by Ian Barclay
The plane moved slowly forward, taking up the slack from the towrope. Then Dartley felt a sharp pull forward and heard the hiss of the glider’s single wheel rolling on the grass. The youth ran some yards, supporting the right wing tip. Suddenly Dartley found himself airborne at the end of the rope while the tow plane was still taking off on the ground.
When the tow plane climbed into the air, Dartley kept in formation with it by keeping it, from his viewpoint, even with the horizon. Once he dropped too low and the glider was buffeted by the turbulent air in the plane’s wake. It was all a matter of imitating the tow plane’s movements with the glider and keeping the plane on the horizon. They were climbing steeply—at seven hundred feet per minute, according to the variometer. Dartley was to release the towline at five thousand feet and was startled by the loud explosive snap. The rope snaked away in the wake of the tow plane, which dived toward the left. Dartley climbed to the right, and the craft felt as light as a feather in the air. The only sound now was the low hiss of air over the wings.
Dartley got a fix on the airfield’s position in relation to the shape of the lake. There was no compass, no radio, so he had to remember his way back by landmarks. The lake stretched like a huge sheet of glass as far as the eye could see; calm and broken only by long arrowheads, each with a boat at its point. He trimmed for level flight and kept his airspeed at around forty-five miles per hour as he looked down at the mansions in their grounds along the lakeshore. From up here they all looked almost exactly alike.
He realized that he was looking in the wrong area. There were too many houses here. Making a right turn to follow the shore, he had to use plenty of rudder to compensate for the yaw. As the craft glided almost level, it suddenly hit a sink and lost almost a hundred feet in altitude before Dartley’s backward pressure on the stick brought the glider out of it. But he brought the stick too far back, and the nose rose up and airspeed was lost, resulting in a bubbling stall and a sudden drop, like a stone, for another hundred feet before Dartley lowered the nose and the glider recovered.
The Velez place must be farther from the airfield than he had estimated. Since he had to travel back as well as go there and was losing one foot of altitude for every twenty-two he glided, he decided to climb any thermal he could find on the way. He saw some vultures or eagles soaring ahead and decided to join them. Their advantage was that they could flap their wings when the updraft gave out, while all he could do was glide and hope to find another column of warm, ascending air. He came in at the same level as the birds and saw that they were five eagles or big hawks, all the same kind. They paid no attention to the glider and calmly shared the thermal with it. The plane’s much greater wingspan immediately outperformed the birds, and Dartley put the craft into tight climbing circles, making maximum use of the thermal. Once he could no longer see the birds for comparison, he had no sensation of climbing—yet the variometer was registering two hundred feet per minute.
Gliding, climbing, and gliding onward again, he finally spotted and recognized the Velez estate beneath him by the large grounds, high wall, the position of the gates, and the side road along which he had driven. The house was at the center of the compound, some distance from the lake. The building was Spanish-style with red tiles, and its one story enclosed a large courtyard. An area of gravel or sand surrounded the house on all sides, and beyond that was grass, so that there was no cover at all for more than a hundred yards around the house.
As the glider swooped and banked, Dartley studied the house itself. The windows toward the outside were small and high, while those opening onto the courtyard were large. The place was a politely disguised fortress surrounded by bare ground. Trees and shrubs filled the rest of the grounds, blocking the view of the house from the lake and from the gates. In one clearing cars stood outside garages. A row of guest or worker cottages occupied another clearing near the water. Dogs lay in the shade in a wired-off enclosure—Dartley guessed that they were freed at dark to roam the grounds till dawn. Some sailboats and motorboats were tied to a jetty, and men moved around on the jetty and on a short boardwalk fronting a wood building at the waterside. Farther in he spotted two men sitting at a table in the shade of a big tree. He saw their faces uplifted, looking at him.
Not wanting to arouse suspicion by staying too long above the property, Dartley eased the plane into a glide out over the water. He could never have reconnoitered the estate for as long as this in a prop plane, for it would have been obvious what he was doing. It was reasonable to assume that the pilot of a glider had much less control and went much of the time where the wind took him. Turning again, he headed back in the way from which he had come, following the shoreline.
As he came in to land at the airfield, with a creditable time of two hours in the air, Dartley had to remind himself that he had to increase speed, not slow down as he would in a powered aircraft. He drove the sailplane toward the grass field at about sixty miles per hour, flared slightly at the last moment, and applied full spoilers. The spoilers, or hinged sections of the wings, popped up and increased the drag, allowing the glider to land at a steep angle without much of a jolt.
Not bad, he thought, at least not for an out-of-practice guy pampered by conveniences like propellers.
“I don’t give a dang about holiday weekends or family trips,” Roscoe James snapped at embassy staff members gathered in his office. “You people want to take it easy while those boys in uniform are getting killed? I don’t believe you do, but even if you did, I ain’t the kind of man who would let you. Everybody can forget all leave until we catch this joker.
