Rebound (14 page)

He hit the man who was clumsily swimming like a charging swordfish, the blade a deadly extension of both his arms held stiffly
out before him, the unforgiving metal edge sinking into the man at the top of his belly. His own sharp reaction and wild struggle
to avoid the pain caused the honed steel to rip through his abdominal muscle and innards, until his guts spilled out through
the opening and hung beneath him in the water like strings of sausages.

Meanwhile the second man had escaped from beneath the raft. The light continued to shine under water, though now its once
powerful beam was diffused to a greenish glow after only a short distance. Dartley saw the escaping man caught in the beam
for a few seconds as he swam in a strong crawl toward shore. Dartley took after him. He had to drop the knife so he could
swim fast enough to catch him before he reached land and the cover of the undergrowth. This man was a witness, and Dartley
wanted no
unfriendly witnesses to survive. He gained on him steadily until a rip of bullets cut across the water a yard to the right
of his head. A wild slash of bullets raised a line of miniature water columns from left to right between him and the man he
was trying to catch. Dartley was about to give up the chase and dive to avoid enemy fire when he realized that Benjael Sumiran
was responsible for the shooting!

He heard Harry, in the boat, curse out Sumiran, and the shooting stopped. Fortunately the gunfire had also caused the fleeing
man to ease up. Now Dartley tore after him in a fierce overarm with his head and neck right out of the water. He caught up
with him as the escaping man found sand under his feet and lost time in trying to walk, instead of swim, the last few yards
to shore. In water up to their chests now, both standing on the sandy bottom, the two men fought to the death with their bare
hands. The water softened the blows beneath the surface.

Dartley’s opponent punched at his face and caught him a beautiful right-hander on the left cheekbone that knocked him back
in the water. As Dartley floundered, trying to regain his footing in the soft sand beneath, the Velez goon charged him. Dartley
let him come, hauled in a deep breath, and sank beneath the onslaught, taking the attacker down with him. Eyes open in the
clear water, Dartley grappled with him, dragging him down, clutching at him, holding him under.

Under water, the man’s eyes widened in fear as it occurred to him that the victor of this fight would be the man who had taken
in the
most air in his lungs and could hold his breath longest—long enough for his opponent to lose consciousness. He struggled fiercely
in increasing panic as his breath gave out. Dartley held grimly on to him, hitting off the sandy bottom in no more than four
feet of water.

The goon kicked, punched, gouged, scratched, kneed, but it was no good; Dartley hung on to him and kept his head near the
sandy bottom. Finally the man’s mouth exploded in a stream of bubbles when he could hold his breath no longer. Dartley watched
him suck water into his lungs.

Another man might have pitied the slowly drowning man for the look of pleading terror in his eyes and on his face as he gradually
choked from breathing water. Not Dartley. He gained new strength from watching his enemy die.

When the features of the man’s face finally relaxed into a dull, fishlike look, Dartley felt he could have held his breath
another full two minutes if it had taken that long for the goon to drown. He stood up in chest-deep water and expelled his
lungs like a whale sounding. Then he breathed in the warm, sticky tropical air, which felt ice-cold and sparkling to his starved
lungs.

Harry nearly ran him down with the boat when he came to pick him out of the water, but Dartley was too content to bother cussing
him or Benjael out for making mistakes. His mission was complete. He had taken out Happy Man in the middle of his estate.
Now he sat back in the boat contentedly, as it made its way over the dark, calm lake. Everything had gone well, if
not smoothly. He was on his way home to America.

Bonifacio delayed and delayed as he and Happy Man walked in Rizal Park. The general kept waiting for the attack to take place
from the dark shadows of the park. But nothing happened. The general was hopeful when he heard a man running toward them—until
he saw that it was one of his own men.

“Excuse me, sir,” the sergeant gasped, out of breath. “Bad news just came by telephone. Mr. Velez, your brother has been killed
out at your Laguna estate.”

It was Good Friday morning as they drove north out of Manila, and everything in this normally colorful, vibrant place seemed
cloaked in mourning. Dartley had Harry and Benjael Sumiran along with him, in spite of his previous vows never to work with
any amateurs again, and certainly never with these two, no matter what happened! Yet it was only a matter of hours before
Dartley realized how helpless and ignorant he was in this society, without contacts. An American could make out in Manila
and probably in a few of the larger cities, but beyond the heavily urbanized areas, Dartley recognized that the people would
treat him as an oddity for whom they might pose for photographs or to whom they might sell native crafts. He could not move
around undetected, and he was bound to break all sorts of local customs and otherwise
cause offense, and therefore hostility, through his lack of familiarity with traditions. It was one thing for a foreigner
to bumble his way through as a tourist, with no serious purpose to be achieved. It was quite another thing for a foreigner
to intrude into an ancient society of complex ethnic patterns in order to assassinate one of the best-known men in the country.
Dartley always added one important condition to each mission that he undertook—succeed or fail, he wanted to get out alive.

“There’s no way I’m going to take Benjael,” Dartley told Harry.

“He can get you guns.”

“I can get all the guns I need myself,” Dartley told him.

Happy Man Velez did not return to his lakeside estate after Dartley had killed his older brother by mistake. When Dartley
learned of his mistake—while packing his bags at the Las Palmas Hotel in readiness for the flight home—he went through the
file on Happy Man provided by Herbert Malleson. There were photos of Happy Man’s three brothers in it, and none of them resembled
him. They were all much thinner than he was. This brother must have put on weight fairly recently and gotten to look like
Happy Man. Dartley could not blame Malleson for missing a detail like that, especially since the Englishman had to do his
research from newspaper files at a distance of seven thousand miles or so, without attracting attention to what he was doing.
Yet it was a small thing like this that could tip the balance one way or the other,
which made relying on research a chancy thing to do.

