Rebels of Mindanao

by Tom Anthony

  They then devised a code with these key elements: neunzig grad—ninety degrees; “I have had three requests for”—three kilometers; Bach rechts—the. stream to the right; Fluechtling, Gefaehr hinter Dir’—fugitive, danger, rear, and so on. The cardinal directions would come from the Iphofen wines. Wolf could announce a musical piece as old Austrian Schlommel music, and “cough” a few words in Viennese dialect that would hardly be noticed even by someone fluent in German, let alone Visayan.

  “OK, so we have a code, and Moser can give you, or whoever has the iPod, messages. What good is it?” Starke asked.

  “The embassy, and therefore our armed forces, will know Elaiza’s exact location. And I mean exactly. If and when she moves in a specific way, she signals back to the embassy by the steps she has taken. Each step will be recorded digitally on a map overlay. The iPod is a radio and a GPS device rolled into one. I’d like to leave it at that.”

  “Pretty slick.” Moser was impressed. “I always thought you were a CIA professional, or something like that.”

  “Moser, I’m just a businessman, but working with Elaiza, and also with Starke here, I hope I can pay back some people I owe for when I was, shall we say, more involved. I still have some personal confidences to keep. And it’s just better that that’s all you know. Don’t get more involved. I’ll tell you the whole story some day.”

  “OK, I wasn’t that curious anyway. But I would like to know what you think you three can do by yourselves that the entire Philippine Army can’t?” Moser thought he had hit the nail on the head.

  “That’s one of the things I’ll tell you some other time. Let’s let it rest there for today.” Thornton raised his glass in another toast, signaling that he did not want to talk any more about that subject.

  Starke was feeling the alcohol only slightly, but the twins’ near presence, his buddies around him, and the interesting conversation put him more at ease and fascinated at the same time. Without asking any more questions, he went into one of the videoke rooms with the twins and a bottle of brandy.

  When Starke was gone, Elaiza declined a beer from Thornton, and ordered a sparkling grape juice, then said, “I got it. We can use the code to direct our team around, but no one will know what we’re doing.”

  Thornton confirmed her conclusion, “Yes. We get close to Mahir Hakki, you turn your uncles loose, and we make him and the cash disappear. It should be easy.”

  14

  The Mission

  Sergeant Henry Starke arrived in Toril in time for breakfast leftovers with Thornton and Elaiza, plopped himself down and completely filled one end of the table, all decked out in tactical black, except for the design on his tee shirt featuring an off-white bald eagle, wings stretched by his girth. He belched in satisfaction, as was the local custom he had adopted as his demonstration of being simpatico with the natives, then tapped his fingers showing his eagerness to get on with the business at hand.

  It was still cool, the morning salt breeze mixing the essence of yesterday’s jasmine with the faintest hint of today’s durian crop on its way to a nearby open market. Starke passed around a newspaper he had bought on his way there, with the report of the bombings at the airport and Sasa wharf, showing photos of shattered windows and a searing picture of a dead girl in a pure white dress splattered with blood, still clutching her small doll. It put steel into Elaiza’s heart.

  “If they can kill that child, they could kill my child someday,” was her low growl.

  The woman who worked for Thornton came and cleared the dirty dishes away. Thornton took out a map and spread it on the table. He explained, “OK, here’s the situation. Some idiots in the Defense Department wanted to send U.S. troops into Davao City proper, ‘for training’ of course, but General Hargens was able to get that mission cancelled. Hargens asked me to help him, just for a short time on a very focused assignment. And I am to keep it all quiet. Only a few will know about our mission and the details.”

  “How we gonna do it, Thornton?” Starke asked; the experienced trooper got right to the point.

  Thornton told him, “We need to find the Turk with the money and finish him, without letting the world know the U.S. is involved in internal affairs in the Philippines. The Filipinos have to get the credit for winning their own war. Elaiza here works for our embassy and will keep in direct touch with a U.S. Army officer who is our only official contact, her boss at the embassy, Major Hayes. He works for Hargens. Our job is to get that Al Qaeda cash before the Philippine Army does.”

