green jungle hat of the sort seen in old film clips of the Burma campaign. He strode crisply up to Sôbô and saluted.
“This is Grande,” Sôbô told Culdee. “Crackerjack jungle fighter. Ex-Philippine Army Scout Ranger. Great record in the war. Killed more of my countrymen than the A-bomb. I don’t for a moment doubt it. I’ve had him training these tribesmen for a little flanking attack I have in mind. Now, if you don’t mind, I have details to work out with Sergeant Grande.”
One of the Negrito guides brought Culdee a steaming calabash full of dark liquid. He sniffed it warily. Just coffee—and good coffee at that. The other brought him a platter of fried sliced bananas. When he had finished the meal, the two men invited him into the longhouse. It was dark and smoky in there, but the jungle light filtered through the plaited roof, and gradually Culdee could make out details. The most striking of these were the shrunken heads that adorned the roof posts—dozens of them, it seemed. And they were not the heads of other Negritos. Some had red hair, some close-cropped stiff black hair, others the black, curly tresses and long noses of Tausuqs. One was blond. Culdee stared at them long and hard. One of the Negritos nudged his partner and pointed to Culdee, laughing.
“Sí, hombre,” he said when Culdee looked over at him. “Como tú. White Joe Milikan, hey?” The Negritos fell down laughing, tears streaming from their eyes. Culdee went out, trying to laugh along with them. Waiting on the longhouse steps, he noticed that many of the Negrito men carried rifles as well as spears. From old newsreels and books on the war he recognized the weapons as the standard broom-stocked Japanese 7.7-millimeter Type 99 infantry rifles. But these didn’t look as though they dated back forty-some years to a war in a tropical jungle. They looked fresh out of the box, gleaming with oil, scarcely a speck of rust of them. And though the rifles were nearly as tall as most of the Negritos, the men handled them familiarly, almost as naturally as they did their spears.
Then Sôbô was ready to leave. He returned Sergeant Grande’s salute, exchanged good-byes with the Negrito elders, and they headed back down the trail.
“Fascinating place, what?” he said to Culdee.
“Those heads are a bit spooky,” Culdee replied. “Christ, they had white men in there.”
“And plenty of Japanese, too,” Sôhô added. “Don’t forget that, old sport. These, by the way, are the fellows described in the guidebooks as kin of the ‘gentle Tasaday.’ If that’s gentle, you have to wonder what the grumpy ones are like.”
Kasim’s maneuvers at the wheel of the Thunder sent Miranda sprawling onto the cockpit deck. By the time she found her feet and groped her way to the handgrips up forward, she saw they were not heading back the way they’d come, but south, toward San Lázaro harbor.
“Where we going?” she yelled to Kasim.
“You sailboat,” he yelled back. He pointed ahead. She saw Seamark dead ahead, lying at anchor in the roadstead. “Capitán Katana, he say so. Ordenes, no?”
The sailboat grew larger as they approached. Miranda held on tight. The Thunder was flying, straight toward the ketch—no, a yawl, she thought inanely. That fucker Curt. . . . She saw Brillo suddenly stand up on the cabin roof, his ruff bristling. He was staring right into her eyes. They would hit the Seamark exactly amidships . . .
“Brillo!” she yelled.
Kasim cut the wheel hard left, and they whipped alongside her, not ten feet from collision. Brillo saw her and barked, once.
Then they were heading seaward, toward the reef. Behind, she saw two Thunders chasing them. Seeing their change of course, the Thunders had angled to cut them off at the reef. Combers broke over the coral. Kasim headed straight for them.
“You hold fast!” he yelled. “We jump!”
It was solid coral dead ahead, covered for a moment by the spilling waves, then bare and sharp-fanged again. They’d tear the Thunder’s guts out . . .
Kasim’s luck ran with them. He hit the reef just as a comber crashed over it. The Thunder leapt up, airborne and straight as an arrow shot from a crossbow, and they hit the sea smoothly on the far side. “Allah akhbar!” Kasim yelled. “God good fella!” Looking back, Miranda saw the first of the pursuing fast boats hesitate a moment, then smash the reef at some sixty miles an hour. Bad timing. Bodies flew through the air, along with chunks of the Thunder. Its gas tanks exploded in a great orange and black burst. The other chaser circled, then ran parallel to them inside the reef. But Kasim angled outward from it, rapidly widening the distance between them. The old man’s eyes were sparking with joy. He turned and looked at Miranda and laughed aloud. “You take wheel awhile, hey? Good fight, hey? I clean up a bit.”
Only then did she notice the dead Tausuq crumpled in the cockpit corner. Blood had pooled deep where he lay. Kasim lifted him by the shirt collar. The man’s head flopped onto his chest. His neck had been nearly severed by the bolo stroke. Kasim shook his own head sadly.
“I grow old,” he yelled to her over the engine roar. “My arm too—how you say—débil? Flojo? Weak,’ hey?” In his younger days he’d have beheaded the man with one blow.
He heaved the body over the side and turned to with swab and bucket. The mess must be cleaned up—Capitán Katana was very strict about such matters.
