Rebels of Mindanao

by Tom Anthony

  It was late afternoon when he walked the short distance up Claveria Street to the Lady Love. He stood in the doorway for a moment with the setting sun behind him, waiting for his eyes to adjust, then walked carefully toward the source of the 80s soft rock music. Halfway across the floor, his vision was restored and he waved to Jade and Jasmine who were dancing together to a quiet number, as he steered toward the trio lounging around the far end of the bar.

  “How is it out there? Rain start yet?” O’Neil greeted his customer.

  “Yeah. Cow pissin’ on a flat rock. Just another day in paradise. Hi guys.”

  Thornton had been speaking with Moser in German, but when Starke came up to them, he nodded toward two men sitting at the other end of the bar. “Something’s going on with those two Australians, Hank, they’re drunk, and they’ve been eyeing your girls.”

  As the twins ended their dance number, one of the sailors waved a bank note in the air and said in the general direction of the stage, “Here pretty pussy, here pretty pussy.”

  Starke was standing only a few feet from them and heard clearly. But he thought it best to keep things quiet and calmly told the sailor, “Take it easy, Davao City is a quiet place. What are you here for anyway?”

  “We’re here for good cheap pussy and bad cheap booze, just like you. We like those two gettin’ off the stage,” the man waving the money mumbled back.

  “That’s not for you tonight. Let ’em alone, they’re just trying to make a few pesos.” Starke defended his protégées.

  “Get lost, they look good to me,” was the response.

  “I’m not getting lost, you guys are the new ones here.” Starke was still calm.

  Without warning, the first sailor threw a punch that was automatically deflected by Starke’s karate chop, and his counter punch caught the sailor along the side of his head, stunning him.

  The other sailor stood up to help his buddy, but Thornton had had enough of the nonsense and blocked him with a hard flat hand into the chest that momentarily stopped his breathing. Starke ended the day for the man facing him with a short, powerful jab to the face.

  Trying to regain his breath, the sailor who could still speak gave up and helped his buddy stand, saying as they decided it was best to leave, not to the men but to the twins, “We’ll see you later, both of you and both of us.” But the sailors had had enough of Davao City.

  13

  The Schloss Code

  Elaiza entered the Lady Love as the two drunken sailors staggered out. When she pushed one of them out of her way, he stumbled and bounced off the door casing. In the bright light of the late afternoon, the two sailors squinted and tried to decide which way to go on Claveria Street.

  Morris O’Neil put a pitcher of beer on the bar. “It’s on the house, gentlemen. Thanks for keeping it quiet in here.”

  Starke clapped Moser on the back and asked O’Neil, “My pleasure. How about putting some of that into one of your cleaner mugs?”

  Wolfgang Moser was not the kind of guy to get into a fistfight, and was happy to go back to his conversation with Thornton, chatting with him while exchanging a “prosit!” with the free black beer, an improbable scene anyplace else around town.

  Elaiza joined them at the bar. “Reporting as ordered, Kapitan Tomas. This must be STAGCOM headquarters, huh?”

  “Hi Elaiza. You could say so. Hank Starke here has signed on, I think, and this beer-drinking German will help us, I hope.”

  Elaiza nodded around Thornton toward them. “How do you do? You guys are an interesting crew. Kapitan Tomas, why did you invite me here? I don’t drink.”

  “I know. Wanted you to get to know these guys.”

  Elaiza accepted a mango juice and took a sip.

  “By the way, I like my new nickname. How’d you come up with that?”

  “History. Five hundred years ago Kapitan Tomas Monteverde, from Spain, brought desperados here, like you.”

  “Well, I’ve been called a lot worse.” Thornton had to smile. He really liked this girl. Then back to business.

  “Wolfgang, lay it out for her, please. Tell her about the Schloss Code.”

  Moser appeared reluctant. “Well, young lady, against my better judgment, maybe I could put things into my radio show. Thornton here wants me to teach you some German.”

  “Let me guess, the best way to do that is while drinking?” she asked.

