by Ian Barclay
“Me too,” Cristobal mumbled. “I suppose you’ll want to stick some piece of equipment out in the sugarcane fields and have it guarded around the clock, day in and day out.”
“I suppose so,” Joker agreed. “Headquarters will send everything, along with some Russian technicians.”
“I think we’re going to bring a lot of trouble down on our heads by bringing outsiders here,” Cristobal said angrily. “What good is all this going to do the sugar workers of Negros? Why should we have to help Russia? We are the ones who need help.”
“We have to think long-term,” Quijano said to him. “We must fight imperialism on all fronts. Once the Americans are defeated, things will right themselves here.”
“I can’t just put some piece of strange-looking equipment out in the sugarcane fields and expect the sugar workers to believe that it is going to help them. They’ll only go along with the CCP as long as we keep the militia off their backs and hold the landlords in check.”
“Just select a small group,” Joker said, “and we will place whatever it is on a deserted part of one of the estates. The NPA controls the workers in the fields, and the land is just part of huge holdings owned by a wealthy family, many of whom spend most of their time abroad. When you need to use his land, there’s nothing so suitable as an absentee landlord.”
Cristobal spat. “Life on Negros is too slow for Happy Man Velez. We hardly ever see him down here.”
Rafael returned with the Kalingas, who wanted to strap Benjael’s body to a chair in their long hut and spend some days mourning him. Rafael explained to them that the dead man had a family and that he and Harry would bring the body back to them. Dartley stopped this.
“There’s no way you can take a dead man shot twice in the head with you to Manila,” he told them. “If the police don’t grab you up here or on the way, you sure as hell will be arrested for murder when you arrive in Tondo with a body. Harry, what’s wrong with you? Have you lost your street smarts in the mountains?”
They were all depressed at the loss of Benjael, and the thought of three days or so of looking at his corpse slumped in a chair, while they chewed meat and drank rice wine, sank their spirits even lower. But the Kalingas were reasonable. Unasked, they produced a clergyman who gave the body a Christian burial next to a little tin-roofed church in the middle of what looked to Dartley like total wilderness. The Filipino clergyman almost fainted when Dartley handed him a hundred-dollar bill.
Dartley knocked the windshield glass out, and he, Harry, and Rafael left that night and drove south, the way from which they had come. By dawn they had reached Bagabag in the province of Nueva Vizcaya. Dartley saw a road sign for an airport.
“I figure they’re going to be watching everyone leaving Balbalasang for the next few days,” he said. “But it should be safe to catch a plane this far south. I want to get rid of the car in case a description has been put out on it. They may be looking along the roads for one with a shot-out windshield.”
They had all gotten cleaned up and shaved before setting out, so they didn’t look too bad. Dartley waited in the car while the two less conspicuous Filipinos tried to buy three tickets to Manila. All seats had been sold on the morning plane, which did not leave for another three hours. Maybe there would be cancellations. Maybe not. The only other plane leaving that day also went to Manila, in the late afternoon. Dartley cursed. He was trying to decide where the most risk lay—in driving on or waiting in Bagabag all day for the later flight—when he noticed a man in a flight suit walking around a blue-and-white Cessna 210, inspecting it. He was a foreigner but did not look American.
“I like the two-ten,” Dartley said by way of opening. “This One yours?”
“Right you are, mate,” the man said in what Dartley took to be an English accent. “You stuck here, trying to get to Manila?”
“I’d consider a charter if the price is reasonable.”
“I’m the most reasonable man you’ve ever met if I get paid my money up front.”
Dartley recognized the accent now as Australian—or, as this man would have pronounced it, “Strine.” “I’ll pay in American dollars before takeoff.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Cargo?”
Dartley and he exchanged a look. “No, we’re not bringing anything. Just a few personal belongings in backpacks.” He had decided to leave their three M16s in the trunk of the car. They would keep their Pindad pistols.