“Some of you have seen the men out at the bases going through personnel photos and records. I want every white male between thirty and fifty, forget hairstyle, forget weight, all you need is color of the eyes: gray-green. That includes gray, hazel, and green—anything that’s not brown or black or bright blue. I want embassy staff records, too, and a list of anybody in the business community who is North American, who is between those ages, and who doesn’t have eyes like Paul Newman or… whatever movie star has brown eyes. Now, this isn’t going to be countless thousands, because the age thing alone will count out most of the troops. Happy Man Velez has decided to be cooperative now that two of his honchos have gotten wasted. We know the names of four employees of Luzon Star Developments who saw this man well enough to identify him. Their descriptions of him all agree, and he didn’t seem to be using a disguise. Any questions?”
“What about other Americans, like tourists and such?”
“Leave ‘em alone,” Roscoe snapped. “First one you approach will turn out to be a newspaper owner’s minister son and we’ll all have to fly back to Washington for a congressional inquiry and early retirement. Any other questions?”
“How long does this alert go on for?”
“Until someone finds him. We or they. Just forget your leisure plans and go to work.”
Hodges, James’s aide, stayed back after the others left. He was ambitious. “Sir, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but aren’t we being a bit overconfident in dismissing the possibility that this man is a short-term visitor here?”
“No, I don’t mind you asking, Hodges. Sit down and I’ll tell you.”
Roscoe James left his aide sitting there while he worked at clearing his desk. Hodges knew enough to sit quiet and wait. After a long while the phone rang, and Hodges picked it up. A member of the embassy staff said, “Tell Mr. James that the general’s car is outside.”
James brought Hodges with him and introduced him to General Bonifacio as the Mercedes limo pulled away. Then he briefed the general on the efforts he and the embassy staff were making to trace the killer of Velez’s four staff members through military and embassy personnel lists and known business residents.
“What about American visitors?” Bonifacio asked right away.
“Hodges was concerned about them too,” James said casually. “No descriptions are on record at Manila International Airport, and we’ve
been through commercial airline passenger lists for the past six weeks without spotting anyone unusual. I’ve explained to Hodges that for constitutional reasons we must not interfere with American visitors here.”
“We can do that for you,” Bonifacio said with a smile.
“Like hell you will!” James barked in a flare of anger. “Before you molest one American to look for who has it in for Happy Man, you bring in the man who ordered all those servicemen murdered. If you people weren’t scared to do that, we wouldn’t have the problem now of this nut hunting Velez down. He’s only doing what your lot were too chickenshit to do.”
“Calm down, Roscoe,” the general said in a voice that was both surprised and offended.
“You pass that on to the Presidential Palace. Hands off all Americans. If that lug Velez or his goons try—”
“Roscoe! I’ll pass on the word. Calm down. You are still sure that Washington did not send a man in behind your back?”
“I’m certain they didn’t. And if they had, they would have had to pull him out by now, the way things are going. We’ll take care of our dirty laundry, you take care of Velez.”
“If it was up to me, he would be standing before a firing squad at dawn.”
Roscoe saw that the general meant exactly what he said, and now the American had to backpedal for fear that he was goading the military man into some action for which he would later claim American approval. Once both had calmed down, Roscoe told the general about his plan.
Nabokodonosor “Joker” Solano paced the cell. It was exactly three meters by three, with a fifteen-watt bulb in the middle of the ceiling three meters high. He was inside a perfect cube made of concrete with only the weak bulb for illumination. It shone day and night. Air came in through the feeding slot in the steel door, but there was no circulation, and he felt half suffocated all the time from lack of oxygen. There was no window, only the solid concrete wall, ceiling, and floor to look at. He could peer out the feeding slot in the door, but all that he could see was a blank wall.
When footsteps approached, he rushed to the slot for a momentary look at a passing guard or sometimes a prisoner being escorted by one or two guards. He had never seen anyone he had known in the outside world. But the outside world was quickly receding. This was his world now. And he rushed to the door to look out the slot every time he heard footsteps. He knew he was not going to see anybody new or anything of interest. Yet he could not control himself. At the sound of footsteps he ran to look. Even when he was sitting on the bucket in the corner, he half hitched up his pants and scuttled to the door to look out.
Joker was in solitary confinement. Isolation. Had been for four months now, unless he had gotten the day count wrong—he was getting confused. Often he could not remember if he had counted a particular day or not counted it. He suspected he might have counted some days two or even three times. He had a second bucket, this one filled with fresh water—or what passed for fresh water in this festering swamp. He had a tin plate, which he passed through the slot twice a day to have it filled with rice and beans or fish or egg. He had a steel spoon to eat with, a mattress stuffed with rice straw to sit and sleep on, and a sheet with which to cover himself when he had a fever. He had a shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of sandals. He had no soap, no razor, nothing to read, no radio, no one to talk to. Early each morning the cell door was opened by a guard, and he carried his slop bucket out, emptied it in a stinking, open sewer pipe, rinsed the bucket beneath a running tap, went back in his cell, watched the door close after him, and listened to the lock turn.