  “What’s our security, Kapitan Tomas,” asked Elaiza, “how do we keep our plans secret and cover ourselves? I don’t want to see any more photos of dead little girls or boys.”

  “Me either. Our primary means of contact, of course, is by cell phone in areas where there is reception. It’s low tech, but relatively secure. I doubt the Abu Sayaf has the technology here in the field to intercept any communications, and if they did, and understood our English, they would not be able to react fast enough to have it matter. So Major Hayes and I talk directly on my cell phone.”

  “But we also will have a back-up,” Thornton continued. “Elaiza is not only our liaison with the native troopers, but also our communications expert. The geeks in the embassy will know where this device is, when Elaiza is wearing it, down to an accuracy of a few feet, much better than any normal GPS and so accurate we can use it to call in an artillery or air strike.”

  Starke was atypically quiet and a bit confused. He asked Thornton, “What do you know about the whereabouts of that money carrier?”

  Thornton let him in on the latest he had from Hayes. “We assume the Turk is with the Abu Sayaf in the southwestern, mostly Muslim half of Mindanao, the ARMM, the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. They will want to hook up with the NPA in northeastern Mindanao, the Moros in the West, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with their breakaway renegades, the Moro National Front as well, here in the south. The NPA has armed troops on the ground in the north and east. If they all get together, they will start to think they can achieve their objective, an independent Islamic state of Mindanao. A civil war could not only break up the Philippines, but also move the world in the opposite direction from what the U.S. President and the President and Congress of the Philippines want.”

  “But the Abu Sayaf say they are not responsible for the blowing up of that little girl, I heard that announcement came from Eid Kabalu himself. If the Abu Sayaf was making trouble, he would want you to know it was him doing it.” Starke was up to date from reading newspapers in the Lady Love.

  “I believe him, but I doubt that my own countrymen will want to believe him.” Elaiza got into it. “I think your CIA wants to connect terrorist acts here to the Bali bombings by the Al Qaeda, whether it’s true or not. The CIA likes to take out the easy targets even more than they like to get the correct target. They want to connect the Al Qaeda terrorists to the deaths of those Australians in Bali, keeping the Aussies on your side. Nobody really cares about my people.”

  “Neither the U.S. nor the Filipinos want to commit significant combat troops in Mindanao, I agree with that much,” Thornton told them all, “but we may have to. The U.S. already has 500 Special Forces rangers on the island helping your countrymen. The Philippine Army is not well trained, has poorly functioning equipment, and their rifles are so old that the rifling is worn out and they don’t shoot straight. A percentage of the soldiers are paid to do nothing, or have sympathies and families with the other side. It’s discouraging. Filipino soldiers can’t find their way back to their own camps or just don’t want to and wind up wandering around in the jungle. It’s more profitable for them to work with their enemy. Consider if they had to find, fix, and destroy the Abu Sayaf elements now in South Cotobato along with the irregulars out there in the boonies. How good would they be? We don’t know which ones are with us and which ones are against us. Or they work their ‘pay to raid’ programs.”

  Starke got into it. “With all due respect, if the U.S
. Special Forces troops running around on the island can do nothing, what makes anyone think just two unusual guys and one girl can?”

  “Want to try me sometime in hand-to-hand, boy?” Elaiza bristled at the “girl” comment.

  Starke groused, “Sure, meet me at the gym sometime.”

  Thornton had to chuckle at his friends’ teasing, but moved the discussion along. “A large combat force would be easily noticed and would not work. The Abu Sayaf will just hide; they want to keep their guns, their power. But a paramilitary unit like STAGCOM has a better chance of success because they won’t know we’re following them.”

  “Why do you think so?” Starke was not convinced.

  “Consider how the rebels view their political situation. Consider the difference between to disarm and to be disarmed,” Thornton told the sergeant. “If the Philippine Army, or worse yet, American troops assisting the Philippine Army, move into the provinces in force and physically take their guns away, the MNLF fighters and the others will resist. The Muslims in Mindanao will join the communists, put on their Che Guevara tee shirts, and say they are the Army of Liberation, or some new acronym for the same old theme, of simple desperation and the desire to be free of Manila, whatever that means to them.”

