by Ian Barclay
“Stop the car,” Dartley said as they passed them.
Dartley walked back to the men, carrying his canvas shopping bag in his left hand (at Bacolod, the previous evening, he had gone back to the store to buy six more of these bags).
“You need help?” Dartley asked the man being driven, ignoring the other.
“Stop him, please. I sick. I cannot work. I lie down because I sick. I not lazy.”
“Leave him alone,” Dartley said to the younger, stronger man as he was about to kick him again.
“He’s lucky Mr. Velez is kind enough to give him work. He owes the big boss money. He gotta work. A poor man has no right to be sick. That’s what the big boss says.”
“Happy Man?” Dartley inquired.
“There’s only one big boss. You here to see him?”
Dartley ignored his question and turned to the sickly man. “Get in the car. We’ll give you a lift.”
“He’s not going! He’s got to work.” He aimed a kick and missed.
“You kick him once more and I’ll kick your ass, sonny boy,” Dartley said with a snarl.
The goon kicked the weaker man so hard, he fell down. He turned to face Dartley with a supercilious grin on his face.
This one is a real dumbo, Dartley thought. The American knew he was mean-looking and big and that others rarely saw him as someone convenient on whom to take out their hostilities. He had better be careful. This asshole might know something. Dropping the bag lightly to the ground, he quickly moved forward, just outside arm’s reach of his opponent. Dartley feinted to the left, then to the right. The goon stood planted evenly on his feet, his big fists closed, not moving an inch in response, his mean little pig eyes staring dully in front of him. Dartley sized him up in an instant as a guy who figured he could take any blow thrown at him and then thump the shit out of the man who’d thrown it.
Dartley hopped high in the air, curling his knees to his chest as he did so, allowing his body to pivot so that his left hip was the nearest part of him to the ground. Then he timed a fast expulsion of air from his lungs with a violent sideways double kick. His two feet, ankle to ankle, drove forward in a single ramrod, and the soles of his shoes caught the goon in the solar plexus. The blow, enough to collapse the rib cage of a weaker man, only winded him and knocked his parasympathetic nervous system temporarily out of whack.
He sat on the ground, gasping for air like a goldfish that had jumped out of its bowl. Dartley strolled over to him and drove his right heel into his left eye, so he would have a shiner to remember him by. He left the goon whimpering and lying on his side by the edge of the road.
“You want a lift?” Dartley asked the weak one, on his way to the car after picking up the canvas bag.
The man pointed in horror to his recent tormentor. “He’s still alive!”
“I know,” Dartley answered.
“But when he is all right again, he will come to kill me, saying that this was all my fault because I waved to you to stop.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Kill him,” the sickly man said without hesitation.
“Anything to oblige.” Dartley returned to the fallen goon and connected with a flying kick to the side of the man’s head. He stomped down on his head a few times with his right heel. “If he survives this, he’s not going to recognize his own mother, let alone remember you.”
“Thank you,” the man said with a grateful smile.
Dartley headed for the car. “Sure you don’t want a lift?”
“Never from strangers.” He grinned, all of a sudden looking in much better health, and disappeared into the sugarcane.
Ken Hodges had arrived that morning on the first flight from Manila to Bacolod. He hired a car and took the desk clerk’s recommendation of a good hotel. He breakfasted there and phoned his office at the embassy for any late-breaking developments. There were none.
There wasn’t much Hodges, himself, could do down here except brief the three good field agents in the area, all Filipinos born on Negros and much more likely to turn up valuable information than a bumbling foreigner. This would be where their little game with Bonifacio began. Hodges did not have to look over his shoulder to know that General Bonifacio would have placed surveillance on him so he would lead them to Filipinos functioniong as CIA agents. Hodges had to shake whatever tails they put on him, avoid any phone traces or recordings that might be useful to them, and make contact with the three agents while maintaining the integrity of their cover.
He enjoyed this kind of cat-and-mouse game because he was very good at it. He would make his contacts later in the day in Bacolod. First he would take a look for himself at the Velez plantations, which he had not seen before. This little side trip also would serve to dull the enthusiasm of his Filipino military intelligence tails. Nothing worked like following someone around for hours in the hot sun as they drove around, seemingly aimless. Hodges did not expect to see anything of importance, and he did not intend to stop and question anybody. He had a highly detailed Philippine army map of the area, with the various Velez properties and residences clearly marked on it.
He took the road there without bothering to check whether or not he was being followed. After being on the road awhile, he noticed a small blue car some distance back. He did not try slowing and speeding to see if it would keep pace with him. It could work to his advantage if they thought he hadn’t spotted them. But he wanted to be sure, so when he saw a sandy area next to a small lake, he pulled into it and parked next to a yellow Toyota Celica. He left the engine and air conditioning running as he smoked a cigarette and looked through the windshield at the lake water and some people fishing along its shore. The blue car had passed and kept going. He waited, glancing in the rearview mirror, until sure enough that the blue car, this time traveling in the opposite direction, pulled into the sandy area. It parked several cars away, and out of the corner of his eye Hodges saw two men in it, with the windows rolled down. They had no air conditioning, which would make things just a little hard on their patience. So as not to give them any rest, Hodges got on the move again and, a little way down the road, saw the blue car behind him again, quite a distance back.
