by Ian Barclay
Once they were in the back of the Jeep Cherokee, safe behind the steel-plated roof, floor, sides, and doors, looking out through the inch-thick bullet-proof plastic glass in the windows, Reuben Montova said admiringly to Happy Man, “You were great back there. You were a hero. A living monument! In three days’ time you will be a mythological figure through the Philippines. If only a TV camera had been there to record it all in living color for future generations…”
Rafael pocketed the hand-held radio and kick-started the light Honda motorcycle he had stolen. He had waited behind, at the edge of the crowd at the cockpit, on Dartley’s orders to put the fail-safe plan into operation if Dartley did not get an opportunity to make a strike during the tupada. Now Dartley had tried and failed. It was time for the plan they had coded KK. He sped out along the narrow dirt road that led to the Velez hacienda. About three kilometers away from the house he slowed and watched the surface carefully. Gradually he road at hardly more than a walking pace, looking into the roadside vegetation from time to time.
He nearly fell off the bike when two almost naked Kalingas, carrying bows and arrows, jumped out on the road alongside him. They waved their arms wildly and pointed to a place in the road. Rafael managed to swing the bike around to avoid crossing over this section of the road. He looked carefully at the surface of the road but saw nothing unusual. The two Kalingas then helped him lift the light motorcycle off the road and into the undergrowth, where Rafael saw whole groups of Kalingas crouched in waiting, armed with bows and arrows, rifles and shotguns. Plan KK was set to go—both K’s standing for Kalinga.
“He was one of those Americans from the bus,” Ruben Montova said in back of the Jeep Cherokee.
“I saw no one,” Happy Man said. “I felt the bullets hitting me—they felt like stabs from a knife. I thought I was finished, and I remember scanning the crowd for a moment to see who it was that had shot me, but all I saw was a sea of faces.”
“I saw nothing, either,” Ruben said.
“Because you were hiding your head under the seat,” Happy Man said, kidding him.
“Maybe I was,” Ruben admitted. “I almost peed in my pants, opposite all those people. And no one was even shooting at me. That’s why I admire your courage, Ruperto. All the same, I think you shouldn’t have left all those men behind us in town.” They were driving back to the hacienda with four guards in the Cherokee and four more in a Trans-Am a few yards in front of them.
“I had to leave them there to take care of my guests, who will come out to the hacienda later. I also want them to check the identity of every American in town. There can’t have been more than a hundred Americans in Balbalasang today. Think what that gives us. Before it could have been any one of many thousands of men. Now it has to be one of less than a hundred. I warned the guards not to get in a fight with any of them. They are only to check their names at the hotels where they are staying and count how many leave on the bus tomorrow. I’m going to have pressure put on the American Embassy to make them weed out that rogue serviceman who is assassinating innocent Filipino citizens.”
“Such as yourself,” Ruben suggested.
“Myself most of all!”
They went on talking and joking in the high spirits generated by a close brush with death and unharmed escape. They were thrown from the seat to the floor when the driver of the Cherokee slammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the Trans-am in front, which had come to a sudden stop in the middle of the road, its front wheels and front end sunk into a trench across the road. Happy Man looked out a window and saw, to one side, part of the twig, leaf, and dirt cover that had concealed the trench still suspended over it. Next thing he saw was Kalingas.
They poured out of the roadside vegetation, firing as they came. Their bullets and shotgun blasts shattered the windshield and side window of the Trans-Am. Velez saw three or four Kalinga bowmen loose arrows into the car’s four guards. The driver backed up the Cherokee fast, and inside they all listened to bullets tapping against and bending the inch-thick plastic glass and scraping along the outside of the steel plates protecting them. The tires were constructed of extra-hard rubber and, so far, seemed not to have sprung a leak.
The driver skidded the car around a hundred and eighty degrees after building up speed, and they quickly headed away from the ambush with bullets spattering off the rear steel plate and plastic window.
“Why now?” Happy Man exploded. “Those fucking Kalingas have been taking shit from me for several years! Why pick this time to get back at me?”
“They are inconsiderate, ungrateful, ignorant people,” Ruben assured him.
“The CIA has recruited them,” Velez muttered. “They’re working for the Americans. I see it now. This whole thing was a carefully laid out plan. The busload of Americans. The Kalingas. Did you see all those Japanese in town? I bet they were in on it too. They’ll do anything for the Yankee dollar.” He suddenly looked at Ruben in alarm. “How do I know they haven’t bought you?”
“Because I can make much more money by sticking with you.”
Ruben’s hard, realistic tone calmed Happy Man right away. He grinned at his confidant, reassured. They understood each other.
They were racing back along the road toward town when the guard in the front seat beside the driver pulled back the sliding glass that separated the compartments. He said, “We just got a radio call. There’s an unidentified car approaching us along this road from the town side.”
Happy Man thought fast. “The Kalingas must have radioed to someone that we escaped. The CIA would have trained them. Now, they know that this is an armored vehicle, which I don’t think they knew before. So they’ve come out to get us on the road. They know there are no turnoffs along here. They think they have us trapped. Stop this car! Now!”
Happy Man, Ruben, and three guards piled out quickly.