Dartley and the Aussie agreed on three thousand dollars to take them to Manila’s domestic airport.
“For another thousand I can take you to a quiet field on the edge of Metro Manila. It won’t be too hard to find a cab there. And I won’t bother filing a flight plan.” He looked at Dartley confidently, knowing that he would pay extra for this.
Earlier in his career Dartley would have worried that this man had to know something. By now he realized that certain opportunists had a nose for things like a man in a hurry. The Australian probably knew nothing—was just relying on instinct. Dartley agreed to pay.
A little more than an hour later they touched down at the airfield. Things were as the Australian promised, and he gave Dartley his business card as they parted.
“You ever in a hurry, mate, just reach for the phone.”
Rafael and Harry went with Dartley to Benjael Sumiran’s home in the Tondo section. On the way Dartley paid Rafael off and told him to go back home. Rafael was relieved at this, desperately wanting to quit but too proud to ask out, even after the death of his cousin. Dartley and Harry waited outside while Rafael broke the news to Benjael’s widow. She had a savings account and Dartley arranged to lodge one hundred thousand dollars to her account there. Then he and Harry split, leaving Rafael there.
Next Dartley paid off Harry and walked him home. “You’re lucky to have a wife and kids, Harry. This work is not for you. Stay home. It’s too easy to end up like Benjael”
“What are you going to do? Are you going back after Happy Man?”
“Forget you ever heard of me,” Dartley told him.
Harry could see that the American wished him well—as long as Harry did not try to come too near.
Ruben Montova reluctantly accompanied Happy Man to his private jet. Their luggage, and that of some girls and guards they were taking along, was being put in the freight compartment as they pulled up in their car on the airfield at Balbalasang.
“I hope someone has checked all those suitcases for a bomb,” Ruben remarked.
Happy Man shrugged. “If someone close to me decides to kill me, he will succeed. There’s nothing I can do about it. What I can’t control, I don’t worry about.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Ruperto. The clear possibility of someone putting a bomb in one of those suitcases doesn’t worry you, yet you allow a deranged American serviceman and a bunch of half-naked primitives who live on a mountainside chase you clear off the island of Luzon. You should never have begun running at Laguna de Bay. That was your first mistake. You let yourself be driven out of there. Now you’re being chased out of Balbalasang, which not even the government would have dared to try to do to you. Don’t get on that plane. Take my advice. Stay here and fight.”
Happy Man tolerantly patted his adviser’s arm. “I always listen to your advice carefully, Ruben, and usually I follow it. But this time you listen to me. I can come back here when I please—the crowd in the cockpit saw that I was no coward. No, I’m moving only because I see that the scales have tipped in favor of this crazy American who is trying to kill me. Because of the two U.S. bases on Luzon, along with foreign tourists in Manila, this island is always open to him. But wait until we fly down to Negros Island. That’s much smaller, much more thinly populated, with almost no foreigners passing through—he’s not going to have freedom of movement down there. He will stand out like a sore thumb. I’m going to be sitting in the middle of the family plantations—Velez land stretching in every direction for miles around. If those people
want to eat, they have to treat me like a king. I’m just going to sit there and wait for him to come after me. When he does” —Happy Man slapped a mosquito on his fleshy forearm and held its mangled body on a fingertip for Montova to see— “this is what will happen to him.”
Dartley sat is a pleasant restaurant in the Ermita tourist section of Manila. He ordered a light lunch of something called baluts, or duck eggs, and opened his copy of Bulletin Today, an English-language newspaper. He naturally turned first to the account of the failed assassination attempt of Happy Man Velez in the mountain town of Balbalasang. The death of Velez’s men were also mentioned, but the Kalingas weren’t. Local authorities blamed NPA guerrillas for all the attacks, including the one on Happy Man. No mention of any American. The newspaper account closed with a conjecture that Happy Man was leaving Balbalasang for the safety of his estates on the island of Negros.