According to his map he could turn off the main road onto any side road in this area and he would be traversing Velez family land. None of the little roads were signposted, and none were named on the map, either, so it would be guesswork as to his exact position. He hung a quick right off the main road and onto a narrow road that cut a niche between tall, green sugarcane and wondered if he had managed to lose his little blue friend following him.
The four Velez guards stood by their jeep and looked down at the body of their fellow guard where it had been left on the side of the road. He had bad injuries on his face and head, and his eyes stared, sightless and dead. But he did not appear to have been shot, and his .45 automatic pistol was still stuck in his belt.
“He was a bully,” one guard said. “He had it coming to him. Some of the workers jumped him and stomped him. They left his gun in case it would be found in their possession. The NPA, if they had done this, would have taken the weapon. And the American crazy man, why would he do this? I say we don’t raise the alarm.”
“If we start shooting flares in the sky every time anything goes wrong, it won’t mean nothing when we really need them,” another guard said.
“This guy ain’t no loss, anyhow. He was stupid and greedy.”
“That’s just because he whipped you for cheating him at cards.”
“I wasn’t cheating!”
They all laughed at that. Just then, they heard the sound of a vehicle approaching, and they all looked that way. It was a car. With one occupant.
“It’s him!”
“The American!”
“Let’s get him!”
They piled into the jeep, swerved to avoid running over the body on the ground, and took after the car, which had not been traveling very fast. They overtook it not far down the road, sq
ueezing past it along a straightaway. One man emptied his M16 magazine into the windshield as they got clear, and the car left the road, plunging through the sugarcane until it came to a stop. The jeep screeched to a halt, and the four guards came running back to the road.
The men were all fired up for action, so when a small blue car came into the straightaway and put on speed when they waved it down, two of the man raked the vehicle with their M16s. The car veered erratically and slid off the road, into the cane.
The single occupant of the first car and the two occupants of the second car were all dead. The guards examined their papers.
“It says he’s an assistant military attaché at the American Embassy. Happy Man was right when he said that the CIA was after him. Now that we got the guy, we found the proof on him.”
The guard with the other men’s papers looked less happy. “They’re Philippine military intelligence. We’d better take these papers to the big boss.”
Dartley and Harry heard the gunfire. It was not far off, although they guessed that sound would carry a good distance over the canefields of this flat land. Harry drove the car behind a big thicket where they could watch and wait. They expected to see vehicles rushing to or from the direction of the gunfire. Dartley recognized the sound of M16s, and when they heard nothing more after the first long bursts, he decided that it was guards fooling around or target practice.
They had been driving around for a while. They had met agricultural trucks on the roads, but apart from the single guard who had been kicking the worker, they saw no sign of either Velez goons or NPA guerrillas. After the long bursts of rifle fire, silence again descended. Only insects were making noise in the heat of the day, and some birds deep in the cane. Dartley was in no hurry to move, watching and waiting.
When they had been there almost half an hour, he said to Harry, “Time to go.”
“Where?”
“Bacolod.”
This marked Dartley’s decision to suspend the mission. He recognized that his hanging around the Velez estates today was only an effort on his part to try to delay that decision. Dartley hated to give up on something—even if he meant to come back later to finish it. But things were running too strongly against him. Velez was too well dug in. Dartley, through his own efforts, could not flush him into the open long enough to have a shot at him. It was all becoming a waste of time. More than that, it had become too dangerous in this location, with all the dice loaded, all the cards marked. He would tell Harry when they got back to the cottage and promise to work with him, if he wanted, when he returned to finish the job.
Yet the gunfire had made Dartley uneasy. He said, “I’ll ride in the trunk until we pick up the Toyota.”
He unlocked and climbed into the large trunk of the Ford LTD. He propped the trunk open about nine inches with the harness of wood and wire he had made the previous evening. He struggled around, making himself comfortable, as the car moved forward over the bumpy road.
Dartley’s first warning that anything was wrong was the car’s sudden acceleration and a scrape of metal as it went through a roadblock formed by two jeeps, which had carelessly been placed with just enough room left for a big car to get through. Bullets spattered off the trunk lid.
The car kept up its high speed as Harry made a run for it, making some sharp turns to throw off pursuers. But the guards knew these roads better than he did, and Dartley soon spotted the two jeeps behind them through the nine-inch gap left by the propped-up trunk lid. He had already fed the disintegrating link belt 7.62 mm ammo into the M60 machine gun. He poked the barrel, from which he had removed the bipod, through the crack and scrunched down so he could line up the blade front sight with the leaf rear sight. Then he waited for a straightaway, as the two jeeps chased them, gaining on them fast, more maneuverable than the clumsy big LTD on these twisting roads.
Dartley looked along the barrel over the square hood of the lead jeep and touched off a brief rattle of fire that shattered the jeep’s windshield. The vehicle began to fishtail, then slowed all of a sudden. The second jeep hit it from behind, and both vehicles left the road in a cloud of dust, smashing down the sugarcane in their paths as they spun wildly around. The last thing Dartley saw was a flare rise from where the two jeeps had gone off the road. He peered out and saw the flare burst vivid pink against the flawless blue noontime sky.