Happy Man said, “There’s a tenant farmer not far off the road from here. We can get horses from him and take a back path to the hacienda.” He said to the driver, “You go along the road. They can’t harm you. Delay them all you can. I’ll radio right now to town for more men.”
Dartley sat in the middle of the backseat, his M16 across his knees. Both rear side windows were rolled down all the way, and he held himself ready to throw fire to either side. Harry drove, and Benjael sat alongside him, the barrel of his M16 poking out the window, ready to deliver- raking fire to their front. Harry was sweating so much, his hands were slippery on the steering wheel.
They had taken Rafael’s second radio message, telling them Velez had escaped in his bullet-proof Cherokee and was headed back toward town.
“I wish I had brought an antitank rocket,” Dartley rasped. “One of those babies would bust open the Cherokee. But there’s nothing we’re carrying that’s going to penetrate its armor. You’re going to have to run it off the road, Harry.”
Harry’s teeth began to chatter. But he listened carefully to what Dartley told him. “Sure, I can do it like that,” he said, and was grateful to Dartley for pretending to believe him.
“Just don’t let him get by us,” Dartley warned.
Harry spotted the Cherokee some distance ahead and put his foot on the gas. Dartley had told him that the other driver, with his stronger, heavier vehicle, would probably collide deliberately with him at low or moderate speed, but no one was going to face head-on into a speeding car. Well, almost no one. But Harry had played chicken before and knew how it went.
Hurtling along the narrow road now, he bore down on the approaching Cherokee wagon. If the other driver did not leave the road, Harry intended to swerve to the right at the last moment and scrape along the wagon, either sideswiping him off the road or causing the two vehicles to become locked together. They pulled their seat belts right, and Benjael and Dartley were set to drop their heads on their knees when the Cherokee driver chickened out and left the road. The wagon’s front and back wheels on the right side dropped in a shallow ditch, and the Cherokee flopped onto its s
ide and skidded a few yards through the heavy undergrowth.
Harry braked to a stop a hundred yards down the road, and Dartley jumped out of the car. He raised the M16 to his shoulder, sighted along the barrel, and waited for someone to make a move from the Cherokee. He lost patience fast, sighted on the gas tank beneath the chassis, and fired a single shot at it.
The bullet ignited twenty gallons of gas in an enclosed space, and the force of the tank blowing turned the wagon over onto its roof. The flaming fluid spilled down over all the sides, and its intense heat cooked alive the Velez driver inside.
Dartley and the others could not see inside, but Harry and Benjael believed that Happy Man had finally been dispatched to a better world! They crossed themselves and murmured a little prayer for the repose of his soul, which seemed to be a courteous thing to do in the Philippines, after you’ve been involved in killing someone. Dartley was not so sure that Velez was inside. He would believe that when he saw it. But there was no time to wait for the flames to die down. Velez goons might have been alerted by the Kalinga ambush and be on the way from either direction—from the town or the hacienda. As it was, they had to wait a few minutes for the flames to stop billowing across the road, so they could pass.
Harry drove back fast, triumphant now, his nervousness gone. Benjael laughed and talked with him. Dartley sat silently in the middle of the backseat, silent, watchful, unbelieving….
But he didn’t see them in time. They were in front of the car, the area Benjael was covering. Harry saw them before Benjael did, and saw damn fast that they were firing at him, the driver. He ducked his head, and the bullets tore in a line across the windshield, just above the level of the steering wheel.
One hit Benjael in the left cheekbone, jerking his head to the right so that the next bullet drilled a hole in his forehead, just going a little way in, much of its force lost in penetrating the glass.
Dartley leaned out the rear side window and caught two men, both with M16s, in a left-to-right cut of automatic fire as the car tore past them. Last Dartley saw of them, they were clutching their guts and their legs were buckling beneath them.
Harry was at the wheel again, sweating and whimpering, able to see only through bullet holes in the fragmented windshield as he sped up into the hills.
Dartley leaned over the front seat to check out Benjael. The first bullet had shattered his cheekbone and lodged somewhere in his neck. The second was embedded in his forehead.
“Take care of my kids” was all he could whisper.
He was already a long, long way away when he said this, fading so fast and easy that Dartley could not say exactly when he died.
CHAPTER
11
Joker Solano sat and waited for Froilan Quijano, the old communist organizer from the city of Bacolod, to say something. Joker guessed from Quijano’s new attitude toward him that orders had come from the Communist Party of the Philippines headquarters. This was backed up by the hangdog look of Eduardo Cristobal, the New People’s Army commander for the San Geronimo region. Cristobal had been set on executing him for betraying three party members while he was under torture. Now, if Joker guessed right, Cristobal found himself reporting to the man he had promised to shoot personally only the day before.
“We’ve heard from CCP headquarters,” the old organizer began lamely. “They say we’re to follow your directions.”
“You, too, Ka Eduardo?” This was the first time Joker had ever used the ka-for-“comrade” form in talking to him.
“Me too,” Eduardo Cristobal confirmed grimly. He had never expected life to be easy as a communist guerrilla, but he didn’t feel he should have to eat this kind of shit.