Miranda hardly noticed what was happening. As the horror of the chase receded, the greater horror of the whole situation came into sickening focus. What kind of hell had she gotten them into? Five men dead yesterday in the Dangerous Ground—cut down by bolo and gunfire in a matter of moments. No hesitations. Now this morning, at least three more. Maybe four? What about Effredio? Her friend of so many years, the best mate she’d ever had. Even if he were still alive, what would they be doing to him?
TWENTY-FIVE
Okay, the commodore thought. Once is happenstance—the photographs in Hughes’s boat. Twice is coincidence—the exploding Bible. Three times is enemy action—the incident off the boat basin. He’d lost two Thunders that morning. The one stolen by the people in the pump boat and the one that blew up on the reef. The crew of the second chase boat had brought back the boloed corpse of the Tausuq helmsman in the stolen boat. What was his name—Mustafa? If those pump-boat folks were just simple islanders, they were mighty damned tough.
He made his decision. The boat basin was the weakest link in his operation—no defenses to speak of, wide open to the sea. He’d withdraw the larger portion of his Thunders to the Balbal base, concentrate them there, take all his files and stores along with them. Leave four or
five Thunders here with just fuel and ammunition enough to present a threat to the flank of any attackers who showed up off Balbal. But the main fight, if it came to that, would be in the waters off Balbal. That’s where his strength lay.
There were still many things the commodore didn’t understand about the situation. (Like all of the details, he thought wryly.) The MATS guy’s head, for instance. Hughes’s role in the equation, if any. The Bible-thumping man and woman from the gospel, though of course that was certainly just cover. Damn clever, though. Ironic. It indicated more subtlety behind the scenes than Culdee could possibly muster. Chi Coms? NPA? MNLF? Perhaps even some rival intelligence agency. The other side’s or our own? Too early in the game to waste time figuring it out, though. The best bet, the commodore was sure, was to concentrate his forces immediately at Balbal, scour the islands, locate the enemy, then wipe him out.
He wondered how Billy was faring. Billy had the prisoner from the pump boat down in the little casita that served as the commodore’s brig, interrogating the man. The commodore hated that end of intelligence work. Still, he’d better go down and have a look, make sure Billy hadn’t killed the man out of sheer Filipino vengefulness without getting anything from him. God, he hated it! Maybe he’d better check first to see how the evacuation was faring . . .
“That’s it,” Billy Torres said. “You’re for the cross, my boy.” Effredio was already hanging, arms extended sideways, dripping with blood, but from manacles on the wall of the brig, not from a wooden cross. He watched Torres through eyes blurred with pain. Every bone, every muscle in his body ached, his arms worst of all.
“But the cross is for Christians,” he croaked weakly. “I am, as I’ve told you again and again, a Muslim. My very name is a Muslim name. Kasim bin Musa, no self-respecting unbeliever would take such a name.” They were speaking Samal. Effredio’s fluency in the tongue was far greater than Torres’s, and Billy was bothered by that. But not much. Most men in the southern Philippines spoke several languages, especially sailors, traders, and military men. And of course revolutionaries.
“So you insist,” Torres said. He poked the joint of Effredio’s shoulder with a Shore Patrol nightstick. The man on the wall grunted. That was one of the fine points about torture—once you’d softened your man up, tenderized him so to speak, you didn’t have to hit him hard to make it hurt. By reducing the actual amount of force employed, you prolonged his life and thus his value. The longer he hung there, the greater the pain. To him, it seemed it would never end. Torres had seen men actually will themselves dead on the wall, but they always needed maximum agony to take them over the edge. This he would not provide. It was a hallmark of Billy’s style, the signature of a master.
“But for a Moro, you look very much like a Visayan to me.” Billy tapped an elbow. Effredio grunted. “Leyte, Cebu, Negros, Iloilo, Siquijor even. You look more like Samar than Samal.” He laughed at his own word play—one was an island, the other a tribe—then tapped Effredio on the ribs. Effredio grunted.
“I told you,” he said. “My father was Samal, my mother from Negros. I’m just a boatman. We were diving shell over on Palawan—good shell waters there, off Taytay. Also stealing birds’ nests at El Nido, those cliffs of black marble where the swallows build their homes. Chinese in Manila must have their nido soup, their bird’s nest soup. Good money there. But mundo robbed us near—” He coughed on a trickle of blood, and the very flexing of his ribs almost made him pass out.
“Yes, yes,” Billy said impatiently. “Near Balabac Strait, on your way to Sabah, where you hoped to recoup your losses by smuggling cigarettes back up to Basilan. Your engine was making trouble, so you stopped here in hopes of repairing it. Then, cruising along the reef, you decided to see if you could dive up any worthwhile shells. You soon discovered the reef was dead, et cetera. I must say, you’re consistent. But so am I. Persistent as well. So we’ll give it one more try, then it’s the cross.”
“But I am a Muslim. The cross is for Christians—”
Torres rattled the nightstick against Effredio’s rib cage. Hard.
“Listen to me,” he barked. “This has all been preliminaries, a warm-up so to speak. Stretching exercises to limber you up for the workout. Now that you’re strong, stretched, and centered, we’ll begin.”