Dartley had wondered what Velez would do. If he had dug in at Balbalasang, he would have been impossible to hit. So long as he was willing to stay out of the public eye and out of national power ploys… But the nature of the beast was not going to permit that. Happy Man would not be Happy Man unless he was drawing attention to himself and clawing for the highest rung of the ladder.
Alone once more, without associates to worry about, Dartley was mobile and free. He felt guilty about Benjael’s death. Just by hiring someone to work with him on an assignment was almost like passing a death sentence on the man being hired. His work was too risky to involve others in it. Even if they thought they could handle anything that came along, without the cold, calculating professionalism that Dartley himself had, they would not last long. Benjael had been a rough son of a bitch who had thrived in Tondo, about as bad a slum as Dartley had seen, yet he had bought it. He had just been relaxing at the wrong second….
But enough of that. Once more he was solo. If things went bad for him, he would not be around to have any regrets. The waiter brought him his baluts. Dartley tried to eat one and had to put it down. It had an embroyonic duck in it.
A pretty girl at a nearby table tittered at him.
Dartley smiled at her. “I didn’t know they would be served ready to hatch,” he said.
“Most tourists don’t,” she answered. “Anyway, they are not ready to hatch. Duck eggs take twenty-eight days to incubate. A balut is only eighteen days old.”
Dartley looked down at the duck embryo on his plate. “Is it dead?”
“It has been boiled for a few minutes. Taste it,” she said, challenging him, and looked coyly at him over the rim of her coffee cup.
“You think I’m chicken?” he said, grinning at his awful pun.
She nodded.
He put the embryo, coated with its egg membranes and yolk sac, in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed it. “Tasty,” he said. “Won’t you join me and have some? In fact, you can finish the rest.”
* * *
Dartley ran his hand down the smooth, golden skin of her back as she lay sleeping beside him on the bed. This was not how he had planned to spend the day, but what the hell. While she slept, he put a call through to the arms dealer Malleson had recommended and arranged to meet him later at the Hilton’s Rotisserie. Then he got back to the matter at hand—stroking her breasts softly, causing her nipples to harden while she still slept. She moaned softly in her dreams as his right hand eased down across her belly and the expert touch of his fingertips roused her to passionate wakefulness, not sure for a while whether she was still dreaming.
He had meant to send her home when he went to meet the weapons man, but he found that he had weakened. Those days and nights in the mountains, and the days and nights before that spent stalking Happy Man at Laguna de Bay, had made his flesh hunger for the comforts of a woman—and now that he had gotten some, he wanted more. At the Hilton he gave her a hundred-dollar bill and told her to go shopping for an hour. She said a hundred would never last her that long, so he gave her another.
The arms dealer was a Filipino of Chinese descent. His name was Fu, a mild, chubby man with rimless spectacles and a mechanical smile. In spite of his harmless appearance Fu had the reputation of being one of the biggest operators in the business. Some of the private armies in the Philippines ran into thousands of men. Wealthy plantation and factory owners were supplied arms by the government for their hired guards, and the communist guerrillas seized theirs in raids or bought stolen merchandise. However, individuals who wanted to protect themselves and their property found it hard to buy a weapon, and when they did, it had to be registered. Fu was known to supply the private armies with what the government wouldn’t give them. He imported guns for distribution to private individuals, but he did not deal with the communists, and very little of his arms had so far ended in their possession. According to Malleson’s data, Fu was the hidden owner of a private detective agency in the United States, which he used as a front to buy guns legitimately. The detective agency had a State Department export license for the Philippines, and Fu was careful never to go overboard into anything stupid. He could get almost anything, he would not cheat, and he would not talk—this Malleson was sure of.
Dartley was not so sure. Experts like Malleson were always cocksure of everything because they stayed home all the time. If they were wrong once in a while, so what, they still had a high batting average. Being wrong even once in a while was something Dartley could not afford. He trusted Malleson as much as he could trust any man who stayed home and did not do the things he did and so never knew what it meant to have his life hang on the balance of some seemingly trivial matter.