“Then we all understand each other,” Joker concluded in a satisfied way. He said to the old organizer, “I want to keep you here for a while, Ka Froilan. You will act as liaison between the CCP and NPA. Ka Eduardo is in charge of all military operations. As a fellow fighter in the struggle of the classes, I respect the work both of you men have done on the island of Negros. You both resent me as an outsider and as someone who has had to sacrifice party lives in order to save his own. That’s reasonable. I didn’t come here for you to like me. In fact, I came to the province of Negros Occidental by chance—it’s where the prison camp happened to be.
“But from what I’ve seen of the large estates around here and of your control over the countryside, the San Geronimo area looks better than the original place I had picked for the project. And this project, of course, is the big secret I had to keep from the military. When I tell you about it, as I am about to, then you two will share this secrecy problem with me—but with no others. No one else must be told. Ka Eduardo, perhaps you will find yourself someday in the same position as me—having to sacrifice the lives of comrades so you can convince a military interrogator that you are holding nothing back from him. Or maybe you will be luckier.”
“I will die without speaking,” Cristobal said with conviction. “And without betraying comrades.”
“That’s what we all say,” Joker said lightly. “All right, here we go. Above our heads right now, about twenty-two thousand miles up, is a satellite approximately twenty feet long and about nine feet in diameter and weighs about one ton. I give you these measurements in feet instead of meters, because this satellite is American, a tool in the capitalist push for global dominance. Its purpose is to spy on the free peoples of China and Siberia. The Americans call it a Code 647 Defense Support Program or DSP satellite, and it carries on board a twelve-foot-long Schmidt infrared telescope fitted with thousands of small lead-sulfide detectors that register the heat emitted by rocket engines. The sensors at the focus of the telescope detect the flare of the rocket booster in the lower atmosphere. Since it takes twenty-five to thirty minutes for a rocket launched in the Soviet Union to reach the United States, this satellite provides an early warning to the American imperialists that a rocket has been launched. They have other satellites, in lower orbits, which predict the rocket’s trajectory. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Quijano and Cristobal nodded.
“The Soviet missile bases, on which Code 647 DSP satellites keep watch, carry nuclear warheads. These silos stretch right across the Soviet Union. Because of supply logistics, they are strung along the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway. When any of these silos fire a test missile, the Americans can tell the type of missile fired by the infrared glow of the rocket plume. Each missile type has its own ‘signature.’ So you can see that this satellite serves a spy function as well as an early-warning one.”
“Why is the type of missile so important?” Cristobal asked. “Isn’t one ICBM as good as another?”
“They all cause nuclear devastation,” Joker allowed, “but some can achieve targets not available to others. I’ll give you an example. Our Soviet friends are known to have SS-18s at six launch areas in south-central Siberia and SS-11s at three launch areas near the Mongolian border. The DSP satellite above us can’t pinpoint the exact location of the silo because it registers the booster rocket, not the initial launching rocket, but it can tell an SS-11 from an SS-18 by its infrared signature. Suppose the Americans saw that SS-11s had been launched. They would know immediately that their Minuteman missiles would be safe, because the SS-11 does not have the accuracy to strike them, which the SS-18 does. So the Americans could predict that the ‘softer’ targets had been picked, like cities or bomber bases. That’s just one example.”
“All right,” Cristobal said.
“But the Americans have more sophisticated satellites in lower orbits that give them more detailed information than the DSP, as I’ve already said. The satellites in lower orbits are all vulnerable to Soviet antisatellite measures. Only the high-flying DSP is not. Yet everything has a weakness if you search hard enough. A few years ago the DSP satellite revealed its weakness by accident. A fire got out of control in a Siberian natural gas field, and the heat was so great from the conflagration that it overloaded the DSP’s sens
ors. The infrared detectors can only handle a certain amount at any given time. As far as I know, that is where you and I come in.”
“They want us to set fire to the sugarcane to fool the satellite?” Cristobal asked incredulously.
“Various methods of interference had been considered, including transmitting spurious commands to the satellite or disorienting its solar antennae to cause it to lose power. I have not been told the means selected to attempt interference, but I can guess. The reason we were chosen is that we are in an almost direct line beneath the satellite. Light travels in a straight line, and the shorter the distance it has to travel, the more intense the beam. A certain type of laser operated from here might duplicate the effect of that natural-gas fire—overload the satellite’s sensors.”
Quijano stirred himself. “Seems to me that if the Americans found the satellite interfered with, they’d know an attack was coming, so it would serve as an early warning to them, anyway.”
Joker smiled. “I asked a Soviet military man about that myself. He claimed he didn’t know what was planned, but he pointed out that if repeated interference of short duration was maintained, the Americans would never know when it was going to be the real thing. He also added that even if the interference was used only to attack and did give the Americans an early warning, it would still mask the kinds of missiles that had been fired. The Americans would not know which launch area had fired, which silos were then empty, and which launch areas still had loaded silos ready to fire. They would not know exactly where to counterattack.”
“Whatever part we have to play will be just one small piece of a large pattern,” Quijano said. “Seen by itself, it might not make much sense, but seen in coordination with everything else, it might be very important. Ka Joker, you have my total support. You can count on me for anything you want.”