  Elaiza didn’t like Thornton’s apparently condescending attitude, but realized he overemphasized to make his point, “But if they disarm themselves?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s the big difference.” Thornton looked at her while she spoke, then turned to Starke. “That’s exactly my point.”

  Starke had been in counterinsurgency operations in his past career and picked up the thread. “If they’re not paid for fighting and if they’re not forced to give up their guns by some outside government foreign to them, they’ll melt back into the jungle because they simply have to find food to live. We can just ignore them and the revolution will dry up through lack of interest.”

  “But we can’t create a Christian crusade against their Islamic jihad. That would mean civil war in Mindanao.” Elaiza wrapped it up.

  “You got it.” Thornton took the lead again, “Now we know who the enemy is and what his mission is. He doesn’t know about STAGCOM. There is just one key guy for us to take out as far as we care, so with stealth and secrecy, our small team is more likely to get him than a bunch of uniforms bumbling around in the brush.” Thornton laid it all out for them.

  Starke answered, “If he knows nothing about us, we have the tactical advantage.”

  Elaiza furrowed her eyebrows. “How do we know where he is?”

  Starke followed along in the conversation, “And if we find him, we just bump him off as soon as we get him, right?”

  Thornton turned and looked directly at Starke. “Wrong, we’ll have to find him, and follow him, and keep the money from reaching the NPA leaders.”

  “And then defeat them so they’ll not be able to bring the tribes along with them into the revolution,” Elaiza concluded.

  Thornton agreed, “Yes, if we can accomplish that mission Hargens—and especially someone back in D.C. I owe a lot to—will be satisfied. Then the official powers that be can get involved and defeat any larger insurrection, and without international embarrassment.”

  “If he really has five million U.S. dollars, he can create a lot of attention here.” Starke could see the money being spread around. “So why not just eliminate him and forget about it?”

  “Because,” Thornton explained what Hargens had told him, “The Al Qaeda in Syria would simply send someone else with more money. But if we track him and wait until he gets to Kumander Ali, the NPA leader, and take Ali out too, then the Abu Sayaf get embarrassed and lose their support base, after all the promises they will have made. That leaves the Philippine Army a short time frame to come in and mop up the hangers-on.”

  “Again, what do we do with the money, can we keep it?” Starke intended to be sarcastic, but Thornton took his question seriously.

  “Yes. That’s the deal. No one back in Manila or in Washington needs to decide what to do with the captured money. Some unit of the Philippine Army can declare victory in a field campaign, the NPA resources dry up, and the Abu Sayaf is bankrupt. Then the squabbling rebel groups won’t be able to unite, lacking the capability to support a force in the field.”

  “What’s the downside?” Starke asked.

  “We die, for example. Nobody will come after us if we’re captured. Or we just wind up wasting time.”

  “Who knows about all this?” Elaiza had been paying attention. “In our government in the Philippines, I mean?”

  Thornton thought it was a fair question with no risk for his team to be informed; they had the right to know most of the details.

  “Very few people, the National Security Advisor to the President of the Philippines will have to know. Liu, of course. The President himself will say he was not aware. Cabals like this go on all the time, as you know. And one senior officer, whose name is best kept secret, will know. That’s all.”

  “How do we find this Al Qaeda agent?” Elaiza asked.

  “As you know, he’s already here,” Thornton reiterated. “But intelligence sources could not track him after he landed and, we suppose, joined the Abu Sayaf. But they will show up and do something obvious. They will want to make a lot more noise than the three bombings this week. When we hear it, that’s where we’ll go. It will happen soon.”

  Starke looked at Elaiza then at Thornton, “I have only one more question. How do we split the money?”

  15

  The Otaza Brothers

  “Ok. Let’s start now. We have a lot to do, right, Kapitan Tomas?” Elaiza liked to play name games; she never lost at Scrabble played in English, which was not even her mother tongue. She knew by now that Thornton was a U.S. Military Academy graduate and had been an army captain. In her school she had learned about a certain Kapitan Tomas de Monteverde, Philippine Maritine Academy, an officer in the Philippine Navy centuries before, who married the daughter of Don Damaso Suazo of Davao City nobility. Monteverde was an early settler in Mindanao, and brought the concept of the fresh water fish farm to Davao. Now a main street and a residential area of Davao City were named after him. So it seemed appropriate for her to call Thornton Kapitan Tomas as he had brought Elaiza back to Davao, and their assignment had taken her in a new direction in her life.