  Thornton wanted to explain. “It was my idea. Tell her about it, Wolf.”

  Moser still sounded unsure, “Thornton thinks I can mumble into the mike in some German dialect and give directions.”

  “But I certainly wouldn’t understand.”

  “No one else would either,” Thornton explained. “That’s why you’re here. Take out your pencil and learn some Deutsch. I’ll drink the beer.”

  Thornton left Elaiza with Moser and joined Starke, who was not in a hurry to hear what Thornton wanted to discuss, but Thornton got to the point and asked him, “What would it take for me to get you comfortable taking chances with my new team? You might have to lead them in combat.”

  Thornton knew he had more work to do to get Starke motivated and on board with STAGCOM without any reservations.

  “Did I hear you say a cool one million U.S. dollars? That share of confiscated booty would make life here a lot more fun.” Thornton had mentioned the possible share that was on the table for Starke. Starke shifted his weight around and took another sip of beer. He visualized taking the twins to Hong Kong for a week, maybe with a side trip to gamble in Macau. It more than passed through his mind; it stuck there.

  Starke ordered a shot of warm Johnnie Walker Red Label to sit beside his cold beer as Thornton began to persuade, looking for signs of emotion.

  “Hank,” Thornton began, “Elaiza thinks she can recruit a Manobo crew. What do you think?”

  “Manobos are tough; I’d take a squad of them into combat. They’ll need some training to develop discipline so they don’t all run around in circles in a combat situation like young boys at play, but I can teach men to follow orders. I like the girl too, she has spunk.” Starke pounded ketchup over the cheeseburger that Jade (or maybe it was Jasmine?) slid to him across the bar while he thought about the operation.

  “So, are you in?” Thornton wanted Starke to make a commitment, internally and personally, to the mission itself.

  Starke asked, “How long do you think it will take to get that Arab guy and, my idle curiosity, what will you do with it all?”

  “If it takes much more than two weeks, I’ll be very surprised. The Abu Sayaf must do something soon, or their support will be whittled away,” Thornton told Starke, who was now paying close attention. “Or their leaders in the field will use up the money to live on and after that not have enough left to fight a war.”

  “OK, so much for the Abu Sayaf, how do you see the New People’s Army fitting in?” Starke wanted to understand the relationship between the two groups.

  “The NPA have the troops, thousands of men with guns; the Abu Sayaf has money and leadership, but only a few hundred men. If the two get together,” Thornton explained, “they can control this island.”

  “How could they get together? The NPA are communists, the Abu Sayaf are Muslim. They have opposing theologies. Just like the communists and the Catholics in the old days behind the Iron Curtain. Remember?” Starke was suddenly a philosopher and theologian, and had been listening.

  Thornton had his theories, and had shared them before with Colonel Liu to test them. “They’ll forget those differences when the issue is their perceived freedom, and once they find a charismatic leader who promises them Liberdad, add a few U.S. dollars, they’ll do whatever he asks. Just like in the old days, buddy. Yes, I do remember. They would be told their local chieftain would represent them in a new federal congress of some sort. Think about it.” Thornton had thought about it, and the picture was not pretty.

  “OK, I’m thinking.” Starke got back to the immediate issue, “So what do we do
when we find them?”

  “First we track them, have to stay close on their heels. Elaiza will stay in communication with the embassy. When we have the opportunity, we take out the rebels, keep the money. After we’ve removed the cash and hence the temptation for certain corruptible officials, we tell the Philippine Army where they are, and Colonel Liu can have his way with them.”

  Thornton left Starke to his ruminations and went to where Elaiza was scratching something on a piece of paper with Moser.

  Wolfgang Moser, an unlikely transplant to Mindanao from East Germany, was a dis cjockey for 90.3 FM Radio Mindanao. His show, “European Classics,” introduced Beethoven, Puccini and especially Strauss to a growing audience that extended to all of the island as his listeners erected makeshift FM antennas, frames shaped like Catholic crosses that implied a larger than expected Christian population within the predominantly Muslim communities in far western Mindanao. Moser’s five minutes of news on the half hour reported events, but he was determined not to get deeply involved in politics. Five journalists had been assassinated in Mindanao in the last three years, nineteen throughout all of the Philippines.