He peered out through the slot in the door at the other solitary-confinement prisoners as they passed his door, one by one, to empty their slop buckets. No two prisoners on this corridor were ever outside their cells at the same time. Joker recognized none of them, anyway, and, by now, would have little to say to them. They all looked like him, with unkempt beards and matted hair, dirt embedded in the pores of their skin, walking listlessly. Only their eyes were alive. Did they rush to the food slots in their doors to look out like he did? In some vague way Joker believed that once he lost interest in doing that, he would not last long.
The days passed. He paced his cell the four steps it was possible to take back and forth between the end of the mattress and the door, or he just lay on his back drifting in and out of sleep. He had exercised at first, but he no longer had the energy for that. He felt his body get bloated and soft from the starchy food and lack of strenuous movements, and he was aware that his mind had grown dull and slow. All this after four months of solitary. What would he be like after a year? Talking nonstop to himself. Seeing and hearing things that weren’t there? Maybe. He could not tell what he would be like, and this added to his fears. His new weaknesses were uncovered every day; only rarely, hidden strengths.
When footsteps approached, he ran to look. The heavy guard with the fat neck who smoked a cigar was walking beside a small, bespectacled man with a briefcase, obviously somebody’s lawyer. He pulled back when they stopped outside the door to his cell. A mistake. This was not his lawyer. The bespectacled man entered the cell, and the door was slammed and locked after him.
Joker just stared at him. This was the first person in months he had come in contact with who was not a guard. The last one had been an interrogator after they had stopped torturing him. No, that was wrong—he had his lawyer after that. He was losing his grip on things.
The man with the spectacles told him his name, which meant nothing to Joker. He said he was a lawyer, which Joker had guessed just by looking at him.
“I already have a lawyer.”
“I’ve been hired by the Philippine Resource Center, in San Francisco, California. My purpose is not to try to replace your lawyer, Mr. Solano, or to interfere with your legal proceedings in any way. I just need to establish the fact of your existence in detention and get word out as to where you are confined. You’ll understand the importance of that.”
“Save me from being ‘salvaged.’”
“Right. The documented salvage cases are running at between five and six hundred a year. If they haven’t done it to you by now, they probably won’t.”
Having escaped being salvaged by the military was Joker’s main achievement so far, and he had succeeded only through having a good lawyer who generated paperwork on him and raised hell shortly after he disappeared. If it hadn’t been for that, he would have been a goner. To “salvage” was Philippine army parlance doubly meaning to “save” information extracted from a victim before destroying the source and to “save” the opponent from his opposition by liquidating him. A case was only considered documented when a body was found.
Joker waved him to a place on the mattress, and the lawyer sat. He produced a full pack of Marlboros. “Smoke?”
“Sure. Though I suppose I shouldn’t. I had given them up for the last few months.”
The lawyer smiled at the irony of that. “It doesn’t count unless you’re the one who decides.” He handed the pack and a book of matches to Joker, who ripped off the cellophane wrapper eagerly. The lawyer took a folder out of his briefcase. “I see you were arrested by the Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group of the Philippines Constabulary in Manila. They took you to an army camp and you were held there for a month. Did they mistreat you?”
“Let me see,” Joker said, pausing to think. “How about sleep deprivation, thumbtack forced under fingernails, electric shocks to my testicles, cigarette burns, plain beatings, and tilting my head back while holding my nose and pouring water into my mouth until I half drowned. If they don’t qualify, I have more.”
“Any permanent injury?”
“You’re sort of businesslike and clinical, aren’t you?”
The lawyer nodded. “I see a lot of cases. Many are much worse off than you. Permanent injuries?”
“I guess I’m okay.”
“Malnutrition? Vitamin deficiencies?”
“No.”
“Beriberi? Tuberculosis? Amoebic dyse
ntery?”
“Yes. Just the dysentery.”
“Malaria?”
“Yes.”
“Do they give you medicine?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’re not doing so bad, Mr. Solano. I think you are going to survive this.”
“That’s good to hear—though you’re no doctor and I haven’t seen one since I’ve been in this place.” The lawyer showed signs of leaving, so Joker talked about whatever came to mind to keep him a little longer. “I shouldn’t be here. Can’t you see that? After my torture—and God knows I told them everything I knew from the first day—the military charged me with subversion, rebellion, and conspiracy before Special Military Commission Number One, which isn’t even supposed to exist anymore since martial law has been abolished. My lawyer got that changed to civil court, where I was charged with violating Presidential Decree Number Thirty-Three for illegal possession of subversive documents. The judge set bail for six hundred pesos, which my lawyer paid in cash, but as I tried to walk out of the courtroom the military grabbed me and held me on the Presidential Detentive Acts, which, as you know, means that they can incarcerate me for a year without charges. So now the civil court wants to release me on bail and the military is holding me. My lawyer is trying to get the case heard by the Supreme Court. But I don’t know what’s happening. Do you?”
The lawyer looked up from his papers. “Mr. Solano, the military believes that you are a member of the New People’s Army. That’s why you’re here.”
“They can’t prove I’m a communist guerrilla!”