“Curt!” Effredio yelled, his eyes wide with pain and fear. “That’s the name you want. Take it! Curt is his name, a Milikan named Curt! I know nothing more, but he is the man behind us, the man who pays us.” His head slumped down on his chest, and he moaned a long, gurgling moan.
Torres smiled and went out to fetch the commodore. On his way to the basin, he told the guards to take the man Kasim off the wall and get him up to Gólgota. Things were begining to move in the right direction. They always did with Billy Torres at the helm.
Culdee lay chin-deep in the hotsi bath, steeping like a tea ball. The water was salt—Perniciosa’s freshwater was precious, collected almost entirely by catchment and cistern from the brief, passing rainstorms that lashed the island nearly every day—but it felt damned good. Culdee ached all over from the hike. Two Japanese sat soaking at the far end of the bath, phlegmatic little men with graying hair and the hard gray-blue hands of laborers or mechanics. There were Japs all over the island, Culdee was learning. They’d ohayoed him and bowed politely when he came in, but now they were pretending he wasn’t there. That was fine with Culdee. He had things to think about.
Miranda had returned with Kasim at dusk, an hour behind Culdee and Sôbô. She was nearly hysterical. Freddie had been killed or at best captured. Kasim had chopped a man’s head off. A boat had blown up, bits of guys flying through the air, great literal balls of fire, gunplay. Culdee’s relief at Miranda’s safe return had been nearly squelched by the news about Freddie.
“It’s all a mistake,” she kept saying when he met her on the lee-shore beach. “We should never have come. Too many killings, too much danger, too much death for everyone, we’ve got to clear out of here.”
He’d tried to calm her and reassure her—maybe Freddie’s all right, you didn’t actually see them shoot him, or even see them capture him. Yeah, we’ll think about getting out of this place. But Culdee knew damned well they couldn’t. Sôbô had them now, for whatever end he had in mind, and he wasn’t going to just let them go.
Sôbô, of course, was delighted with the capture of the fast boat. His black go-stone eyes shone like those of a kid with a new toy, or, more aptly, an admiral with a new addition to his task force. He promised Miranda that everything possible was being done—he’d already given orders to rescue Effredio. He had agents in Millikan’s camp. And more such bullshit. If he had agents with Millikan, how come he didn’t know about the book bomb until that slippery Arab on Moro Armado told him? But Culdee didn’t mention that, certainly not to Miranda.
The funny thing was, Culdee didn’t want to clear out. Not knowing, as he did now, that Turner was there, and that Turner was Millikan. And that Sôbô planned to kill Millikan-Turner as dead as those SEALS who’d died at Brigadune. Culdee wanted to be in on that, even if it killed him in the process. But he also wanted Miranda out of it, whether she got her boat back or not. Shit. . . . Salt water stung his eyes, and it wasn’t from the hotsi bath. He ladled more of it over his head, to keep the Japs at the far end from noticing. She was his daughter, by God . . .
He found himself remembering something that had happened long ago, when Miranda was just a toddler. He’d been home-ported in Long Beach at the time, and one weekend he borrowed a car from a shipmate and drove Viv and the kid up to Marineland of the Pacific, in Palos Verdes. A family outing. Miranda would surely adore the porpoises exploding from the water in formation, the big black pilot whales suddenly erupting from the surface to take fish from a man’s hand. Guys who’d been there said kids loved it. While they were waiting in line for their tickets, Miranda staggered around at their feet—she was still unsteady on her pins, just learning to walk and proud of it—and a man trying to c
ut into the head of the line bumped into her, knocking her flat on her diapered duff. Culdee had never felt any particular possessiveness about his daughter up to that point, just a gentle, pleasant fondness for her, a mild sort of love. But when the line-jumper knocked her down, rage ignited in him like a gasoline fire. Before he knew it, he’d grabbed the man by the shoulder, spun him, and coldcocked him—knocked him sprawling on the dirty asphalt. He was shaking with rage when the security guards intervened. Viv straightened it all out, as did the other bystanders, and no harm was done, except to the other guy’s face and dignity.
It was a revelation. Culdee’d heard other men, tough old salts, officers and white hats alike, talk on the long night watches about how fiercely they loved their kids. He’d thought it was bunk. Then, he knew differently . . .
As he toweled himself dry on the steaming tiles, three more Japs came in. These were younger, though. Tougher-looking, or at least more swaggering than the older mechanic-Japs. When they stripped off their robes, he saw they were tattooed from their necks to their ankles, from wrist to wrist. Japs had to be crazy.
Sôbô sure was.
The two priests stood in the chancel, surveying the cathedral. Its santos, with the exception of San Lázaro, of course, were suitably draped in Lenten purple, as they had been all Holy Week. The patron saint’s effigy was wrapped in wax-steeped cerecloths, like those that bind a corpse. Under the flicker of candlelight he glowed faintly yellow in the gloom of the nave. It is the color of pus, thought Padre Cotinho, as from a suppurating wound. Not Christ’s wounds, surely, but those of a failing church.
Blood Tide Page 19
