Rebound (22 page)

They had taken Rafael’s second radio message, telling them Velez had escaped in his bullet-proof Cherokee and was headed back
toward town.

“I wish I had brought an antitank rocket,” Dartley rasped. “One of those babies would
bust open the Cherokee. But there’s nothing we’re carrying that’s going to penetrate its armor. You’re going to have to run
it off the road, Harry.”

Harry’s teeth began to chatter. But he listened carefully to what Dartley told him. “Sure, I can do it like that,” he said,
and was grateful to Dartley for pretending to believe him.

“Just don’t let him get by us,” Dartley warned.

Harry spotted the Cherokee some distance ahead and put his foot on the gas. Dartley had told him that the other driver, with
his stronger, heavier vehicle, would probably collide deliberately with him at low or moderate speed, but no one was going
to face head-on into a speeding car. Well, almost no one. But Harry had played chicken before and knew how it went.

Hurtling along the narrow road now, he bore down on the approaching Cherokee wagon. If the other driver did not leave the
road, Harry intended to swerve to the right at the last moment and scrape along the wagon, either sideswiping him off the
road or causing the two vehicles to become locked together. They pulled their seat belts right, and Benjael and Dartley were
set to drop their heads on their knees when the Cherokee driver chickened out and left the road. The wagon’s front and back
wheels on the right side dropped in a shallow ditch, and the Cherokee flopped onto its side and skidded a few yards through
the heavy undergrowth.

Harry braked to a stop a hundred yards
down the road, and Dartley jumped out of the car. He raised the M16 to his shoulder, sighted along the barrel, and waited
for someone to make a move from the Cherokee. He lost patience fast, sighted on the gas tank beneath the chassis, and fired
a single shot at it.

The bullet ignited twenty gallons of gas in an enclosed space, and the force of the tank blowing turned the wagon over onto
its roof. The flaming fluid spilled down over all the sides, and its intense heat cooked alive the Velez driver inside.

Dartley and the others could not see inside, but Harry and Benjael believed that Happy Man had finally been dispatched to
a better world! They crossed themselves and murmured a little prayer for the repose of his soul, which seemed to be a courteous
thing to do in the Philippines, after you’ve been involved in killing someone. Dartley was not so sure that Velez was inside.
He would believe that when he saw it. But there was no time to wait for the flames to die down. Velez goons might have been
alerted by the Kalinga ambush and be on the way from either direction—from the town or the hacienda. As it was, they had to
wait a few minutes for the flames to stop billowing across the road, so they could pass.

Harry drove back fast, triumphant now, his nervousness gone. Benjael laughed and talked with him. Dartley sat silently in
the middle of the backseat, silent, watchful, unbelieving….

But he didn’t see them in time. They were in front of the car, the area Benjael was covering. Harry saw them before Benjael
did, and
saw damn fast that they were firing at him, the driver. He ducked his head, and the bullets tore in a line across the windshield,
just above the level of the steering wheel.

One hit Benjael in the left cheekbone, jerking his head to the right so that the next bullet drilled a hole in his forehead,
just going a little way in, much of its force lost in penetrating the glass.

Dartley leaned out the rear side window and caught two men, both with M16s, in a left-to-right cut of automatic fire as the
car tore past them. Last Dartley saw of them, they were clutching their guts and their legs were buckling beneath them.

Harry was at the wheel again, sweating and whimpering, able to see only through bullet holes in the fragmented windshield
as he sped up into the hills.

Dartley leaned over the front seat to check out Benjael. The first bullet had shattered his cheekbone and lodged somewhere
in his neck. The second was embedded in his forehead.

“Take care of my kids” was all he could whisper.

He was already a long, long way away when he said this, fading so fast and easy that Dartley could not say exactly when he
died.

Joker Solano sat and waited for Froilan Quijano, the old communist organizer from the city of Bacolod, to say something. Joker
guessed from Quijano’s new attitude toward him that orders had come from the Communist Party of the Philippines headquarters.
This was backed up by the hangdog look of Eduardo Cristobal, the New People’s Army commander for the San Geronimo region.
Cristobal had been set on executing him for betraying three party members while he was under torture. Now, if Joker guessed
right, Cristobal found himself reporting to the man he had promised to shoot personally only the day before.

“We’ve heard from CCP headquarters,” the old organizer began lamely. “They say we’re to follow your directions.”

“You, too, Ka Eduardo?” This was the first
time Joker had ever used the ka-for-“comrade” form in talking to him.

“Me too,” Eduardo Cristobal confirmed grimly. He had never expected life to be easy as a communist guerrilla, but he didn’t
feel he should have to eat this kind of shit.

“Then we all understand each other,” Joker concluded in a satisfied way. He said to the old organizer, “I want to keep you
here for a while, Ka Froilan. You will act as liaison between the CCP and NPA. Ka Eduardo is in charge of all military operations.
As a fellow fighter in the struggle of the classes, I respect the work both of you men have done on the island of Negros.
You both resent me as an outsider and as someone who has had to sacrifice party lives in order to save his own. That’s reasonable.
I didn’t come here for you to like me. In fact, I came to the province of Negros Occidental by chance—it’s where the prison
camp happened to be.