  “Yes, we do. It will be an important day. I want to get Pedro and the other Otazas on board with us and together with Starke.”

  “Your Sergeant Starke looks eager now, working out and jogging. By the way, Pedro has a large family back in Agusan, if you need more troops for our venture,” Elaiza reminded Thornton. “And being family who live in the same village they know each other better than most brothers.”

  “Thanks, we’ll see. We have to keep STAGCOM as small as possible, just enough men to do the job, no more.” Thornton was pleased with the prospect of having a potential team of irregulars who knew and trusted each other. “Ask Pedro to get his four brothers here now; see if they’ll join up with us.”

  “Pedro’s nearby. I’ll get him moving.” Elaiza was picking up the ball quickly; Thornton liked that.

  Elaiza made a call to a sari-sari store, a temporary stall built next to the gutter on the main street where a woman sold general merchandise and foodstuffs in small quantities, asking her to locate Pedro and to have him call her back. He would be near the store, waiting for Elaiza’s call. Pedro was living in a lean-to he had erected against the concrete wall surrounding Our Lady of Prague monastery, overlooking Davao City. He preferred staying on his own in the improvised shelter since he had ridden in from Agusan with Elaiza and Thornton, waiting to see what Elaiza would want him to do after the terrorist bombs had gone off.

  Waiting for Pedro to call back, Thornton suggested, “Let’s have a pig roast on the beach; a big party with music should be a good incentive for them all to get here quickly.”

  “OK. Great idea. I’ll set it up.” Elaiza was starting to i
dentify with her job, in spite of her earlier reservations. “They can meet Sergeant Starke and get to know him.” A few minutes later she received the return call from Pedro and explained the situation to him.

  “I can have my brothers get into Davao, but it interrupts Robelyn’s marriage plans,” he told her. He sounded uncertain.

  Elaiza had an inspiration. “How about, bring them all, with their families, and we’ll have the wedding on the beach, Manobo style?”

  “Deal.” Pedro answered quickly, and he started to talk faster and louder as he discussed arrangements with Elaiza. “Tomorrow soon enough?”

  As soon as he hung up, he left the sari-sari store with a proud strut that made his old sandals flop audibly as he prepared to make a quick trip to Agusan to round up his brothers. He would be remembered as the one to invite the whole family to a special occasion.

  The rest of the day Thornton and Elaiza continued to plan, with books and maps spread out on the long table set up outside on the second floor balcony of Thornton’s house in Toril. It seemed each learned from the other as they practiced translating the Schloss Code and studied the capabilities of the TIAM.

  The next afternoon Pedro showed up in Toril with his four brothers from Agusan del Sur. They came with their families, seventeen people arriving twisted and cramped into a twelve-seat jeepney. The extended Otaza family brought with them, tied with ropes on the roof of the jeepney, a fat sow past her litter-bearing years, who would show up later on the beach for dinner, cardboard boxes full of fruit, and a few skinny gift chickens to be kept alive in a crate until the next day. The new arrivals had not eaten during the five-hour trip so they all got together for a lunch of rice first. While the children and their mothers finished the rice, Juanito, the youngest Otaza brother, slaughtered the sow, catching its blood to make dinuguan by frying the intestines in it. Later the assemblage took the pig carcass to the beach at a place that Elaiza had arranged. The men chopped the pig into one-inch cubes with a sharp bolo while the women started three charcoal fires smoking under a palm tree near the black sand beach. The cooks flopped pieces of fatty pig meat onto makeshift grills formed from rusty construction re-bar found at nearby construction sites and overcooked the meat, eating the blackened, greasy chunks by hand, with great satisfaction. The crew was lucky to have several pans of burned meat left over for the next day, as well as the dinuguan, which apparently was better after it aged for a day or so. The band of Manobos, including all five of the Otaza brothers now, could live comfortably as squatters where branches of short trees hung over the beach.