All went well for a few minutes. Dartley couldn’t even tell the direction in which Harry was driving anymore, but he was going there fast, which was okay with Dartley. Then, when things seemed to be going well, he heard bullets hitting the car once more. This time they came in a series of hard, sharp knocks as the high-velocity projectiles punctured the steel. Harry seemed to be all right, since the Ford was keeping to the road. An instant later Dartley saw the source of their trouble—a high-sided open truck moving into the crossroad they were passing through, with men standing in the back, leaning rifles on the truck side and shooting at them. Although the truck was moving fairly slowly the road was very bumpy beneath it, and the jolting was throwing off the aim of the riflemen. It occurred to Dartley that Harry probably owed his life to this bumpy road, maybe himself too.
The truck made a turn and roared after them. Dartley checked the ammo belt and clutched the pistol grip to the M60, wedging the shoulder piece into his chest. It was no easy matter groveling on the steel floor in the trunk of a fast-moving car on a bumpy, twisting country road, wrestling with a twenty-five-pound machine gun. The truck did not gain on them, but the men in the back shot forward over the cab roof at them. When their shooting grew increasingly accurate, Dartley decided to put a stop to it. They were using M16 rifles, and his M60 machine gun had more than twice the effective range of their weapons. At nine hundred meters the M60 was still deadly.
Just as he was about to open up on the truck, the car rattled across a plank bridge over a creek. Dartley waited for the truck to reach it, hoping that no sudden turn or bend would obscure his view. As the front wheels of the truck rolled onto the planks, he opened fire. He blasted away until he could feel the machine gun’s barrel grow hot.
The 7.62 mm bullets beat down on the truck front, thick as hail. The driver was killed instantly by a bullet between the eyes. The man next to him somehow managed to escape being hit by flying lead, but a foot-long sliver of nonsafety glass from the windshield buried itself in his throat. He clutched at the sliver with both hands, tearing up his palms instead of grabbing the steering wheel out of the dead driver’s hands and keeping the truck on the bridge.
With an upward wave of the M60 barrel Dartley blew away three or four of the sharpshooters firing on the Ford. As the truck pitched nose-first off the side of the bridge, the other riflemen were tossed out, like a bronco throwing a rider.
They made it to the main road with no further incidents and, after transferring the weapons from the LTD to the yellow Toyota, left the big Ford at the edge of the lake.
CHAPTER
15
When they got back to Hacienda Luisa at La Castellana, Dartley and Harry spent an hour in the pool. Dartley told Harry of his decision to suspend the mission over dinner at a local restaurant. After the last two days of “touring” the canefields this came as a great relief to Harry.
“I was wondering how I was going to be able to face tomorrow,” he admitted. “The Virgin has answered my prayers.”
“Pity you didn’t pray that we hit Happy Man instead.”
Harry was mildly scandalized at the suggestion, but it didn’t stop him from celebrating the good news with numerous bottles of San Miguel beer and a large helping of kari-kari, which consisted of oxtail, tripe, and greens coated with peanut sauce. Dartley ate adobo, the Filipino national dish, a dark stew of pork, chicken, and pieces of liver spiked with soy sauce and vinegar.
Next morning, Dartley wanted to avoid the airport in case it was being watched. They would take the Negros Navigation ferry for the two-hour ride across the Guimaras Strait to the island of Iloilo. They could arran
ge to fly from Iloilo City to Manila, or travel on to the island of Panay and fly from there. Dartley felt it was important to get off the island of Negros as soon as possible, but they did not have to risk drawing attention to themselves by heading directly for Manila.
Back at the cottage, they lugged all the armaments, stuffed into the golf bags, inside, unable to leave any of the weapons behind them during the day because of the resort maids, or in the car overnight on the off chance of car thieves. Harry, a little the worse for his celebrations, fell beneath one of the loaded golf bags and had to be released by Dartley. The cottage had two rooms, one with two beds and the other with a couch and a table and chair, plus a small bathroom. It was a short walk from the pool and had its own bit of patchy lawn and some trees and bushes for privacy. The nearest cottage was fifty yards from them, and no one snooped.
All the same, Dartley was tense. He would be until he got off this island. He was beginning to feel trapped. He lay on the bed, drifting in and out of uneasy sleep, listening to Harry snore on the other bed. At some point during the night he opened his eyes and found the room lit by a whitish glare. The blinds were down over the two windows, but their material was not enough to keep out this fierce light. It was as if the moon were right outside the cottage! Dartley didn’t have to move the blind to peer out—he would see nothing except blinding pans of light. He rushed into the other room, and then the bathroom, to see if the lights shone outside those windows too. They did. The cottage was completely encircled by mobile flashlights on folding aluminum tripods—Dartley could have remembered the brand name of the equipment if he only had time to think—and beyond that circle of light, invisible behind the glare, stood a circle of trained men with automatic weapons. For the first time Dartley heard some sounds. He listened. They were evacuating other cottages. A woman was giving them a piece of her mind, refusing to leave quietly.
