Rebound (12 page)

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!”

“That’s not why I am here, Mr. Solano,” the lawyer said apologetically, getting to his
feet. “I have your brother’s and your two sisters’ addresses. I’ll make sure they get word about you. Anyone else you want
me to contact for you?”

“No.” Joker grew alert.

“Sure?” The lawyer stood and looked him in the eye. “I’m sympathetic to the cause. I do what I can to help.”

At that moment Joker became certain. This man was a plant, sent here to pry information from him. Joker grinned and said,
“Next time you meet your friends in the New People’s Army, tell them to come rescue me.”

Ken Hodges, the assistant military attaché at the U.S. Embassy, had driven north to Clark Air Base and sat with the serviceman
and his wife in their living room. Roscoe James had told him it was worth going just to make sure. They had heard three Tagalog
newscasts from three different radio stations and had been able to pick out the serviceman’s name.

“It’s going down,” Hodges said with satisfaction.

The serviceman looked doubtful, and his wife looked really pissed off. No one had told her until the last moment. Orders.

Finally Hodges found an English-language newscast. The first item mentioned how the American serviceman had been knifed to
death in a supermarket near the base by a young Filipino male who had subsequently escaped.

“I don’t see why it had to be my husband,” the wife complained.

“The Air Force picked him, not I,” Hodges snapped, tired of her uncooperative attitude.

He turned up the radio’s volume as she continued to complain how it was unlucky to make such a false claim that her husband
had been murdered, that it was sure to bring sickness or worse down upon them, that it was flaunting God’s will in such matters,
and so on. Then Hodges heard what he had been listening for—an item mentioning that Happy Man Velez was meeting with General
Bonifacio to discuss the recent attacks on Velez’s men. The newscaster went on to say that the two men were to meet outside
the Manila Hotel and walk together in Rizal Park, that they were old friends who had grown apart under the strain of recent
events but were now getting together to renew their friendship. It sounded like bullshit, and of course it was.

They caught a couple of other English-language newscasts on other stations before Hodges rose to go. The serviceman was looking
flattered to hear his name over the airwaves, even if it was only to announce his murder.

“It’s great to be noticed at last,” he told Hodges with a grin.

“This is nothing,” Hodges told him. “Wait until your friends see you walk toward them tomorrow. I bet some of them run.”

The serviceman guffawed. “Yeah, they’re going to repent their sins, all right, when they see this ghost coming at them from
afterlife.”

His wife didn’t think it was so funny. “This
is stupid. I don’t care who or what you are at the embassy, Mr. Hodges. I’m telling you, this is just dumb.”

“We don’t want to wait till another American gets killed,” Hodges told her for the tenth time or so. “This way maybe we can
trap the man who attacked those men who worked for Velez—”

“But he ain’t the one who’s been killing Americans,” she pointed out.

“It’s complicated, but believe me, it’s going to work out,” Hodges assured her.

“It still sounds dumb to me,” she insisted.

“Honey, it’s going to be just fine,” her husband said to her.

Benjael Sumiran had decided to be difficult at the last moment, according to Harry.

“He said we were not to pick him up, that he’d meet us at the rapids at Pagsanjan,” Harry explained to Dartley as they drove
from his building in the Tondo section. “He sent a boy around late last night to tell me.” When he saw Dartley scowling, he
hurriedly added, “I’m certain he’s not pulling something. It’s just that Benjael is used to being his own boss and doesn’t
like to have to take orders from anyone. This is his way of showing you that you just can’t tell him to be somewhere. He’ll
follow orders as long as you let him play his little independent games every so often.”

“That’s childish,” Dartley snapped.

Harry smiled and shrugged.

Dartley had to allow that the delicately built peddler had accurately summed up the
tattooed gun dealer. He took the southern route around the big lake called Laguna de Bay, which would take them to Pagsanjan
without having to pass near the Velez estate. He wanted to go close to Happy Man’s residence as few times as possible now,
even along the main road, because of the off chance that Velez’s guards or government troops on the watch for communist guerrillas
might notice. Dartley was convinced that in his business a man could not ignore the long-shot odds of something happening
if there was some way to avoid it. He was already extended beyond the way he liked to work, which was solo, and one of his
two associates was showing signs of becoming a prima donna. Dartley decided there and then that if Benjael Sumiran tried to
mess with him today, he would kill him on the spot. Having decided that, Dartley felt better, and his good mood returned on
the drive around the southern shore of Laguna de Bay.

The town of Pagsanjan was inland from the lake, at the fork of two rivers. It was more old-fashioned and traditional than
the so-called swinging resorts along the lakeshore. There was no sign of Sumiran.

“I think maybe he meant us to go down the rapids,” Harry suggested somewhat nervously to Dartley, expecting the American to
become angry.

Dartley only nodded expressionlessly, which Harry had not yet learned was a danger signal. They each took a long canoelike
craft called a
banca
to descend the rapids, of which there were eleven in all. Their
bancas
eased out over
the still, brown water of the Pagsanjan River, each navigated by two boatmen. As the craft entered the shallow rapids, the
boatmen, one fore and one aft, steered between rocks jutting out of the fast-moving water. The man in the prow kicked his
left or right leg in the water to steer and shouted back and forth with the man in the stern, who pushed the long narrow craft
with hair’s-breadth accuracy between jagged boulders in the surging waters.