“But from what I’ve seen of the large estates around here and of your control over the countryside, the San Geronimo area
looks better than the original place I had picked for the project. And this project, of course, is the big secret I had to
keep from the military. When I tell you about it, as I am about to, then you two will share this secrecy problem with me—but
with no others. No one else must be told. Ka Eduardo, perhaps you will find yourself someday in the same position as me—having
to sacrifice the lives of comrades so you can convince a military interrogator that you are holding nothing back from him.
Or maybe you will be luckier.”

“I will die without speaking,” Cristobal said with conviction. “And without betraying comrades.”

“That’s what we all say,” Joker said lightly. “All right, here we go. Above our heads right now, about twenty-two thousand
miles up, is a satellite approximately twenty feet long and about nine feet in diameter and weighs about one ton. I give you
these measurements in feet instead of meters, because this satellite is American, a tool in the capitalist push for global
dominance. Its purpose is to spy on the free peoples of China and Siberia. The Americans call it a Code 647 Defense Support
Program or DSP satellite, and it carries on board a twelve-foot-long Schmidt infrared telescope fitted with thousands of small
lead-sulfide detectors that register the heat emitted by rocket engines. The sensors at the focus of the telescope detect
the flare of the rocket booster in the lower atmosphere. Since it takes twenty-five to thirty minutes for a rocket launched
in the Soviet Union to reach the United States, this satellite provides an early warning to the American imperialists that
a rocket has been launched. They have other satellites, in lower orbits, which predict the rocket’s trajectory. Do you understand
what I am saying?”

Quijano and Cristobal nodded.

“The Soviet missile bases, on which Code 647 DSP satellites keep watch, carry nuclear warheads. These silos stretch right
across the Soviet Union. Because of supply logistics, they are strung along the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway. When
any of these silos fire a test missile, the Americans can tell the type of missile
fired by the infrared glow of the rocket plume. Each missile type has its own ‘signature.’ So you can see that this satellite
serves a spy function as well as an early-warning one.”

“Why is the type of missile so important?” Cristobal asked. “Isn’t one ICBM as good as another?”

“They all cause nuclear devastation,” Joker allowed, “but some can achieve targets not available to others. I’ll give you
an example. Our Soviet friends are known to have SS-18s at six launch areas in south-central Siberia and SS-11s at three launch
areas near the Mongolian border. The DSP satellite above us can’t pinpoint the exact location of the silo because it registers
the booster rocket, not the initial launching rocket, but it can tell an SS-11 from an SS-18 by its infrared signature. Suppose
the Americans saw that SS-11s had been launched. They would know immediately that their Minuteman missiles would be safe,
because the SS-11 does not have the accuracy to strike them, which the SS-18 does. So the Americans could predict that the
‘softer’ targets had been picked, like cities or bomber bases. That’s just one example.”

“All right,” Cristobal said.

“But the Americans have more sophisticated satellites in lower orbits that give them more detailed information than the DSP,
as I’ve already said. The satellites in lower orbits are all vulnerable to Soviet antisatellite measures. Only the high-flying
DSP is not. Yet everything has a weakness if you search hard enough. A few years ago the DSP satellite revealed its weakness
by accident. A fire got out of control in a
Siberian natural gas field, and the heat was so great from the conflagration that it overloaded the DSP’s sensors. The infrared
detectors can only handle a certain amount at any given time. As far as I know, that is where you and I come in.”

“They want us to set fire to the sugarcane to fool the satellite?” Cristobal asked incredulously.

“Various methods of interference had been considered, including transmitting spurious commands to the satellite or disorienting
its solar antennae to cause it to lose power. I have not been told the means selected to attempt interference, but I can guess.
The reason we were chosen is that we are in an almost direct line beneath the satellite. Light travels in a straight line,
and the shorter the distance it has to travel, the more intense the beam. A certain type of laser operated from here might
duplicate the effect of that natural-gas fire—overload the satellite’s sensors.”

Quijano stirred himself. “Seems to me that if the Americans found the satellite interfered with, they’d know an attack was
coming, so it would serve as an early warning to them, anyway.”

Joker smiled. “I asked a Soviet military man about that myself. He claimed he didn’t know what was planned, but he pointed
out that if repeated interference of short duration was maintained, the Americans would never know when it was going to be
the real thing. He also added that even if the interference was used only to attack and did give the Americans an early warning,
it would still mask the kinds of missiles that had been fired. The Americans
would not know which launch area had fired, which silos were then empty, and which launch areas still had loaded silos ready
to fire. They would not know exactly where to counterattack.”

“Whatever part we have to play will be just one small piece of a large pattern,” Quijano said. “Seen by itself, it might not
make much sense, but seen in coordination with everything else, it might be very important. Ka Joker, you have my total support.
You can count on me for anything you want.”

“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.”