  Moser had lived seven years in Davao City, since meeting and marrying a Filipina when they were both studying at the University of Vienna. After earning her degree, she brought her new husband to live in Davao City and, after the fall of the wall, got his aging father out of East Germany to join them in the tropical sun. Thornton enjoyed his conversations in German with Moser and his family. They were unlikely to be comprehended by eavesdroppers, and Moser knew it was a hobby for Thornton to keep up his language skills.

  When Thornton first heard Moser’s radio show, he took the initiative to meet him, and they quickly found areas of common interest, thereafter meeting weekly downtown for lunch and philosophy. After he got to know Wolfgang’s father, Thornton was allowed to call him Vati, and he enjoyed drinking a beer and singing songs Vati himself had forgotten, but remembered again with the first few notes, no matter how off-key Thornton was. No one else enjoyed their music, and it offended some, but when he heard the words, Vati would remember lost loves, hardship in the snow, and that Russian prisoner of war camp where he was lucky to be fed pea soup twice a day for a year, and his old red eyes would swell up.

  Thornton had introduced Moser to the Lady Love, and sometimes they stopped by with the early crowd for a few bottles of beer, or a bottle of bad and overpriced Spanish red wine served too cold, and a hamburger. They sang German marching songs, and played with Austrian and Bavarian dialects. They listened to the Schlommel music, reminiscing about the hills around Grinzing from their days there and the more famous music of Strauss, the latter the only music that was likely to be played on the air by Moser.

  When Thornton had unveiled his idea to create a code in German, Moser told him he could not put his radio station into some sort of espionage game. This was not communist Germany, and the Cold War was over.

  Now, talking to him with Elaiza listening, Thornton explained to them both, “Wolfgang, what if, for example I, or Elaiza here, or your own wife, got lost in the boonies. Wouldn’t you help them find their way home?”

  “Of course, but you’re talking here about undertaking a for-profit venture with political ramifications.”

  “Well, I’ll make it easy for you.” Thornton tried to put his friend at ease, and in the process to educate Elaiza as well. ‘Just imagine, imagine you could tell them over the radio, during your program, what direction to take, and you could do it secretly.”

  “Why a secret? If they’re lost, they could call me on my cell phone. What’s the problem?” Moser was puzzled, and Thornton thought for a while about how to explain it to him.

  A large man, English maybe—Thornton could hear the language but not the accent—entered and sat at the other end of the bar from them and ordered a Jack Daniels with a San Miguel Pils. Thornton spoke more quietly, revealing the details of his idea. “Just imagine that our STAGCOM patrol was lost, I mean ‘misoriented.’ It would be unhealthy for me if the terrorists out there knew we were communicating.”

  “Yeah, another terror alert was announced today, a Yellow Alert for Davao, with Kadayawan coming up this weekend.” Starke showed he was still following the discussion. “Terrorism is an unhealthy event around here.”

  “Well, Abu Bakar has been convicted, and this Himbali has been taken out, just last week. That hits the Abu Sayaf hard.” Morris was also getting interested.

  “The loss of their leaders will inspire the Abu Sayaf to retaliate,” was Elaiza’s opinion as she listened to the men while she sipped her mango juice.

  “The Abu Sayaf are buying new hired hands, as we’re sitting here,” Moser said, “and all of us are already targets. Thornton, back to your theoretical question. Of course, I would have to help.” The D.J. was obviously intrigued. “But what would stop an assassin from walking right into my studio and popping me?”

  “They wouldn’t know what you were saying,” Thornton told him. And he went on to explain, “German is very different from the dialects in Mindanao; Wolf, you could literally cough into the mike and communicate a message.”

  Starke digressed, reading the newspaper: “Have you heard of the Magdalo? The coup plotters?”