To Dartley, Fu looked like he would supply a buyer with what he could if the price was right. For a man like Fu, not dealing with communists was less a moral decision than a wise business one—he could hardly expect the government to let him operate if he supplied their enemies. Dartley cared nothing about this. What worried him was the secondary business that many arms dealers carried on, one that earned some of them almost as much as their trade in weapons, and that was selling information. They sold and then told. Many mercs and solo hit men got shot down by their dealers. It was a vulnerable point in any mission, and this was the reason Dartley had been content up to now to buy black-market guns through Benjael. The guys who sold them to Benjael assumed that the weapons would be used for ordinary crime. Fu knew damn well that this American had not come all this way to rob a bank.
The arms dealer had the pro-assassin and merc by the short hairs. They had to have weapons. Although they were popularly pictured as arriving with blackened faces in camouflage combat gear, armed to the teeth, landing by inflatable raft on a moonlit beach, most pros knew that this was all hogwash. Where do you start out from, looking like that, in the raft? Long Beach? Staten Island? The pros arrived in the designated country outfitted as businessmen or tourists, carrying nothing incriminating of any kind. That was the only way to do it. The major weakness of that approach was that it left the incoming hitman or mere team at the mercy of some local dealer, and a lot of guys willing to sell guns to foreign strangers had no qualms about selling anything else they could find out about them to anyone who would pay. Some dealers reported to the authorities in order to keep the police off their backs.
The weapons pickup was the most frequent disaster point. So long as the assassin or mercs had no weapons, they could be charged only with conspiracy, which tends to be a vague charge and hard to prove in a court of law. Once the hit man had a military-grade weapon in his possession, he was almost automatically guilty of whatever the authorities wanted to charge him with. It’s hard to get anyone to believe that you were only after ducks with a self-propelled antitank grenade.
These things were passing through Dartley’s mind as he and Fu sized each other up over the gourmet food. Dartley was starving, after only one duck embryo and an afternoon of sex. The grilled meat was a welcome change from his Balbalasang diet of lechon rice—pork and vegetables over a bowl of boiled rice.
“I’m a reasonable man, Mr
. Tompkins,” Fu told Dartley. “Single weapons cost more than if you buy in quantity, as you well know. But since you come recommended to me by Mr. Malleson, I will see that you have good value. A 60 mm mortar for $4,000. An M79 40 mm grenade launcher for $1,200. An M72 light antitank weapon for $2,500. An M60 7.62 mm machine gun for $3,300 or a 50-caliber machine gun for $3,000. I can let you have M60 ammo at 30 cents a round, 50-caliber at $2.75 a round, or 60 mm mortar rounds at $430 each, no limit per customer. You won’t beat my prices anywhere in the Pacific Basin.”
Dartley smiled. “It sounds reasonable.” He didn’t give a damn what the weapons cost, as long as they were in excellent condition and he could get what he wanted, but he had to play the game and bargain. Otherwise Fu probably wouldn’t take him seriously enough to deliver quality goods.
“Where can you arrange delivery?” Dartley asked at one point.
Fu shook his head and waved his hands. “Metro Manila only. Once, only a couple of years ago, I could have delivered to you anywhere you liked in the Philippines. Now the rebels control everything outside the cities and big towns, and those cities and towns are controlled by pro-government militias who are often as bad as or worse than the communist guerrillas. This country is coming apart at the seams, Mr. Tompkins,” Fu said, using the alias Dartley had given him.
“I’ll take delivery in Metro Manila,” Dartley offered, pleased at the fact that Fu had made no effort to find out where he was headed.
After he left Fu he found the girl, still shopping. There was a pair of shoes she absolutely had to have, which set Dartley back close to another hundred.
“All the local militias are financed by the Velez family,” Eduardo Cristobal said. “They have to put on a show when he arrives. Their colonels will be knocking on his door tomorrow, begging for money.”