Dartley blamed himself for not having a radio along that day. It was an incredible oversight. He told himself over and over
that if only he had heard about another American serviceman being killed, plus the fact that Velez was going to be in Rizal
Park, he would have hit him there. The next day, when he heard that the report about another American having been killed was
in error, he saw that the meeting in Rizal Park had been a trap set for him. Harry came to the same conclusion independently
and arrived at the Las Palmas Hotel to warn him. This made Dartley decide to continue working with him.

They heard that Happy Man had left the Manila area for his northern stronghold in the town of Balbalasang. Harry said he knew
no one up in that wild country and suggested that they take Benjael along. This was when Dartley said no and that he didn’t
need Benjael’s guns.

“He has cousins who live up that way,” Harry said.

Dartley looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure?”

“I’m certain. That’s where his family came from originally. Not all the way up at Balbalasang, but far enough up there. That’s
why he is a wild man. Now, my family has always lived in Manila, for many generations, which is what makes us so civilized.”

So it turned out that Dartley, who prided himself on his intricate planning and faultless execution of detail, who only liked
to work alone, found himself driving north with two
amateurs he hadn’t even bothered to argue with when they had fucked up previously. He had no plan. No details were worked
out. He had no knowledge of the place they were going, except that it was wild and hot and had plenty of mosquitoes. If Happy
Man had ordered anyone besides American servicemen killed, Dartley would have abandoned the mission and gone home. He had
no wish to take on overwhelming odds or to operate under unfavorable conditions. But Happy Man had murdered innocent young
GIs, and Dartley was determined to make him pay for that with the only price that fitted the crime—Happy Man’s own life.

They drove north out of Metro Manila not long after dawn. The urban sprawl covered the lower part of Bulacan province, with
housing subdivisions, memorial parks, factories and warehouses, and only traces left of old rice fields, fish ponds, mango
groves, tanneries, duck farms, and clay-pot kilns. They took the Cagayan Valley road, and this led northward into open rice
fields and volcanic hills with caves and springs. All Dartley knew was that they would find Benjael’s cousin at a
penitensya,
which seemed to be some kind of religious ritual, in a village near San Jose in the next province north, called Nueva Ecija.

Dartley asked, “You have all these places with Spanish names, and the Spanish were here until the end of the last century,
but how come the Spanish language died out so fast?”

“It didn’t,” Harry answered. “It was never spoken much when they ruled here because the
Spanish allowed only the small Filipino upper class to learn it. They thought that if the common people learned the language,
it might help to overthrow them. So the monks translated the bible into our languages and preached to the people in the local
language. The religious orders were in control when the Americans arrived at the turn of the century, and that’s when we began
to speak English.”

“We like to say,” Benjael added, “that that’s what happened to us Pinoys—four hundred years of monks, then Hollywood.”

Dartley laughed. This was a good description of a lot of what he had seen, such as statues of medieval saints in Barbie Doll
costumes, American jeeps with graffiti-style prayers, shades and box radios along with smiling courtesy—he was constantly
being hit with unexpected combinations. “Pinoys” was what Filipinos often called themselves. At their insistence Dartley stopped
twice—once at a grove of mango trees whose white flowers gave off an overpowering perfumey scent, which both Harry and Benjael
claimed worked well as an aphrodisiac.

“We’re not coming up here to get laid,” Dartley said.

The second stop was for sweet, soft candy called
pastillas,
made from the milk of the carabao, the Philippine version of the water buffalo. The playful mood of the two men puzzled Dartley
at first, until he thought to ask how well they knew this area. They looked at each other for a moment, then Harry admitted
that they never had been this far from Manila before. Prior to this, their only trip outside the city limits of
Metro Manila had been their expedition to Happy Man’s Laguna estate. Dartley began to understand now why Benjael had set up
the whole stunt at the Pagsanjan River rapids—he had just wanted to see them while he had the chance! They were both in their
late twenties and had hardly strayed farther than the slum in which they were born. This explained the excited way they were
staring out the car windows at the passing countryside, which was nothing very exceptional. Here he was, taking a pair of
underprivileged, overgrown kids on an outing, on their way to kill one of the richest, most powerful men in the Philippines
and who had his own private army. Dartley wondered why he was enjoying himself all the same.

The next province, Nueva Ecija, was mostly low-lying flat plains irrigated for rice. They drove on as far as San Jose, an
agricultural market town two-thirds of the way up the province. There they left the main road and followed a set of progressively
narrowing and deteriorating roads, pausing frequently for conflicting directions.

The church bells in the town square were striking eleven as Dartley parked his car in the shade of a tree and they got out
to find Benjael’s cousin. At that moment a procession poured into the square and passed the church doors. Dartley stared.
The procession was composed of about thirty men, followed by large numbers of townspeople chanting hymns. The thirty men were
bare to the waist except for white cloth hoods over their heads, and they struck at their backs over each shoulder with leather
thongs
into which glass spikes were fitted. These whips ripped into their skins, causing fresh wounds with every blow. Blood flowed
from their backs and arms, and down over their pant legs and shoes. The white hood over each man’s head was held in place
by a headband of twisted thorny vines. Red bloodstains spread into the white cloth.