  “It doesn’t matter to people here who runs Manila,” said Elaiza. “If some cadets recently graduated from the Philippine Military Academy want to throw out the old order, who cares?”

  Starke risked sounding negative, but shared his opinion. “The plotters only hurt themselves, those Tagalogs. But the Philippine Army will retaliate here, in Mindanao, the two-faced bastards. Look in today’s paper: ‘A battalion of Philippine Marines boards a transport ship at navy headquarters in Manila to fight the Abu Sayaf in Mindanao.”

  At this point the big guy at the other end of the bar seemed to come alive as Jade and Jasmine began to dance again. He tipped them to do a number for him on the raised platform. The music got louder, and the group of expats and Elaiza at the bar were forced to speak in less hushed voices when they resumed their conversation.

  From his perch on the end stool, Starke watched his twins, whom he took more than a paternal interest in protecting and preserving.

  Elaiza watched them too, with mild curiosity. She asked Thornton, “What does all this have to do with me and my iPod, even ‘upgraded’ as it is?”

  “Listen to this for a while, see what you think.” Thornton was still intrigued with his idea of a code. He might actually need it sometime, it was more than just an exercise in semantics. “When I was in the army in Germany, I lived near the small town of Kitzingen near the smaller town of Iphofen, famous for its dry Franken wine—you know, it comes in a Bocksbeutel, those bottles famous for being shaped like goat’s gonads? Well, I won lots of bets, with Americans and Germans both, that I could tell from one taste which side of the mountain behind Iphofen the wine came from, north, south, east, or west. They took my bets, because all the wine looked exactly the same, in the same little green bottles, just with different vintner labels, and they all came from about a five-mile radius. I almost always, I would say always, won.”

  “How did you do that, a foreigner, an American?” Moser had not heard this tale before from Thornton.

  The twins had come over and loitered around Starke after their dance, oozing their natural sexuality, warm skin just a little bit moist and evaporating hints of perfume. But Elaiza’s cold stare discouraged them from any snuggling, so they retreated to a front table to sit and flirt with the guy who had tipped them.

  Thornton went on. “It was easy. There were four wines from very different grapes, the Mueller-Thurgau, Riesling, Kalb and Sylvaner. They grew on different sides of the mountain. The east and south got lots of sun; the north not so much, and it got cold much earlier in the autumn on the northern slope. On opposite sides on the mountain the soils were very different, loam, clay, sand, and limestone. The wines were as different as a red from France and a white from Italy. I won the bets
.”

  “The point is?” Starke asked.

  “We create a simple code using strange German words. Elaiza, you’ll need to make notes of key words, Thurgau will mean north, Sylvaner, south; Kalb, east; and Riesling, west.” Thornton was thinking as he spoke. “Use difficult and long words like Neuschwanstein, crazy Prince Ludwig’s castle near Fuessen.”

  “OK, but what good is a code?” Elaiza was getting curious.

  “Moser could easily, and in secret, give us directions on the air; since no one would be specifically looking for secret communications, it would be simple.” Thornton turned to Moser. “Wolf, you could announce something like, ‘Three callers tonight have requested Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Kalb Sylvaner Kalb,’ slurring the words a bit into your mike. I would interpret that as, ‘Move three kilometers east southeast.’ Nothing to it.”

  “But anyone who knows music or German, would figure out something was strange.” Moser was understandably skeptical.

  “Yes, eventually, but it would work for a week, and that would be long enough. You know all the people in Mindanao who both understand German and know something about music, and they are not the ones we care about deciphering a code. Worst case scenario with those who could be suspicious, laugh it off as a contest you were running to see if anyone noticed. Or put them all to sleep with some Mahler.”

  “OK, but where would I get the information to help you?”

  “From Major Hayes; he’s assigned here in Mindanao during our mission and is hooked up with the U.S. Embassy tech guys in their lab by cell phone, or even land line. He could be in the station with you, giving you the messages we need.” Thornton pulled it all together in a way that made Moser comfortable.