Rebound (16 page)

The guerrillas came at the camp from the south. The M60 spat lead at them, and they dived in the dirt. Half the guerrillas
crawled around to the east side and tried to mount an assault from there, while the five others exchanged fire with the two
soldiers manning the machine gun facing south. The defenders pulled the second M60 to face east and set it up among the heavy
palm logs. They dropped one guerrilla with their opening burst of fire and forced the others to take cover. M16 assault rifles
were no match for an M60.

Just as the sergeant and his ten men reached the village, only to find two bodies, burned houses, and the guerrillas already
gone, they heard heavy fire from the direction of the prison camp. The sergeant cursed the lieutenant and ordered his men
back on the double. Their movements were again monitored by two of the scouts, and their position was reported to the rebel
platoons by radio. They were ambushed midway by the platoon that had attacked the village. Their point man walked into a clearing
and took a single bullet in the side of his head. The sergeant and three other experienced men threw themselves on their bellies
and rolled out of the path they were traveling on and into the cover of the heavy brush. Five men who did not move fast enough
were caught by the fire as the rebels used the clear line of sight along the path to knock them over by automatic fire like
skittles in an alley.

When the rebels moved cautiously forward
to investigate, the sergeant blasted two of the more trusting ones, spraying them with shots to the torso. After that the
survivors of both sides lay low for a while, before pulling back and losing contact in the dense tree cover.

The platoon leader at the prison compound sent a signal to the men on the east wall, and both men with the M79 grenade launchers
fired simultaneously on the two machine guns. The grenades lifted out of the shotgunlike launchers, arced through the air,
and wiped out the two-man crew on each of the M60s.

The barricades caught fire at the points of explosion, and the flames swept through the dry palm logs and bamboo stakes. The
guerrillas waited only long enough for an opening to show, and they entered through the breach. The prison guards and the
lieutenant fired on the ten men running through the flaming logs. They hit two, but the other eight guerrillas came forward
at a run, half concealed as a breeze blew smoke toward the cell blocks. One rifle stitched a line of lead across the lieutenant’s
chest, and he sank to his knees, still trying to raise his M16 to return fire.

Three of the prison guards died in the open, fighting like men. One killed another guerrilla with the last bullet in his magazine
as he staggered, finger pressed on the trigger, after being hit in the gut and shoulder. The guerrillas found the other five
guards hiding in an empty cell. They were pleading for mercy and offering to make bargains when high-velocity bullets smacked
into their bodies and stopped their voices. Bullets ricocheting off the six concrete
surfaces of the cell further peppered their fallen forms, and a few whistled out the open door, narrowly missing the men who
fired them.

“Joker Solano!” the platoon leader yelled.

“Here!” a voice shouted from inside a cell.

A rebel ran to unlock the door with a key taken from a guard’s body.

The guerrilla leader called out six other names, and these seven men left right away with two guerrillas. The others then
unlocked the rest of the cells. The prisoners in better shape helped those no longer able to walk unaided. Others gathered
weapons and ammunition. They had no explosives strong enough to destroy the cell blocks.

When the sergeant and five soldiers who had escaped the ambush reached the prison camp, the barricades were reduced to ashes
and all the cell doors hung open. They saw the lieutenant’s body through the smoke.

Ruperto Velez arrived at his hacienda not far outside the town of Balbalasang, in the northern part of the large island of
Luzon. Although the huge city of Manila was also on this island, the northern areas were some of the wildest in the Philippines,
and some of the people there were nearly untouched by the twentieth century. Happy Man felt far from untouched by current
events. He hoped that coming up here to his northern stronghold would make him impervious to outside agents once again.

Ruben Montova had met his white Gulf-stream II twin-engine jet with orange-and-burgundy stripes and glistening chrome trim
as it touched down and parked at Balbalasang’s small airport. Happy Man had had the main runway extended a couple of years
ago, to accommodate this private jet. He had come directly
from the family estates in the province of Negros Occidental, where his brother was interred in the family cemetery.

“Damn, Ruben, I have to leave my Laguna house because it’s not safe for me to be in anymore. I have a stranger trying to kill
me—someone who can’t even tell me from my brother. Fortunately for me. You know, I hadn’t realized how much he had grown to
look like me in the last year or two.”

“Since he started to put on weight,” Ruben said maliciously.

Happy Man grinned. “It cost the poor bastard his life. Ah, well, better him than me. The bright side of it, of course, is
that with my older brother dead I am now head of the family.”

“You were always head of the family, Ruperto. Your brother always did what you told him.”

“He was weak and stupid, and his bitch of a wife was trying to turn him against me.” Happy Man scowled. “I’ll see to it that
she gets left out in the cold now that I’m in control of everything.”

“There was no will?” Ruben asked.

“Sure, there was a will. But I didn’t like it. I’m having it changed.”

Montova nodded.

“Anyway, like I was saying,” Happy Man went on, “I had to run for my life out of my Laguna house, and when I got to our lands
down in Negros Occidental on the morning of my brother’s funeral, there was a rebel attack on a detention center near one
of our plantations, which succeeded in freeing all the dangerous troublemakers who had been put out of circulation there.”

“I heard about it.”

“We were responsible for having a lot of them arrested, and now it’s my guess that they’ll try to get back at the Velez family.
Things are bad enough with the collapse of the sugarcane business down there. These dangerous radicals on the loose again
are bound to cause serious trouble. I got the hell out as fast as I could and came up here. My younger brothers can handle
things for a while. Let them earn their keep for a change.”

“You’ll be pleased to hear that things are going well for us here in Balbalasang,” Ruben told him.