While this was going on, the man aft also kept up a tourist commentary in English for Dartley’s entertainment, touching on
the world at large, the Philippines in particular, and life in general. Dartley could see that this commentary was almost
as fixed and calculated as the rocks they had to avoid in the rapids, so that at any given boulder or swirl of water the boatman
would be saying the exact same words at the exact same time on each trip. The boatman recited how the Chinese thought Filipinos
were too Americanized, how Indians thought they abused the English language, and how Malays were upset by people so like themselves
who were not gentle Buddhists. This led to his claim that the Philippines was the only Catholic country in Asia and that Dartley
was about to see the only Buddhist temple in the Philippines, which had been built by an American. Dartley expected to see
some dopey-looking cult members from California doing the lotus position at the side of the stream. Instead he saw a ruined
temple and a bamboo shack clinging to a cliff ledge, looking ancient and overgrown. There was something familiar about it
that Dartley could not place,
until the boatman told him that it had been built by Francis Ford Coppola for the movie
Apocalypse Now.

The river narrowed into a gorge, the sheer walls of which rose above them for hundreds of feet so that the sky was a narrow
blue ribbon far up between the wet, glistening walls, encrusted with moss and other plants, dripping cold water on their heads.
They came to the first of two big waterfalls. At the second falls they rode a raft, guided by long ropes from the banks, to
a cavern under the falling water. Benjael Sumiran sat on a rock in the dank interior, smoking a cigarette and waiting for
them.

Dartley could not get mad at him for having dragged him through all this, because he could see that Benjael was taking it
all very seriously. The tattooed Filipino slum dweller was a romantic at heart. Meeting Dartley beneath a waterfall after
a run down rapids past a set from
Apocalypse Now
probably seemed to him just a good way to set the mood for their upcoming day’s work. It was Dartley’s experience that guys
involved in all the trappings and atmosphere were never much good when hit with the real thing. But as he and Harry stood
and watched Sumiran posing under the waterfall, he figured he wouldn’t kill him for trying hard.

Sumiran had everything in his car and a boat fitted with a high-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor in tow. Dartley did not
ask where they came from. Sumiran backed the car down a public boat ramp until Dartley and
Harry could slide the boat off its trailer into the water. They loaded the fishing poles, tackle, and provisions into the
boat and put out on the water. As they went, Dartley cut tallow candles into sections, and all three men worked the wax sections
in their hands until they became soft and pliable. Sumiran had bought fifty 7.5 mg Tranxene capsules on the street, and they
enclosed each of the red-and-gray tranquilizer capsules in its own small wax ball. Next they made fifty meatballs out of five
pounds of ground beef and put a wax ball inside each meatball. They divided the meatballs into two strong plastic bags and
tied off the necks of the bags.

Dartley signaled to Sumiran to cut the motor, and when the boat lay still, he said, “I guess we’re about two miles away. It’d
be safer not to go closer. I can make it there and back easy from here. It will take time but that’s okay. You guys are just
sitting in a boat fishing. If you see me in trouble, come get me. Otherwise, stay out here and fish. Don’t come any closer,
no matter how curious you get.”

Dartley stripped down to his swimming trunks. He snapped on a frogman’s belt, with a sheathed, foot-long knife, and tied the
two plastic bags to it, one at each hip. He fitted on flippers and a snorkeling mask, which he pushed up on his forehead.
Then he went over the far side of the boat from the shore, surfaced to dip his mask in the water, and fit the mouthpiece.
He did not waste time on good lucks or last words of advice, being accustomed to working alone without backup of any kind.

Using his compass watch, he swam steadily
due north without surfacing once. It was as hard to swim underwater in a straight line without a compass as it was to walk
through a forest. He saw nothing in the deeper water, which faded into a lime-green color beneath him as he swam just beneath
the surface with slow, methodical leg movements and a minimum of arm work. As he approached shallower water he glided over
the tips of clusters of tall, waving weeds. Then he found himself pushing his way through them as he got into the shallows
of twelve feet or so. It was time to take a look.

So far he had been swimming with only his breathing tube protruding above the surface. Now he would have to raise his entire
head and lift his mask, since droplets on its glass front would block his vision if he didn’t. However, this was better than
swimming all the way in and suddenly standing up in water to his knees, only to find himself looking into the barrel of a
gun.

He raised his head, lifted the mask onto his forehead, and looked toward shore. He found himself off an undeveloped marshy
area of shore. To his left the cinder-block wall that formed the perimeter of the Velez estate came to the water’s edge and
supported multiple coils of knife wires where it ended. Dartley guessed that there would be a guard just inside to watch this
obviously vulnerable place in the estate’s defenses. He estimated that if he went back in the water and swam slowly west for
fifteen minutes, he would emerge out of sight of the guard on the far side. This would also bring him closer to where he wanted
to go inside the estate.

Next time he stuck his head out of the water, all that could be seen were the wavelets beating on a narrow strip of sand and
the luxuriant growth of palms, shrubs, and creepers. He waded quickly out of the water, kicked off his flippers, and moved
fast into the undergrowth, watching as he went for TV cameras that might be hanging from branches or trip wires stretched
inches above the ground. He saw neither and moved quickly ahead after stashing his mask and flippers. This was not the time
for slow, cautious movement—either he had been seen or he hadn’t, and either way speed would count in his favor.

The dogs yelped when they smelled or heard him coming. When they saw him—seven German shepherds—they bared their teeth and
snarled. But they did not bark. He threw meatballs over the nine-foot hurricane fence, scattering them widely to make sure
all seven dogs got their share. The animals gobbled them down. Only one spat out the wax ball and then promptly ate it again.
Some dogs got more than others, but all got at least four meatballs.