“I want to keep this as my power base,” Happy Man said. “The government doesn’t show its face up here without a company of
soldiers in armored personnel carriers. We’re already much stronger than all the New People’s Army forces combined in the
area, and if we keep building our strength here, it will give me the kind of credibility I need to be a national force.”

Montova nodded in agreement. “You think General Bonifacio wants to form an alliance with you?”

“I don’t know what he wants. He had something on his mind that night we met in Rizal Park, but he sure took his time about
getting it out. If we hadn’t been interrupted by the news of my brother’s murder, I’m sure he finally would have got around
to it. Though he’s so pro-American, I don’t see how he could think of himself being allied with me.”

“At least you know he wasn’t out to kill you,” Montova said.

Happy Man laughed. “In a way I owe my life to Bonifacio. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been at the Laguna house
when the attack took place. He came down for my brother’s funeral and told me that the Americans believe a career officer
at one of the bases is responsible, a deranged man working alone. I agreed that it sounded likely and thanked him for coming.
He never mentioned a word about our interrupted meeting in Rizal Park, though.”

“Perhaps he thought the occasion wasn’t suitable,” Ruben suggested.

Happy Man looked puzzled.

“It was your brother’s funeral,” Ruben explained.

“That must have been it,” Happy Man agreed. “You got some people together so we can party tonight?”

Dartley, Harry, Benjael, and his cousin, Rafael Sumiran, took turns at driving every few hours. They had avoided the large
resort city of Baguio by taking this road north. They left the flat rice-growing province of Nueva Ecija as the road zigzagged
up into the brown foothills of the Caraballo to Dalton Pass. According to Rafael, the pass was named after an American World
War II general who had led a division of American and Filipino troops in a bloody clash with retreating Japanese forces at
this place. North of the pass lay the province of Nueva Vizcaya, flat and heavily forested. The road was mainly a truck route,
and the heavily loaded vehicles traveled at suicidal speeds with ore from the mines, lumber from the forests, and agricultural
produce from the fertile valleys. Roadside stands sold peppers, sweet potatoes, and woven bamboo baskets. They passed through
country towns with names such as Bambang, Bayombong, and Bagabag.

Then they hit Igorot country. The Igorots were the people of the mountainous north, traditionally enemies of the central government,
whether it be Spanish, American, Japanese, or Filipino. Happy Man’s stronghold at Balbalasang was in the northernmost province
of Kalinga-Apayo, and they had to cross the Ifugao and mountain provinces to get there. The road climbed gradually up to the
town of Lagawe and, from there, climbed steadily higher to Banawe. The town of Banawe wasn’t much, with muddy streets, tourist
hotels, and souvenir shops, yet it was not the town that tourists came to see but the famous rice terraces on the sides of
the local mountains.

Harry and Benjael were annoyed when Dartley would not stop to see the sights.

“I’m paying you well enough,” he said, snarling at them, “so you can afford to come back here and gawk on your own time after
we see this mission through. Right now we got work to do, and the only reason we’re going by road instead of air is so we
can bring weapons along. So forget the sight-seeing crap. We’re up here to kill a man.”

Bontoc was fifty kilometers to the northwest, over a Cordillera skyway. Here there were terraced vegetable gardens with spiral
beds, and mountain orchids grew on gnarled oak trees. At Bontoc, Dartley relented and allowed a stay-over
at a hotel. Here the air smelled of pine, and the temperature was in the sixties, a pleasant change from the nineties in the
dusty plains. Bontoc had its own rice terraces on the mountainsides, which the locals claimed were superior to the more famous
ones at Banawe, the Bontoc ones having stone, instead of mud, walls. The town itself was in the deep valley of the Chico River.
Before leaving the next day, they stocked up on provisions, enough to fill four backpacks and to keep them for at least a
week in the wilderness.

Dartley had no illusions about being able to operate from the town of Balbalasang. Now that Velez had come up here, the unexplained
appearance of one American with three Filipinos would probably be enough to cause the police to ask questions. No doubt Happy
Man would have a lot of influence with the local authorities. Even if he talked his way out of their questions, any attempt
on Happy Man’s life would bring the police after him again. Up here there was nowhere to run except in the wilderness, which
was everywhere. Dartley decided that they would be better off taking to the hills sooner rather than later, and that the less
the town of Balbalasang saw of them, the better.

The road steadily deteriorated the farther north they drove.

“Go by bus!’” Dartley had been warned by an American missionary at the hotel in Bontoc. “The guerrillas and Kalinga warriors
do not usually hold up local buses. You may have to share your seat with a baby pig or some chickens, but at least you’ll
get there alive.”

“Kalinga warriors?” Dartley asked, not sure he had heard right.

“Tribal people,” the missionary told him. “Very honest, decent people but inclined to be a bit warlike. They’re upset over
a proposed government dam, which will flood their lands.”

Dartley later confronted Benjael’s cousin, Rafael, with this information. He dismissed them by saying, “They’re out in the
hills. They don’t come into the town of Balbalasang.”

“We’re going to be out in the hills, Rafael,” Dartley said.

“When we get there, I will find out what the Kalingas have been doing lately,” he promised. “They won’t kill us unless they
think we work for the government.”

Balbalasang was a pleasant surprise. They had expected a huddle of tin-roofed houses in a valley, although Rafael told them
it was a nice town. Rugged mountains gave it a spectacular setting, and even Dartley allowed that the place had lots of pretty
women, orange trees, and waterfalls. They spent an hour familiarizing themselves with the town’s layout. Then they drove out
past the Velez hacienda.